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Mar 2, 2025
An architecture of identity beneath sci-fi mecha anime and apocalyptic battles, its world is shaped more by the dreams, psychological repression, and human fragility than by external conflicts. At its core, this is a study of individual existence. Futuristic means of exploration of the subconscious do not provide truth but merely expose the fragile illusions upon which identity, emotional stability, and relationships are built. Earlier mecha fiction often presented their machines as symbols of progress and human resilience; Evangelion strips away these comforting illusions, revealing the genre’s greatest fear: losing control. The Evas are not just weapons but cages, binding their pilots in cycles of
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pain and dependency, mirroring personal and existential despair. The Evas embody the fear that evolution might mean losing one’s humanity altogether, transforming into something unrecognizable in the pursuit of survival. The Evas are the testament to the failure of science to comprehend the soul. Knowledge alone is insufficient; human connection and the search for meaning lie beyond the reach of technological advancement. Technology may not be the key to progress; an attempt to play God could only lead to greater suffering. This nihilism is the antithesis of the usual mecha narrative, where human perseverance is celebrated. What if the ultimate fear is not extinction, but existence itself? The imagery of water is recurring; water is ever-present, fluid, and unknowable, just as the subconscious exerts an influence that cannot be resisted. The closer they come to understanding their own desires and fears, the more they disintegrate, a horror of losing themselves entirely crawling from the burden of perception and knowledge. It lingers in the spaces between dreams and waking life of the pilots, leaving behind the haunting feeling that to be human is to forever struggle against the depths of one’s own mind. Shinji's path as a pilot reveals the existentialist truth that meaning cannot be assigned; it must be created from within. Rather than glorifying heroism, Evangelion tells the tale of the notion of destiny itself being cruel. Religious symbols are, more than anything, symbols of the lack of human comprehension. With a promise of erasure of suffering, Instrumentality mirrors religious concepts of spiritual union, not unlike the Christian idea of heaven: the return to divine oneness. The conflict between the Angels and humans is not a war between good and evil but a struggle between competing evolutionary paths, two different seeds. The biblical symbols are instruments of ambiguity; salvation and annihilation become one, and the divine is an incomprehensible force, indifferent to humanity. Here humanity is born from Lilith rather than Adam, a fault, an accident that survives not through divine favor but through relentless self-assertion. By stripping the Angels of their religious role and presenting them as unknowable forces, what is brought up is the idea that divine beings may be completely indifferent to human suffering. The very existence of Angels challenges the assumption that humanity is the rightful and true subject of this world. The apocalypse is not just a cosmic incident; it is a personal one, the final reflection of human fear in a collapsing world, which is an event orchestrated only within. Evangelion masterfully blurs the boundary between external warfare and internal collapse; the apocalypse must be the logical conclusion of human isolation and the failure to connect. Every character exists within their own impenetrable shell, longing for connection yet running away from it, inside the purgatory that is self-imposed yet inevitable. Few characters in anime embody depression as well as Shinji. He does not fight because he wants to but because he sees no alternative. He does not seek connection because he desires it; he does it because the isolation is unbearable. Even our bleakest moments and our most desperate, stumbling attempts to reach out are what define us; it is perhaps the only thing we can do. The world where reality is uncertain and where pain and misunderstanding exist is the only world where we can exist as individuals. Humanity’s growth has paved the road to unbearable loneliness, and therefore, the next stage is not expansion but a regression into a single, undivided entity. The dissolution of the self, framed as the final step in evolution; a transcendence and an annihilation. If human nature is defined by suffering, then true evolution might mean erasing any trace of our nature and the self. Instrumentality is, in theory, the solution to human suffering. But it is not presented as the rapture, as it is a horror.
The interpretation of depression in Evangelion is the Human Instrumentality Project, the final disintegration of self, the erasure of loneliness and pain. Instrumentality is the terminal promise of depression, which is an end to suffering, and not through healing, but through oblivion.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Mar 2, 2025
“If you’re not remembered, then you never existed.”
As Lain transcends beyond human limitations, she becomes more connected than ever before, and remains thoroughly alone. Omnipresent, intangible. She can access infinite knowledge, but no longer knows herself. If identity is shaped by memory, then what happens when memory itself is fluid and unreliable, when the past can be rewritten, when presence can be erased at will? Lain’s shifting identity raises the question: can the self ever be singular? If others perceive different versions of me, does that mean my identity is a collage, a projection, a construct without essence? Here identity is impressionable, shaped by perception,
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by the technology of the new world. We create multiple personas across different online spaces, each one distinct yet interconnected, each one just as “real as the other”. And are personas a genuine part of our being? Lain erases herself from the world, a sacrifice and a transformation. By dissolving her selfhood entirely, she paradoxically achieves a kind of omnipresence, existing as a deity outside of reality, unseen yet always watching. Who is the real Lain? Who am I, when my existence depends on how others see me? If identity is untrustworthy and plural, can I ever believe to have a singular, true self? Serial Experiments Lain, being well ahead of its time, leaves these questions open and urgent. Godhood in the digital age is not a state of enlightenment but of fragmentation. She does not ascend to a higher plane of being, she dissolves into it. The paradox of deification is that in gaining ultimate presence, the ability to be seen is lost. Memory is revealed to be an illusion. Memory is an illusion. Our existence is not established; we, the shifting signals in an endless web, are ghosts in the machine, echoes in each other's memories. Lain’s ultimate erasure from the collective consciousness is a new kind of death; a conceptual death. If one is not remembered, was one ever real at all? It is strange to be.
“Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.”- Sartre
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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