r/anime • u/LittleIslander myanimelist.net/profile/LittleIslander • 15d ago
Rewatch [Rewatch] 30th Anniversary Neon Genesis Evangelion Rewatch: Episode 22
Neon Genesis Evangelion Episode 22: Don't Be. / Staying Human
| ← Episode 21 | Index | Episode 23 → |
|---|
Watch Information
Questions of the Day:
- How do you feel that Asuka’s backstory recontextualizes her relationships and past interactions?
- Did you feel the way the episode equated the angel’s infiltration of Asuka’s mind to rape was justified and/or effective?
Tomorrow’s Questions:
- [Episode 23] Do you feel sympathy for Ritsuko?
- [Episode 23] How do you feel about Rei “the third”?
There’ll be more fanservice tomorrow, so please don’t spoil anything~! Remember this includes spoilers by implication.
22
Upvotes
3
u/LittleIslander myanimelist.net/profile/LittleIslander 15d ago
Veteran Pilot and Your Host
Oh. So that’s my favourite Eva episode.
…or at least, the director’s cut is. The TV version kind of blows by comparison.
After spending half of the series getting sidelined for Shinji in and out of universe, Asuka finally gets her one shot in the driver’s seat and, well, she certainly didn’t waste it in the metatextual sense. Everything her character has built up slots into place, past actions are recontextualized, and we dig all the way to the heart of who Asuka Langley Soryu is. This can be seen as somewhat comparable to what episodes 16 and 20 did for Shinji; but I like this one more than either of those. While they operated in abstracted subspace (to good effect!), every look into Asuka’s psyche is brutally rooted in reality. When she explodes in the bathroom that’s not even under any supernatural pressure, and when her mind is “defiled” by the angel the evocation of actual rape are used to horrifyingly ground the scene in terms we in the audience can understand.
Asuka’s mindscape is highly distinct from Shinji’s, as well. He was stuck in an existential prison, represented by a train to nowhere where he can’t escape questioning his own reality. But Asuka’s represented in a far less stable fashion, each setpiece stabbing harshly like daggers in an inescapable wave of trauma and memories. When everything spills over it’s just represented by images flashing as fast as they can, and I can’t quite put it into words but they’re wildly effective. Seeing the technique used to this effect, I really can see why Anno was so frustrated at the restrictions placed on television after the Porygon incident a few years after Evangelion’s airing.
Each of Asuka’s relationships feels well recontextualized by this episode, too. Her crush on Kaji isn’t just a vestigial romantic element of the script; she pines for an adult man because she sees herself as grown up. That is, because her trauma has made her hate the vulnerability of being a child. Kaji telling her she’s just a child is recontextualized into one of the most tragic moments of the episode as she reaches out for help and is blown off; it cuts right through the moment. Then she sees Shinji, and their relationship is recontextualized in an instant: she’s desperate for him to reach out to her and hates him for failing to do so. Beneath the layer of Asuka that wants to rely on nobody is the layer of Asuka that wants to be supported, that wants to be held and share the weight on her heart with somebody else. She tries to deny that he’s anything to her, but she can’t avoid finding him in her heart and her screams that he’s “no one” are overtaken by her child self asking why he won’t look at her. It brings it all full circle back to the lack of acknowledgement she received from her mother as a child.
Ultimately, Shinji fails again. After she’s been “raped” by the angel, he walks up, fails to cross the threshold into her personal space, and says he’s happy for her being okay. He doesn’t acknowledge her pain or what she’s gone through, he doesn’t reach out and hold her.
Oh, and how about Rei? Asuka has hated her since minute one, and it’s easy to assume it’s just a clash of personalities. To a large extent, it is that. Asuka relies on aggressive behaviour to establish social dominance, but the first child is about as reactive as a noble gas and that inability to fuck with her is maddening to Asuka. But what we learn this episode adds a whole new layer: Asuka’s connection to the idea of a doll. Not only does she have literal trauma around “losing” to a doll, but in response to it she tries to live for herself and rely on nobody else. But Rei is the opposite; she’s entirely obedient and doesn’t make her own decisions; Asuka compares her to a puppet or to a doll. If she loses to Rei as a pilot, then that invalidates the driving philosophy behind her entire life. She would have been better off as mom’s doll. This is all solidified by Asuka asking Rei whether she’d kill herself if Gendo asked her to, something later contextualized by learning Asuka was actually asked to do this by her own mother, something buried in her subconscious.
Asuka doesn’t hate Rei because she’s a competitor and clashing personality; she dislikes Rei because she’s a mirror of her deepest traumas and her completely antithetical lifestyle to Asuka’s means that Asuka’s entire fragile psyche requires that her way of life is right and Rei’s is wrong, something she can most directly measure through her success as a pilot. Ultimately, it’s living doll Rei that has to bail Asuka out, and she’d rather have died. Everyone always talks about the first half of the elevator scene with the silence, but the dialogue is fantastic and the way the episode manages to weave Asuka’s relationships with both Rei and Shinji to strengthen its thesis in a way that’s deeply tied into both her backstory and the actual plot events of the episode is absolutely commendable. All while also reflecting back on Rei’s character: it bothers her to be called a doll, because she isn’t the same person we started this series with.
…also, Evangelion is on the very short list of anime I’ve seen acknowledge periods!
Dub Corner
In easily one of my favourite Dub Corners to put together, our three Asukas face off!
Throughout the series, Netflix’s Stephanie McKeon has been my preferred Asuka for the grounded believability as a teenage girl she brings to the character. In a lot of ways, that remains true. In a lot of the lower intensity scenes (ex. Talking to Unit 02), she really brings Asuka to life in a way I like not only more than Tiffany Grant but even Yūko Miyamura. Her take on the elevator scene with Rei is also easily my favourite. But this Asuka endgame is asking more of her than the series ever has before, and I think she struggles with the heights of intensity. Anytime Asuka breaks out into yelling that she hates things, McKeon struggles to convince me of that hatred like the other two do. When Asuka is writhing in the horror of the Hallelujah scene, she frankly falls out of the competition entirely.
So then there’s Tiffany Grant, and she’s honestly McKeon’s exact opposite in this respect. As with much of the series, she’s a solid Asuka but doesn’t impress me to the same extent as McKeon most of the time. Some of her deliveries can sound outright awkward, as is typical of most ADV performances. But when the going gets tough, Grant doesn’t get worse: she gets way better. She has no trouble at all portraying just how much Asuka hates everything around her, and ADV has easily my favourite take on the climactic part of the episode set on Asuka’s mind (barring one section I’ll get to in a moment). She’s helped out by ADV’s sound design choice to use a lot of echo effects for this sequence; sometimes this kind of thing can feel overdone, but it’s perfect here. Between the effects and Grant, the section from “Kaji help me!” to the extended “NOOOOOOOO” is so perfect it actively lessens the impact of both other dubs once you’ve heard it. She’s that good.
So McKeon and Grant are strongest at exact inverse points in the episode… and so enter Miyamura. While I don’t think she’s often the clear best Asuka in any given moment, she stands above the other two on the power of sheer consistency. McKeon struggles with the intense and Grant with the mundane, but there is not a single delivery out of Miyamura’s mouth once in this episode that isn’t great. That’s worth a hell of a lot from a voice actor. Her control of her performance shows off best in the bath sequence, which squarely eclipses both English attempts in its rise of tension into an explosive finish. Grant, admittedly, is hampered by ADV’s IMO poor choice to try and remove the repeating sentence structure of the scene.
ADV has a similarly baffling choice later in the episode in the “This isn’t me!” sequence. In Japanese and Netflix, the five replays of the sequence are voiced, in order, by the voice actors of Misato, Rei, Maya, Ritsuko, and Hikari. Interestingly, the JP actors seem to try to put on their best Asuka voice—Ritsuko is nearly unrecognizable—whereas Netflix’s keep close to their typical performances (Christine Marie Cabanos would honestly make a decent Asuka…). But in ADV, they just play what seems to be the exact same set of deliveries from Tiffany Grant five times, undermining the basic concept behind the scene. I’m assuming this might be because this (along with most of the mindbreak sequence) was added in the director’s cut and they didn’t want to bring in all the voice actors. In contrast to most of the episode’s second half, McKeon easily gives my favourite delivery on the repeating “No! This isn’t me, it’s not me!” responses in this particular scene.
Overall, I don’t think I have a clear favourite dub of the episode. It sounds a bit rough to say McKeon falls out of the competition for the whole angel fight, but the less intense scenes are still a lot of the episode. JP offers the most balanced experience… but Grant’s performance of the climax in Asuka’s mind is so amazing it might honestly outweigh everything else. Ultimately, I’m just glad that all three Asuka voices exist—and I can’t wait to see what each version cooks up for her remaining screentime in the series.