The words of Cruel Angel’s Thesis speak of a boy on the threshold of greatness, the wind of destiny wafting through the open door, wings only waiting to be unfurled adorning his shoulders. And yet the boy hesitates, “desperate for that gentle touch,” his gaze focused solely on the protector beside him. Generations of audiences have interpreted this metaphor of awakening in their own ways, whether to point out Anno’s clear antipathy towards the perpetual adolescence of fandom, the ways in which Evangelion echoes and reifies the heroic journeys of prior mecha pilots, or Evangelion’s own obsession with human connection and distrust of “adulthood.” Of course, Anno did not write Cruel Angel’s Thesis; if he did, I somehow doubt the song would proceed with such confidence, such assurance that any hesitant boy will one day learn he has the wings to take flight.

Because Evangelion is not simply a story of a boy walking through the open door, and learning he has within him the makings of a legend. Many characters walk through many doors in Eva, and many of those crossings demand an unbelievable mustering of personal strength. The door of Misato’s apartment, for one, which Shinji at various times must be brave enough to either embrace as home or reject as imprisonment. Shinji’s classroom, a gateway to normalcy which he eventually strides through with ease, but which ultimately proves only a simulacrum of adolescence. And the hatch of the entry plug, the alleged cradle of strength and maturity which we have come to know is closer to the opposite, a retreat to the comforting dependency of the womb. Shinji’s greatest victories have often come not by his own hand, but through him retreating into himself while Unit 01 makes the monsters go away.

And of course, there are the plentiful examples offered by the adults around him, the figures any child must use to model their own performance of adulthood. What do Shinji’s caretakers have to offer him? Not much, if we are being honest. Though she adopted Shinji with bright hopes of building a makeshift family, Misato would be the first to admit she doesn’t know how to be a mother, an adult, or really anyone that can be of use to Shinji. She has connected with him only through their shared experience of suffering, their mutual understanding that their roles are thankless, but that they can at least provide charity and support to each other. His father? Another boy hesitant to take flight, circling back towards the same lost warmth and certainty that haunts Shinji’s nightmares. With the possible exception of Kaji, all the adults in Shinji’s life have taught him is that there is no such thing as adulthood, just more cycles of assumed competency and eventual comeuppance that have already defined his journey with the Eva unit.

Many describe Evangelion as a work of cynicism or at least harsh critique, a story that derides the insular perspective of its assumed audience while simultaneously wallowing in a certainty that nothing better is possible. Perhaps to those who find human connection or personal fulfillment easily attainable, it does indeed read that way; that such a story could only validate self-defeating philosophies, and that reading about such sadness is unlikely to make anyone less sad in turn. But though I do not agree with Cruel Angel’s Thesis, I do agree with Anno, and see something hopeful in these characters’ continuous grasping towards connection.

As far as I have come to understand it, adulthood is indeed a fabrication, and moments of apparent fulfillment or understanding will inevitably loop back to disorder and trauma. That’s just the way the world is; what is important is what we do with that understanding, how we carry forward in spite of knowing our terminal destination. That is what defines our capacity for hope, courage, and understanding – and having suffered for so long, the fact that Shinji is still able to walk forward reads to me as the ultimate demonstration of faith in human nature, the proudest possible declaration that our longing for love is stronger than any force in the universe.

Well, sometimes. For Evangelion’s statements of human perseverance to ring true, the story must also embrace all that is fraught and terrible about our nature, our capacity for inflicting suffering and our frequent inability to march on in spite of it. So it goes for Asuka Langley Soryu, who has at this point lost her mother, Kaji, and even her pride as a pilot. In the wake of her mother’s suicide, she chose to live through defiance, daring anyone to claim she was worthless in spite of her magnificent aptitude for piloting. It is a hard way to live, but it was all she had; and with that pride now tattered in the wake of repeated failed deployments, she has nothing to live for at all. NERV’s intelligence division collects her from the ruins of a Tokyo-03 apartment, where, like a fatally wounded animal, she has crawled into the LCL bath of a disused tub to wait for death.

“The cat died,” Ritsuko informs Gendo, sitting in judgment for her destruction of the dummy plug duplicates. “The one I’d left in my grandmother’s care. I hadn’t paid any attention to her for so long, but now, suddenly, I’ll never see her again.” Misato once mocked Ritsuko for that cat, but swiftly apologized, realizing too late she’d hit a nerve. When external sources of pride like piloting ability or technical genius abandon us, what we have left are the watermelons we’ve tended, the small acts of personal care that connect us to the world and people around us. Like Asuka, Ritsuko sustained herself on the necessity of her labor for as long as she could; but when she looked up and realized she wasn’t happy, there was nothing left to comfort her but a notice of the cat’s passage, the last thing that made her feel human. “What am I supposed to do, Mother?” she asks herself – but just as in Asuka’s case, her mother’s example is a long path to a door that must never be opened.

Once again, it is somehow Shinji who still holds a hope of human connection, idly wondering where Asuka has disappeared to. Of course, at this point he knows well that his words would only hurt her more. Sumptuous images of desolation greet us as he wanders the ruins of Tokyo-03, which in the wake of the last angel attack has been entirely evacuated. The late-afternoon light offers a mirror of his first vision of the city, when Misato once drove him to the ridge overlooking mankind’s latest marvel, to demonstrate for him just how meaningful his labors truly were. There is nothing to defend now; Tokyo-03 is a speckling of craters filled with gently lapping waters, the burnt orange sun painting them in LCL hues. Staring out at this desolation, Shinji admits to himself he no longer has anyone to turn to. “What should I do?” he asks all the mothers and sisters who have abandoned him – and is answered by a gentle humming melody, the song of a strange boy resting at his side.

“Singing is great,” reflects the stranger. “Singing enriches the soul. It’s the crowning achievement of the civilization that the Lilim created. Don’t you think so, Shinji Ikari?” His words are laden with diverse intent right from the start; they quite simply have to be, as this is the only episode in which Kaworu Nagisa ever appears. Despite looming so large in the Evangelion mythos, allegedly echoing Anno’s friendship with the equally mercurial Kunihiko Ikuhara, Nagisa only ever shares a handful of scenes with Shinji. The brevity of their relationship is a testament to how easy all of this should be, to our capacity to find love and understanding in each other, if only we are willing to respect and reciprocate the feelings of others. Connection should be the simplest thing, but we Lilim, the disparate and despairing children of Adam, still make such trouble of managing it.

Kaworu’s first words establish both his mystery and his promise. He begins by praising the power of music, one of the few topics that we’ve seen to ever bring joy to Shinji, as displayed through both his looping tape recorder and his enduring cello practice. Whether Shinji is happy or in despair, he wants music in his life – and though Kaworu’s seemingly distant reference to the “Lilim” paints him as something apart from humanity, his sharing of music’s pleasures with Shinji ties them closer than anyone else in Shinji’s life. And of course, there is that final question – “don’t you think so,” not a challenge or command, but an invitation to connection, and reflection of genuine interest in Shinji’s thoughts. Shinji has been desired, but only for what he can provide, or how he can furnish the egos of others. Has anyone truly cared what Shinji thought before this moment?

Shinji is surprised at Kaworu’s recognition, to which Kaworu gently chides him, telling him he should be a little more aware of his own significance. His nature is intimate without obligation; he neither coddles nor chastises Shinji, and freely invites the third child to call him simply Kaworu. A gesture of camaraderie that is immediately returned, Shinji blushing in embarrassment yet happy to have reached such immediate mutual understanding. In a world where everyone else wants something from Shinji, even those who claim to or genuinely do care about him, Kaworu offers a tonic of unqualified intimacy, a presence that is simply glad to share his company. Must such a simple need always be so difficult to satisfy? We Lilim certainly make things hard for ourselves.

Kaworu’s otherworldly nature is not a closely guarded secret; his difference would be clear enough in his immediate synchronization with Asuka’s unmodified Unit 02, even before he outright tells Rei that she and him are fellow strangers to mankind. But what of it? We find connection and understanding wherever we can, and though Misato is suspicious of Kaworu’s intentions, she is the first to admit that she has failed as Shinji’s guardian. Desperate for companionship unsaddled with the painful baggage of Misato, Asuka, or Rei, Shinji waits for Kaworu to complete his testing. “Were you waiting for me?” the strange boy asks – an intended affirmation of their bond, which Shinji is of course too anxious to answer in the affirmative. Kaworu, with characteristic grace and understanding, quiets Shinji’s stammering by first admitting he himself is happy for Shinji’s presence, proving again the simple, fundamental, and yet seemingly unreachable comfort of mutual understanding. What all of Evangelion’s lost souls would do for a friend who is happy that they are there.

Encouraged by Kaworu’s earnest curiosity, Shinji unloads some of his own anxieties, stating that “lately, I don’t really want to go home.” Kaworu does not simply affirm these feelings; he contextualizes them in the context of all Shinji’s struggles, stating that “the fact that you have a home will lead to your happiness. It is a good thing.” Kaworu speaks not just to what Shinji outright says, but what he needs to hear – that the sanctuary he crafted with Misato and Asuka was not a lie, and that so long as he sees that apartment as home, it will always be a source of comfort in his life. Neither Shinji nor Misato have the confidence to believe in their home, having each lacked a model on which to base it. But the secret they do not know is that all homes are such optimistic practices; that it is not buildings or blood relations which make a home, but our day-by-day commitment to finding home in each other.

“You go to such extremes to avoid first contact,” Kaworu marvels, having breached the further intimacy of joining Shinji in the NERV showers. “Are you afraid of connecting with others? If you don’t get close with others, you’ll never be betrayed and you’ll never hurt each other. But you’ll also never be able to forget your loneliness. Humans can never banish their loneliness for good, because being human means being alone. But humans are able to go on with their lives because they’re able to forget it every so often.” How simple our troubles must seem, from the perspective of one who takes perpetual connection for granted. Even just the clasping of one hand in another, a simple expression of basic motor function, is made so complicated by our fear of rejection, our terror of consequence!

“You’re so delicate, like glass, especially your heart,” Kaworu marvels, with clear admiration in his eyes. It is our blessing to feel so fully, and our curse to be in constant pain for that feeling, tethered always to our desperation for connection and fear of rejection. To all of this, all these nested contradictions and desperate hopes, Kaworu smiles and says “you have my regard for it.” “Regard?” Shinji wonders. Kaworu clarifies without hesitation: “it means, I love you.”

What does it mean to be loved? Is to love to admire without condition, to see in another something irreducibly beautiful? Many of Evangelion’s characters seem to treat love as a kind of personal validation; they see either praise for themselves or a reflection of their own feelings in another, and thereby seek connection without friction, an understanding that evades the fickle contours and frequent misunderstandings of spoken language. Then how do we come to love another, if not through first loving ourselves? Can we truly appreciate the beauty of something that is unlike ourselves, that does not in some way remind us of our own precious humanity? And how would we arrive at such appreciation, in a world that so insistently demands we conform to the wishes of others, to the model of society, to arbitrary standards of gender and passion and purpose and truth?

Such a small word, for a feeling so vast and intangible it defies all attempts to categorize or contain it. But if there is anything worth loving in this world, then Kaworu is undoubtedly correct. There is not one thing more beautiful than our efforts to console each other, attempted with full understanding that intimacy will always incur suffering. There is nothing more precious than our beautiful hearts of glass.

But oh, how we punish each other in pursuit of our hearts’ fulfillment. While Gendo prays to the unblinking Unit 01, telling Yui that they will soon be together again, the unfortunate Rei III lays alone in her sterile apartment, left to wonder why she has been revived at all. As secrets are unveiled and the field of drama narrows, Gendo’s ambitions resolve themselves not as lofty attempts to herald a new age in human evolution, but in the simple, selfish, and profoundly human desire to reunite with the woman he loves. In this consolidation of the speculative and fantastical into the personal, Eva insists that our loftiest fantasies are still embedded in the soil of our fundamental desires. However far we stray into technobabble and speculative fiction, it is the personal and human that will always draw us home. Evangelion’s scifi trappings are ultimately just exceptional texture; its true fascination is the difficulty of stepping through that open door.

Over at Kaworu’s apartment, Shinji’s unusual friend continues his gentle probing, asking Shinji “what do you want to talk about?” His language is somewhat strange, both more formal and more direct than the phrasing we generally apply to such charged inquiries, as he says “there are things you want me to hear, right?” It is a distinction that speaks both to his unfamiliarity with conversational convention, with the barriers of ego and persona that generally inform our spoken affectations, and also to his frank disinterest in such defensive tools. Through the contrast of Kaworu’s language, the AT fields implicit in our conversational games are made apparent; what is left is simple concern and curiosity, the language a mother might use to enquire about their child’s feelings.

Confronted with such earnest curiosity, Shinji speaks more freely than we’ve ever seen, his comfort emphasizing again just how easy this could all be, if it were only detangled from the weight of ego and expectation – though of course, it is those intrinsic human qualities that Kaworu finds so marvelous. Shinji confesses the ease with which he lived before coming to Tokyo-03, answering Kaworu’s question of “did you hate people” with the unconsidered freedom of personal detachment: though he hated his father, he otherwise did not care one way or the other. It is only our attempts at closeness that inspire friction, just as it is only our lonely egos that demand the validation of others. We are a mess of contradictions that simultaneously inspire and thwart our psychological ambitions; seeing and admiring all of this, Kaworu wonders if “maybe I was born so that I would meet you.”

Still, Kaworu must complete the duty he was assigned. That is the nature of angels, to return back to the womb of Lilith, and thereby discontinue the painful separation of form and identity that so plagues the Lilim that are humanity. It is less an irony than an inevitability that the angels are also seeking the sense of maternal unity that so plagues Evangelion’s human characters; it is our separation of ego that makes us special, but also ensures a lifetime of continuous, painful isolation.

Kaworu, the “final messenger” and angel, descends with Unit 02 into the depths of Terminal Dogma. After trying time and again to connect with humans via their natural faculties, fusing their thoughts and identities with a procession of unwilling pilots, it was only through mirroring the separated forms and imperfect conversational tools of humanity that our siblings were actually able to reach us. And though Shinji cannot either understand or value his own life, it was through his description of the difficulty of human existence that Kaworu came to understand what makes us worth protecting, how our feeble approximations of mutual understanding might possess an inherent worth, perhaps even a certain nobility of intention. A pity that Shinji cannot himself understand how essential his humanity has become; but of course, that too is the way of human nature, to hinge our self-evaluations on lofty, external accomplishments while ignoring the cruciality of our presence in the lives of others.

“Humans forget their foolishness and repeat their mistakes” crow the old men of Seele, not understanding that it is precisely such qualities that make humanity worth saving. Is Shinji screaming that Kaworu cannot be an angel “forgetting his foolishness,” and again repeating the mistake of attempting to reach out to another? As has been made apparent time and again across these final episodes, Shinji’s true strength is his unerring desire to find love in another, no matter how that wish is coopted or distorted by the forces around him. If Shinji’s desperation to redeem Kaworu is a sign of foolishness, then truly there is nothing worth saving in the human heart.

To fight, Shinji must again compartmentalize his feelings, and align what is left of Kaworu with his vision of the despised enemy. “You betrayed me, just like Father did!” he screams, willing himself to hate the boy he loves. The clash of Units 01 and 02 is a proxy battle, the husks of Adam grappling for the right to decide humanity’s future. Seeing the lengths to which humanity will go in order to protect their lonely, desperate existence, Kaworu can only admit that “I do not understand.”

“The hope of man is written in sorrow,” Kaworu reflects. And it is true. Everything that makes us impressive is born in a lack, a desire, a desperation to be known and fulfilled. It is our painful, ever-unfulfilled desire to know ourselves from which is born our psychological interrogation of the soul, our grand works of self-analysis. It is our desperation to assume a rational place in an irrational world that inspires our profound yet ever-shifting philosophies, anatomies of human ambition that echo across history. It is our unfailing need to be known by others, to express our truth in a way it can be universally understood, and thereby perhaps console or even inspire others, that conjures our incredible works of artistic passion. All that is great in mankind, from the tenderness of unconditional intimacy to the audacity of reaching for the stars, is born from the sorrow of our fundamental nature. Our AT fields will never connect, and that is both the sorrow and the beauty of mankind.

Gazing up at the crucified titan at mankind’s terminus, Kaworu finds himself struggling with what he must do. “Must all who were born of Adam return to Adam? Even at the cost of destroying humanity?” For perhaps the first time, frustration crosses his face – a reflection of disconnect between his intended nature and his adopted feelings, a likely consequence of drawing so close to human nature himself. Previous angels did not require faces with which to express themselves, because there was never any disconnect between their nature and their purpose. For humans, life is never so simple; we are thrust continuously between incompatible priorities, asked to find purpose and meaning in a world that offers none. The impossibility of this task is etched in the creases of our face.

Faced with this suddenly incomprehensible choice, Kaworu admits that he is glad Shinji defeated Unit 02, glad to have been stopped before he could fulfill his destiny. As Kaworu says, there is a great sorrow in our search for meaning in a meaningless world, but also a great hope. Humans have the capability to choose, to disagree, to find purpose in whatever task ignites our soul’s fire. For the angel Kaworu, there is only the choice to fulfill his purpose or die in its pursuit – a meager binary that he nonetheless savors, knowing it is the closest he will come to Shinji or to human nature. “Dying of your own will. That is the one and only absolute freedom there is.” And even though this is the only choice that is truly his own, he makes a gift of it to Shinji, saying to this confused and desperately lonely boy that “you are not a being who should die.”

“Your people need the future,” Kaworu proclaims, to Shinji, Rei, and all the other sorrowful children of humanity, the countless souls who must find in desperate hope what they cannot find in certainty of purpose, who must seek in connection with others the fulfillment of a gnawing hunger to be loved and understood, to be more than an animal concerned only with fulfilling genetic programming. There is a beauty in mankind that elevates us beyond the aspirations of survival and self-propagation, that demands we see in the future an outrageous dream of transcending the very sorrows and frustrations that inspire us to such towering heights. “Thank you,” Kaworu says to the boy carrying these hopes, the scion of all that humanity lacks, and therefore all humanity is capable of. “I’m glad I met you.”

“Kaworu said that he loved me,” Shinji tells Misato, after all of it is finished. “I loved him. Kaworu should have been the one to survive. He was a much better person than I am.” To this, Misato can only respond with animalistic pragmatism, stating that Kaworu “abandoned his will to live, clinging to a false hope.” Misato is wrong, but Kaworu would nonetheless appreciate her gesture, a clumsy effort to allay Shinji’s sorrow with whatever rhetorical tools are at her disposal. “You’re cold, Misato” Shinji responds – a rejection of her attempted intimacy, like so many prior failed connections. They stand alone yet together, sharing what consolation they can find in their imperfect mutual love. The hope of mankind is written in such sorrow.

This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.