Reviews of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) and related work

• Adaptation: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
• Compilation: Death & Rebirth (1997)
• Remake: The End of Evangelion (1997)
• Remake: Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2007)
  • Sequel: Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)
  • Sequel: Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)
  • Sequel: Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Anno Hideaki (director).

Review refers to the Renewal/Platinum DVD versions with integrated additions from the feature film Death.

Anno’s magnum opus is original, jagged and mesmerizing, but Neon Genesis Evangelion didn’t spring from a vacuum. Like Space Runaway Ideon (1980), the giant mecha of Evangelion fuse Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) with its superheroic predecessors, as remade in “Giant Robo: The Animation” (1991). Ikari Shinji is less gung-ho and less generic than Ideon’s Cosmo, a lot more like the directors of both shows. Like Nagisa of Fight! Iczer-1 (1985), he does not want the job. As in Iczer-1, The Incal (1980) and “Interface” (1993), Freudian psychology underpins the SF action, drama and horror.

Though it did not spring from a vacuum, Evangelion is complete on a level all its own. On a mere TV animation budget, slashed for adult content, Anno combined what is supposed to be impossible. The show is hilarious and unsettling, a risqué, even pandering comedy with all the abrasive, unfunny earnestness of puberty. It’s got colourful and horrifying tokusatsu-/kaijū-style battles with implausible happy endings punctuating black ruminations on human relationships in the abstract. It’s a hugely entertaining spectacle and, at the same time, it is absolutely sincere. In one TV series you get the visceral glory of Eva-01 sucker-punching Zeruel through a concrete wall in episode 19, Kaji watering his melons at the emotional apex in episode 21, and Anno using the most basic elements of verisimilitude in the craft of animation—a ground plane—to explain his feelings on self-conceptualization and socialization after abandoning mimesis, in episode 26.

It’s art, but it’s barely science fiction. The technobabble is pulled from mythology, psychology and cell biology instead of physics, but it’s still just technobabble. The bakelite is a callback to the history of Gainax, not a piece of worldbuilding. Much of the background is left unexplored in the TV series, merely implying influences comparable to Erich von Däniken or H. P. Lovecraft’s godlike aliens dressed up in Judaeo-Christian emblems for exoticism, similar to their use in Mobile Police Patlabor: The Movie (1989) and Anno’s own Nadia (1990) which has embryonic versions of the score by the same composer. Evangelion’s apocalypticism is more haunting, its Angels ever more invasively intimate. It reminds me of the primal and obsessive angst of the early Christians, of Revelation (ca. 95 CE), but not of actual Christian beliefs: It is the intrinsic cataclysm of The Quiet Earth (1985) and the extrinsic, equally permeating cataclysm of Godzilla (1954) and other nuclear cinema, rather than Yahweh’s work.

When the official translations mention Angels, the term is shito (使徒, apostle), not tenshi (天使, angel), apparently because the sh of shito is so close to the palatal fricative h of hito (人, person) that whenever NERV personnel spot a human on their instruments, they have to use the term ningen (人間, human) to disambiguate. In this instance, the borrowing of Christian terminology serves the purpose of foreshadowing the shared nature of humans and other monsters. The English-language name for SEELE’s project is Instrumentality, named not after the shadowy, telepathically spying leaders in Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction, but instead having the same source as Smith: Christian theology, where priests performing the sacraments and/or the authors of scripture are thought to be instruments of the gods. In SEELE’s version, the relationship is reversed. More material relationships with The Bible (ca. 110 CE) are weak. When Gendō talks about the Dead Sea scrolls, for example, that’s a plot token dipped in a digest of the Kabbalah for added flavour, not the real scrolls. It’s technobabble and namedropping for atmosphere, not real theology. Early English translators of the series didn’t seem to get this and mistakenly interpreted アポプトーシス as “apotheosis”, when it’s actually “apoptosis” with a possible double meaning in mind.

It all works better as a whole than I can account for. The characters are certainly wonderful, brought to life in a perfect storm of Sadamoto’s designs, skilled animators and brilliant actors, but I think it is Anno’s sincerity that really carries the show. He meant it, whereas The Incal, for example, was “only” entertainment, in spite of its spiritual currents.

NGE changed the industry and raised awareness of animation among Japanese intellectuals. For example, in a 1996 article, young philosopher-critic Azuma Hiroki praised NGE against a blanket assumption that “anime as a genre is dead”, barren for the preceding decade, due to industry introversion (“autism”), and furthermore, that Anno revived the genre and “brought anime to a final closure” (「アニメ的なもの、アニメ的でないもの」, quotes from the official translation “Animé or Something Like It”; the article is a review in InterCommunication 18, 1996; written before Death). As for flaws, rewatching this on Netflix in 2019, it took me about ten seconds to get over the loss of “Fly Me to the Moon” due to licensing hell. Dan Kanemitsu’s translation is faithful within the constraints of studio mandates and works well enough.

References here: 2023-06-30, 2023-07-03, Tredje Aposteln anfaller, Ikari Gendō vid dockan, EVA-01 utanför Small Worlds Tokyo, 2004-06-05 16, Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), Gasaraki (1998), Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (2001/2005), Fullmetal Alchemist (2001), Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden (2001), All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), 24 (2001), RahXephon (2002), One Hour Photo (2002), Kiddy Grade (2002), Gunparade March (2003), Shadow Star Narutaru (2003), Fafner (2004), Lost (2004), Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), Pacific Rim (2013), Stations of the Cross (2014), “Me! Me! Me!” (2014), “Neon Genesis: Impacts” (2015), Stranger Things (2016), Shin Godzilla (2016), Devilman: Crybaby (2018), SSSS Gridman (2018), Shanghai Fortress (2019), Dorohedoro (2020), Bocchi the Rock (2022).

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‣ Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Sadamoto Yoshiyuki (writer-artist).

Read in 2019.

Though it is an adaptation of the TV series into sequential art, the first chapter of this version was published before the series began airing and was made by the same artist who designed the characters for TV.

In the early volumes, there are scenes where Sadamoto thoughtfully adds details that improve the story without taking away from its other (non-story) attractions. For example, in the last chapter of volume 2, Misato reveals that she took in Pen-Pen because he was an experimental animal who would have been put down without her intervention; this is a passable reason for her to have a weird pet, and a parallel with Shinji, hence a good reason to mention this background detail. In the same chapter, the NERV agents who escort Shinji to the train follow him onto the platform and care about whether he’s really leaving, whereas in the TV series, they are inexplicably absent from the platform (in every shot). Shinji’s former teacher, a notable omission from the TV series, is replaced with an older couple (an aunt and uncle with their own kid) who appear on the page (for the first time) in chapter 16 and receive a little bit of characterization still later.

Near the end, Fuyutsuki spells out more of the deep background than was shown in the first animated versions, including the dual seeding of the Earth and what Instrumentality actually entails. However, even here, who sent the seeds is unclear, and the gigantic project of building and running NERV without spilling its secrets is just as mysterious as on TV. There is a little more talk of a god being responsible, rather than the aliens supposedly planned in early scripts, but the god is not named or characterized. Many minor lacunae, such as how Aida and Suzuhara got into Unit 01’s entry plug in combat, remain off screen.

Some of Sadamoto’s changes are more invasive. Asuka gets an early win on her own, actually demonstrating her superior intelligence, talent and training, which is an improvement, but then she loses her battle against the EVA Series. Tōji is the focus of volume 6, adding a welcome depth of detail to his tragedy, including a scene where he personally tells Shinji about being selected; this, too, is an improvement simply on the grounds of believability. Thought bubbles provide an additional psychological interiority to Shinji, showing him to be just as depressed as he appears to be in the TV series, but also more forward, more petulant and markedly more judgemental. His body language is amped up compared to the TV version, putting his emotions closer to the surface. Sadamoto strips his solitary wanderings in episode 4 down to the single scene of encountering Aida on a meadow, pulling out a lot of the emotional impact. On that train platform at the end of volume 2 (which corresponds to the end of episode 4), Misato actually gives Shinji a hug instead of merely repeating the ritual phrases for returning home, and—in a continuation of the scene into the next volume—Shinji laughs out loud with Aida and Suzuhara. In general, the characters are a little warmer, and the blood-curdling screams fewer.

More obvious changes include: Kaworu is less of an ethereal ideal and more of a realistic teenage weirdo, present through a lot more of the narrative. The second Rei develops a love of Shinji, including holding his hand by a romantic gazebo in a moment of happiness. Shinji never masturbates over Asuka in the hospital, nor does he express a corresponding depravity by other means. Gendo is the one who rescues Shinji from the troops, thus actually helping his son, and explaining his own motives at greater length. Instead of quickly rematerializing on a beach with a despondent Asuka, Shinji appears to have been reincarnated—again with Asuka—into a very similar civilization, rebuilt after what may be tens of thousands of years: The EVA Series has been fossilized standing up and is still standing in this future world. The reincarnated teenagers have no memory of their previous unhappy lives, a situation resembling the “school sitcom” alternate universe of the TV series, and not an improvement.

There is no equivalent to Anno’s live-action rebuttal to his irate fans. Sadamoto’s version is the more conventional and genre-bound, on every level. Though the art is beautiful, the artist does not find his medium’s strengths in quite the same way Gainax found the strengths of moving pictures. Still, Sadamoto is a surprisingly competent writer. In volumes 4 and 5, in particular, he adds comedic scenes that work just as well as the original’s. At other times, including the final battles, he sticks too close to the original keyframes. At its heights, the work is moving, but the truly jarring emotional power is not there.

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‣ Death & Rebirth (1997)

Anno Hideaki (director), Tsurumaki Kazuya (director).

Animated feature film released to theatres after the controversial ending of the original series. The first half, named Death, is a summary of the TV series (episodes 1-24) with some additional footage, directed by “Masayuki”. The second half, Rebirth, is itself only the first half of an alternate ending, directed by Tsurumaki.

Death is artful, but incoherent. It’s just a refresher, inadequate as a summary for those who never saw the original series. This film is therefore obsolete. The only significant footage that hasn’t been recycled is of preparations for a recital, which does not fit into the canonical plot anywhere, despite Shinji himself playing the cello in the original. The additions to the main plot have been worked into Renewal and The End of Evangelion (1997), while the purpose of a summary faster than the TV series is served by the first installments of Rebuild.

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‣ The End of Evangelion (1997)

Anno Hideaki (director), Higuchi Shinji (storyboard artist).

Theatrical feature animation, with moments of other media. It’s not a complete remake: This film is both Rebirth and the sequel to Rebirth, forming an alternative or complementary plotline with regard to the last two episodes of the TV series. The film incorporates elements of live action, including pictures of real death threats to Anno and footage from a screening of Death & Rebirth.

Furious genius. The title The End of Evangelion is an invention for the foreign market, just as Neon Genesis Evangelion itself is a studio-mandated corruption of the original title, Shin Seiki Evangerion (Gospel of the New Century).

References here: Death & Rebirth (1997), “Anime Tencho” (2002), Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), SSSS Gridman (2018).

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‣ Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2007)

Higuchi Shinji (storyboard artist), Anno Hideaki (supervising director).

Seen in 2013.

This is the first in a series of four feature films, named Rebuild of Evangelion. They tell an increasingly original version of the entire story. This film was produced at a new studio, Khara, but again directed by Anno Hideaki.

The first couple of Rebuild films are more visceral, mainly as a result of the higher budget. It’s put to its best uses here. The great visual beauty of Diebuster (2004) is added to an intelligently polished narrative. My only serious complaint is that the Fifth Angel, and improbable civilian involvement in that fight, should have gotten a more substantial revision, akin to the now brilliantly impressive Sixth Angel. Silly prehensile CG kaijū ribs don’t cut it. Even the Sixth Angel is still slightly flawed: Its drill looks better than it did on TV, but the twisting of the material is inconsistent with its hyperdimensional contortions.

Rebuild of Evangelion got progressively worse. 1.0 is the best of the series, and not simply because it is extremely beautiful. Actually showing the collective human effort of the war against the Angels makes a great addition, especially the various huge crews working to execute Operation Yashima. The comparative nakedness of SEELE in this version, working without their committee disguise, makes it seem as if they’ve taken more control of society since Second Impact. That event is barely mentioned, and SEELE is not a more powerful force in the later films. On the other hand, Gendō plainly states that each Angel is complete unto itself as an alternative humanity. Gendō’s villainy is a little bit sharpened even in this first outing of the remake, so much so that he might have arranged the otherwise mysterious disappearance of Rei’s entire medical crew during the Fourth Angel’s attack.

References here: Evangelion-färg, Kondensatorvagn.

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‣‣ Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)

Higuchi Shinji (storyboard artist), Anno Hideaki (supervising director).

Seen in 2013.

The narrative is more sloppy than the first film, on par with the lower moments of the TV series. The injection of moe and creeping titillation is a drag. There is still great attention to detail but in a manner that feels directed at the long-time fans, not at producing a final version that can stand alone. For example, despite being present in the first film, Kaworu remains one of many characters pushed to the margins. Similarly, Misato is shown and mentioned as having experienced Second Impact first hand, but only just barely, without the shots of the elder Katsuragi putting her in the impromptu life boat, or that boat on the ocean. Asuka has her mother’s doll, but not her mother, and so on. This must be confusing for newcomers, beyond the dense weirdness of the original.

I love the ecological angle, with a long visit to a special water purification facility protecting some oceanic wildlife from the broken Antarctic. It’s both good worldbuilding and the franchise’s most sincere attempt to illustrate the profound influence of the lifelong apocalypse on the minds of the children, some of whom have never even heard of turtles.

The action scenes continue in the same amazing mode as the last fight of the first film. Most of the Angels are designed for 3D CG in a way that uses the natural abstraction of the medium to enhance the alien wonder of these alternate humanities: It is more beautiful than Hollywood’s typically more naturalistic CGI, but at the same time, it has the immediacy of a terrorist attack. Zeruel is sublime. 2.0 is positively first-class action cinema, but despite two attempts at musical sequences similar to “Komm Süsser Tod”, the apocalypse never reaches the transcendent strength of End.

References here: Evangelion-färg, Love & Pop (1998), “The Water Museum” (2009).

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‣‣ Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Higuchi Shinji (storyboard artist), Anno Hideaki (supervising director).

Seen in 2014.

A turn back from action toward introspection, but retaining the heightened apocalyptic elements. A turn away from remake onto a new path, but still loosely based on episode 24 and the TV series, focusing as it does on a new Rei, Kaworu’s love, and Shinji’s despair. The overt human-on-human conflict is an elaboration upon the concept of the human attack on NERV in End, humanity being the 18th Angel in that continuity.

The time skip is great, except the use of “Eva no jubaku”, which should have been restricted to Shinji alone, the same way that more realistic time dilation is restricted to the main character of Gunbuster: Aim for the Top! (1988). I love the fact that the world appears to have moved on during the skip, including a continuation of Third Impact and—likely—several Evas that we do not see. It’s Diebuster again, and it all feeds beautifully into the crucial anti-heroism of the piece.

The introduction of the Wunder is a fun scene in itself: A nonsensical homage to the tradition represented by the White Base, the Solo Ship and the Macross, dating back to the Yamato. Its first battle is scored with tongue in cheek, but does little to build the story.

Reviewing the US Blu-Ray, Zac Bertschy interpreted the most significant dramatic movement of the film to be the realistically failed expectation that one person’s sincere love—Kaworu’s—can cure the self-loathing of another: Shinji. This is indeed a good centerpiece, and the scenes with Kaworu in the busted-up Unit-01 hangar are great, but 3.0 is again more sloppy than the previous film.

It is a minor plot hole that the people of Wille, in their vindictive contempt and despair, do not warn Shinji about the likelihood of meeting a new Rei clone, but they assume they had plenty of time to do it, and Fuyutsuki does explain the whole thing before Shinji chooses to get in Unit-13. I am more disappointed to see the ecological aspect of the apocalypse lost, along with the idea of NERV needing workers.

I don’t understand how the ruined Geofront base is supposed to work with no visible personnel other than Gendō, Fuyutsuki, Ayanami and Nagisa, whereas Wille still needs lots of people, even after the dummy-plug and Eva mass production project have been spun off into compact drones with AT fields. If Gendō and Fuyutsuki can trick even Kaworu into carrying out their scheme, they should be tricking a few workers too.

References here: “Until You Come to Me” (2014), “Confidential: Evangelion: Another Impact” (2015), “Cassette Girl” (2015).

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‣‣ Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Tsurumaki Kazuya (director), Maeda Mahiro (director), Nakayama Katsuichi (director), Anno Hideaki (writer, chief director).

Seen in 2022.

The Muromachi-period Otogi-zōshi mentions the Sesshōseki, or “Killing Stone”, a rock in northern Tochigi Prefecture. The rock was real and harmless, but according to the legend, anyone who touched it would die. In that detail, the Sesshōseki resembles the Judeo-Christian motif of the “chastisement of Uzzah” that happens in 2 Samuel 6.

In 1995, Gainax created an extraordinary piece of entertainment, almost divine. It’s so Japanese that it opens with the sound of cicadas (semi), the most emblematic sound of the summer in a country long obsessed with seasonal key words in its poetry. The cicadas in NGE, however, do not represent summer, but literally apocalyptic global warming that ended the country’s seasons through Second Impact. From that first scene of the TV show, time in NGE was always unnaturally suspended. Like the evil spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae who was said to live inside the Sesshōseki, the Angels of NGE exist on a time scale and a power level far beyond the human. NGE did not refer specifically to Uzzah, but to other myths of the Bible, and was loved far outside Japan. It was my first experience with Japanese animation, and a numinous piece of art.

For 26 years, Gainax kept milking its greatest masterpiece: An evergreen media franchise that spawned dozens of mutually irreconcilable, mostly shitty video games and other non-canon spin-offs. A franchise cannot live entirely on such poor fodder. It had to develop further and was therefore remade three times: The TV series ended in 1996, The End of Evangelion in 1997, the comic in 2013—before the time of Third Impact—and then in 2021, the Rebuild series finally ended, too. On 2022-03-05, it was reported that a big chunk of the rock in Tochigi Prefecture had fallen off, exposing a less weathered interior of a different colour. The day after that, I saw 3.0+1.01 for the first time.

In a sense, the Sesshōseki was always flawed, like NGE with its super-sentai heritage and frequent rewrites. Where it lay in Tochigi, the rock was probably carried by a major glacier in the Late Pleistocene. It must have taken tens of thousands of years, at least, to form the crack that would eventually split it. Even fully exposed to the freeze-thaw cycle under an open sky, it was a slow process; slow enough for the legend of its divinity and lethality to form and persist for at least 500 years. Anno didn’t take that long, but he had to touch his work to finish it. Touching the holy rock was always a dangerous business.

I am glad the rock split. It is better that way. The best stories have definite endings, and the splitting of the Sesshōseki is at least definite. Worryingly, the film’s greatest flaw has to do with its own finality. A long sequence in it takes place in “Village 3”. In this rural substitute for Tokyo-3, Wille’s hypertechnology has reversed the effects of Third Impact, or “Near-Third” as the characters call it. Not only is the apocalypse partly undone here, but even certain people with no business being alive have gone full John Wyndham. It’s a board-driven pastoral idyll for Rei to be cute in. This paradox resembles the eternal cicadas, but exists on a higher level: Inartistic repetition, rather than the unnatural repetition that signals the end of the world.

In this version’s protracted finale, it is not Rei who discovers her strength and rejects Gendō as in the original, nor does Asuka get to win, even this time around. Asuka, whose mother is still absent, actually implies that she herself is as artificial as Rei, which almost amounts to an explanation for Eva no jubaku. Instead, it is the “new” girl, Mari, who achieves the last heroic victory, and ends up in a romantic relationship with Shinji, without becoming as bestial as she was in 3.0 and without her background being explored. This is unsatisfying. So is Gendō’s turn to magical supervillainy, and the fight scenes in general. There is one fight in particular where Mari fends off a little army of mini-01s that are just heads with arms. They look like the folkloric goblins called yōkai, of which the Sesshōseki’s Tamamo-no-Mae is one example.

I like that Gendō gets to explain himself in more detail than he does in the comic. The explicit parallels drawn here between Shinji and Gendō save the emotional core of the franchise, making canon what has been fanon for 25 years. The new Rei’s death does the same; she chooses to save Shinji by getting close to him, knowing that doing so will kill her and hurt him, thus reminding him that social life is both necessary and necessarily painful. Anno did not forget the “hedgehog’s dilemma” that is the psychological bedrock of NGE, but there are long sequences where he struggled. Those sequences are designed in the style of the French New Wave and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), anti-mimetic and overtly symbolic, smash-cutting their way through dubious philosophy. There is an amusing moment where the souls of the dead, released as Gendō’s plan is averted by his reconciliation with Shinji and Yui, include a cow and a sheep.

There is also a traditionally mimetic sequence where the Wunder ejects a set of gene banks at L5 as a backup plan to reseed the Earth with its natural life. That’s nice; it shows a certain concern for matters greater than human feelings. However, at the mimetic level, there is a number of plot holes. For example, the opening sequence takes place in Paris. Not only is that low-lying city above water, despite the Second Impact that melted Antarctica, it is also the old European headquarters of NERV and it works like Tokyo-3, despite it being an ancient city—thus prohibitively expensive to rebuild even above the water line—and having no Geofront underneath for the buildings to drop into. This is not like the paradox of the eternal cicadas, and it’s not the sort of crack that splits a rock and leaves it more impressive. It is only internal contradiction, driven by Anno’s desire to salute the city of Paris. It is too similar to the apocalyptic Paris of Final Space (2018), which also has randomly floating debris.

The storytelling is otherwise little changed. All the old trademarks are still there: Teenage butt, purposely malpositioned exposition, dense technobabble, sharp reversals, Misato coldly failing at motherhood like every other woman in the franchise—except Hikari apparently—and apocalyptic imagery. The apocalypse is greater than ever in scale, but it’s thanks to CGI duplication, even featuring a glittering tsunami of headless Unit-01s flooding the ruins. A little of it feels appropriately sublime, and the music is not bad, but there is no “Komm Süsser Tod” kicker even here, and most of it happens in a void. There is too little sense of scale and continuity for the epic visuals to connect on the emotional level.

Instead of Asuka restored to her unbroken hatred of Shinji on the beach, Shinji is alone on that beach after the apocalypse. The restoration is apparently instant, so the water is blue until the animation breaks down to just the line art, and soon after that, to continuity sketches. As in the end of the TV series, Anno seems to be wringing all the artistry he can out of his medium as such, as he says farewell to the series.

The splitting of the Sesshōseki is sure to draw more tourists and many a joke about Tamamo-no-Mae once again interfering with politics, as the legend has her doing in the Heian era. As for the Rebuild of Evangelion, it was very well received and it has silenced the cicadas, but it does not replace the original. For me, who discovered anime through NGE, the emotional resonance of this last film is deeper than I can say. However, it relies on the viewer’s knowledge of the TV series to reach that depth. It does not stand alone as a remake.

The very end of this end of Evangelion echoes the ending of the TV series. It does not have everyone congratulating Shinji, and it does not have Utena turning into a car, but 3.0+1.01 is a happy ending. Though very good, it is not as good as the endings that came before it. As of 2022, it still has the potential to improve upon the franchise, by having made further change impossible. In a 2022-03-08 livestream, Anno affirmed that it is time for him, at least, to call it quits. May the rock lay split forever: Unapproachable, numinous and complete.

References here: “One Last Kiss” (2021).

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