Heart of Glass: A Character Study on Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion by Jianna Acerbo

*Disclaimer: All the photos/videos are used for an educational purpose and they belong to their rightful owners.

Introduction

When one is prone to be extremely sensitive or emotional they’re referred to having a heart of glass, since their heart is easily breakable and fragile. Being emotional or sensitive to pain is just human nature, yet there are some who are outwardly shunned for being too sensitive or emotional. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the main protagonist, Shinji Ikari, was often criticized for being a crybaby, for actually showing feelings other than happiness or anger. The show is classified as a Shonen anime which is a genre of anime that is targeted towards a young male audience and is full of action pack plots, with the main character usually being a young boy around fourteen to eighteen years old. The show follows all the criteria to make it a Shonen anime, but Shinji is not the average Shonen protagonist.

An average Shonen protagonist is optimistic, confident, believes in their friends and family, and has faith in their ability to save the world (or whoever they have to save in their series). A Shonen protagonist has to be tough, has to withstand a beating in order to rise up again and finish the job, so they can’t have a glass heart, they need something more durable. Shinji lacks everything a normal protagonist has that helps the protagonist grow into a Shonen protagonist, instead he’s just a normal kid that sits uncomfortably in Shonen anime. Even though Neon Genesis Evangelion is a beloved series in the anime community, Shinji is far from a fan favorite because of his weak demeanor and how he is the exact opposite of a Shonen protagonist. A Shonen protagonist does what they have to do because they genuinely want to protect others out of the goodness of their heart, while Shinji only does it because he thinks people would grow to care for him when they see that he is not completely useless. Shinji is more of an “atypical hero.” Shinji has no friends, no family, no faith in his own ability; he basically “is devoid of any true desire to protect humanity; the action of playing the martyr and having someone depend on him” is the only reason why he stays to pilot an Evangelion, aka an EVA (14 Dejeu).

Shinji’s entire characterization revolves around him wanting people to like him, he doesn’t even think they could love him so he settles for them liking him. A Shonen protagonist's only goal is to improve themselves and find a way to defeat the bad guy, but Shinji is more worried about his desire for people to like him. Shinji doesn’t try to improve himself, he doesn’t care about saving the world, and he doesn’t do anything for himself. One of the major themes in the show is that the individual is responsible for their own suffering, however, instead of taking responsibility for his suffering, Shinji avoids it. Instead of facing it head on and pushing forward, he tries to ignore it until the very end, which is why many consider him to be the worst Shonen protagonist.

Instead of a hero, Shinji Ikari is just an unfortunate, depressed kid, with daddy issues, who is put in charge of the fate of humanity. Shinji is unloved, in and outside of the anime because of how different he is, but this difference is exactly why his character deserves a close study. Shinji’s depression episodes are relatable because, when writing the show, Hideaki Anno used his own experience with clinical depression to create the characters and the issues they deal with. Maybe the reason why people don’t like Shinji is because of this realism, he makes them think about their own issues. People just want to be loved and not alone, which are the only things that Shinji truly cares about. Shinji is trying to avoid pain by escaping his reality, just like all the people who chose to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion because they want to escape their world for a bit. Shinji makes viewers think about their life outside of the show, even when all they want to do is avoid it. Shinji breaks the fantasy and that scares viewers. Instead of ignoring or rejecting Shinji, this website is dedicated to a deep analysis of his character. My analysis of Shinji isn’t trying to redeem him, it’s intended to change the perspective of him away from the usual Shonen heroism and toward the everyday realism that Shinji represents.

“‘People feel Shinji is an unusual hero,’ he (Hideaki Anno) continued. ‘I think that’s due to the sense of reality I brought, drawing on my experience and knowledge. But Shinji and the other characters are not just a reflection of me; they include elements of the personalities of all the artists on the creative team” (Solomon).

The Hedgehog Dilemma: Psychology and Philosophy Featured in Neon Genesis Evangelion

Before going into the character analysis, I need to discuss the psychology and philosophy that makes up the whole show. It’s almost impossible to talk about any of the characters or even the plot of the show without talking about some of the psychology or the philosophy that goes with it. Especially since the whole theme and message of the show revolves around a psychoanalysis of the characters and the philosophy behind why they act the way they do. Before talking about the psychological trauma that is featured throughout the show, I want to talk about the philosophy that goes along with the themes of the show. The main themes of the show revolve around individuality, freedom of choice, and the responsibility of one’s own happiness which is shown through the teachings of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is the main philosopher whose teaching is talked about throughout the show because his teaching is all about despair. In his book, The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard talks about his experience with Christianity and how he feels that a physical death is nothing to worry about, it’s the mental one, despair itself, that you have to fear.

“For, humanly speaking, death is the last thing of all; and, humanly speaking, there is hope only so long as there is life. But Christianly understood death is by no means the last thing of all, hence it is only a little event within that which is all, an eternal life; and Christianly understood there is in death infinitely much more hope than merely humanly speaking there is when there not only is life but this life exhibits the fullest health and vigor” (7 Kierkegaard).

Everyone at one point or another has felt a sense similar to despair, a feeling that just fills them up until it is the only thing that they can feel which is a terrible feeling, so we try to find ways to avoid feeling like that again. We find ways to escape from it, to run away, doing anything we can to avoid it, but Kierkegaard believes that if a person has felt any kind of despair then they failed somewhere along the line. In Evangelion, Shinji avoids his despair by being an EVA pilot. People praise him when he is an EVA pilot and he based his happiness solely on the praise he receives as a pilot. This can also be applied to the other EVA pilot, Asuka, who has built her whole life around her job.Both Shinji and Asuka associate their happiness with this praise from others, which leads them to believe that if they aren’t EVA pilots they can never be happy.

But, Kierkegaard wanted people to understand that as humans we are in charge of our own feelings, so we cannot blame others for the despair we feel. Human beings must take responsibility for their feelings, they can’t rely on others to help them, they have to push forward towards their own conviction in order to avoid despair.

“Despairing narrowness consists in the lack of primitiveness, or of the fact one has deprived oneself of one’s primitiveness; it consists in having emasculated oneself, in a spiritual sense. For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which precisely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself” (33 Kierkegaard).

Evangelion has a whole episode that was named after Kierkegaard’s book titled “The Sickness unto Death, and Then….” During the episode, Shinji and his EVA are trapped in the Twelfth Angel, Leliel. While trapped in Leliel, Shinji is forced to interact with his inner self and face all the problems he has been trying to hide from. Shinji blames everyone for his own misery, but when his inner self tries to make him face the consequences of his own feelings, Shinji shuts down. Shinji is still a kid, so it’s no wonder why he would shut down, Kierkegaard says that “the child’s imperfection consists, first of all, in not knowing what the dreadful is; and then again, as an implication of this, in shuddering at that which is not dreadful” (8). Kids don’t understand how to process emotions like despair, especially if the adults in their life didn’t give them the tools to properly deal with this feeling, which leads us into the psychological trauma that is experienced throughout Evangelion.

Every single character in the series has issues that make them dysfunctional, all because of the trauma they endured due to the Impacts that led to their apocalyptic world, specifically the Second Impact. Characters experience depression, social anxiety, masking, and abandonment issues throughout the series; especially the children who are picked/candidates to be EVA pilots. All EVA pilots face similar traumatic experiences which form an umbrella trauma. The children are burdened with the responsibility to fix problems that they inherited from the adults in this world and they’re not simple problems at all, they’re all big, violent problems. This, along with their personal trauma, is more than any child should have to deal with. It also doesn’t help that to be an EVA pilot, the candidates must be motherless, fourteen year old children, specifically children whose mother’s died during the Second Impact. The reason for this specific requirement is the soul of their dead mother is placed into the EVA unit, so the pilot would have a better chance of synchronizing with them, making it easier to pilot them. So, along with the baggage of losing their mothers, they have to learn to deal with the trauma of attempting to save the world at the age of fourteen, while also riding in a giant robot that contains their mother’s soul.

Asuka suffers from anger issues over facing her mother’s insanity while she was still alive and from finding her mother’s body after she committed suicide; Asuka uses her pride as an EVA pilot to mask the anger and loneliness she feels after losing her mother. Rei, who turned out to be a clone of Shinji’s dead mother, is depicted as basically emotionless throughout the whole series. She doesn’t care about being an EVA pilot, but she does it because it is her job, the only time she feels true emotions is at the end of the series when she is about to die; Rei isn’t sad about dying, she is actually happy and ready for death, she wants to return to nothing, to experience Thanatos. Since Rei is a clone, she knows that she will constantly be replaced, so she is always ready to return to a state of nothingness.

The last pilot, Shinji, is arguably the most traumatized out of all the pilots. Along with Shinji’s depression, he has major social anxiety because his father abandoned him after Shinji’s mother died. He only reunited with his father when Gendo summons Shinji so he can be an EVA pilot. No one told Shinji that he was supposed to be an EVA pilot. Because of the trauma from Gendo abandoning him, Shinji is not really a personable person. He closes himself off from the world because he is scared of getting hurt again. At the beginning of the series when Shinji is having a hard time adjusting, he is considered to have a Hedgehog Dilemma by the character, Ritsuko Akagi, when she is talking to Shinji’s caretaker, Misato Katsuragi. The Hedgehog Dilemma is “an analogy used by both Freud and Arthur Schopenhauer, the Hedgehog’s Dilemma describes both the necessity and cost of human intimacy. Hedgehogs, in order to survive the winter, Dr. Akagi says, will nestle close to each other for warmth; however, because of their proximity, they must be careful not to stick one another with their spines” (Smith). Shinji is terrified of being hurt again, so he pushes everyone away before they can end up leaving him again, just like his father. Shinji, Asuka, Rei, and all the other candidates for EVA pilots are just kids, kids who should have never been responsible for the fate of the world and never should have be traumatized the way they were by being associated with EVA’s; however, the adults of the world failed them by not figuring out a way for an adult to pilot the EVAs.

“But Shinji Ikari, a typical withdrawn adolescent, who has the chance to operate an enormous robot, does not elicit sympathy; the protagonist’s depression and lack of self-confidence, in fact, alienate the audience. Shinji is indecisive; he cannot even make one decision and consistently shifts responsibility onto others. The messiah, on whom the fate of humanity depends, appears powerless, and thus the anime does not carry out the therapeutic function of mass culture” (57 Afanasov).

Even though the adults are just as traumatized as the kids by the Second Impact and everything going on in the world, they had a responsibility to make sure that the kids around them wouldn’t have to suffer like them. However, the adults failed their job in protecting the younger generation, especially the kids who are forced to pilot giant robots that have the souls of their mother’s in them. The central characters experience trauma that all comes back to a sense of familial abandonment and disorientation, so we can connect the series’ attention to psychology to the harm caused by parents. The parents caused the main character’s to feel alone, making them feel incomplete and broken because of it. When talking about the final ending of the series’ last movie in a documentary, Anno talked about his dad a lot, specifically how his dad “hated the world” (Anno, Hideaki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion). Anno talked about how his dad was missing a leg and how his “dad symbolized something always missing in life,” which led Anno to believe that being incomplete was actually a good thing, even during the worst days Anno’s dad kept going even if he was “incomplete” (Anno, Hideaki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion). All of the character’s were traumatized by something missing from their lives, which made them dysfunctional and feel incomplete. Just like Anno’s father, these characters are built by a loss that makes them feel like they’re lacking something in their lives. Even with this loss they had to learn how to keep going, just like Anno’s father. That’s a big point in the series, trying to show that the character’s had to push forward even with their problems, they couldn’t run from them, just like in real life.

“What makes the psychology of Evangelion’s characters compelling is that nobody is well-adjusted or normal. Everyone has some pathology or dysfunction, and as the situation becomes increasingly desperate, everyone cracks from the pressure. There is no such thing as a ‘norma’” reaction to trauma in real life, either. Evangelion is full of references to psychoanalytic theory, and one lesson it can teach us is that psychopathology is not exceptional. Rather, it’s the default human condition, rising from a rift in our subjectivity. We are driven by the impossible desire to fill this lack; if there is anything that passes for normal, it is this wounded incompleteness. And, in our futile attempts to become whole, we—like the characters in Evangelion—end up hurting each other” (Kalinovski)

Shinji Ikari and the Rifts in our Subjectivity

Shonen shows are supposed to be an escapism from the real world, that lets people imagine themselves in a completely different life where they’re the heroes. Evangelion does have heroes in it, but not the kind of heroes people usually imagine themselves becoming. The heroes in a Shonen anime are the kind of heroes that aren’t realistic, making it impossible for one to envision themselves becoming a hero that can save people just by fighting. In Evangelion, the heroes are just everyday people who have the same flaws that people in the real world have. The characters in Evangelion may live in an apocalyptic society, but even in a more chaotic world the characters still face the problems people in the real world face. That’s not the kind of hero people want to imagine themselves being, especially one who would rather run away than actually fight.

Shinji Ikari would rather choose flight instead of fighting; he’s always quick to run away from anything that would cause him emotional or physical pain. Shinji avoids the possibility of pain instead of running headfirst into danger. However, the fate of humanity relies on Shinji to actually act and fight against the Angels that are trying to cause harm. For everyone watching the show, the Angels are depicted as the villains since they want to destroy the human race so they can become the dominant life form on the planet, but Shinji doesn’t understand why he has to be the one to stop them. That is because Shinji is unprepared. All the other EVA pilots were prepared for their role and knew that they were going to be an EVA pilot, but Shinji came to NERV expecting to talk to his father after years, not to pilot an EVA.

Characters and viewers of the series are angry at Shinji for being cowardly, but they forget that Shinji was never actually informed of his role in saving the world. Shinji went to NERV because his father asked him to come and, even though Gendo hasn’t seen Shinji in years, the first thing he tells Shinji to do was pilot the EVA. But, Shinji refused, so Gendo told the people around him to get Rei; she was wheeled in on a stretcher while being covered in bandages, and Gendo was going to have her pilot the Eva. Shinji looked at Rei and he didn’t want to be the reason she got hurt again. So, he agreed to be the pilot. That was the only reason he got into the EVA in the first place, because he wanted to prevent Rei from being hurt by his father’s actions. Although Shinji could have walked away from being the pilot, Gendo made sure that Shinji would be aware that he would hurt others by not being the pilot. This forced Shinji to say yes.

After reluctantly agreeing to be the EVA pilot, everyone thinks Shinji's going to be able to destroy the Angel even though he has absolutely no training. Even though Shinji puts in his best effort to stop it, he still gets absolutely destroyed by the Angel; Shinji only survives because the EVA took over to protect him. This was his first day on the job and technically he did it successfully by defeating the Angel, yet people were still very mad at him because of all the damage that was done to the city. His classmate, Toji, even took out his anger on Shinji because his little sister was hurt during the attack and Shinji just took the abuse. When Toji starts to criticize Shinji’s effort as an EVA pilot all Shinji has to say is “it’s not like I pilot that thing because I want to” (“The Silent Phone”).

At that point in the series, Shinji is right about not piloting by choice, but eventually he realizes he can’t run from his duty as being an EVA pilot. When the audience watches the moment that Shinji realizes he can’t run away from his duty, they would assume that this is when Shinji begins his true Shonen protagonist transformation but that doesn’t happen at all. Shinji realizes that he can’t run away from his duty as a pilot, but he only stays as a pilot for more selfish reasons. Shinji stays a pilot because for the first time ever, people actually praise him for doing a good job, even his father praised him. Shinji has always been a people pleaser. He never had a personality of his own because Shinji built his whole personality on the approval of others. He has no real passion for anything, all he really seems to enjoy doing is listening to his cassette tape over and over. Shinji even learned how to play the cello at a young age, but he only did it because his teacher that was taking care of him suggested he try to learn an instrument, he didn’t seem to even enjoy playing it. Shinji does whatever he has to in order to survive, then he just pretty much avoids anything that would complicate his life, all because he doesn’t want to make anyone hate him more than he thinks they do.

“From as early as 5 years old, Shinji adopted a new personality. He started playing the cello, after a suggestion from his teacher. Shinji shows no apparent passion for the instrument, claiming to only have continued practicing because no one told him to stop. His obedient nature seeped into all aspects of life, identified by the small favors he does for all of the characters. On top of cooking and cleaning for his housemates, he jumps when someone asks for a beer or to make a small delivery. But most interestingly is how far Shinji will go to meet the expectations of others” (15 Dejeu).

Throughout his whole life, no one has ever said that they loved Shinji, let alone liked him, so he gravitates towards the activity that gets him praise. Shinji has such a dire need to be loved by the people around him because throughout his whole life he felt that he didn’t deserve love, if he did then his father wouldn’t have abandoned him when he was a child. So, he seeks out love and acceptance from the people around him, trying to fill out the hole in his heart that his parents left him, but Shinji truly believes that there is no hope for him. For so long, Shinji had grown to hate himself because he could never get anyone to stay for him; he made himself believe that if his own father could abandon him, why would anyone else stay. Shinji’s self hatred ends up being the root of his cowardice and also his selfishness. He becomes a coward to protect himself from other people’s hatred.

Shinji is too scared to let anyone close to him and by doing that he can never be hurt again. However, no one can survive loneliness for long, so Shinji starts to become a little selfish. He knows that people need him to be an EVA pilot, so he pretends that people actually like him because of it. This shows that he is only piloting the EVA for selfish reasons. Being an EVA pilot gets him praise, so he pretends that praise is in admiration instead of thinking of it as the bare minimum. This causes Shinji to form an unhealthy codependency on the people around him, if they don’t like him it reinforces the self hatred that he has for himself. A character can’t be a Shonen protagonist without having a little bit of self hatred or resentment of others, but Shinji’s self hatred goes beyond the normal amount. It’s insanely hard for Shinji with his social anxiety, depression, and abandonment issues to trust others when they actually grow to care about him, especially when they are all constantly yelling at him for being a coward.

“Psychoanalytically, Shinji desires for others to desire him, yet he remains incapable of recognizing when they return his desire, for even when he gains a wide circle of friends after coming to live in Tokyo III, he still never recognizes himself as the object of others’ love. Instead, he views himself as an object of scorn and ridicule, and he therefore hates himself (or thinks he hates himself) as well. Because of his father’s abandonment, which denied Shinji the recognition of fatherly love, we might argue that Shinji experiences his lack so profoundly that it precludes him from being able to achieve a state of sublimation” (159-60 Miller).

No one plays a bigger part in calling Shinji a coward than the pilot of EVA Unit-02, Asuka Langley Soryu. Asuka didn’t like Shinji at first because he was able to control an EVA very well for someone who had no training of being a pilot, she didn’t like how easily it came to him, especially since she considers him to be spineless. In episode 16, “The Sickness unto Death, and Then…,” Asuka ends up lashing out at Shinji because he does better than her at a test with the EVA’s; Shinji doesn’t know what to say so he just apologizes, which made Asuka so angry she screamed “You always apologize instantly! Do you really even feel sorry?! It’s like a conditioned response with you! You do it so people won’t yell at you!” (Anno). Although Asuka is a little harsh about everything that has to do with Shinji, she is right that he is conditioned to say sorry very easily, it’s part of his defense mechanisms.

With all of Shinji’s mental issues, he’s learned some tricks to help himself avoid the pain of everyday living; he uses denial, projection, displacement, and sublimation. His denial is used to avoid reality and basically refuse to accept things that are happening around him; he uses projection to put blame onto everyone else around him instead of facing the fact that he’s making himself miserable. Then, he uses displacement by taking his anger out on people, like Asuka, who have never caused everlasting harm against Shinji, they just are the easier targets; his last defense mechanism is one of the only reasons why he keeps piloting the EVA, sublimation. With sublimation, he uses his anger towards the world to react when he sees something terrible happening when he is piloting the EVA; for example, if he sees Rei or Asuka get hurt by an Angel, he immediately turns all his hatred towards the Angel in order to save them. Sublimation allows Shinji to do the thing he hates the most, pilot an EVA he never wanted to pilot in the first place.

“Shinji Ikari has employed defense mechanisms at the very beginning and by the near ending. During the middle of the series, Shinji has developed a better personality from his good relationship with others before everything seems to be good until what makes him happy has been collapsed like good relationship with everyone especially with his father. Because of Shinji’s severe depression, he employs various of defense mechanisms to keep himself alive from guilt by superego where as it can lead him to suicidal action” (Henglerttrattana).

Even though Shinji is not a hero type and does a lot of things for selfish reasons, he is a good kid underneath it all. He never wanted to hurt anyone, he just wanted to make some friends, have parents that were actually there for him, and just have a normal life. Unfortunately he wasn’t allowed that, so he made do with what he had and even made some friends along the way. He was in a happier place for a while, he was even starting to like and trust his father along with all the adults working in NERV. However, they all ruined the trust Shinji had with them when they took control of his EVA so they could defeat the Angel that took over another EVA unit. When Shinji saw that another EVA was being controlled, he realized that there was a person in there and anything he did to the EVA would hurt the person inside of it. Shinji was begging for them to think of another way to save the pilot, but Gendo said there wasn’t any other way so he shut Shinji out.

Once the EVA was neutralized and Shinji regained control he discovered that his friend, Toji, was the pilot (all though in the new movie adaptations of the series, they replaced Toji with Asuka). This caused Shinji to snap, he was so angry and was threatening to destroy the whole NERV base with the little bit of time he had left in his EVA. Shinji wanted to destroy them all for what they made him do and they kept trying to make excuses on why they had no choice, but Shinji only said “that doesn’t make it okay!” (“A Man’s Battle”). Shinji was tired of their excuses, was tired of all them yelling at him for being a coward when they have him do their dirty work; in the movie Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone, Shinji was honest with his feelings and said “I’m scared of piloting the EVA… You guys have it easy. You just stay below and give out orders. I get stuck doing all that scary stuff! You’re all hypocrites” (Anno).

Once again, Shinji was tired of everyone in NERV and decided to stop being an EVA pilot, again. This was probably the fifth time he said he would stop being an EVA pilot, so the audience figured he would be back once again since he’s never stuck with that resolve, and he does. At this point, no one in the show or outside of the show will ever take Shinji seriously about quitting being a pilot because he keeps coming back. He’ll keep coming back for non heroic reasons. He keeps coming back because he is a kid who is desperate for others to praise him and love him. Eventually, Shinji does meet someone who loves him, the first person to ever say that they love him. Kaworu Nagisa, introduced as a new pilot for the EVA program, attaches himself to Shinji and tries to make him feel loved in the little time they have together. It’s the first time in Shinji’s life that he feels accepted and whole, so of course it has to end badly for him. Kaworu turned out to be the final Angel that had to be destroyed in order to save the rest of humanity, so he asked Shinji to kill him. Shinji is heartbroken and tries to convince Kaworu there has to be another way, but all Kaworu has to say is “it’s my fate” and that “choosing to die is the one absolute freedom” (“The Last Cometh”). Shinji’s a good friend to Kaworu, so he eventually gives in and kills Kaworu by squashing him in his EVA’s hand. This action begins the end of everything in the world of Evangelion.

“Kaworu said that he loved me. It was the first time someone told me they loved me. He was similar to me. And to Ayanami. I really liked him. If only one of us could survive, it should have been him. He was a way better person than I am. Kaworu should have survived!” (“The Last Cometh”).

“Congratulations!” The End of Shinji Ikari

Even though Evangelion technically has three endings, they’re all the same ending. All the endings mean the same thing, they're just told from a different perspective, which ended up confusing a lot of people at first, because they just wanted one solid ending that ties the whole show together. However, “there is no canonical Evangelion. Only the story of a fan, full of doubts, trying to find meaning in the stories they love and the life they’ve lived” (Stewart-Ahn). There’s no perfect ending. Similar to real life, the ending is complicated but that’s not what people sign up for. When they first started this anime, they most likely expected an ending where everything works out. Like in a regular Shonen everything always works out in the end, it’s why people watch Shonen because they want an ending you don’t see in real life. But, Evangelion has been shown to not be an ordinary Shonen and doesn’t have a normal protagonist, so the ending had to be imperfect.

For the original series, the show ends by having all the characters share the same mind (basically), where they all talk out their dark feelings that they have and when they resolve those feelings they create a new world. In The End of Evangelion, it has a more action packed ending for the series, with more EVA fights, intense visuals, but still ends with the start of a new, better world. In Evangelion 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon a Time, it basically becomes a combination of the original series and The End of Evangelion approach on how to end the series; it has some action scenes, a mind meld scene, and ends with a new world. All the endings are unique with their different approaches, but all of them make Shinji face his own demons.

Shinji finally comes to terms with the reason why he’s so miserable all the time, he realizes it’s his own fault for being miserable. He blamed his father for the longest time, but that didn’t fix anything in his life, he used that as a reason on why he can’t get better. He closed himself off from the world which stopped him from letting anyone in, making himself believe that he was all alone because they hated him. These endings all made Shinji realize that he’s responsible for all his choices, which made him responsible for his own happiness. In a Shonen anime, a majority of them strive to show that things like the power of friendship can fix all things but that’s not realistic. Then again, that’s exactly why people like Shonen, it’s not reality and keeps them from thinking about their own lives. Even in a fantasy that people try to escape to, the trauma that hovers over the characters in the fantasy brings people back to reality.

No matter how hard they try to escape it, it’s impossible to. Evangelion had an ending that required its audience, that were just trying to escape from reality for a bit, to reflect on their own life. Their protagonist wasn’t fun or heroic, he was a complete mess for a fourteen year old, but he was the most human out of all the Shonen protagonists out there. Shinji was a kid, who was abandoned at the age of five, so he closed himself off from the rest of the world to protect himself from harm. He struggled with social anxiety and depression, he never felt like he had a home anywhere, and he tried so hard to have people love. He was a broken person who didn’t realize that everyone around him was just as alone and broken as him, but they let others in unlike him.

Shinji Ikari resonated with a lot of people, me included, because he showed real life portrayals of depression, loneliness, despair, and what it looks like to want people to love you. The whole point of his character was to be different from every other Shonen protagonist because Anno wanted a protagonist that represented people as a whole, to make them think more critically about their own life after watching Shinji’s failures. Shinji Ikari is memorable because he’s a real kid.

“In Evangelion, as in our world, human beings are unequipped to live under the shadow of doom. This psychological realism is a mirror in times like ours, reflecting our perceived faults and inadequacies back at us and offering reassurance that it’s normal to not feel normal. If there is any comfort to be found in the apocalypse, it is that everyone is going through the same thing. Our individual traumas are unique and may be difficult for others to comprehend, but now we are united by a lack of control over our lives: we’re all alone together” (Kalinovski).