Gendo on Rei when confronted with Shinji’s refusal to pilot EVA-01
I read Leuconoe’s new post on deicide and thought the final question interesting to explore. (if our personal views don’t align with a particular story’s internal morality, do we judge the characters from our viewpoint, or the show’s?) Unfortunately, I have already picked a side with regards to it and have now this post (which started out as my comment to on his blog) to try to explain why I stand by it.
I’ve always believed in judging a character based (how ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or more accurately, how ‘complete’ or ‘empty’) based on the show’s given context. Unfortunately, I’ve not seen many shows in which the given internal morality differs greatly from my own generally accepted code, being a free-thinker and widely open, so I’ve never been really challenged to decide whether I accept or condemn a certain character’s actions. I can only remember a few instances where I’m challenged to consider a show’s premise when judging a character, and one of those is within Neon Genesis Evangelion.
In NGE, Ikari Gendo is portrayed as a cold hard father to his introverted and fragile son, Shinji. Though it’s never revealed in the show, Gendo confronts Shinji once in the manga at his wife’s empty grave and explains to Shinji that he gives the latter the cold shoulder because Shinji ‘is no longer an infant’ and has to ’stand up on his two feet and walk’, after which Shinji tries to argue that people may try to understand each other and Gendo promptly rejects.
NGE’s world is post-apocalyptic in nature; most of the world has died and there aren’t many to take their place. To further worsen the situation, giant flying freaks arrive on an irregular basis and attempt to end humanity altogether, as a predator does a prey. This suggests a shift of morality in NGE to one closer to animality, a code whereby survival takes precedence over everything else, including the value of a person and our recognized idea of how a family should function.
“Damn straight, yo!”
Hence, Gendo’s words to Shinji may be interpreted as that of a mother fox/wolf/insert-your-favourite-middle-of-the-food-chain-animal-here towards her cub (both who are able, by some miracle, communicate in words (like Pokemon)). He refuses to show affection towards his son, and instead tells him that he has to be independent in order to survive. He is a man living in the present, adopting what is required in his harse reality in contrast to Shinji and Misato who seem to still value a set of morals from the pre-Second Impact era, one which defends human rights and encourages people to love (though Misato obviously shows signs of not being able to hold onto said moral code).
That being said, one who looks at NGE through the eyes of our world may pity Misato and Shinji while misunderstanding or digging too shallowly into Gendo, labelling him simply as a ’shitty dad’ or a cold asshole. But it’s only through looking through the eyes of Gendo’s world may one, at the very least, empathize with him, and that’s why I’m all for judging a character through his/her show’s viewpoint, for the other option leaves me at risk of misinterpreting it.
To end this off, it’s time for a quote from Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly which I think has some relevance to this post and even if it doesn’t I find it cool anyway.
What does a scanner see? I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner … see into me — into us — clearly or darkly? I hope it does see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
—Philip K. Dick
July 21, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Mmmm.. Eva characters are the most complex ones I’ve ever seen. Either that… or Happy Feet.
July 22, 2008 at 12:06 am
Now you point it out, Evangelion’s world is closer to a Hobbesian state of nature than it at first looks: they have giant robots and skyscrapers which can retract into the ground, but they’re putting fourteen-year-olds into giant killing machines to (supposedly) defend the Earth from giant space monsters. I suppose I’d say Gendo’s moral code, at least from what we see of it, is definitely suited to this world. I don’t know if the story as a whole, rather than just the world it’s set in, has a coherent set of morals – given that this is Eva we’re discussing, I suspect not.
All that said, however, I don’t know if judging characters using your own ethics is necessarily misinterpreting it so much as reinterpreting it. Hopefully, if it’s something we do in a self-aware way, the process tells us something about ourselves.
Given that you describe yourself as an ‘open’ free thinker, perhaps the kind of story which would challenge you would be one which suggests that there is one, and only one, moral stencil which we can apply to the world. But I can’t think of an example right now, so I’ll just leave that out there.
Props for the Dick quotation, too. I think my favourite parts of that book were the tragicomic, seemingly-endless conversations the characters had about nothing, while they were high.
July 27, 2008 at 5:30 am
I agree that viewing a character through one’s ethics reveals a stuff about ourselves and our attitudes and biases. However, how this is useful to fully understanding the character is debatable ’cause it seems to me that with this method, I’m using a coloured lens or kaleidoscope instead of a clear looking glass, which is why I try to steer away from it or place it as a more auxiliary way of judging a character, more for general interest than appraisal; subjective versus objective.