Nothing in pop culture will mess you up like a good anime. Not Bambi's mom dying in Bambi, not Joni Mitchell's Blue, not the part of Cool Runnings where they shout feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's bobsled time! Nothing I have seen, read, or listened to in my years of following pop culture both personally and professionally has so thoroughly and completely wrecked my shit the way the cult classic anime Neon Genesis Evangelion did. And I think about it all the damn time.

As far as foundational traumas go, watching Neon Genesis Evangelion falls somewhere between "The Church" and "9/11" in my personal development. If this seems like an exaggeration, that's because it is, but it's also genuinely on its own level when it comes to something I saw that immediately and irrevocably broke my perspective into pre-and post-Evangelion. It's a singular work unlike anything I've ever seen before or since.

On its face, Evangelion is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story that takes place fifteen years after the Second Impact, a worldwide disaster that awoke massive, nearly unstoppable monsters called Angels that seem interested in little else than razing everything around them. Taking place in the fortified city of Tokyo-3, Evangelion follows Shinji Ikari, a boy who is thrust into war against the Angels when one finally attacks Tokyo-3. He discovers his estranged father is a government scientist that has come up with a solution for fighting the Angels: giant robot/monster hybrids called Evangelion.

Peek behind the curtain, and Evangelion is largely the product of two overriding forces: It's a reaction to and deconstruction of the insanely popular giant robot trend in anime that dominated the medium at the time, and also the product of its creator, Hideki Anno, working through the throes of a deep and overwhelming depression. There's a lot of other stuff at play too, things that I, as a clumsy American, don't have the insight to speak to,. But these are the two things that made Evangelion devastatingly effective on me. You too, should you take the plunge.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a work that constantly denies you the things you want from it. It's a show about teens piloting giant robots to save the world—which, in most cases, is one of the biggest wish fulfillment fantasies a kid could think of—and clearly depicts them as PTSD-addled victims for having to face down these horrors and fight in a war of attrition at the behest of adults. As a protagonist, Shinji is despicable. He's full of doubt and self-loathing, immediately falling into a feedback loop during which he hates himself even more for all the doubt and self-loathing he feels: Over his inability to pilot the Evangelion he's paired with, Eva Unit-01. Over his need for his distant, asshole father's approval. Over the fact that he's a horny teen boy lusting over his female mentors and peers, unable and unwilling to develop the emotional maturity to forge meaningful relationships. Shinji is reluctant to grow, change, or get in the damn robot to deliver the robot fighting action we came to see.

All this extremely heavy internal misery porn is levied by an elaborate, engrossing, and barely-explained mythology that draws from Christian iconography, apocryphal texts, and Jewish mysticism that complicates its narrative as much as it enriches it. Evangelion casually drops ideas that are fascinating enough to fuel entire seasons of other shows completely in passing, taking its own inventiveness for granted as it moves on to the next thing. It throws ideas out there that are so far afield it doesn't even bother to logically connect them all, but the ones that are explained send you reeling.