Why Everyone Is Cold to Shinji in Evangelion 3.0: Japan's Answer

So there's a Japanese channel that does nothing but Evangelion and Khara analysis, and it put out a video on the one thing people have been chewing on since Evangelion Q came out: why does every single adult around Shinji treat him like a loaded weapon instead of just telling him what happened while he was gone? The channel's answer is that nobody in the cast ever leads with an explanation. They lead with feelings. That's it, and 191 comments later the thread had stopped being an analysis and turned into a trial with names attached.

That's the top comment. No hedging, no setup, straight to sentencing. And a good chunk of the section agreed with the shape of it, if not always the target.

• “Shinji did nothing wrong lol”👍28
• “A world without a single adult you can lean on. The worst possible one.”👍37

The longer replies get more specific about what the complaint actually is. It isn't that the adults are mean. It's that the story keeps asking a kid to carry an adult's composure and then holds it against him when he can't.

And the detail people keep coming back to is that Shinji didn't decide to do any of it on his own. He was told to go. The uploader brought up the line himself, because it was already a running joke when the film was new.

• “It's completely unfair. They tell him go out and fight, then when it fails he's told to atone for his sins. The other pilots don't get told maybe I should have taken it down myself either, they just get yelled at for being slow to decide. Across this whole film series Shinji gets an absurd deal.”👍32
• “If a single functional adult had been present, a proper explanation and some actual care would have happened. The adults around him are dodging responsibility. The end.”👍46

So where's the split? It shows up when one commenter refuses to let the civilians be written off as unreasonable.

The reply came back fast, and it moved the blame one level up the chain rather than defending the crowd.

Then the uploader stepped back into his own comment section and did the thing that actually settles it. He stops treating the cast as one group. Some of them watched Shinji do it. Some of them only ever saw the crater.

Which is a much kinder reading of the film than the top comment gives it. Not everyone was persuaded, though, and a few decided the blame belonged outside the story entirely.

• “The responsibility lies with Anno for writing that scenario in the first place.”👍32
• “Isn't the problem that not one character ever leads with a reason or an explanation, only with emotion? That's what I kept thinking the entire time I watched it back then. And the ones who do explain go the other way, no feeling at all, just flat facts. I had no idea there was a reason that deep behind it. Reconstructed, huh.”👍35
• “The basic problem with Evangelion is that no adult ever takes responsibility, and watching it gets under my skin. Well, maybe they're doing it somewhere off screen.”👍3

By this point the thread had done the serious version of the argument twice over. And then one viewer summarized the whole situation using a piece of Japanese internet slang, which is the sort of thing that only ever happens in a Japanese comment section.

The joke leans on a stock Japanese phrase for the one girl at the center of a club full of guys who all orbit her. Swap in a global catastrophe for the club and you get a fairly brutal summary of Shinji's position in this film. The channel's comeback lands it in Sakura's voice, which is the same character whose gunshot the argument had been circling for the last hour. Thirty years of people fighting about who failed this kid, and it still ends with somebody making a joke about him being the princess.