---
title: 'Why Evangelion''s Endings Make Each Other Better'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=0VABh_NE4Xg'
video_id: '0VABh_NE4Xg'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 645
---

# Why Evangelion's Endings Make Each Other Better

> Source: [Why Evangelion's Endings Make Each Other Better](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0VABh_NE4Xg)

## Summary

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a landmark anime that subverts the giant robot genre into a Freudian coming-of-age story. The series and its film, The End of Evangelion, present two different endings that together capture the ongoing struggle of choosing to live.

### Key Points

- **Two Endings** [0:06] — Evangelion has two endings: the original TV finale and the film The End of Evangelion, both depicting Shinji's decision to accept life.
- **Budget Constraints** [1:11] — The original series ran out of money, so the finale focused abstractly on Shinji's internal choice rather than plot resolution.
- **Fan Backlash** [2:05] — Fans hated the abstract ending, leading to death threats, but Gainax later made a movie to provide a more concrete conclusion.
- **Same Story, Different Tone** [2:28] — Both endings tell the same story but with vastly different tones: the TV finale is hopeful, the movie is bleak and violent.
- **Movie's Grimmer Arc** [3:27] — In the movie, Shinji's acceptance of life is portrayed as a difficult, iterative process rather than a triumphant moment.
- **Personal Reflection** [5:34] — The creator relates the two endings to real-life experiences of choosing to live, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with mere spite.
- **Enriching Each Other** [6:20] — The two endings together create a dissonance that captures the ongoing nature of the decision to live, unlike a single ending.
- **Neither Ending is Real** [9:22] — The real ending is neither the TV finale nor the movie, but the space between them, representing the continuous middle of the story.

### Conclusion

Evangelion's two endings together illustrate that the choice to live is not a one-time event but an ongoing struggle, making them more powerful as a pair than alone.

## Transcript

Which of Evangelion’s endings is the real one?
Some background: Neon Genesis Evangelion was a 
landmark giant robot anime whose influence is  
still felt today. It took a common trope 
in Japanese children’s entertainment–a  
young boy becomes a man by fighting monsters 
in a giant robot his father built–and  
turns it into a Freudian nightmare. 
It’s still a coming of age story,  
but coming of age in Evangelion 
is a terrifying, messy,  
violent thing. The robots–biological machines 
full of teeth and blood and the ground up  
souls of the pilots’ mothers–serve as a potent 
metaphor for the body horror of adolescence.  
And the heightened stakes that come from choosing 
to pilot these fleshbots, doing something  
scary and risky that puts you in the path of great 
harm and lets you inflict great harm yourself,  
stands in for the sudden psychological weight of 
adulthood. The central question is not whether its  
protagonist Shinji will be a hero: It’s whether 
he will simply be, whether he will accept the  
world with its people and its pain or retreat 
into himself, completely safe and utterly alone.
In addition to this existential question, there 
were also cool mech fights and political intrigue,  
but those take money to animate, and by the 
time the studio, Gainax, wAS producing the final  
episodes, they had none. So instead of wrapping 
up the plot, the original series’ finale zeroed  
in on Shinji's character and his decision whether 
to accept the hurt of other people or escape into  
his own mind. It presents these questions in 
abstract, bloodless terms, the safe void of  
solipsism a blank sheet of paper, the pain knowing 
and being known a series of angry scribbles.  
And it ends with Shinji accepting, wholeheartedly, 
that he wants to live, to try to relate to others  
even when it hurts, to seek love despite 
its promise loss. The rest of the characters  
applaud and congratulate him. It is, after the 
agony of the last 24 episodes, a happy ending.
Of course, fans hated this. Dropping the plot 
entirely to lecture on the themes is, to put it  
mildly, a bold move, and the death threats the 
studio received were a sort of grim prelude to  
the worst parts of fandom to come. But because the 
show was a hit, Gainax had the opportunity to make  
a movie, titled The End of Evangelion, to provide 
a more satisfying conclusion. And while my reading  
of it has always been that End of Evangelion and 
the original series’ finale tell ultimately the  
same story, the tone is waaaaay different. The 
movie was bleaker and grosser and meaner than  
even the most horrific parts of the TV show. It 
too ends with the ultimate existential question  
of to be or not to be, but it’s not represented as 
abstractions anymore. Though still metaphorical,  
part of Shinji’s head trip, it is rooted in 
the story and its characters. The pain of being  
known is not a series of angry scribbles: It’s 
Shinji’s fellow pilot Asuka tearing into him for  
his selfishness and cowardice. And the rejection 
of others is not a clean blank sheet of solitude.
It’s Shinji choking Asuka out.
The End of Evangelion follows the same rough 
character arc for Shinji as the series:  
He has to decide whether he wants to brave this 
world. He has his moment of doubt, briefly ending  
that world to escape it. And, finally, he 
changes his mind, choosing to accept the  
agony and ecstasy of other people. But that final 
decision, so triumphant in the original series,  
is much grimmer in the movie. Instead of 
rising to his feet while the rest of the  
cast congratulates him, here Shinji wakes 
to a desolate beach and a sea of blood,  
the giant corpse of his friend slash mom slash 
apotheosis of humanity staring lifelessly ahead.  
The scene is quiet and deliberate and surreal and 
excruciating. The only other person is Asuka, this  
time the real Asuka, not a figment of Shinji’s 
mind, not a synecdoche for other people as a whole  
but her own person and all thrill and terror that 
promises. And, faced with a real person, Shinji  
relapses. He chokes Asuka again, tries to bring 
back his solitude through violence. But she gently  
caresses his cheek, and he weeps and loosens his 
grip, and she tells him, simply, “how disgusting.”
This is the world Shinji has decided to accept: 
not the blue skies and congratulations of the  
original series but a strange and silent 
and barren place, filled with brief,  
undeserved tenderness and scorn earned many 
times over. He has made the right choice, the  
good choice, the brave choice, but the reward for 
that choice is not a bright and happy ceremony,  
not a sudden unbreakable will to live, not a 
cure for his loneliness and pain that means,  
from here on out, things are going to get better. 
It is instead an awful and iterative process,  
one where he will stumble and regress, 
where the challenges of life feel  
only slightly less terrible than the 
oblivion that is their alternative.
Most of the time, the choice to continue 
living is automatic, pushed on by momentum  
and survival instincts. But, without going into 
too much detail, there have been times in my  
life where it has had to be a very deliberate 
decision. And sometimes that decision has felt  
like Evangelion’s original ending, and I am 
excited to do the scary and difficult things  
that will make my life better. And sometimes it 
has felt like the movie’s ending, like I am not  
rising to the challenge but lurching towards it, 
not filled with a renewed purpose but merely a  
spite just animating enough to keep me going. The 
choice to live can be a resounding affirmation  
of the joys of this world, and it can just as 
easily be a half-hearted refusal to die just yet.
And this is why Evangelion’s two endings enrich 
each other, why they are more effective in tandem  
than they would be alone. By telling 
the same story in very different ways,  
it draws attention to their contrasts while 
letting those contrasts occupy the same space.  
It’s like one image superimposed on the other, 
or a word struck through, the End of Evangelion  
replacing the original finale but not entirely 
erasing it, showing you clearly both what this new  
ending is and what it is no longer. This is why my 
most enduring takeaway of this story's conclusion  
is not anything in either ending, despite 
how striking they are in their own ways,  
but the space between them, the push and the 
pull, the conversation formed by their many  
similarities and crucial differences. On 
their own, each ending is just one thing,  
no matter how effective that thing is. 
Together, though, they're something else.
This is novel because most stories, with 
their single endings, encourage the reader  
to extrapolate from the final scene. A moment 
of happiness becomes "happily ever after,"  
while a downer ending suggests a whole world of 
sadness when the story finally ends. The Sopranos  
uses this to interesting effect by making the 
paranoia of its last scene stretch out like an  
eternal punishment. An ending does not show us 
every single thing that happens to this universe  
and its inhabitants, but by showing us one last 
thing, it asks to fill in the rest accordingly.
But the strange harmony of Evangelion’s 
two endings doesn’t allow for such a neat  
extrapolation. That they are at odds with 
each other, two tellings of the same thing,  
means that one single tone (sopranos joke) 
doesn’t get to define what this world becomes.  
That, instead, there is dissonance. There is, 
where the conflict of the story is supposed  
to give way to resolution, more conflict. 
Where as a bittersweet ending may contain  
several feelings within its whole, 
these endings defy wholeness entirely.
And, given what the ending is about, 
that’s perfect. Because Evangelion is,  
ultimately, about Shinji’s decision to live, 
to hurt, to be. And, no matter the telling,  
his decision is yes. But that yes is never 
final: You do not choose just once to go on,  
then go on forever. It is a choice you have to 
make over and over, and you will make it in the  
optimism of the series' finale and the weary 
loathing of the film, in grace and in shame,  
triumphantly and worn to marrow, beneath blue 
skies and amidst slick nightmare blackness,  
at once a chorus of congratulations and 
a single whisper of “how disgusting.”  
Either ending, on their own, captures a 
moment of this decision, but together,  
they hold its exhausting repetition, its ebb and 
flow, its unending burden of a committment kept.
The answer to the question we opened with–which 
of these endings is the real one–is not, as I had  
suspected it would be when I started writing 
this, both of them. Instead, it is neither:  
For in the space between them, the arc 
of lightning between two poles, there  
is no ending at all. There is none of an ending’s 
peace, none of its certainty, none of its relief:  
There is only the story’s middle, stretching 
on and on, wonderfully, awfully, forward.