# Hedgehog's Dilemma (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

"Hedgehog's Dilemma", also known by the Japanese title "Rain, After Running Away", is the fourth episode of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by Gainax. The episode, written by Akio Satsukawa and directed by Tsuyoshi Kaga, was first broadcast on TV Tokyo on October 25, 1995. The series is set fifteen years after a worldwide cataclysm named Second Impact, and is mostly set in the futuristic, fortified city Tokyo-3. The episode's protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy who is recruited by his father Gendo to the organization Nerv to pilot a giant bio-machine mecha named Evangelion into combat with beings called Angels. In the episode, Shinji is overcome by the stress of being an Evangelion pilot and runs away from home. After wandering around Tokyo-3, he must choose between quitting and staying at Nerv.
Production of "Hedgehog's Dilemma" took place after the fifth and sixth episodes were made, and the content varied from the staff's original ideas. It is the only episode in which Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno is not credited with direction or screenplay. The episode's title references the namesake concept proposed by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, variously called the "hedgehog's" or the "porcupine's dilemma". The episode scored a 5.8% rating of audience share on Japanese TV and was generally well received by critics. The episode received appreciation for focusing on the psychological description of the characters. Critics also appreciated the philosophical themes and directorial choices of "Hedgehog's Dilemma", such as the representation of natural landscapes and the use of still images.

## Plot

Special agency Nerv Major Misato Katsuragi notices Shinji Ikari, a minor in her custody and official Evangelion pilot, has run away from home. Shinji aimlessly wanders around the city of Tokyo-3 and the countryside, and meets his classmate Kensuke Aida sleeping in a tent. In the morning, men in black escort Shinji back to Nerv headquarters, where he renounces the title of pilot and chooses to return to ordinary life. Shinji is taken to a station to board a special government train, and meets Kensuke and Toji Suzuhara, another of Shinji's classmates, who had struck him in the previous episode. Toji reconciles with Shinji under Kensuke's push. Misato drives to the station, believing Shinji has already left. She notices Shinji, who has decided not to board the train, on the platform, and they smile at each other.

## Production

   [Shinji] tries to live in a closed world where his behavior dooms him. ... He has convinced himself that he is a completely unnecessary person, so much so that he cannot even commit suicide. And there is a 29-year-old woman [Misato] who lives life so lightly as to barely allow the possibility of a human touch. She protects herself by having surface-level relationships, and running away. Both are extremely afraid of being hurt. Both are unsuitable — lacking the positive attitude — for what people call heroes of an adventure. But in any case, they are the heroes of this story.
"Hedgehog's Dilemma" was once omitted in terms of the series composition, and it was planned that the fifth episode "Rei I" would come after the third, "A Transfer". After the battle against Angel Shamshel, Shinji would become friends with Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida in "A Transfer", receiving a call from them. As production progressed, however, staff members said they thought there was a need to depict Shinji's relationships with the people around him after the third episode. "Hedgehog's Dilemma" was thus made with contents that differ from the original plans. Moreover, Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno had already worked on the fifth and sixth episodes of the series, and tried to go beyond regular anime and develop realistic characters with the installments.
The episode's script was written after the fifth episode's script had already been finalized, making "Hedgehog's Dilemma" the only episode in which director Anno did not have direct input into the plot and script. Akio Satsukawa wrote the episode, while Junichi Sato, who is credited as Kiichi Jinme, drew the storyboard. Tsuyoshi Kaga directed the episode and Satoshi Shigeta served as chief animator. In 1993, Gainax wrote a presentation volume of Neon Genesis Evangelion named New Century Evangelion (tentative name) Proposal (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (仮) 企画書, Shinseiki Evangelion (kari) kikakusho). The studio published the Proposal document in 1994. In the original project, the fourth episode should have been titled "14 years, the first day" (14歳、 始まりの日, 14-sai, hajimari no hi); during the episode, Shinji's birthday would occur, but his father Gendo would have ignored the son without wishing him a happy birthday. Rei Ayanami would then attempt to make dinner for both of them, while Misato would decide something for Shinji.
During production, the staff thought about opening and closing the episode with Misato reading the day's notes from her diary, but the idea was dropped and used for the movie Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth (1997). The draft script for "Hedgehog's Dilemma" also mentions dates that were cut from the broadcast, according to which the fourth episode spanned 15 to 18 July 2015. Furthermore, in a scene in which Shinji watches the disaster film about the Second Impact in a cinema, a "story within a story" script was created and dubbed for realism, including all of the film's main characters, who were voiced by Kōichi Nagano, Hiro Yūki, Megumi Hayashibara, Fumihiko Tachiki as the doctor, Tetsuya Iwanaga and Tomokazu Seki as his assistants. A frame in which Rei is analyzed in a computerized scanning was added in the following scenes, in which normal cells have been integrated with computer-generated effects. The Tokyo-3 signs in the night scene were also produced by the staff on the computer, and were later incorporated into the final drawings. Italian writer Mario Pasqualini noted how the scene features, among others, a karaoke sign, whose sign, however, reads karawoke (カラヲケ), where the kana character オ (o) is replaced with ヲ (wo). Pasqualini linked this to a specific choice of Anno already used in Gunbuster and to the gyaru-moji writing style, which has spread among Japanese youth during Evangelion broadcast using arbitrary homophones or graphic inventions.
Writer Virginie Nebbia noticed that Misato, usually depicted in a sensual manner, wears long pajamas that cover her entire body in "Hedgehog's Dilemma". According to Nebbia, this is due to the absence of Anno from the main staff. However, Nebbia noted how Anno's imprint is still present, as it features elements typical of his direction, such as close-ups of electricity poles and the long silent final shot. During the episode, existing geographical places such as Atsugi, Gōra, Togendai, the Ōwakudani valley, a pampas grass field in Sengokuhara Lake Ashi, are named and drawn. A fictional JRG train model named Odakyu 7700 series CHiSE was also drawn for the episode. Hayashibara and Hiro Yūki served as female and male speakers of the train, respectively. Hayashibara and Yūko Miyamura also voiced two prostitutes in a scene in which Shinji wanders Tokyo-3 at night.
For the last scene, which is set in the New Hakone Yumoto station, staff took inspiration from the real Hakone-Yumoto Station, depicting it similarly to the actual station. The stairs into which Shinji is led by the men in black were depicted as dark, similar to the corridors of a prison. Another Okadyu Romancecar train similar to the Odakyu 10000 series HiSE was drawn for the scene, along with a Renault Alpine A310 car without modifications driven by Misato. In the same sequence, the songs Bay Side Love Story – from Tokyo and Face from Masami Okui's album Gyuu (1995) were used as background music. A fifty-second-long take in which Shinji and Misato look at each other in the station was added as a conclusion to the episode. The take was originally supposed to be one minute long, but staff decided to cut it during production. Academic Philip Brophy noted that Shinji is positioned in wide-frame, visually reducing him in size, focus, and importance; the scene has no music, with just the station announcements and Okui's song "at the threshold of audibility", so "at these moments, location sound is either reduced or voided". Brophy described it as a musical haiku, where the "individual elements collide, merge, and quietly coumbst". British singer Claire Littley also sang a cover of "Fly Me to the Moon" which was later used as the episode's closing theme song, replaced in late home video editions by another cover by Yoko Takahashi.

## Cultural references and themes

The episode's English title "Hedgehog's Dilemma" references the psychoanalytic concept of the porcupine's dilemma, mentioned for the first time in the previous episode. The concept, suggested by Satsukawa during the script writing, is usually used to describe the behaviors of individuals with a borderline personality disorder. Like the porcupines of Arthur Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, Shinji is afraid to be hurt and withdraws from human contact. As noted by writer Virginie Nebbia, all the main Evangelion characters hide their inner self for fear of being hurt, as in Schopenhauer's dilemma. Shinji's relationship with Misato Katsuragi follows Schopenhauer's concept, since they both hurt but look for each other. Misato is also a victim of the dilemma, and during the episode she realizes Shinji's loneliness and communication difficulties. Gualtiero Cannarsi, who curated the Italian adaptation of the series, noticed the characters get closer without hurting each other at the end of the episode. Schopenhauer originally named his concept after the porcupine, or hystricidae (Stachelschweine in German); Evangelion staff however chose an alternative translation, since they wanted to portray Shinji as a hedgehog, an animal with smaller, blunter spines than those of a porcupine, suggesting more delicacy for the character. Furthermore, according to director Anno, when Shinji says "I'm back" at the New Hakone Yumoto station, the first stage of his growth journey ends.
Shinji's temporary resignation from Nerv is a tribute to the television series The Prisoner, Junichi Sato compared the third and the fourth episode of Evangelion to Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, while critic Mario Pasqualini likened the scene in which Shinji stops near a Jizō statue to a similar sequence in the film My Neighbor Totoro (1988). According to academic Susan J. Napier , the scene shows how Evangelion has some "nostalgic aspects" for the premodern pastoral world. In the cinema scene, Shinji sees a movie named World Sinks (世界沈没, Sekai chinbotsu), a parody of Japan Sinks. Cannarsi also noticed Kensuke plays a survivor game alone in "Hedgehog's Dilemma", comparing him to a military fan who appears in Otaku no Video (1991), a previous work by Gainax. Multiversity Comics' Matthew Garcia traced an influence on the episodes "A Transfer" and "Hedgehog's Dilemma" to Hideaki Anno's personal experience, particularly the production of his previous work, Nadia; according to him, like Anno on Nadia, Shinji is thrown "into a situation he didn't understand or have much investment in".
The main theme of "A Transfer" and "Hedgehog's Dilemma" is interpersonal communication. No battle against an Angel is presented in the episode, which is entirely focused on the psychology of the characters instead. Cannarsi and Yūichirō Oguro, the editor of supplemental materials included in the Japanese edition of the series, noticed Evangelion characters have communication difficulties, except for Kensuke, who shows great communication skills in the episode. Kensuke takes advantage of his dialectical skills with his classmates Toji and Shinji in "Hedgehog's Dilemma", but they described his communicative ability as a defense mechanism that could mask loneliness and inner fragility. Walter Veit in Psychology Today compared Shinji's behavior to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist concept of bad faith and Albert Camus's "philosophical suicide" for his passivity and his submissive attitude. During the episode, Shinji flees from reality and listens to music with his Sony Digital Audio Tape, constantly repeating tracks 25 and 26; Carl Gustav Horn, editor of the English edition of the Evangelion manga, linked the tracks to the last two episodes of Evangelion, which close the series in an interrogative style. For writer Philip Brophy, Shinji listens to his DAT "as if to soothe his own debilitating PTSD state". According to writer Claudio Cordella, since Shinji "is living an unsuistainable situation for him, he has a rejection reaction with hallucinatory states". In the following scenes, Shinji is overcome by a panick attack; everything turns red with the sounds of cicadas, orchestral murmur, and reverberant sirens. According to Philip Brophy, "this is the noise of the world he is actively suppressing: the presence of others, the closeness of friends, the touch of Rei". Brophy also noted that Shinji's voice is noticeably different in the episode, with a calmer, higher-pitched, breathy sound, echoing Rei Ayanami.
In the scene at the New Yamoto station, Toji demands Shinji to punch him back to make them even; academic Cristopher Smith described this as a "stereotypical manly exchange of violence expected to lead to homosocial bonding, at least in anime tropes". As noted by Smith, Shinji reluctantly agrees and punches Suzuhara, thereby momentarily performing hegemonic violent masculinity, but he cannot sustain this performance. Shinji then returns to Suzuhara with tears in his eyes proclaiming that he is the one who should be hit because he is "cowardly, timid, sneaky, weak". According to Smith, these four words are a "catalogue of his failures to perform hegemonic masculinity: cowardly and timid rather than courageous and confident, sneaky and weak instead of straightforward and strong". Moreover, Joshua Sorensen of Film Daze compared Shinji's attitude in "Hedgehog's Dilemma" to otaku, a Japanese term for young people who are obsessed with computers or particular aspects of pop culture to the detriment of their social skills. The series' assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki, noting "distant, awkward communication" can be observed between Shinji and other characters in the first episodes, described Evangelion as a "story about communication" that is directed to the otaku, criticized by director Anno for being overly closed in on themselves. Anime Feminist website writer Jeremy Tauber interpreted the scene in which Shinji listen to his walkman ignoring the other train passengers as a reference to "how the electronics industry drove Japanese consumers to alienation". According to Tauber, Shinji does demonstrate the symptoms of social withdrawal felt by Japanese youth at the time, as his preference towards dissociation over socialization and camaraderie indicates. Shinji's frequent habit of skipping habit. Tauber then compared Shinji's behaviour to hikikomori, young Japanese people who exhibit total withdrawal from society and seeking extreme degrees of social isolation; while not describing Shinji as strictly hikikomori, he noted that skipping class, or fushūgaku, is "a tell-tale sign of social withdrawal and the descension into hikikomori-ism".

## Reception

"Hedgehog's Dilemma" aired on October 25, 1995, and scored a 5.8% rating of audience share on Japanese TV. The episode was generally well received by critics. Stephen Bijan, writing for The Verge, described "Hedgehog's Dilemma"'s plot as one of the great tensions of the series and Shinji's reactions as instructive; he also considered the episode as an example of the show capacity of "synthesizing its philosophical influences into a coherent, cohesive whole". Anime News Network's reviewer Nick Creamer described it as "harrowing" and a "wholly tonal, visually driven experience".
EX.org's Peter Cahill praised "A Transfer" and "Hedgehog's Dilemma", but also stated "action fans might be a little disappointed in the story", since character psychology has a more prominent role in it than mecha fights. Max Covill of Film School Rejects ranked "Hedgehog's Dilemma" among the lowest of Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes; he criticized Shinji for being "whiny and unlikable", attributing the negative traits to the exclusion of Anno from the screenplay, but he also listed the scene of the colloquy between Shinji and Misato, with the Nerv logo in the background, among the "perfect shots" of the series. Anthony Gramuglia from Comic Book Resources defended Shinji's refusal to pilot the Eva and his weakness, comparing him to Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam, which he said was viewed "more favorably" by anime fans.
The Animé Café Japanese reviewer Akio Nagatomi described the scene in which Kensuke plays a survivor game alone as an example of the "incongruous character traits" presented in the episode. He also said that the viewer is never concerned about the plot development, since "It's just not that well written". Jane Nagatomi similarly described the ending as "predictable enough", but praised the scene in which Shinji, Toji and Kensuke talk as "really cute", "definitely a touch different". Writer Dennis Redmond described the natural scenery around Tokyo-3 shown in the episode as "gorgeous". Forbes Lauren Orsini praised the final scene's still frame of Shinji and Misato, describing it as a "refreshing alternative" from the frenetic action of modern shows and "a silent response to the noise that allows us to look inward alongside these characters".
Psychology Today's Walter Veit attributed the popularization of the concept of the porcupine dilemma to Evangelion. Official merchandise based on the episode has also been released, including lighters, umbrellas, and t-shirts.