Rei Ayanami Quotes

Seven questions and no verbs of feeling anywhere in them. The series builds Rei by withholding interiority for twenty-three episodes and then giving her interrogatives rather than statements, so the audience learns what she wants only in the shape of what she cannot answer. Asking how she resembles Kaworu is the closest the show lets her come to asking what she is.

Received wisdom makes Rei the lonely one, and this sentence in episode twenty-three has her diagnosing loneliness in an Angel instead. Armisael has entered Unit-00 and is offering to merge, the same offer every Angel makes in one form or another, and Rei refuses on the grounds that she is herself and not it. Then she turns the offer around: the Angel is the one alone. Take her literally. 'We are many' is spoken before the tank of spare bodies is shown to Shinji and Misato later in the episode, so on first viewing it reads as humanity's plural; on second viewing it is Rei counting herself, the clones, and knowing exactly what she is. Later in the fight she self-destructs Unit-00. A girl who knows she is replaceable and chooses to be used up protecting one boy is not lonely in the way the series' first half suggested. She has company, and it is the worst company in the world.

There is a strong objection to this scene, which is that it is a therapist's voice put in a fourteen-year-old girl's mouth. The Rei of the Instrumentality sequence speaks with a clarity the Rei of the series never had, and it is easy to feel the author reaching past the character. Grant that and then ask what she is answering. Shinji has just said he thought Instrumentality would be a world without pain or uncertainty, and she is telling him that the absence of other people is not the same as the absence of pain. That is not a therapist's insight; it is the film's thesis and the reason it ends on a beach with two people rather than in a sea of one. The Rei who says it has merged with Lilith and contains, at that moment, everyone. She is speaking for the whole species to the one boy who tried to opt out on its behalf, which is a voice earned rather than borrowed.

Cowboy Bebop closes on a man who has spent his series calling his life a dream he cannot wake from, and finds the dream ending. Evangelion's film, two years earlier, has a girl who is now the whole of humanity tell a boy that a world with nobody in it is not even a dream, only a stand-in for the reality he refused. The two shows use the same word and mean opposite things by it. Spike's dream is the past, and waking from it kills him. Shinji's is a future in which no one can hurt him, and the sentence Rei speaks is what wakes him into a world where they can. Watch what the film cuts to around the exchange: a live-action theater, then the same theater empty. Anno is asking the audience whether the world with nobody in it felt good, and the answer he wants is the one Rei gives. The comparison flatters neither hero, and only one of them gets to walk off the beach.

Episode twenty-six was made in a hurry, and its group-therapy sequence, in which the whole cast takes turns saying a sentence about perception to a boy on a chair, is where the strain shows most. This is one of those sentences. It is true, in the way a pamphlet is true, and the show had already dramatized it far better: Rei's actual line about loneliness, spoken to an Angel in episode twenty-three, needed no abstraction because it was said inside a dying Eva by a girl about to detonate herself. Here she is a voice in a circle, and the aphorism lands on nobody in particular. The defense is that the broadcast ending is deliberately a rehearsal room, actors reading the moral because the play could not be staged. Fine. The film staged it a year later, with the same girl, and needed none of these sentences to do it. The good version of this idea exists. This is the storyboard.