I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion half-convinced that the buzz around it was more noise than substance. But I found a work that dares to break the mecha mold and delivers a raw dissection of the human soul. This is not an easy show, nor a comfortable one. It doesn’t even try to be. More than telling a story, it exposes a series of existential fractures that play out both inside its characters and within anyone who dares to watch.
What looks like a show about teenagers piloting robots quickly reveals itself as a dense choreography of trauma, inherited guilt, and suffocating loneliness. Each angel is more than an enemy: it’s a metaphor, intricate and piercing. Shinji, Rei, Asuka, Gendo... they aren’t archetypes. They’re walking wounds, drifting in a Tokyo-3 haunted by its own past.
Psychology here isn’t a backdrop, it’s the core. Depression, abandonment, pathological need for validation—none of it is sugar-coated. Hideaki Anno isn’t giving me answers, he’s offering emotional x-rays. The show doesn't explain; it suggests. It doesn’t resolve; it interrogates. And in that uncomfortable ambiguity, I found truths I wish I hadn’t seen so clearly.
The social dimension creeps in through the cracks: a critique of hierarchies, of institutions that promise salvation but operate through coercion, of a masculinity stripped of tenderness. Evangelion forces me to confront how structure quietly manufactures suffering in those who refuse to conform. It’s a veiled indictment that hits harder because it whispers in apocalyptic tones.
Then there’s the religious layer—not dogma, but symbolic provocation. Crosses, names, the weaponization of the divine as justification for erasing the self. It’s not about faith; it’s about what humanity becomes when there’s no God left to answer us. Evangelion doesn’t debate God—it questions what we do in His silence.
I finished the series with more questions than answers, but with the certainty that I had witnessed a work that doesn’t want to please, but to confront. It’s not perfect, nor does it pretend to be. But in its imperfections lies an artistic honesty I rarely see in anime.
