Evangelion
I’ve never experienced anything quite like Neon Genesis Evangelion. Most anime fits neatly into categories—good, great, whatever—but Evangelion doesn’t want neat categories. It wants to disturb you. Along with Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon and Wolf’s Rain, it’s one of the best things anime has produced, but unlike those shows, it doesn’t feel like entertainment. It feels like something dangerous that got released by accident.
Shinji Ikari is 14 years old when his father calls him back into his life. The year before, Shinji’s world witnessed something catastrophic—an event that rewired how society functions. Now his father wants him to do the impossible: pilot a giant robot to fight creatures called Angels that keep appearing. The show spends 26 episodes showing what happens to a kid when you put him in that situation. Joy and horror occupy the same frame. Fear and hope are the same thing. By the end, the entire narrative structure collapses because it has to.
What gets you is Shiro Sagisu’s score. It sounds biblical and wrong, like it’s pulling something from inside you that you’d rather leave alone. The characters—Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato—aren’t written to be likable or sympathetic in any conventional way. The show just shows you what happens when children are subjected to trauma and expected to function. Pen Pen, this absurd penguin that lives in Misato’s apartment, is the healthiest presence in the entire series, which tells you everything about how broken everyone else is.
The ending doesn’t resolve anything. It fractures. The director basically loses control of the narrative in real time, and that’s exactly right. The show understands that some truths can’t be contained by a three-act structure, so it just lets itself come apart. The finale is almost unwatchable, and that’s the point. That’s always been the point.
What happens after you watch it is harder to explain. It doesn’t feel good or inspiring or cathartic. It just sits with you differently than other shows do. It rewires something about how you understand people, suffering, why we try despite knowing how much it costs. That effect is permanent.