Evangelion vs. Claymore

kinda…

Neon Genesis Evangelion and Claymore don’t have much in common – but are united in presenting us with boy heroes who are famously miserable whingers. But they are also warriors. Raki has to struggle against inhuman monsters in the company of a supermonster, Shinji turns giant space monsters into pretentiously shaped explosions. Who then, in this clash of warrior heroes, will triumph? And does anybody care?

Ok, rules – 1 on 1, no allies, no weapons. Mothers may not intervene. No equipment may be taken along, to avoid technology related disparities. Of course neither individual has ever shown any capability for unarmed combat – but still, one cannot overemphasise this condition: all temporal contamination is banned. We must be completely fair, so they must be naked. Location: the men’s bathhouse, a warm summers eve.

You would think that Raki, a child who walks all day and swings swords in his spare time, would have certain physical advantages in a fistfight. But you would be misreading the true strengths of the characters. For surely the major threat each of these men faces is not from his opponent, but from his own tendency towards spontaneous emotional breakdown.

The one who can still see through his bleary eyes when the going gets tough will surely triumph. Observant viewers will recall that it is only really Raki who spends all the time crying, Shinji just mopes. But then, moping like Shinji is such an all consuming hobby that it’s actually roughly as debilitating as blindness. Both are equally useless when distressed – so he who cries least (the manliest[obviously]) will win. On what grounds can such wimps prove to us their manly manliness? I suggest the human penis (spoilers for both series).

The thing about Raki is, he gets to have fights, and then he gets to have romantic interests – but (for shame!) his penis is never involved. Like so many child heroes, he gets true love but no boner. Hormones shape sex development in the human foetus, more hormones = more man (science see). Which is why angsty teenagers so often have to be drafted in to save the world, whilst professional soldiers look on in awe. Those grizzled commandos may look tough, but their sperm is deteriorating in quality by the hour. This is why all old people look the same. The logistics of progressive demanification are a nightmare for even our greatest generals. When the world’s great leaders wake up suddenly drenched in sweat, you now know exactly what’s on their minds.

Shinji’s great strength is a deep and profound connection to his own genitals. On what do I base this assessment? In a typically classic scene of Eva surrealism our hornyboy wonder sees the faces of various female cast members blurring into one another as he imagines them propositioning him. This scene shows that he feels the omni-directional imperative of the johnson. Shinji doesn’t really get anywhere, but he shows honourably repressed intentions. Anything in a skirt is enough to get him in a lather. Even a girlish boy is close enough to rouse his interest. Ok, Raki slpt in the same bed as a nekkid girl, bonus points. But Priscilla has a horn. A horn. Plus, she’s mentally about 5, and statutory rape is, er, gay.

With superior puberty comes superior trauma. Shinji suffers from a subtle blend of abandonment fears, paternal manipulation and matental death. World class trauma – because manliness is measured by its intimidation factor, and there’s nowt more threatening than a raving psycho spluttering over your shoulder. Mere loss of family is as nothing, it is the thrash metal of mental trauma – full on and tactless, common. In Claymore every second person saw their brother eating their uncle’s gizzards, can’t walk down the street without a supermodel decapitating your neighbour. But Shinji has classical trauma, a wonderfully constructed array of perfect neuroses.

Think of those great old entrepreneurs of yore, pursuing wealth, being the man, neglecting their offspring and so forth. They drank your fucking milkshake every day before building a couple of railways and perpetuating a few patriarchal hierarchies. Repression, delusion, self-obsession. This is how Shinji might have turned out – a bit like his dad.

Of course they say you aren’t a man until your dad dies, perhaps explaining our juvenile society. [My paternal grandfather infuriatingly lives on into his dotage, what chance do I possibly have?] Here Raki Orphaneto definitely has an advantage, backed up by the fact that his substitute parent is a professional killer. And he kisses her. That romantic kiss proved nowt as far as hormones go, he didn’t even initiate it. But it did show an admirably unhealthy inclination towards molesting the family. All his relatives are dead, but he still tries to have incest – we can only admire his fighting spirit. Shinji is on the remedial course, in that his dad is only dead inside – so the son is still in the interim between child and man.

Yet Gendo does add weight to Shinji’s side by proving certain genetic advantages. Think of someone who’d be alive in Eva’s hypothetical future. Someone irritating and young. The child-”actor” Harry Potter stars, sitting in their houses with their families and dead dreams of thespian careers. Gendo turned them into soup. Fucking hell, considering that the Catholic church would have survived Second Impact, he most likely did the Pope in too. And all of the Swiss Guard. Shinji may never be quite that insane – but he is already messed up, and clearly has approximately half of the necessary world-squelching chromosomes. Raki may grow up to be tough, but the boy Shinji shows more evidence of personal unpleasantness.

So, more or less arbitrarily, I declare that Shinji wins.

Or, to put it less concisely: They face off in the centre of the steamy room. Shinji sees Raki’s claymore and (recalling a certain someone) waters at the eyes. Seeing a fellow human being in tears, Raki feels a pang of sympathy and begins to bawl uncontrollably. Shinji is alarmed by this sudden change in the audiovisual status quo, and curls whimpering into a foetal position. Unfortunately the torrent from the tear ducts of his opponent has lubricated the floor – Shinji thus slips onto his side and with the momentum from his fall, still in a huddle, spins haphazzardly across the room towards Raki. The rotating floor-level adolescent trips our blinded hero up, causing the amateur pugilist to hit his head on the hard tiled floor and die instantly. Shinji has shut his eyes tight, and is thus unaware of his victory.

Later in the evening the janitor finds the still-petrified Shinji, leisurely violates him with the mop, carries him out back and chucks him in the gutter, where he lies prone. A passing lonely supermodel forcibly appropriates one of his arms, tries it on for size, sneers, then dumps it in a public bin. A few minutes later a kind old lady calls for an ambulance, and Misato picks the battle-wearied Shinji up at the hospital to buy him a celebratory drink. He stutters out the details of his battle – a tale of bawls and moans, eternally retold.

This pointless exercise is really a (substantially) delayed reaction to the surprising levels of awesome to be found in Rebuild 0.1, which prompted a realisation of how much I like Shinji. I was thinking maybe Shinji had to whine so much week to week so that his being a neurotic mess could be reinforced within the context of each episode. The recent film is whinge-heavy, but gives him more of a sense of development – organic changes in mood made him feel more natural and thus more sympathetic. I wonder how they’ll now reconcile this unified filmic approach to character building with the “fun” feel of week to week Evangelion episodes which I associate with Asuka, PenPen, Misato’s beercans, robot dancing – that divergent silliness. Probably, they can’t.

So the original series remains the pure form for Eva, and millions more will watch as Shinji demonstrates his characteristics week in week out. And they’ll laugh at the overblown nature of his neuroses, the get done in by the ending. But then, we deal with a medium of absurd extremes – where every villain is an unprecedented genius of evil, and every boy is a lucky saviour. Extraordinary people in extraordinary outfits, the wimps as outrageous as the rest.

If we’ve got a culture hung up on gender competition then it’s connected to that same psychology which lies behind all lists, best ofs. We take the dramatic roles which operate within a series and, of our own accord, write them large and authoritative over a whole imagined world of tv characters. Who’s the strongest? Who’s the coolest? The most moe, gar, whatever? The embodiment of an attribute in your favourite show is of course the top dog everywhere. We’re left asking which series triumphs in over-emphasising simple characteristics in the course of a 25 minute story. Maybe we only make such competitions because the tropes of anime characterisation are so blunt and repetitive. But then, we all seem to like it this way, so why whinge?