she said, "don't make others suffer for your personal hatred"

neon genesis evangelion (episode twelve, "a miracle's worth")

One problem with #basementlife, aside from the part where you live in a basement,¹ is that I frequently forget what day of the week it is. In the basement, every day is Tuesday. I can’t explain this but it’s true. Yet outside the basement, only one day a week is Tuesday. All this is to say, I forgot the day last week with that week’s Evangelion post… twice! I did it twice! This is very annoying, to me and to you, and it can’t keep happening so I have instituted what I believe to be… a solution.

That said, before we get to the actual post, I have a poll for you. Do you want the Evangelion posts over holiday weekends? My inclination is to skip them because people tend not to read things over the holiday because they are “spending time” with their “loved ones.” But what say you?

OK—onto the show.

---

Here’s my question: If Shinji is the protagonist of the children, is Misato the protagonist of the adults? I’ve always found her prominence in the opening credits a little bit odd—not that she’s not important but I think if somebody watched the opening credits without any context they’d think the show was about a love triangle among Misato, Shinji, and Rei. None of the other adults get this kind of attention. Misato features more heavily in the credits than Asuka does. Secondly, Misato is in a unique position vis-a-vis the other adults: as we talked about in her last showcase episode, she and the rest of the bridge crew are not really “in the know.”

And, finally, because it emerges that she and Shinji had very similar dads, and they are both here because of their dads. But Misato’s father is dead.

“A Miracle’s Worth” is another Misato showcase (the last one was episode seven). We open with a flashback showing us how she got that scar across her chest, as a bloodied and dying man, who turns out to have been her father, puts a young Misato into an escape pod during the Second Impact.² In a classic Evangelion combination of emotional resonance and cheesecake, we then see the scar again while Misato is putting on her bra.³ As she heads out to work, Kensuke (who is visiting the apartment with Toji), notices that her uniform has changed because she’s gotten a promotion—she’s a major now. Misato’s the officer in charge when Gendo and Fuyutsuki skip off to do little schemes elsewhere. For instance, they are currently in Antarctica.

But Misato isn’t very happy about this promotion, which only Shinji seems to notice. He tells her that receiving praise makes him feel bad, too. “Receiving praise” isn’t really Misato’s problem either, though. She’s wrapped up in memories of the past.

As she tells Shinji later in the episode, her father was much like his own: a distant scientist who neglected his wife and child, “a spineless man who couldn’t stomach reality.” But he saved her life during the Second Impact, leaving her with a difficult mixture of love and hatred. The promotion is presumably a kind of good news, but she didn’t sign up with NERV to climb the ladder. She signed up for revenge, though she admits she doesn’t know if she wants revenge on the Angels or on her dad.

That’s something to figure out another day though, because an Angel is here.

somewhat biblically accurate angel

The Angel intends to crush its way into NERV using its AT Field—which haven’t come up that much since the show’s beginning, I think, but they are the defensive field that renders the Angels impervious to non-Eva weapons. They have to be ripped through before the Angel’s core is vulnerable to attack. The Evangelions also have an AT Field which is perhaps why they can fight so successfully.⁴ The Angel’s wide deployment of its AT Field also means radio communications don’t work, so there’s no way for Misato to check in with Gendo and Fuyutsuki—she’s flying solo.

Her first move is uncontroversial: Misato evacuates all civilians. Her next move is to come up with a plan that involves deploying all the Eva units and using their combined AT Fields, a plan Ritsuko virulently protests (without success).⁵ Misato tells the bridge they’re free to evacuate, but they choose to stay, feeling it’s cowardly to send fourteen year olds to face possible death and then run away.⁶

But it all ends up all right: they defeat the Angel, Gendo (over the radio) tells Shinji he did a good job, and they all go out for ramen.

---

I found this episode surprisingly hard to write about—even after I remembered what day it was—and on reflection I think it’s because Misato herself is such a slippery character. She wears a lot of masks. It’s not that Misato is secretly bitter and angry all the time but that her bubbly cheery personality is a choice. She is capable of coming out with flat and devastating summations of people—her description of her father as “spineless” is a stand-out here. She picks up on Shinji’s discomfort at her promotion party in a way that suggests her sociability these days is a hard-won skill more than a personality trait. Certainly, the image she paints of her younger self to Shinji—the bitter daughter who laughed at her father when her mother divorced him—feels very unlike the woman we know now.

This move into the history of the adults will continue with the next episode, which focuses on Ritsuko and her mother, and which similarly stresses a multiplicity of character. Was Misato’s father a bad father for all the times he wasn’t there, or a good father for the one very important time he was? Was he a good man because of all the good qualities he had for people outside his family, or a bad man for his coldness to his family?

When we see Gendo and Fuyutsuki sailing through Antartica, which has been rendered completely dead thanks to the Second Impact, Gendo seems to relish that it is a world without “sin.”⁷ Fuyutsuki, who is perhaps the only person who ever talks back to Gendo, says he prefers a world with humans in it, even if it’s sinful. He terms Antarctica “a realm of the dead where no life is permitted to exist,” surrounded by a literal “dead sea.” While in one sense this conversation doesn’t really indicate much beyond reminding us that Gendo has schemes of his own, I think, at the risk of overburdening it, we can tease something bigger out of it.

That is: Gendo cannot abide multiplicity—a sterile and dead but homogenous and sinless world is preferable to a messy living world where things live and die. It’s a complete shock in this episode when he says something kind to Shinji, and a part of me wondered if he loathes Shinji because he can see his own face looking back at him, so he took advantage of being unable to see him.⁸ Unlike his son or Misato or really anybody else in Evangelion, Gendo experiences no inner conflict or doubt.

So we could read the scar that runs across Misato’s chest as a symbol of the mixed-up-ness of the rest of us, a reminder of human capability, the fact that we contain multitudes. (Some of those multitudes are bad.) Misato is in one sense still a young woman but she’s lived many lives at this point, she has been many people, and she will become more.

Next episode: l33t h4ck3r 4ng3lz

---

Odd observations:

• Once again FUNimation’s decision to use translations of the Japanese titles rather than the official English titles deprives us of a classic. This time I was so annoyed I just made it the title of the post.

• That Asuka gets frustrated with Shinji for caring so much what other people think is yet another illustration of how what most annoys us in others is generally prominent in ourselves.

• The cut from Toji complaining that only he and Kensuke care about others to Asuka’s shoes on the floor… the very shoes that stomped his cap… he’ll never forget. He’s gonna die thinking about those shoes.

• I continue to wonder if this stretch of episodes is meant to soften Gendo’s edge a bit—Misato’s dad turned out to love her enough to save her life, he praises Shinji in this episode, etc. It would make sense for an emotional reconciliation between Gendo and Shinji to be where the show ends and it would make sense for the show to start laying the groundwork for such a reconciliation around here. Those of us who have already seen the show are aware that this is not what is going to happen, but is what’s going on here meant to be some subtle misdirection?

• Shinji finally puts together that he pilots the Eva because he wants his father’s approval.

  

  
  Well, we never said our boy was a genius.

• So Asuka pilots the Eva so everybody will know how great she is, and Shinji pilots it so his dad will love him, and… where did we leave Rei again? “I don’t have anything else,” was it?

• The joke that the “Second Impact generation” has a stereotype for being cheap (or just easily impressed?) is pretty funny.

1. Actually the basement’s pretty nice.

2. Child endangerment obviously NBD in Evangelion but like… why was Misato there. She’s probably about Shinji’s age.

3. I’m not sure if Evangelion was how I learned of the existence of front-closing bras but it was an important document in any case.

4. They spell out AT Field in the opening credits (Absolute Terror Field), but nobody ever calls it that. There used to be a fan belief that “AT Field” was a real psychological term but this is not true. That said, it should be. Life should imitate art. Don’t you want to listen to a therapist talk to you about your Absolute Terror Field.

5. Also like… what’s your big idea Ritsuko.

6. Misato reveals that the kids will be safest in the Eva units whether they win or lose, so she’s actually hedging her bets a little here.

7. The FUNimation translation says “original sin” and maybe that’s what he says but this is not what “original sin” means so.…

8. This doesn’t totally hold up as he was nasty over the phone just the last episode.