Kaworu Nagisa Quotes

The most quoted romance line in the series is also literally true, and the literal truth is the horror. Kaworu was made, sent, and scheduled; his birth genuinely does aim at this meeting the way a bullet aims. Fandom keeps the sentence as pure sweetness, and the sweetness is real, but the show has double-coded it with an exactness that rewards the reread: every tender word he says is simultaneously a fact about his mission, and the episode's tragedy is that the tenderness turns out to be the part he improvised. He is the one being in the story who offers Shinji affection without invoice, unconditional, immediate, stated aloud, and he is also the instrument pointed at the species. The two facts share a sentence and cannot be separated, which is Evangelion's cruelest design decision: the boy starved of love all series receives one perfect dose of it from something aimed at him. What follows in the episode's final minutes is the price, paid at Shinji's own hand, and the series never lets him or the audience decide whether the meeting was a gift or a wound. It was both, on purpose, from birth.

Five words in English and an argument in Japanese. The original is suki, which covers everything from liking a food to declaring yourself, and the two major English releases split on it: ADV went with love, and the 2019 Netflix subtitles went with like. Netflix's translator pointed to Anno's own remarks that Evangelion leaves things open to interpretation, while saying that excerpt should not be read as a defense of his choices. Ambiguity is a defensible position about writing and a poor one about this scene. The test is not the word, it is Shinji afterwards. What happens to him at the end of the episode is not the response of a boy who has been told he is liked. A translation is a choice, and this one changes what the following twenty minutes are about.

It sounds like a put-down from something that is not human, and the objection writes itself: easy for an Angel to say. What complicates it is the audience. He says it to SEELE, not to Shinji, and SEELE's reply turns straight to the one man trying to obtain the power of god. The limitation he names, that people need something to hold, is offered to the people who sent him, as a description of what they are.

The most decorative sentence in a series that is otherwise allergic to decoration, and it gets quoted more than anything Kaworu says that costs him something. Spun flax and threads belong to a different register than the clinical dread the show runs on, and the line's popularity is partly that it sounds like wisdom in isolation. His plainer lines about needing something to hold are the ones doing the work.

Humming the choral theme of Beethoven's Ninth atop an angel-like statue is how Kaworu enters, and his first words to Shinji are about singing, which is the show's joke and its plan in one image. Episode twenty-four had a problem to solve: an Angel arriving as a boy has to be liked by the audience faster than any character in the series has been liked, because he will be dead in twenty minutes. The mechanism is to have him praise humanity for singing, in a series whose protagonist plays cello alone at home in episode fifteen, with only Asuka coming back in time to compliment it. So a stranger arriving with a tune and a compliment reads as the first person in the story who is not afraid, and 'Lilims' does the rest: he is admiring us from outside. The Ninth is the music that plays over his death. The episode chose the song before it chose the boy.

A boy who has just said he does not want to go home these days is told, in reply, a greeting-card sentence about how having a home leads to happiness. Quoted on its own it sounds like wisdom; heard in the scene it is a boy from outside the species failing to listen. Misato's apartment, at this point in the series, contains a guardian drinking through her grief for Kaji and an Asuka who stopped speaking and was fished out of a bathtub in a derelict house at the top of this same episode. Shinji is right not to want it, and the one character in the show who is supposed to understand him tells him, gently, that he is lucky. The line earns a place on the page because of what it is not: it is not one of Kaworu's insights, it is the first hint that his tenderness is generic, a kindness aimed at the Lilim rather than at this one. He gets specific later, in the shower and the room after. Here he is guessing.

Being disarmed is the favor he is grateful for. Unit-01 has just torn Unit-02 off him in Terminal Dogma, and Kaworu's response is to thank the boy for it, on the grounds that with Asuka's Eva he might have gone on living. What the sentence commits him to is a death he has already chosen and now cannot back out of, and what it commits Shinji to is worse: the knowledge, held for the rest of the series and the whole of the film, that the one person who said they loved him asked to be killed and meant it as a gift. Everything that goes wrong for Shinji afterwards runs through this. He refuses to pilot in the film because his hands did this. The static shot of the hand closing, held for about a minute, is the show making the audience sit in the consequence with him. Kaworu's gratitude is real. It is also the cruelest thing anyone says to Shinji in twenty-six episodes.

Gendo, not Shinji, is the one he is speaking to, which is the detail worth keeping. During the Instrumentality sequence, the father's confession to Yui is answered by three figures, Kaworu, Yui and Rei in turn, and it is the dead Angel who delivers the first verdict. That is a strange assignment for a character who barely met Gendo. But look at what Kaworu is: a boy who spent his one episode trying to get close to a child who flinched at every approach, and who was killed by that child's hands. He knows the pathology from the receiving end. The line he says here is the one he never quite said to Shinji in the shower, softened then into an observation about keeping others at a distance and delivered now, to the father who taught the flinch, without any softening at all. The film is drawing a straight line from Gendo's fear to Shinji's, and it uses the one victim of both to draw it.