# Weaving a Story 2: oral stage

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" is the twentieth episode of the Japanese anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by Gainax. Hideaki Anno wrote the episode and the animator Masahiko Otsuka directed it. The series' protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy whose father Gendo recruited him to the special military organization Nerv to pilot a gigantic, bio-mechanical mecha named Evangelion into combat with beings called Angels. In this episode, Eva-01 absorbs Shinji inside its cockpit. Trapped inside the mecha and devoid of a physical form, Shinji reflects on his life and past battles. Meanwhile, Nerv implements a plan to rescue Shinji.
The episode echoes the title and pattern of the fourteenth episode of the series, reusing frames and situations from previous installments. Production of the episode took about a week to complete; it was marked by the series' production schedule, which was close to collapse. The installment focuses on motherhood and masculinity, referring to scientific and psychological concepts; the title refers to Sigmund Freud's eponymous psychoanalytic concept.
"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" was first broadcast on February 14, 1996, and drew a 7.4% audience share on Japanese television. Critics gave the episode an ambivalent reception; the last scene, which depicts implied sex between the characters Misato Katsuragi and Ryoji Kaji, was criticized and became controversy upon airing on TV Tokyo. Some critics criticized the recycling of previously used animation and continuity errors, while others appreciated the use of previous footage, Anno's writing, the final scene, and the performance of Misato's voice actor Kotono Mitsuishi.

## Plot

After the massive fight against the Angel Zeruel, Shinji Ikari, pilot of the mecha Eva-01, becomes trapped inside its cockpit, losing his physical form and dissolving into it. Nerv devises a plan to recover Shinji. After a month, nerv implements the recovery project but Shinji refuses to return to reality; the pressure in the cockpit increases, rejecting its contents, including Shinji's pilot suit. Shinji's consciousness relives his life and the people he has known, such as Nerv Major Misato Katsuragi, and his fellow pilots Asuka Langley Soryu and Rei Ayanami, and reflects on his reasons for boarding the Eva. He also contemplates the nature of the series' enemy the Angels, comparing them to his father Gendo Ikari, with whom he has an adversarial and detached relationship. While floating naked in a sea, Shinji feels the presence of his mother Yui, whose soul is kept inside Eva-01. Shinji decides to return to the real world and emerges from Unit 01's exposed core. After Shinji's recovery, Misato meets with her lover Ryoji Kaji; while they have sex in a bed, Kaji gives Misato a capsule, saying it may be his last gift to her.

## Production

In 1993, Gainax, the studio that developed Neon Genesis Evangelion, drafted a plan for the series. In the plan, the twentieth episode of the series was titled "The Birth of Nerv", in which Unit Eva-05 was to be shipped to Nerv from Germany. The same episode was to include a flashback to Gendo's story and an incident in which, fifteen years before the events of the series, the Dead Sea evaporated. The series staff changed the original scenario of the series, merging the twentieth episode's plot into the twenty-first. The show's director and main screenwriter Hideaki Anno wrote "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage", and worked with the chief animator Kazuya Tsurumaki on the storyboards. This makes "Weaving a Story 2" one of the few episodes in the series written by Anno alone. Masahiko Otsuka directed the episode. As well as Gainax, other studios—including Studio Cockpit, Production I.G, and Tatsunoko Color Center—were involved in the production of this episode.
"Weaving A Story 2: oral stage", like the fourteen installment "Weaving a Story", is a summary that is largely centered around the reuse of already existing material but tells a new story. Several frames from previous episodes of the series are used in scenes focusing on Shinji's introspection; the staff added the scenes and made only minor changes, such as the backgrounds. Gainax also included a short sequence of a child Shinji inside the laboratory as foreshadowing of an event that occurs in the following episode. According to writer Dennis Redmond, the introspective sequences create "a vibrant visual rhythm which matches the subtle techno loop of the sound-track". Images of trains and newspaper headlines are visible, along with shots of a seashore and kanji characters in various fonts.
In one of the scenes, the Eva-01's empty cockpit is shown with only Shinji's suit floating inside. According to the Japanese architect and academic Osamu Tsukihashi, in the previous episode, "Introjection", Shinji is depicted aboard the Eva-01 in his school uniform. In the following scenes, Nerv's scientist Ritsuko Akagi's claims Shinji, absorbed by the Eva-01, shows his image through his pilot suit, which represents his essence. The explanation was absent at the storyboard stage. According to Tsukihashi, Ritsuko's explanation results in strength but it may have been inserted by the episode staff to emphasize Shinji's physical absence. Tsukihashi traced the discontinuity between the two episodes to Evangelion production history; Anno said he did not follow a defined blueprint but chose fragmentary images that flashed through his mind and added them to the story as he worked, like "a live performance". With the lack of time due to the schedule, and despite "Weaving a Story 2" being conceived as a recap episode, the production for the installment took about one week. According to chief animator Kazuya Tsurumaki, the schedule was a "disaster" at the time, with constant time pressures that prevented the staff from working quietly. He said he felt exhausted at that time; despite this, especially from "Weaving a Story 2" onward, he felt a pleasant sensation, and although he felt "dead tired", he experienced the feeling of using his natural abilities to their fullest potential.
The final scene, consisting only of close-ups and no explicit images, is an implied sex scene between Misato and Kaji and was designed for airing in a protected time slot. The sequence lasts almost two minutes, with partly cut close-ups of the characters' faces. According to writer José Andrés Santiago Iglesias, this peculiar interrelation of shots is reminiscent of panel transitions in manga, and "pillow-shots" in Japanese classic cinema. The term was borrowed from Japanese poetry and was first coined by film theorist Noël Burch to refer to scenes composed of apparently random shots, depicting events that are secondary to the main action. Panel transitions are used to define the overall mood or a place in a given scene, and "rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments", the Evangelion viewer "must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments". Misato's words were left up to Kotono Mitsuishi, her voice actor; the script had only Anno's direction that said: "Mitsuishi, I look forward to working with you".
Because of the schedule, the staff also concluded production of episodes just before the deadline, and TV Tokyo, the series' Japanese broadcaster, did not have enough time to check them before airing. Toshimichi Ōtsuki, a representative of King Records and producer of the series, did not see the episode's final scene; he stated if he had known in advance what Anno had done, he would have stopped it. The staff felt so tired due to the production schedule and wanted to show a close-up of human genitalia so the show would be canceled. Anno said he had been "under pressure" because of restrictions. He defended the inclusion of Misato's sex scene, saying sex and violence are integral parts of human life, and that these scenes were necessary for the unravelling of the plot and "understanding life". According to Anno, such topics, which usually kept away from children, should be shown in all their rawness, as a "poison" with which to immunize children and prepare them for real life.
The episode's closing theme is a version of Bart Howard's song "Fly Me to the Moon" entitled "B-22 A-Type", which was later replaced with a version of the same song called "B-4 piano" in later home-video editions of the series.

## Cultural references

Ritsuko and other characters in "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" name the concept of the "ego boundary", a limit within which the ego recognizes its body as "self" and which if crossed leads to the dissolution of the body into a "quantum state", that is, a state in which the body is formed by quanta rather than atoms. In this case, the term ego refers to Sigmund Freud's psychic apparatus model, in which the ego mediates between the instinct of the id and the censure of the superego. Nerv's operators compare the composition of the liquid inside Eva-01's cockpit, in which Shinji is dissolved, to a "soup of life", the primordial soup from which terrestrial life is thought to have arisen. Evangelion Chronicle, an official encyclopedia about the series, and the book Evangelion Glossary (エヴァンゲリオン用語事典, Evangerion Yougo Jiten), edited by Yahata Shoten, likened this detail to the RNA world theory and the theory of chemical evolution, according to which organic substances formed from inorganic substances in the oceans; this term is later used for the LCL sea in the movie The End of Evangelion (1997).
Other scientific or psychological terms are named during the episode; including apoptosis, Hayflick's limit, the trigonometric concept of tangent, addiction, alienation, and compensation. During Shinji's retrieval operation, a Nerv's operator says the boy's "ego boundary results in being fixed in an indefinite loop", and Ritsuko claims the emitted signals remain imprisoned in "Klein's space", referring to the Klein bottle, a three-dimensional version of the Möbius strip. Shinji's monologue mentions internalization, a process through which the superego is formed; he also mentions repression, identification, and symbiosis, a form of mutual dependence between two living beings.
According to the writer Virginie Nebbia, the challenge of the series is to succeed in leaving the mother figure, to whom the characters return thanks to the Evangelion units, to free themselves from their addictions, and attempt to live an adult and responsible life. According to Nebbia, the series does not make "an idyllic and unclouded portrait of mothers facing contemptuous fathers". The benevolent mother figure stands alongside the overprotective mother, also symbolizing "otaku's fear of women". Other psychological terms appear on Nerv's monitors; on a graph called Psychic Essence Threshold Signal, the negative axes are labaled destrudo while the positive axes are named libido. They refer to the two concepts in Edoardo Weiss's psychoanalysis that are linked with the Freudian Eros and Thanatos; they denote the life and expansion drive, and the death and retraction drive, respectively. During the rescue operation, there is a death or destrudo reaction, and the term cathexis, which in Freudian psychology indicates libidinal investment toward an object, is named.
In Shinji's inner monologue, he hears a dialogue between Gendo and his mother Yui saying if they had a boy they would have called him Shinji, while if they had a girl they would have called her Rei; Yui repeats "Shinji ... Rei". According to Evangelion Chronicle, the scene is key to the relationship between the two characters. According to the academic Taro Igarashi, this can be linked to the Shinji's high compatibility with Rei in the series, acting as a backup pilot for her. Writer and researcher Fabio Bartoli connected Yui's phrase "Shinji ... Rei" to the shinjinrui (新人類, lit. "new human race"), the young people who grew up in the 1970s who were perceived to be different from earlier generations; he described Evangelion as a gospel directed to the shinjirui. During the process, Shinji also hears his mother Yui saying: "Anywhere can be heaven if you have the desire to live", which writer Dennis Redmond interpreted as a reference to Akira Kurosawa's 1956 movie Ikiru. Mechademia writer Mariana Ortega noted Yui repeats the same words in the finale of The End of Evangelion.

## Themes

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" represents a turning point in Neon Genesis Evangelion; from this point, the series relies more on the mysteries and emotional bonds of the characters than on action elements. According to Hideaki Anno, with this episode, the third-and-last arc of the anime begins. so the story becomes more "abstract". Shinji, absorbed by Eva-01 after the previous episode's battle, finds himself in his own inner world, and questions his life and his reasons for piloting the Evangelion 01, concluding he boards the Eva to gain the approval of others. He finds himself in a closed, cozy world where he seeks the innermost aspirations, and dreams of his own ego's desires. Searching tentatively for the meaning of his own existence, it becomes clear he desires affection and care from the people around him. He remembers past battles and ponders the meaning of war. In his spiritual world, Shinji remembers he had already met the Eva before he arrived at Nerv, fleeing from his parents. According to an official booklet about the series, Shinji ran away from that site, and that incident planted a "compulsive idea" he must not run away in him. Academic Giuseppe Gatto noted the theme of "postbiotic" fusion is linked to "forms of narrative diradiation and confusion" that intensify as the relationship between Shinji and the Eva-01 becomes more complex, and the boundary "between reality and virtuality, intention and action, me-ness and we-ness becomes indistinguishable".
Yūichirō Oguro, the editor of supplemental materials included in the Japanese edition of the series, noted the episode deals with masculinity. As in the battle against Angel Leliel in "Splitting of the Breast", Shinji declares himself to be a man, but he is punished by his mother and trapped inside Eva-01's womb-like cockpit. According to the Japanese academic Kotani Mari, winning the fight against Angel Zeruel in "Introjection", "the hero is also incorporated into the cyborg feminized matrix" of Evangelion-01; according to Mari, this reflects the fact during Evangelion, Shinji becomes increasingly feminized. According to Cristopher Smith, Shinji confronts the fact others treat him kindly only because he performs hegemonic machista masculine violence; performing violence for society is a requirement for being cared for by others or even allowed to exist. Smith said: "men with queer masculinities that cannot perform hegemonic masculine violence have no place in society, and therefore no right to exist". In the same dream, Misato tells Shinji his current personhood exists because he piloted the Eva and performed violence. She also tells Shinji he must choose his own actions from now on, that there is a choice, and, according to Smith: "he can let hegemonic violent masculinity define him, or he can choose something else".
During Shinji's monologue, a childlike Rei chases Shinji as he flees; an alter ego of Shinji and the image of his father standing in his way are also visible. Shinji links the image of the enemy—the Angels—to his father Gendo. Academic Susan Joliffe Napier, noting the Angels are explicitly associated with Gendo, described the Angel themselves as father figures. According to Dennis Redmond, Rei takes on the role of Shinji's internalized conscience; "the arbiter of a complex set of Oedipal conflicts and psychological ambivalences". During the last dream sequence, there is a rewriting of Shinji's farewell to Misato at the train station before Zeruel's attack in "Introjection". In his dream, Misato tells Shinji only he can decide his future. Redmond said Shinji finally grasps what Misato really said: "that she would always care about him, regardless of whether he was a pilot or not". In the real world, Ritsuko talks about a failed recovery plan that happened ten years before, foreshadowing Yui's contact experiment with Eva-01 seen later in the series.
In another part of his monologue, Shinji sees Misato, Rei and Asuka proposing to becoming one with him. According to Redmond, the scene quotes erotic hentai manga. Misato's role is that of the motherly provider, while Rei addresses Shinji by his last name Ikari, a formal reference to family ties. Only Asuka is genuinely seductive, airily tossing her hair, flashing her eyes, and urging Shinji to do something instead of bemoaning his fate. According to Mariana Ortega: "melding with Misato, Rei and Asuka, Shinji ceases to be who he is, and they cease to be themselves, becoming part of an asexual, impersonal, and immaterial bliss that exists outside time and space". Ortega noted this also prefigures the Instrumentality seen in The End of Evangelion. The writer Bounthavy Suvilay noted the scene is reprised in the last episode of the series. According to the Japanese writer Shoko Fukuya, the scenario of Shinji dissolved into Eva-01 resembles the Instrumentality shown in the finale. According to Anno, the scene with Misato, Rei and Asuka represents Shinji's mother voice, and in the end his mother returns Shinji to Misato. According to Ortega, this represents Shinji's encounter with a sort of "eternal feminine" that is traced back to the mother "not as an individual but as a state of being". This event also represents a "portrayal of sexual anxiety"; an equivalent myth can be found in the Jewish character Lilith, a "killer of children and oneiric temptress".

### Motherhood

The episode's title "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" refers to Freud's eponymous psychoanalytic concept; in Freudian theory, the oral stage is the first stage of a child's psychosexual development, in which pleasure is mainly gained from sucking on the mother's breast and the main erogenous zone is the mouth. In the opening scenes, during Nerv's preparation for Shinji's rescue, there is a close-up of Misato's mouth as she argues with Ritsuko, a foreshadowing of the theme. Shinji asks for kindness from others, showing he has a passive, dependent personality; he thus regresses to the oral phase, a period in which the self and others are undifferentiated.
In the final scenes, Ritsuko and Misato hear a radio program in which a speaker talks about a reader's companion, explicitly naming the oral phase. In this case, the term refers to the concept of fixation or oral personality, which according to Freud is exhibited by individuals who were inadequately nurtured during childhood and who therefore desire attention, seeing others solely as objects for their own pleasure. Hideaki Anno stated he felt like Shinji because he acts like a "melancholic oral-dependent type". Anno reused the Freudian theory of the oral phase in the last episode of the series, in which Shinji sees both the good side and the bad, hidden side of other people, like the child who realizes in the oral phase his mother is not split into "good mother" and "bad mother", understanding instead positive and negative aspects can coexist in a single individual.
In his inner monologue Shinji sees the image of his mother's breast feeding him as a child, and himself curling up in the fetal position, another reference to the Freudian oral stage. The image led Ortega to describe Yui as a "benign Madonna", more balanced than the other mothers in the series, Naoko Akagi and Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu. Unlike Naoko and Kyoko, who died by suicide, and are characterized and died by their "woman" aspect in fits of jealousy and guilt, Yui simply disappeared into Eva-01 and became "all-mother". According to Ortega: "unlike the vampiric Naoko and Kyoko, Yui/Eva01/Rei/Lilith ultimately acts as the force of development and engenderment". Yui acts as protector and salve against the demiurgic Gendo, who plays the role of a "paternal tyrant". For Ortega, Yui's nature becomes the final sacrifice that allows "the 'new genesis' promised in the title to come into being".
During the rescue operation, Shinji seems to refuse to go home and his pilot suit is forcibly ejected from the cockpit; the image is reminiscent of that of a miscarriage. Shinji also remembers his mother's smell, and swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid, he sees a flickering light in front of him. The light resembles an image of the outside world as seen through the eyes of a baby in the womb and the religious concept of the soul, which Nerv treats as a concrete entity. According to Oguro, the image of the mother's breast can be interpreted as a metaphor for Shinji going back in time, drinking his mother's milk, and resolving his fixation. Regressing to the oral stage allows Shinji to re-establish a trusting relationship with his mother, and thus to resolve his oral personality. He then hears a conversation between Gendo and Yui before his birth; the scene marks the boy's rebirth as a human being. Shinji chooses to return to real world and, touched by his mother's feelings, appears naked before Unit 01's lit-up core; this image resembles childbirth.

## Reception

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" was first broadcast on 14 February, 1996, and drew a 7.4% audience share on Japanese television. In 1996, with 93 votes, it ranked eighteenth among the best anime episodes of the Anime Grand Prix, a large, annual poll made by Animage magazine. In July 2020, Comic Book Resources reported an rating of 8.6/10 for the installment on IMDb, making it the seventh-highest-rated Evangelion episode. Merchandise based on the episode, including a line of official tee-shirts, was released.
The episode proved controversial. According to Nikkei Business Publications, and writers Kazuhisa Fujie and Martin Foster, the closing sex scene between Kaji and Misato, while it contains no explicit images, was criticized as being "inappropriate" for an anime show that is viewed by children. GameFan described the sex scene as "tastefully-done".
The episode received a mixed repection from anime critics. The Anime Café's Akio Nagatomi criticized "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage"; while appreciating the introspective exploration of the human ego and "some fine acting" by "a most distraught" Kotono Mitsuishi in the ending scene, Nagatomi said the way Shinji is recovered with a deus ex machina destroys the effect because the "writer buried the plot so deeply, there was no means to extricate it". He also criticized the continuity error in which Shinji's suit is shown instead of his school uniform, and the use of long-dialog pieces rather than single-scene shots and flashbacks. Film School Rejects' Max Covill ranked the episode among the worst of Neon Genesis Evangelion, criticizing the use of flashbacks to fill in the run time and writing. According to Covill: "Shinji does eventually come back to the physical world, but the lack of animation is painful in this episode". Despite his criticism of the recap of previous episodes, Covill praised the shot in which Shinji's suit is expelled from Eva-01's cockpit, citing it as among the "perfect shots of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Other critics were more appreciative. Dennis Redmond praised two shots of Eva-01 swathed in white bandages, describing them as "extraordinary". Digitally Obsessed's Joel Cunningham gave a positive review of "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage", saying it cannot be missed and praising its "great ending". According to Cunningham: "This episode is also a series highlight, once again exhibiting how much can be done with simple animation and suggestion/repetition". Analysing the episode, Japanese academic Osamu Tsukihashi noted Anno's script leads the viewer to connect and join together seemingly disconnected parts; Anno's work does not represent a coherent overall picture, and the viewer is needs to create a coherent picture of the work as a whole. According to Tsukihashi, the incoherence of the episode enhances the work.