The core of the human being.
Rei is the NGE’s symbol of the apathy: a doll without a soul, born just to be useful to her creator, unable to create a human contact with the other people. On the other hand Asuka is extremely violent in the way she expresses emotions and she’s always dragged by them. That’s a reason why the First Children is more performing than Asuka in the battle, even if Asuka has a great potential- But because Asuka can fallen into the desperation we can say she’s alive, while Rei is born like an empty shell for the benefit of the other people and this is why she acts like an object for almost all the series. This is even the attitude which Asuka so look down on Rei, because she acts like a doll.
Moreover Asuka always acts for herself, while Rei always acts for the others. While Asuka fins her motivation in anincrease of her self-consideration, Rei finds her one in being useful to someone.
Asuka as the Shinji’s foil:
We can read these two characther as two sides of the same coin: Asuka is the iper-active side, while Shinji is the passive one. Both of them are searching for some love, but in a different way. Asuka wants that everybody look at her with admiration, try to prevaricate other people with her intellect capacity but almost always do something by herself without following the orders, while Shinji even wants the other’s admiration but because he acts like someone asked. So we can say that Asuka always acts out of the system, while Shinji always acts into it and these are both presented by the author like problems.
Moreover they both have a problematic relation with their parents, Asuka with her mother and Shinji with her father.
At the end of the series They end in the opposite way: Asuka chooses a more passive approach and she lets her die, while Shinji refuses a passive life to choose a protagonist’s role.
Shinji as the Rei’s foil:
Shinji’s development forces him to increase the relations and to realize that the relations can hurt but you have to accept this ugly truth. So Shinji has to regenerate the feelings who forced to repress and accept the pain, to raise again. On the other hand Rei always felt nothing for the reality around, so she needs to “create” from zero this pain which Shinji tries to refuse so hard. Because of this pain Rei can die as object to born as human. They need to do a big effort in the opposite directions.
Moreover they have both a fetish which linked them to the same person: Gendo Ikari. Gendo is the point from which both of them develope a trauma and they need to let his figure go to be happy. On the other hand Gendo developed an attachment to Rei while he still refuses his son.
These foils introduce one of the mostly interesting theme of the series, in my opinion: the impossibility to divide love and pain, because people are too clever to distinguish black from white. This means an eternal thrust to eros and thanatos and the only one who can overcome this painful is a God, because the destruction of the AT-Field. Where however the AT-Field seems to be the core of the human being and the element which permits to call someone “human”.
The sacrifice’s motif is a result of this start point, which has Kaworu as its most powerful expression: he defines himself with the free will and from Kaworu starts the final act for all the characters in the series.
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