“Hmm, sounds like you don't get along with your dad. Uh, you sound just like me.”
Misato Katsuragi 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.
“That was a grown-up kiss. We'll do the rest when you get back.”
Both of them know there is no rest and no getting back, which is what the scene is actually about. Misato is bleeding out against a corridor wall, 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 cancelled. 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.
Read Misato Katsuragi'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.
Find Neon Genesis Evangelion on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Delivered as car-ride small talk, and it is the series handing over its blueprint in the first episode: the adults of Evangelion are the children of Evangelion, twenty years on, unrepaired. Misato hears a boy's estrangement from his father and files it instantly under her own, which is accurate, warm, and quietly alarming, because the person assigned to shelter this child has the same wound at the same depth and a fridge full of beer on top of it. The show builds its entire adult cast on this rhyme. Every guardian is a former abandoned child managing the damage with a different anaesthetic, work, sex, drink, secrecy, and the institution they all serve is run by the most abandoned child of all. What sounds like sympathy in the car is really the series' warning label: nobody in this story has an adult to hand, including the adults. Misato's honesty about the resemblance is her best quality and her confession in one breath, and the arc she gets is the long test of whether likeness can substitute for parenting. It cannot, and she is the one who finds out.