What Is a Self, and Can It Cry in a Mecha?
(Evangelion Week, Day 4)
Evangelion is full of impossible machines and catastrophic metaphysics. But some of its most devastating moments are the quietest: a child in a cockpit, crying alone, connected to the body of a god.
It’s a show about apocalypse, but also about embodiment.
About pain that doesn’t stay inside the skin.
About the self as something you feel—and sometimes want to escape.
Evangelion is full of impossible machines and catastrophic metaphysics. But some of its most devastating moments are the quietest: a child in a cockpit, crying alone, connected to the body of a god.
It’s a show about apocalypse, but also about embodiment.
About pain that doesn’t stay inside the skin.
About the self as something you feel—and sometimes want to escape.
The Sync Ratio Is Too High
When you pilot an Eva, you don’t just move it.
You merge with it. Your thoughts become actions. Your pain becomes its pain—and vice versa.
And if the sync ratio is too high?
You lose distinction. You feel its arm tear off as if it were your own. You scream inside a machine that’s also screaming through you.
It’s not metaphor. It’s ontological collapse.
Evangelion doesn’t just ask “Who am I?”
It asks: Where do I stop?
Am I the body I inhabit? The machine I sync with? The pain I can’t distinguish from someone else’s?
Trauma and the Shifting Self
Shinji, Asuka, Rei—they all blur at the edges. They break down. They lose control not just of their actions, but of their boundaries. The self becomes porous, unstable, violated.
This is what trauma does.
It rearranges your borders. It confuses agency. It makes your body feel like something that doesn’t quite belong to you anymore.
So when Shinji cries in the Eva, the question isn’t “Why is he weak?”
It’s “Where else could that grief go?”
The Self as Something We Locate (Badly)
We talk about the self like it’s inside us. But Evangelion suggests it’s also between us. In the nerves that fire too early, in the words that don’t land, in the bodies that betray us, in the machines that reflect our worst instincts back at scale.The self might not be a stable thing.
But it feels like something.
And sometimes, that something hurts.
Selected Texts for When You Accidentally Sync Too Hard
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
The classic on embodied subjectivity. Your body isn’t a tool—it’s how you are in the world. Especially helpful if you’ve recently become one with a biomechanical weapon.
[2] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
What happens when your identity is shaped by trauma, opacity, and the gaze of others? A slow, brilliant unraveling of moral narration and fragmented selfhood.
[3] Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident
A beautiful, brutal book on how trauma changes the structure of identity—and what it means to become someone else because of it.
[4] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Pain resists language. It destroys world-making. It reduces the self to something raw and untranslatable. This is the theory behind the scream.
[5] Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (kind of a curveball)
A novel, but relevant: distributed consciousness, posthuman embodiment, and what it means to feel yourself dissolve into something shared.
When you pilot an Eva, you don’t just move it.
You merge with it. Your thoughts become actions. Your pain becomes its pain—and vice versa.
And if the sync ratio is too high?
You lose distinction. You feel its arm tear off as if it were your own. You scream inside a machine that’s also screaming through you.
It’s not metaphor. It’s ontological collapse.
Evangelion doesn’t just ask “Who am I?”
It asks: Where do I stop?
Am I the body I inhabit? The machine I sync with? The pain I can’t distinguish from someone else’s?
Trauma and the Shifting Self
Shinji, Asuka, Rei—they all blur at the edges. They break down. They lose control not just of their actions, but of their boundaries. The self becomes porous, unstable, violated.
This is what trauma does.
It rearranges your borders. It confuses agency. It makes your body feel like something that doesn’t quite belong to you anymore.
So when Shinji cries in the Eva, the question isn’t “Why is he weak?”
It’s “Where else could that grief go?”
The Self as Something We Locate (Badly)
We talk about the self like it’s inside us. But Evangelion suggests it’s also between us. In the nerves that fire too early, in the words that don’t land, in the bodies that betray us, in the machines that reflect our worst instincts back at scale.The self might not be a stable thing.
But it feels like something.
And sometimes, that something hurts.
Selected Texts for When You Accidentally Sync Too Hard
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
The classic on embodied subjectivity. Your body isn’t a tool—it’s how you are in the world. Especially helpful if you’ve recently become one with a biomechanical weapon.
[2] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
What happens when your identity is shaped by trauma, opacity, and the gaze of others? A slow, brilliant unraveling of moral narration and fragmented selfhood.
[3] Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident
A beautiful, brutal book on how trauma changes the structure of identity—and what it means to become someone else because of it.
[4] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Pain resists language. It destroys world-making. It reduces the self to something raw and untranslatable. This is the theory behind the scream.
[5] Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (kind of a curveball)
A novel, but relevant: distributed consciousness, posthuman embodiment, and what it means to feel yourself dissolve into something shared.
Comments
Post a Comment