Misato Katsuragi Quotes

Both of them know there is no rest and no getting back, which is what the scene is actually about. Misato is bleeding out, the boy in front of her has quit entirely, and the only fuel left in the building is a promise she cannot keep, so she makes it, and shoves him toward the lift. The kiss is the most argued-over gesture in the film, and the argument usually misses its function: it is not desire, it is denomination. She pays him in the only currency guaranteed to obligate a fourteen-year-old to stay alive for the next ten minutes, an IOU drawn on a future both parties know is canceled. The End of Evangelion is merciless about its adults, and this is the one moment it allows an adult to be magnificent, by lying perfectly, for someone else's benefit, at the door of her own death. What the film does next with Shinji makes the gift look wasted. The gift was not wasted. It got him into the lift, which was the entire achievable good remaining, and she knew that too.

Shinji hears this as heartlessness: his reply is to ask how she can be so cruel. Read it instead as the only thing she is qualified to say. Misato survived Second Impact as a girl in a capsule her father put her in, spent years mute, and built a career on getting back at the Angels; the woman lecturing a boy about the will to live is describing the one thing she knows she has. Her mistake is not the sentiment but the diagnosis. Kaworu did not ignore his will to survive. He told Shinji, in Terminal Dogma, that his death was the only absolute freedom available to him and that his survival meant the end of the Lilim, which is not a false hope but an accurate account of the choice. Misato was not there for that. She is arguing with a version of the last Angel she has assembled from a MAGI report, and consoling a boy who heard the real one.

Compare the woman saying this with the captain in episode one, who took a boy she had never met by the shoulders and told him he must not run away, he must confront his father and himself. Twenty-six episodes and a film separate the two speeches and the difference is that the first one issued orders. By the time of the corridor in The End of Evangelion, with a bullet in her side and the JSSDF working through the Geofront floor by floor, she has stopped commanding him. She has also lost everything she used to hide behind: Kaji is dead, and NERV is being overrun by its own government. What is left is a guardian handing over the one thing she never delegated, which is the choosing. She will kiss him, push him into an elevator, and die on the floor wondering whether she did the right thing. The speech is her answer to that question, delivered before she asks it.

The list of crimes comes first: Asuka, Kaworu, dishonesty, cowardice, a wish to do nothing at all. The refusal of sympathy is what she has instead of time, and the film prices it. Soon after he is in the plug, then inside Lilith, then choosing whether anyone else gets to exist, and the choice he makes there is the one she demanded here: pain over nothing. So the line worked. What it cost is the other thing to hold onto, because Misato does not get to see it work. Her last words, alone on the floor with the elevator gone, are addressed to Kaji and Pen-Pen and ask whether she did the right thing. The series had spent twenty-four episodes on adults who ask children to pilot and then feel bad about it. The film's answer is an adult who stops feeling bad long enough to be useful, and dies before anyone thanks her.