Neon Genesis Evangelion 1x14: "Seele, the Seat of the Soul" // Full-Length Reaction
Added 2025-10-04 00:24:09 +0000 UTC
Comments
You see, NGE had played with psychoanalytical themes before -- the Hedgehog Dilemma, Rey's attachment to Gendō's broken glasses, the relationship between Shinji and his father Gendō, questions like 'why do you pilot the EVA?' -- but this episode shows a sudden twist: now psychoanalytic topics -- the attempt to understand precisely why each character is the way s/he is -- becomes central. (Just look at the titles of some of the future episodes: 'Introjection'? 'Oral phase?' 'Splitting of the Breast'?...) We thought NGE was just about fighting aliens who attack us for some reason, and that the story would be about finding out why; but this particular topic becomes less important as time goes by (I tend to see the list of all angels at the beginning of the episode as a farewell to that specific topic), and the personal hells of everybody slowly come to the fore. It's not that we're no longer interested in why the angels come, what Seele really wants, and so on; but these questions begin to get less and less time, and internal questions concerning who everybody truly is and/or wants grow more and more important. That is what convinced me that Evangelion is a show I would never forget. In a very visceral way, it 'gets' people. In a way I have seen very few shows do, Evangelion really gets to you, and you see yourself asking yourself the same questions ('why do I do what I do?' 'who am I really?' 'am I loved?') as the show goes on. You're entering this phase now, it's quite a ride, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did when I first saw it. As Pen² would say, 'hruuup! khuuug! good stuff! bfoog!"
Sergio Meira
2025-10-04 18:38:36 +0000 UTCIndeed, Evangelion does change after this roll call of defeated angels... The question now is, what is Evangelion the show, and what is it about? Ray going: "Who am I? Who I am? I am the one who is..." THAT is Evangelion...
Sergio Meira
2025-10-04 14:36:27 +0000 UTC
