The Blackberry Walk

Shinji is a troubled young boy, as we can all agree. Rejected by his father, abandoned by his mother through her death (or so he thinks), he is lost: adrift. Eva is very cool. The franchise has so much lore, such beautiful shots, such well written plot, but what the show is really about, what Eva is really trying to explicate, are the lives of their characters. Characters who've been abandoned by the gods, abandoned by their parental projections, abandoned by the sustenance they need to develop as a person in the world. Shinji as a character stands at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist of anime. He represents the anxious child who turns away from contact with the world and instead turns to a life of escapist fantasy. Regressing ever further backwards away from growing up. But as everyone in Shinji's life tells him, he has to stand up for himself. If he doesn't stand up for himself he's doomed. He's doomed to be swallowed whole by the society he lives in. Doomed to be eaten by the Father. Only by taking hold of the Lance of Longinus for himself, as he does in End of Eva, can he stand up for himself. But instead he begins to tumble down... And tumble down he does. In End of Eva, when he hears Asuka, his soul-image, being savaged over the intercom, he finally ruptures and his ego disintegrates. Instrumentality isn't the final stage of human evolution; it is the first. By that I mean that instrumentality takes you back to the ouroboric union of the baby rather than that of the complete man. Instead of becoming accomplished and reintegrated, you regress to the embryonic state wherein the you and the world are undifferentiated. The ultimate retreat by Shinji. Escaping every danger on the outside, he retreats back into the impregnable (well, perhaps pregnable) walls of the womb. In the process of instrumentality, Shinji is encased in the Lance of Longinus before he enters Lilith as the seed of instrumentality. Shinji has lost to society. The fatherly society has castrated him and cut him off from his soul, Asuka. Like the sons of Kronos, he has been swallowed and never allowed to grow up, never confirmed by his father as a man. But through his interactions with Rei withinin instrumentality, Rei being modeled after his mother, he manages to escape the state of instrumentality which the tyrannical father, Gendou/Society, has put him in. And just as Rei saves Shinji from instrumentality and from the father, so too does Rhea (rei-a) save Zeus from Kronos. The story of Eva is the heroic development of Shinji who has now become the king of his own destiny. Bursting out of Lilith's eye, Shinji can now stand on his own two feet and see the world for himself - looking others in the eyes and confronting them instead of turning away in fear. And thus Shinji is reborn.