southern discomfort

Feb. 24, 2018 at 12:44pm with 444 notes

Reblogged from qmisato

Kaworu’s ultimate betrayal is not that he is an angel so much as he eventually does force Shinji to finally reckon with his own existential terror. “Life and death are of equal value to me,” he says to Shinji, which is horrifying to him because it is an explicit statement invoking the concept of existential absurdity. “Dying of your own will. That is the one and only absolute freedom there is.”
Remember this essay I posted? After so many episodes existing as the anxious dreamer, I like to look at Episode 24 as Shinji finally staring into the abyss of Nothingness, becoming dizzy from the anxiety produced, and beginning to faint. In doing so, he grasps at finitude – of which death is the ultimate – and it is only in doing this, in his own individual recreation of The Fall, that he will finally be able to comprehend true infinity: the possibility that he can mean something in spite of his absurdity.
This interpretation is further hammered home by the theory that Shinji has attempted to drown himself in episodes 25 and 25’ (the beginning of EoE). Since Anno has directly stated that Shinji wants to kill himself but lacks the commitment to attempt it, we can assume that this is a sign Shinji has stopped running from his anxiety and has finally confronted it.
And what is the ultimate anxiety? That we are the gods who shit, vessels containing the inherent paradox of finite and infinite, trapped in decay yet capable of comprehending what it all means (or doesn’t):
Episode 25 begins with Shinji interrogating himself, consumed with the guilt he must finally process, head in his hands. Why did I kill? Why did I kill? Why did I kill?
Frustrated and ever looking to deny his own agency, he screams that he had no choice (did he?), that Kaworu was an ANGEL and thus the enemy, and so had to be eliminated.
Apologies for the crummy subtitles. But there it is, the paradox, in writing. Kaworu was an angel, but he was HUMAN AS WELL.
The remainder of the series, as well as EoE, are Shinji’s attempts at coming to terms with the terror of this incongruity as well as the possibilities granted by recognizing the power of his own subjective will.