Part 311: The Boy at the End of the World: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji Ikari, and the Number of the Last Choice

Few works in the medium have been argued over as long or as hard as Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン), Hideaki Anno's 1995 landmark — a giant-robot series that curdled, deliberately and famously, into a nervous breakdown rendered as apocalypse, and that ends by dissolving its own genre into a raw interrogation of what it costs to be a self among other selves. At its centre is Shinji Ikari, perhaps the most divisive protagonist in anime: a frightened, depressed fourteen-year-old asked to pilot a vast biomechanical machine against monstrous "Angels," by a father who abandoned him and a world that offers him love only in exchange for his suffering.

Shinji Ikari reduces to a Destiny 9 — the Humanitarian and Sage, endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles — and the work itself, Neon Genesis Evangelion, to a 5, the Freedom Seeker, with an 11, the Visionary, in its Heart. Those numbers, on this work, are almost too apt, and I will treat them with the suspicion part 300 demanded — but they point, as ever, somewhere true.

The Number of the One Who Must End It

The 9 is the number of endings, of the closing of cycles, and of the compassion that attends them — and Evangelion hands its 9 the literal end of the world. Shinji is placed, by the story's design, at the fulcrum of Instrumentality: the dissolution of all individual souls into a single undifferentiated whole, the end of the loneliness of being a separate self, purchased at the price of the end of selfhood itself. He is asked, in the end, to choose — to close the cycle of painful, isolated, individual existence, or to reopen it, to accept the walls between people and the hurt they guarantee as the price of being anyone at all.

This is the 9's burden made cosmic. The number of endings, borne by a boy who must decide whether existence should end. And the manga and its various endings — the notorious television finale, the shattering End of Evangelion film — are all, in the end, meditations on the 9's real question: whether the closing of the cycle is a mercy or a surrender, whether the compassionate thing is to end the pain of being alive or to endure it. Shinji's final movement, in most readings, is a 9's hardest wisdom: the choice to re-enter the cycle, to accept separateness and pain and the possibility of connection, over the painless dissolution of everything. The number of endings, choosing not to end.

The Freedom and the Vision in the Machine

The work's own 5 — the Freedom Seeker — and its 11 in the Heart name the two forces that tear it apart and make it great. The 5's restless disruption is the manga's method: Evangelion refuses to stay the show it began as, disrupting its own mecha genre, breaking form, dissolving into psychology and abstraction, seeking a freedom from the very conventions it was built on. And the 11's heightened, unbearable awareness is its subject — the perception, pitched past what a person can stand, that Anno drew directly from his own documented depression. Evangelion is the 11's affliction made into art: seeing too much, feeling too much, the awareness that isolates and wounds. The Grammar of the Screen series discussed how anime encodes interiority; Evangelion's late episodes are the medium's most extreme experiment in animating a mind coming apart.

The Pioneer Who Could Not Look Away

Hideaki Anno reduces to a Destiny 1 — the Leader and Pioneer, the will to act alone — with a 6, the Nurturer, in the Personality. The 1 is the pioneer, and Evangelion was genuinely one: it reinvented what anime could do and be, and its influence on everything after is incalculable. But the pioneer's solitary number sits over a work made from private pain, and the 6 in the Personality hints at what he was reaching for through it — a connection, a care, that the work both dramatizes and, in its making, seems to have been Anno's attempt to reach. The Serialization Machine essays noted Evangelion's role in establishing the late-night, disc-sales, production-committee model of the modern anime industry; the 1 pioneered a business structure as well as an art. But this series has only ever cared about the other thing: the boy at the centre, and the choice he is made to bear.

The Close

The caveat is permanent and, with Evangelion, especially necessary — this is a work that invites over-reading more than almost any other, and I have no intention of pretending a romanized name's arithmetic reveals its secrets. Part 165 and part 300 settled the method's emptiness for good.

But the number of endings, on the boy asked to end the world, sent me back to Evangelion to see past the decades of argument to the simple, terrible thing at its core. It is a story about whether being a self — separate, lonely, capable of being hurt by everyone you reach for — is worth the pain, and it hands that question to a frightened child and makes him answer it for all of us. Shinji is a 9. The number of the closing of cycles. And the wisest thing Evangelion ever says, through him, is that the cycle is worth reopening — that the pain of being a person among people is the price of the only thing that makes it bearable, which is the chance, however uncertain, of being reached. The arithmetic is empty. What it pointed at is the reason the argument has never stopped.