This extends to Shinji's attempts at living up to his father’s masculine ideal, as Mongillo’s shrill, high-pitched, scream desperately claws at some kind of toughness. Mongillo's voice has a waver to it, a subtle lilt that undercuts Shinji's attempts at manliness, even as you can feel the creep of puberty infect even their lightest deliveries. Where Ogata was a cis woman performing masculinity, and Spencer was a cis male performing as a character questioning their identity, Mongillo's delivery captures the delicate interplay between the masculine and feminine aspects of Shinji's voice and personality, bringing his bodily and gendered anxieties to life in a way those two classic performers couldn't. Right away, Mongillo differentiates themselves from original Japanese performer Megumi Ogata and original English dub actor Spike Spencer. It wasn't until Casey Mongillo came on the scene that I got a taste of what a more explicitly queer and trans Evangelion would be like. The basis of our recognition came through Shinji’s intense repression, his struggles to live up to an impossible masculine ideal we relate all too well to. I know this because I am one of those trans women.įrom the moment I came out to myself and started socializing with more trans women, we would bond over Evangelion, sharing memes about Shinji undergoing HRT (hormone replacement therapy), screencaps of all the times he wore feminine clothes, and fanart of him in dresses and maid outfits. It is through these conflicts that Evangelion has attracted not just a queer fanbase, but also a transgender one. From his inability to live up to his father Gendo Ikari's expectations, to his doomed relationship with the mysterious co-pilot Kaworu Nagisa, Shinji's at constant war with both his sexual identity and his performance of masculinity.
As many of the characters around him battle depression, thoughts of suicide, and the dehumanization of war, Shinji also wrestles with his sexuality and gender. Masculinity, both toxic and affirmative, is intrinsically tangled up in Shinji’s story, and it is through that lens that a queer subtext begins to unfold.
0 kommentar(er)
