The Gospel of Anno
Every week or so I acquire a new ultimate purpose. Something I’d sell my furniture for, possibly my body, just to collapse into it completely—to become its greatest living expert and die of cardiac arrest at the apex, satisfied. Not long ago I was convinced that climbing to the top of League of Legends ranked play was the only thing standing between me and whatever inner peace I’m owed. Then I sat in the bathtub and decided I was obligated to save the internet from copyright law—petitions, awareness campaigns, fair-use initiatives. And at some point I became fairly certain I needed to fuck Sasha Grey, a conviction I haven’t entirely abandoned.
This week all of that gives way to one specific scenario: getting into bed with a cheap bottle of red wine and some sushi and watching a few more episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The original series. Japanese audio, subtitles. Not the rebuilt HD films that take the entire story and put it through a blender. For which I could cheerfully beat Hideaki Anno around the head.
Everyone with a functioning pop-cultural conscience knows what the show is. Psychologically broken teenagers forced into giant mechs, fighting creatures called Angels, defending what’s left of humanity from apocalypse. Behind everything, shadowy organizations named NERV and SEELE. Religion and father complexes and suicide and warships and underage breasts and betrayal and ceilings and friendship and one highly intelligent penguin. The description reads like a catalogue of every anime cliché in existence. The execution makes you forget all of that immediately.
Evangelion is the anime I keep returning to as the measure of what the medium can do. Watching it again reminds me why I loved it, drifted away, and came back. I sit rigid in front of the screen while the cicadas sing and the sirens go and the ground opens up, and I have actual tears when Asuka lies bleeding in the bathtub. There’s something close to pure, wordless happiness when Misato cracks open her beer can and that specific melody kicks in. Lying in the dark afterward, I go over everything: the lies, the silences, what Shinji chose and didn’t choose. Rei. The relationships. The provisional ending. What comes after.
I’m almost reluctant to chase the mysteries the show keeps placing in front of me. I don’t want the analyses, don’t want the confessions unpacked. I want to walk out to the 24-hour convenience store instead, ride the subway, watch the city lights through the window, let the thing press against the inside of my skull. Evangelion keeps trying to break me. It succeeds. Then, a few minutes later, it lets me back in.
What Anno built isn’t just a franchise vehicle moving merchandise through arcades and printing its characters on instant ramen packaging. It’s a revelation—one that only works the way it works if you drop your defenses entirely and let it do what it needs to do. Once you do that, there’s no getting off.