“I Am Not Your Doll”: Ayanami Rei, Anime Girls, and the Paradox of Emptiness
Published in
4 min readAug 12, 2021
You can read the first essay in this series here.
Ayanami Rei from the series Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most iconic characters in anime history. Scholars of anime and Japanese culture argue that NGE and the fandom surrounding Rei in the 1990s was a key moment in bringing global attention to otaku culture—both as a cultural…
