Chapter Text
A couple nights ago I received this question and ever since I’ve been working to answer it, except it turns out that I have a hell of a lot more to say than I originally thought I did. It’s thus turned into a multi-part series, so stay tuned for coming installations. I have been curious about the odd relationship between Gendo Ikari and Rei Ayanami ever since I was a fourteen-year-old myself, but my latest Evangelion rewatch at the ripe old age of thirty-three has brought it all surging back and provided me with a lot more insight that I had in my past watches (first as a teenager, then as a twenty-something). It’s also really the perfect archetype of a type of fictional relationship that has always absolutely fascinated me, which I’m sure anyone who’s followed this blog and read my work for long enough can tell. In an anime that really centres on characters’ relationships it’s definitely the one that I think is the most interesting, and part of that is its deep ambiguity and flirtation with being openly taboo.
I should first note that I’m mainly going by the canon for the 26-episode anime and End of Evangelion here as that’s mostly what I care about in terms of the franchise and it’s what I’m personally most familiar with. There’s been lots of things given Word-of-God since, and there’s plenty of additional detail in the manga (once I’m done reading the manga I may do a separate post on that, since the manga really makes explicit the implicit), and that’s not even counting the many alternate universe stories and the Rebuild series. For brevity’s sake I’m thus primarily using what we see in the anime. Also, I may get things wrong since the lore is so uncertain and at times contradictory.
Gendo’s textual treatment of Rei from the anime and EoE alone speaks volumes about the nature of their dynamic, even if many of the exact events that developed that dynamic are unclear. And to understand Gendo’s relationship with Rei, we first have to understand his relationship with his dead wife, Yui Ikari.