Anime - Socialism with Kawaii Characteristics
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Art by ΛHRIMΛN (Dmitry Grozov)
Established 2022-04-04
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I agree with what you said, but I think more of their problems stem from their childhoods rather than their present. Asuka herself is already alienated from her peers since I think she mentioned once that she was some kind of genius and had already graduated, and she only did poorly in school because she couldn't read Japanese. Thus even if she weren't an eva pilot she wouldn't have been able to really view her classmates as peers. Plus, she watched her mom hang herself, and even when we first meet her it's clear she has a hard time integrating herself into society. Even though fighting the angels kind of destroys her psyche later on, it still stems from herself, as iirc she's increasingly angry that despite looking down on Shinji for being a weak and passive idiot she still can't defeat an angel alone, a problem which arguably stems from her own insecurity.
I'd also say Shinji being an eva pilot doesn't really interfere with him connecting to his classmates----Toji and Kensuke are definitely his friends, and they truly support him. It's more that he can't find it in himself to connect to them, in part because of his relationship to his father, which has basically broke him emotionally. And them going away later when Tokyo-3 is evacuated only fucks him up even more, because the people who are pretty much the only ones who ever care about him are gone. Then Rei, Asuka, Kowaru etc dying are only more nails in the coffin. I guess it could be argued that this was the result of him having to pilot the evas, but even if her was not a soldier, losing people like this would still be similarly devastating to him, since it's very clear he's never really had friends like this before. If anything, becoming a pilot was actually a good thing for him, at least for a little while, since he got to have friends for a short period of time.
As a counterexample Mari or whatever her name is in the rebuilds is also a pilot, but in contrast to the rest of them she's pretty mentally stable, because she lacks the mental baggage that Shinji and Asuka are carrying even before they learn about the evas.
On a more meta level I'm pretty sure the creator struggled with depression around the time he created this, and he was trying to sort out his feelings with creating this work. The theme of using children as pilots is probably a throwback to his earlier work, gunbuster, which is also about kids flying giant robots (not sure if they have depression though)
(sorry for these super long comments I'm really into evangelion)