Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I think I may have been born just to meet you, Shinji Ikari.”
Kaworu Nagisa Quotes
1 quote from Neon Genesis Evangelion, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read Kaworu Nagisa's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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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 cruellest 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.