Neon Geneis Evangelion – Mechas and Mental Health issues

Hey guys what is up welcome back to my blog I’m so thankful that you guys took the time out of your day to read my blog post. Hope you all are safe and healthy. I really didn’t know how to approach a review of this series because it’s just that grand and confusing. So I’ll review everything from the TV series to the movie and the Rebuild movies in one post. SPOILERS ahead for sure, I highly, highly recommend going into this series blind and forming your own opinions.

In 2015, fifteen years after a global cataclysm known as the Second Impact, teenager Shinji Ikari is summoned to Tokyo-3 by his father Gendo Ikari, director of Nerv, an organization created to battle Angels, beings that threaten the earth and humanity. To combat Angels, Nerv has created Evangelions, humanoid mechas that are piloted by specific children among which Shinji is known as the Third Child. Piloting the Eva(short for Evangelion) Unit 01, Shinji battles against the Angels and begins a journey that will reveal to him, the true nature of the Second Impact, the origin of the Angels, and most of all how he can save humanity. All of this while Shinji fights a personal battle with depression and social anxiety.

The characters are where Evangelion shines 1000%. All of the characters are unique and suffer from their own mental health issues and growth. Talking about these characters without spoilers is very hard for me so please if someone feels that I have written about only one side of a character understand that I do not wish to put up spoilers. Shinji Ikari is a teenager with depression and social anxiety who is our protagonist. A ‘weak’ protagonist is considered bad in the anime community these days but Shinji truly is a wonderful character who shows human qualities like compassion while suffering from depression. Misato Katsuragi is an official in Nerv who at first appears to be a free spirit but later on reveals a dark past, personal vendettas, and reasons for being in Nerv. Gendo Ikari, the father of Shinji shines most brilliantly in the Rebuild movies, especially the last one where all the times we see his actions contracting the picture painted of him make sense. Ayanami Rei, I have no idea how to speak about her character at all so I will simply say that I liked how she was written and she would have become my favortie character were it not for Asuka, a girl who at first I actually was annoyed by but as she showed her combat genius, past and how she suffered from separation anxiety, I loved her character as my favorite.

Evangelion is different from other anime with its characters, they aren’t fully established right at the start rather we see through their multiple layers as we go throughout the story. The series is highly Sci-Fi as one might expect but the series still strongly focuses on the characters first, then the story, and then the Sci-Fi stuff. The large-scale battles are amazing to watch, however as the original Tv series went further into being abstract and showing us inside the character’s minds it just gets better. I really liked the character designs of both the humans and the angels since each one was different and there were quite a few of them. The series deals with adolescence and the characters’ own psychology really well and the TV series shines there extremely well. The Rebuild movies are done well enough that they deserve their own review but I will put the best parts here. They manage to condense the story perfectly, the new characters are awesome, and they manage to symbolize really well, especially with Shinji’s tape player. They are bigger and grander and are the perfect ending to a series like Evangelion. One might say that there is much left unexplored throughout the series but I will say that the series manages to do what it set out to do.

Everyone is hurting inside, Evangelion manages to show the broken people that make up the world, their struggles, and how they try to fill their holes through each other really well and makes it pretty much the primary theme of the show so to speak. The series however also shows that one is in control of their life, especially with the ending of the Rebuild movies. Evangelion as a series explores so many different themes that it just wouldn’t be fair to talk about one and leave out the others and yet I must do it.

26 episodes, 5 movies. That is what makes up Evangelion, a show that starts off with something else and ends somewhere else and yet manages to connect everything together to tell a beautiful story that the director must be commended for. The Rebuild movies are continuations after the original series and the End of Evangelion movies, it might be confused as a remake but believe me, it is so much more than that. Even though Evangelion has its flaws, it will receive a 10/10 for me and a spot in my top 1.

So that is it for this post guys hope you got some value from this.  Thank you guys for reading to the end hit me up on Instagram and Twitter with your thoughts and if you have any ideas on what I should write about. Stay safe. Thank you again and I’ll see you all next week.