“Your truth can be changed simply by the way you accept it. That's how fragile the truth for a human is.”
Kozo Fuyutsuki Quotes
2 quotes from Neon Genesis Evangelion, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“When Man created Evangelion, were we trying to create a clone of God?”
Fuyutsuki was Yui's professor before he was Gendo's second, which is the history the question is asked from. Episode twenty-one shows him as a biology lecturer at Kyoto who disliked Gendo on sight and was drawn into the project once he learned what Second Impact had been; he has spent the series standing one step behind a man he never respected, out of loyalty to a woman inside a machine. So when he puts this to her during Instrumentality, he is not asking about theology. He is asking his student whether the thing he helped build for her was worth what it did to her son, and her answer, that the Eva will outlast the sun as proof humanity existed, is the answer he supplies the last word of himself. The old man completes her sentence. That is the whole relationship: he was always going to finish her thought, and never once got to change it.
Read Kozo Fuyutsuki'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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Here the objection writes itself: a series that has spent twenty-five episodes on children being used by adults ends with the adults sitting in a circle telling the child that reality is a matter of perspective, which is what abusers say. Fuyutsuki is the right man to raise it about, because in the plot he is the vice-commander who knew about Second Impact, about Yui's absorption and about the scenario, and said nothing for fifteen years. Now steelman the sentence anyway. He is not saying that what happened can be reinterpreted away. He is saying that the meaning of what happened is not fixed by the people who did it, which for Shinji is the only available exit: Gendo's use of him is a fact, and whether it defines him is not. Fuyutsuki spends the film asking Yui whether they built a clone of God. An old man who got everything wrong and knows it is exactly who should be allowed to say the truth is fragile.