All my existential feels. 

Just watched the entire series again tonight. The complexity of it is just making my braincells happy.

More so because it greatly reminds me of Jean Paul-Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” And in case you didn’t know already, the title of the 16th episode of the series called, “Sickness Unto Death, And…” is actually a quotation from the title of Soren Kierkegaard’s book, “The Sickness Unto Death,” in which he basically refers to despair as well as defining the idea of the “relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.” You can also throw in some Nietszchean void and the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer (the hedgehog’s dilemma, anyone?) and you got yourself a one disturbingly cerebral anime series. It makes you question your perception of reality and your relationship with it not to mention your interaction with others and/or the lack of it that consequently leads you to plunge into a general feeling of sadness.

I just like how every character has deep-seated psychological issues and how they’ve created some sort of symbiotic relationships due to their respective comorbidity. It’s an unsettling network of equally damaged individuals stumbling in the bleakness of their existential ennui, struggling to make a bit of sense of something—anything, or just completely resigning to the absence of a raison d’etre and the resolute lack of motivation to seek it, which makes it quite ironic considering how determined they are on pushing the idea of having nothing else left for them. I enjoy their intermittent soliloquies throughout the entire series, which is a constant reminder of how they are enclosed in their own self-consciousness like some introspective mental state of some sort. I could go on forever about this series but this aspect of it is what struck me the most via my existentialist fangirlism etc.

More over, it gravitates to this notion that no matter how well-adjusted you perceive yourself to be, somehow, one way or another, you’re as fucked up as everybody else.  And boy Anno just nailed it fucking right.