Before the Impact, Everything Was Already Over
The first time I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, I didn’t sleep properly for a week. Not because it was frightening in any conventional sense—there are no jump scares, nothing lunging out of the dark—but because it had done something to the inside of my head that I couldn’t undo. It planted a specific kind of dread that I recognized: the dread of being asked to do something enormously important by someone who doesn’t love you, and discovering you might fail, and discovering you might not care.
The setup is almost insultingly simple. It’s 2015—the 2015 of 1995’s imagination—and the world has already half-ended. A cataclysm called the Second Impact has melted the Antarctic ice and killed half the human population, and now enormous beings called Angels are arriving periodically to finish the job. The organization NERV, run by a cold and absent father named Gendo Ikari, fields giant biomechanical robots called Evangelions against them. When fourteen-year-old Shinji Ikari arrives to visit the father he barely knows, he is immediately strapped into one of these machines and told to fight.
Shinji doesn’t want to. That’s the whole point. He is not a reluctant hero who overcomes his fear and becomes a warrior. He is a boy who has been abandoned by the person who should have protected him, who flinches from human contact, who would rather retreat into his headphones and his own numbness than engage with the catastrophic demands being placed on him. Hideaki Anno, who directed the series and effectively poured his own depression into it, understood something that most genre fiction refuses to admit: sometimes the person at the center of the story just doesn’t have it in them. And the world keeps asking anyway.
Alongside Shinji are Rei Ayanami, pale and dissociated, concealing something fundamental about her own nature, and Asuka Langley Soryu, ferociously competent and furiously insecure, covering a wound so deep she can barely acknowledge it exists. The three of them are children. The adults around them—Misato Katsuragi, who tries to mother Shinji while drinking too much and refusing to process her own trauma; the calculating Ritsuko Akagi; the impenetrable Gendo—are no more equipped for what’s coming. Nobody is. That’s the series’ most brutal joke.
What sets Neon Genesis Evangelion apart from every other mecha anime is how seriously it takes interiority. The robot fights are spectacular—Shiro Sagisu’s score swings between orchestral grandeur and near-silence in ways that still feel precise decades later—but the show is fundamentally interested in what happens inside people who have been broken and then handed weapons. The religious imagery, drawn from Kabbalah and Christian apocalypticism in ways that Anno always insisted were more aesthetic than theological, gives the series a weight that outlasts the plot. The Angels are terrifying partly because they don’t seem to hate us. They’re just forces. The hatred is entirely human.
The series famously collapsed in on itself in its final two episodes, produced under extreme budget and deadline pressure and transformed into something stranger and more interesting than a conventional finale could have been: an extended interior monologue, Shinji’s psyche examined from every angle, arriving at a fragile and unconvincing self-acceptance that the subsequent film The End of Evangelion immediately demolished. Both endings are necessary. The TV ending is the wish; the film is what happens when the wish is granted.
I’ve watched it several times since that first sleepless week, and each time I find something different. In my teens it was the loneliness. In my twenties it was the fathers—all the different kinds of damage a father can do just by being absent. More recently it’s been the secondary characters: Toji, Kensuke, even the penguin Pen Pen lurking in Misato’s refrigerator, who exist in the wreckage of this world and try to keep something ordinary going. The show is cruelest to them. The characters who want nothing more than a normal life are denied it most completely.
No other anime has landed the same way for me. Cowboy Bebop is more stylish. Sailor Moon is more purely joyful. Wolf’s Rain has a particular elegiac quality that’s entirely its own. But Neon Genesis Evangelion hit something structural—something about how I understood despair and desire and the way people use each other when they can’t admit they’re drowning. It’s been on Netflix since mid-2019, in a new English dub that reignited the usual translation arguments, which Evangelion fans will recognize as a condition of loving the show rather than a problem to resolve. I still go back to it. Something in those twenty-six episodes knows things about loneliness and fathers and the specific paralysis of not wanting to save the world when you can barely save yourself. It doesn’t resolve. That’s why it stays.