Shinji Ikari Quotes

Fandom prints it as a mantra of resolve, and as motivation it is overrated in a way the show itself keeps saying out loud. Listen to the scene: the line is recited, three and five times over, by a fourteen-year-old talking himself into a box of armor and pain, and the animation frames it as self-coercion rather than courage, a boy whipping the one animal he owns, himself. Nothing about it is aspirational. The series is a long demonstration of what the mantra costs, because a child who cannot permit himself retreat has no setting between compliance and collapse, and Evangelion is the story of the collapse. What redeems the line is that the show prices it honestly. Running away is treated as a real option with real shame attached, staying is treated as damage with real applause attached, and the adults harvesting the applause are the villains of the piece whether the plot says so or not. As a poster it teaches persistence. In context it is a symptom being mistaken for a virtue, by the speaker first of all.

Episode one states the series' real subject in the shape of a tantrum, before the first Angel is even down. A boy is standing in front of the father who discarded him, discovering that the summons was not an apology but a requisition, and everything Evangelion will ever be about is on the table. The genius of the scene is the order of grievances. Not why must I fight, not I might die, but you did not want me, which is the actual wound, with the giant robot as its delivery mechanism. Gendo needs a pilot; Shinji hears a son being needed and cannot tell the difference, and the series is built in the gap between those two sentences. Every battle that follows is a child performing usefulness for a parent who priced him at his utility. The show hides its thesis in plain sight by making it sound like adolescent noise, which is exactly how the adults in the room treat it, and that treatment is the plot.

The unfamiliar ceiling becomes a refrain, and it is doing something a monologue could not. Evangelion tells the audience where its protagonist is emotionally by showing what he wakes up under, which lets the series skip the interior narration a lesser show would need. By the time the phrase recurs it functions as a status report: still nowhere, still a guest, still counting the tiles.

The reasonable objection to Shinji as a protagonist is that he refuses, constantly, and it is exhausting. The reasonable answer is that he is correct every time. A fourteen-year-old is being handed an untested weapon by an agency whose other pilot was badly hurt in an earlier experiment, and the series is careful to make the refusal the only sane position in the room before it makes him do it anyway.

Two adults decide where he will sleep before anyone asks him. Fuyutsuki tells Ritsuko, in the previous scene, that living apart is natural to the Ikaris, and Shinji's answer when the arrangement reaches him is this shrug. Fourteen years sit behind the shrug: a mother gone when he was three, a father who handed him to a teacher, a boy who has learned that the cheapest way to be abandoned is to say it was his idea. What makes the line worth keeping is that Misato overrules it in the same episode, badly and on impulse, announcing to Ritsuko that he will live with her and promising Ritsuko she will make no passes at him. The show's argument about isolation starts here, with a bad joke and a spare room, not with the hedgehog lecture an episode later. Shinji does not want to be alone. He wants not to be asked.

Toji has just asked to be punched. On the platform in episode four, with Shinji's train to nowhere waiting, the boy who decked him twice in episode three offers his own face as settlement, and Shinji's refusal comes out as this inventory of his own faults. Structurally the scene needs it. The episode has followed a runaway: two days of wandering, a night in Kensuke's tent, men in black escorting him back. For the ending to work, for him to step away from the train and tell Misato he is home, somebody had to hear him say a true thing out loud first, and the show chose the two boys rather than any adult. That is a deliberate ranking. Misato's understanding arrives a scene later, as an inference about the hedgehog's dilemma. Toji gets the confession itself.

Inside the Angel, argued with by his own voice, Shinji has been made to say what he lives on: praise from Misato after he beat Asuka in a test with the Evas, the reason he charged into the fight Leliel swallowed him in. The objection the Angel puts to him is a strong one: a life stitched together from other people's approval is not a life, and he is deceiving himself. Grant it. Then notice the show does not side with the Angel. Episode sixteen ends with Unit-01 tearing its own way out of the Dirac sea, much to the horror of the onlookers, and Shinji recovered alive. Self-deception kept him breathing in an entry plug whose life support was running out. The series is harder on his motives later, in the film, but here it lets a borrowed reason to live count as a reason to live, which is a more generous position than its reputation suggests.

Spike Spiegel's exit line in Cowboy Bebop, spoken three years later, makes the natural pair: he is not going to die, he is going to find out whether he is alive. Both are answers to the same question, whether a man walks back into the thing that broke him, and they point opposite ways. Shinji's comes in episode nineteen, the episode in which he decides to leave NERV. The important word is 'sucks'. It is a teenager's word, and it refuses the grandeur Spike's version claims. Bebop lets its hero make cowardice look like fate. Evangelion makes its hero say the small true thing, then spends the rest of the episode leaving him to choose the plug again on his own, which is the less flattering and more honest version of the choice.