Kaworu as a replacement for Yui?

[fluffyharpy]

I've been working on a theory as of late centering around the manner in which the way Shinji behaves throughout the Evangelion TV series is related to his having lost Yui at an early age. I began throwing this together after first hearing the radio chatter playing in the background of an episode 19 or so when Misato and Ritsuko are driving together. In short, it is a radio program of sometimes in which a caller describes the boyfriend of a friend of hers whom she thinks is using his girlfriend as a replacement for his mother. This got me to thinking how this same idea could be applied to Shinji and eventually led to the theory I'll put forth.

Anyway, we all know that losing his mother at an early age screwed up Shinji pretty badly. He's weak willed, indecisive, and in general not a very pleasant person to be around. But for the sake of this argument, the most important of his character traits is that he has weird tendency to wish for other people to tell him what to do. On several occasions we see this in tendency in Shinji's world, such as when he comments to Asuka that he never stopped playing the cello because no one ever told him to do so, and in Lelial's mind picking session when the topic of swimming comes up, Shinji begns to rant about how humans are not meant to swim because he had never been taught how.

From this I have come to see Shinji as a person who, despite the fact that he is a rather isolated human being, craves direction from others. A trait I imagine was instilled in him after Yui's loss. As he lost his mother at such an early age, Shinji is stuck in a state of arrested development in which his mindset is still that of a small child. At that age his parent's still, for the most part, made all of his decisions for him. And in the present, even at the age of fourteen, Shinji still craves that sort of direction in his life to be handed down to him from above.

Now relating this to Kaworu for a moment, in episode 24 we see that Kaworu is a person who makes all of Shinji's decisions in their relationship for him. Kaworu is the one who decides they should bathe together, he is the one who decides that Shinji should sleep over, and, in the end, he is also the person who tells Shinji that he must die so that humanity can live on. We see this again in Shinji's dialogue with Misato after Kaworu's death in which Shinji states to Misato that Kaworu made him kill him.

Shinji seems to be naturally drawn to people who take agency away from him and allow him to exist in a state like that of when Yui was still alive and he was only a small child. By this logic, I think that Shinji sees, at least in part, Kaworu as something of a replacement or stand-in for his long missing mother. I could also stretch this to say that he had tried to find similar replacements in people like Misato, but eventually gave up on them after particular incidents, like Misato's actions in episode 23, alienated him and broke the motherly image he held in his mind.

Any who, that is all for my crazy theory. Lemme know what you guys think!

[ElMariachi]

A very interesting analysis, I agree that Shinji craved something since his mother's disappearance, but I don't agree on the what.

Personally, for me Shinji didn't craved a direction in life, but affection: we saw more that once that he was perfectly able to disobey orders and tell people to fuck off when he disagree with something (Shamshel and Bardiel being the biggest examples), and it was stated again more than once that his tendency to stay passive and avoid conflict and hard decision is because he's afraid to make the wrong decision, hurt other people and thus being rejected.
That fear comes directly from her mother's disappearance (although he didn't realized it until EoE), when he was little she insisted that he comes to see the Contact Experiment, then she disappeared and a week later his father abandoned him without looking back, so in the young Shinji's mind, that means that somehow everything that happened was his fault, especially since during the next 10 years he was told that his father was working on saving the world when he asked, meaning that his father is a great man, so in Shinji's mind Gendo can't be at fault, since he's such a great man working to save the world.
So that mean that the problem comes from Shinji himself, that it's him who's not a good person. Hence that constant self-loathing and low self-esteem, deep down Shinji is convinced that he's a fundamentally bad person and that he shouldn't try to get close to people, or else he'll end hurting them sooner or later.

That's why he always doubt the sincerity of other people's affection, because for him since he's a horrible person, then the other people's concern and kindness must be fake, for the sake of social convention or because they want something from him. He's always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For Kaworu, the circumstances are different: Shinji's little world that he built in Tokyo-3 is crumbling apart, Touji is maimed in an hospital bed, he can't face his classmate because of it, Kaji died, as well as Rei, Misato turned into a cold revenge obsessed machine and Asuka as gone missing and tried to kill herself, at this point he's just desperate for any comfort and emotional support. Then come this guy that's not screwed in the head, don't judge him and accept him as he is and even tell him that he's a fascinating person, in short he accepts Shinji without after-thoughts, so yes, Shinji latches onto him.

Which is why he's so devastated after he had to kill him, because for Shinji that was the confirmation that he's an horrible person that always ends up hurting the people he tries to get close to.

[Gob Hobblin]

^

Exactly.

As for a surrogate for Yui...I frankly see his relationship with Rei as this. His interest in her can sometimes border on obsessive, but not in a romantic or even necessarily creepy way. He senses an intrinsic and important connection with her, and he desires to understand and strengthen that connection even if he doesn't understand it. Further, a lot of the things he says about her indicates that his interest isn't exactly sexual or lustful (as far as that can go with a teenage boy, and the scene in her room notwithstanding: that could easily be interpreted as being flustered in a sexual way, but also Shinji's sheer awkwardness at being in the same room with another naked human being), and the more he knows her, the more 'motherly' terms or indicators he seems to apply to her.

...and again, this doesn't discount that he may or may not have a romantic inclination towards Rei. If anything, it just shows how warped things have gotten for Shinji ('I want a motherly relationship with the hot clone of my mom I have a crush on: does that make me a bad person?')

[mechashiva]

I think with Rei, it cuts both ways. When Asuka interrogates her in the elevator and asks if she likes Shinji, she says she feels "warm" around Shinji and it seems hard to her to wrap her mind around. She feels protective over him, which speaks to her motherly personality

As for Kaworu, I personally waffle back and forth between Kaworu's place in the whole series and I think that's about as close as I can see for his relationship with Shinji beyond a blind "YAY YAOI!" shipping thing. His bond towards Shinji feels a lot like the unconditional, motherly love a mother feels for her child. I don't know if there's a clinical term for it but after pregnancy, when the mother sees her child for the first time, she sees her child as the most beautiful and perfect thing in the world and wanting to protect it from all the bad things in the world. Kaworu's role in NGE and in the Rebuild movies smacks of not only wanting Shinji to be happy and to be loved but wanting to take his burdens away and ease his suffering but in doing so, means leaving Shinji without his lifeline and his source of comfort in both instances where Kaworu must sacrifice himself to save Shinji.

[TheAdmiral]

Now relating this to Kaworu for a moment, in episode 24 we see that Kaworu is a person who makes all of Shinji's decisions in their relationship for him. Kaworu is the one who decides they should bathe together, he is the one who decides that Shinji should sleep over, and, in the end, he is also the person who tells Shinji that he must die so that humanity can live on. We see this again in Shinji's dialogue with Misato after Kaworu's death in which Shinji states to Misato that Kaworu made him kill him.

Shinji seems to be naturally drawn to people who take agency away from him and allow him to exist in a state like that of when Yui was still alive and he was only a small child. By this logic, I think that Shinji sees, at least in part, Kaworu as something of a replacement or stand-in for his long missing mother. I could also stretch this to say that he had tried to find similar replacements in people like Misato, but eventually gave up on them after particular incidents, like Misato's actions in episode 23, alienated him and broke the motherly image he held in his mind.

Any who, that is all for my crazy theory. Lemme know what you guys think!

I don't think that it's crazy at all. Was it not Anno who said at some point that Evangelion was a reflection of how modern-day Japanese tend to flea responsability? Shinji's character embodies the avoidant personality disorder, and by avoiding responsability, needlessly prolongs his own suffering.

Kaworu, I think, sincerely wants to help Shinji and is working to achieve instrumentality all at the same time. His love of Shinji is authentic and pure, and not a romantic attraction as some have theorized. When you love someone, you act for their greater good and not simply to fulfill their immediate needs and desires. Think about how it's sometimes necessary to confront and institutionalize a drug addict in order for them to overcome their addiction: in the short-term, their life is turned upside-down and they might see your actions as a betrayal, but the long-term effect is that their health and quality of life improve dramatically.

To that end, I think that Kaworu offered Shinji a "lure" in the form of someone who would offer to take responsability away from him, comfort him, after which he would spring the trap for his final, major lesson. It has all the earmarks of an initiation.

It's only in the last couple of years that I really understood why Anno insisted on the English word 'angel' in translation. Angels are Divine messengers, but also guardians of evolution and Shinji is being guided along an evolutionary path to self-realization and self-responsability. Each angel acts like the neters of ancient Egypt, initiating Shinji to different degrees of consciousness with each obstacle... Until he finally gets it in episode 26. Anyway, that's just my opinion.

[mechashiva]

^ This

Also tying in with the OP's theory of Kaworu as something like a mother figure to Shinji, one of the pet themes in the show is Shinji learning to grow into his own as a person and his loneliness and dependency on others for his happiness. I don't remember much about Freud's theories beyond the few bits I understand in conjunction with Evangelion but one of the episodes (I forget which but its the one where Shinji becomes merged with the EVA-01 and one of the title cards is "Mother is the First Other") Shinji WANTS to be mothered but wants the love and affection without putting in work to meet others half-way or understand the emotions of those around him (Taken to its logical extreme with EoE) but with Kaworu, he gets that: he gets somebody who loves him and wants the best for him and wants to, like I said, ease his suffering. But the problem with that is (and why I think Kaworu dies in both NGE and 3.33) is that Shinji SHOULDN'T rely on Kaworu or anybody else to make the bad things in his life go away so he doesn't have to deal with them. He wants the praise and love without having to do the hard things that deserve praise, which is probably why he gloms onto Kaworu's affection for him even though they barely know one another.

[Dataprime]

Kaworu, I think, sincerely wants to help Shinji and is working to achieve instrumentality
all at the same time. His love of Shinji is authentic and pure

Kaworu died for Shinjis sins.
He is basically Space Jesus.

[ElMariachi]

Kaworu died for Shinjis sins.
He is basically Space Jesus.

Made even more explicit in Q!

But in NGE Kaworu decided that Instrumentality wasn't the right way for mankind, he explicitly said it to Shinji, in NTE that's still ambiguous.

[mechashiva]

Made even more explicit in Q!

But in NGE Kaworu decided that Instrumentality wasn't the right way for mankind, he explicitly said it to Shinji, in NTE that's still ambiguous.

Kaworu being Space Jesus actually spurned on this crazy discussion me and my boyfriend had: Kaworu is the Starman from "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" so now I just think of Kaworu unofficially as the Starman.

[Rei IV]

I thought that was the amusing thing of LKS or KawoShin, you can interpret it (the relationship) in many ways and therefore, making him a "mother" to Shinji just as equally valid. The only bad thing about this particular pairing is the obnoxious tendency of Angel Boy to omit certain little factoids in both continuities and can be quite the charismatic, manipulative bastard too.

[NemZ]

Split out a whole lot of tangents. You can find them here.