The Series That Broke Me First
No medium shaped me the way Neon Genesis Evangelion did. I’m willing to say that plainly, without hedging. Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, Wolf’s Rain—all great anime, each doing something distinctive with the form—but Evangelion got into something deeper. It found the place where joy and depression share a wall so thin you can hear both simultaneously, and it spent twenty-six episodes living there without blinking.
The premise sounds mechanical. Fourteen-year-old Shinji Ikari arrives to visit his father, commander of a secret organization called NERV, just as another catastrophe erupts in a world already fractured by one. He ends up inside a giant robot, fighting a monster he doesn’t understand, serving a purpose nobody has fully explained. What follows is ostensibly a mecha series about teenagers piloting humanoid weapons against entities called Angels. What it actually is—what you realize somewhere around episode sixteen and can’t un-realize—is a dissection of depression, isolation, and the terror of other people, dressed in apocalyptic imagery dense enough with religious symbolism to feel genuinely blasphemous.
Shiro Sagisu’s score is part of what makes it work. There’s a brazenness to mixing classical pieces with original compositions in a way that shouldn’t cohere but does—the music makes the stakes feel cosmic even when the scene is just a teenager refusing to get out of bed. Which happens more than you’d expect. Which is the point.
The supporting cast creates just enough warmth to make the eventual collapse devastating. Misato Katsuragi with her beer and her buried grief. Toji Suzuhara clowning around until he can’t. The incomprehensible penguin Pen Pen haunting the refrigerator. You get attached. That’s the design.
Asuka Langley Soryu is probably the most psychologically complete character in anime, and I say that having since watched a lot of anime. Her arrogance is legible. Her collapse is earned. The episode that strips her down to nothing is one of the most brutal things the medium has produced, and it doesn’t look away. Rei Ayanami I understood differently at different ages: serene in a way I wanted to emulate at fourteen, terrifying later, and now she reads as the series’ central question given a face—what makes a self a self, and what happens when the answer is unclear?
Neon Genesis Evangelion arrived on Netflix in 2019, introduced to a new generation who didn’t have to hunt down bootleg VHS rips or pray a DVD was still in stock somewhere. I’m glad it’s accessible. I also hold some irrational nostalgia for the era when finding it felt like discovering something that wasn’t meant for everyone—something that demanded enough of you to make you uncertain whether you actually wanted it. You won’t be the same after it. That’s not hyperbole. It just reorganizes certain things.