Neon Genesis Evangelion/Tear Jerker

TV Series

• Asuka's Mind Rape scene had me crying and screaming at my TV.
  • What's even worse is what's finally confirmed in that very episode; the whole reason Asuka is such a jerk and the whole reason she uses "doll" like it's an epithet on par with the n-word is because part of her mother Kyouko's soul was sucked into Unit-02, leaving poor Kyouko clinically insane and incapable of loving her own daughter, treating a little rag doll like the actual Asuka. Asuka's mother then hangs herself on the very day that Asuka is chosen to be the pilot of the very robot that, without her knowing, drove her mother insane; she enters the hospital room to find that Kyouko has hung herself. In the manga, they actually made it even worse: just before committing suicide, Kyouko attempts to murder Asuka by strangling her. This eventually causes Asuka to attempt the very same thing on Shinji, in lieu of the infamous "wanking" scene.
    • The anime also has shots of said rag doll hanging from its own little noose -- recall that Kyouko thought this rag doll was Asuka. Oh, and don't forget the voiceovers of Kyouko asking Asuka to die with her and Asuka desperately agreeing and pleading "Don't stop being my mama..."
      • The only reason I wasn't crying was because I was scared out of my wits. Seriously, this was just too much.
      • The worst part for me was when young Asuka crying Berserker Tears screams at her mother (supposedly) "Why won't you look at me?!"
• Any time Shinji screams. The English dub is superior in most other departments, but the heart-stabbing blood-curdling hellish screams produced by that one little boy push the Japanese dub to the top.
• Most of episodes 16 to 26 had me crying or meaning to.
  • I especially appreciated the end of episode 18, where Shinji is powerless to stop Gendo from murdering unit 03.
    • The manga version of the above episode is even worse for a lot of people, as Shinji actually ends up killing Toji.
    • And in Rebuild it's Asuka who's inside Unit 03.
• Hell, damn near anything with poor Shinji that isn't a relentless Narm.
• Episode 24. After 23 episodes of relentless mental torture, Shinji finally finds someone who understands and loves him, and he turns out to be the final angel and Shinji has to crush him with Unit 01's armoured hand. Even worse when you realise that since the Eva's and pilot are synched, it will feel like Shinji has killed him with his bare hands. God, it sucks to be Shinji!
  • Depending on how you see it, it's either a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Kaworu, who willingly sacrifices himself to save humanity, or his version of Mind Rape on Shinji.
    • ... can't it be both?
• The end of episode 21 deserves a mention, too - namely, Misato breaking down while listening to the last answerphone message Kaji left before his death.
  • It's worth mentioning that his actual death scene counts as his Crowning Moment of Awesome as he casually asks his assassin, "What took you so long?"
• Misato bidding farewell to Pen-Pen was not exactly a Tear Jerker, but it was sad to see the resident comic relief penguin go. And then, depending on which finale (original 25-26 or End) you believe is the true ending, things either got worse or near-infinitely worse.
• There's also both of Rei's heroic sacrifices. The first time she almost died protecting Shinji, but he managed to save her. The second time it happened in reverse - he ran in to save her, but she died protecting him.
  • For me, this particular scene was awful since Thanatos was playing in the background. To top it all off this is one of the few times we see Rei manifest emotions in the anime. She CRIES for heaven's sake!
  • It's even worse in the manga. When Rei sees Shinji coming to rescue her, the Angel (which is bonded with her at the time), rushes towards Unit-01, taking the form of lots of Reis who all lovingly embrace the Eva. Rei notes that this is her heart, which wants to "be with Ikari" - and Shinji has to cut all these Reis off with his prog knife. He tries and utterly fails. So she reverses the AT Field, containing the Angel in Unit-00, and blows herself up. And they give her a Really Dead Montage when Shinji remembers all the special moments they had later that night, whilst sobbing his heart out. Wow.
  • And of course, Ritsuko's complete mental breakdown. Specially when she recalls Naoko's mistake of falling for Gendo, and calls herself stupid and worthless because she committed the same mistake 10 years later.
• Touji. Hikari. That. Is. All.
• Something all of the episodes have in common, but only really sinks in around episode 18: heart-breaking, traumatizing action, horrendous tragedy, episode ends, and..."Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars..." That song becomes so disturbing.
  • The fact that, in Evangelion, both Adam and Lilith fell on Earth traveling in "moons" (Adam brought life on Earth, and Lilith initiated the First Impact which ultimately resulted in mankind) makes it way more symbolic. "Flying to the moon" basically means returning to the Black Moon (Lilith's moon), thus merging into a single being. This song is an huge foreshadowing, starting at the very first episode.
  • How's about "Zankoku na Tenshi no Teze"? That stays upbeat right through the series.
• Asuka sobbing over how she hates herself at the beginning of episode 23.
• Episode 25 when Misato says that she hates herself and doesn't know how anyone could love her.
• Episodes 25 and 26 as a whole. Shinji, Rei, Asuka, and Misato having emotional breakdowns over their percieved flaws is absolutely heartwrenching to watch.
• Episode 26: a positive version of a Tearjerker - tears of joy as everyone congratulates Shinji for beating Instrumentality by resolving to fully embrace, accept, and even love himself, appreciate others close to him and life around him, and go on living in the world because "my life is worth living here!".

End of Evangelion

• Ritsuko deserves a mention here. She installs a firewall to keep out the hackers for a couple of days, but while she is doing this she tries to sabotage Gendo by changing plans. It doesn't work. The computer she was working with was based on three sides of her mother, Naoko's, personality Melchoir-1 as a scientist, Balthasar-2 as a mother, and Casper-3 as a woman. Her mother? She was Gendo's mistress. Just like Ristuko

Ritsuko: A loving daughter's final request - mother, let's end it together. (pushes a button on her PDA but nothing happens) It's not working? Why?! (red NEGATIVE blinking next to Casper) Casper betrayed me? Mother, how could you choose your lover over me?!

• If you know it's coming, Misato's death scene is especially gut-wrenching. Especially hard-hitting is the speech she makes beforehand. She knows she's dying, and she spends her last moments trying honestly to help Shinji and bring him out of his BSOD, even using her own death to try and shock him back into action; trying to show that even if it hurts and everything seems to have gone to hell (which by that point, it pretty much has), you can still step forward.

Misato: "That's an adult kiss, we'll continue the rest when you get back"

• Shinji rejecting humanity due to him suffering from rejection too much in End, resulting in everyone on Earth to melt into LCL and die (especially with Komm Susser Tod playing).
  • Also consider this: the event took place at midnight, on New Year's Eve, 2015. Humanity didn't see 2016 besides Shinji and maybe Asuka.
  • Gendo's part in this scene. He finally realizes that he wasn't a good father to Shinji, only to be killed. Everyone in the world is confronted by the one person they want most, so that they let down all the mental and emotional shields that separate them from each other. The thing Gendo wants most in all the world? To be violently murdered by his son. GOD.
    • You can also see that scene as Yui taking her revenge on Gendou for abandoning Shinji, and thusly cutting him out of his greatest dream, Instrumentality, entirely. I'm not sure which one's worse.
• Asuka's death is pretty hard too. It's especially crushing because she had just crawled out of her Heroic BSOD and seemingly destroyed her enemies in one of the greatest mecha battles ever. She fails entirely because of circumstances that she couldn't affect. And the act itself was sickeningly brutal: Eva-02 is mutilated, torn apart and devoured, and Asuka with it because of her synch-ratio.
• I will always cry when Maya dies. Especially the whole "I Need You" thing. ;_;
• "Nobody needs me, so they can all just die". Keep in mind that it's a 14 YEAR OLD is saying that.
• This whole damn conversation, ending in Shinji screaming:

Shinji: Nobody wants me. So, everybody just die.
Rei: Then, what are those hands for?
Shinji: Nobody cares whether I exist or not. Nothing will change. So, everybody just die.
Rei: Then, what is that heart for?
Shinji: It'd be better if I wasn't here either. So I should just die, too.
Rei: Then, why are you here?
Shinji: Is it okay for me to be here?
(Silence.)

• Your Mileage May Vary on this one, perhaps it was just me, but the one scene in End which had me bawling, even when none of the others did, was young Shinji building a sand castle on his own, then crying and kicking it down.
• For me, it was a moment just before Shinji begins Instrumentality. He's curled up in the EVA cockpit, falling to pieces, screaming, and then he looks up and sees Kaworu, smiling, and just for a second he looks so overwhelmingly happy, for the first time in God knows how long. It's just heartbreaking to realise that Shinji is so broken that a single smile from a boy that he only knew for a few days means so much to him.
• Like much of End, the very last scene is both disturbing and heartbreaking: Shinji trying to strangle Asuka with a blank face, and then he just breaks down crying.
  • What really made this troper start crying again (after somewhat recovering from a severe Heroic BSOD due to the infamous LCL scene- literally a psychological Brown Note due to depression issues) was what Asuka did: reach out and touch Shinji's cheek. Keep in mind that she's severely bandaged up/ still wounded from her fight with the Mass-Produced Evas, possibly took all of her mental willpower to come back out of the LCL and reform her physical being, AND is being choked while in this vulnerable state. Then, thinking back to Shinji's internal struggle (where Asuka called him "worthless", hence why he's choking her) up to this point where Shinji realizes from this one, affectionate gesture that he's wanted and has worth to someone... suffice to say, it hit a little too close to this troper.
• Pen-Pen is usually the Comic Relief in the series. However, his appearance in the movie where he watches Shinji confront and strangle Asuka, seeming very confused, just somehow seems to hammer in how depressing it gets.
• During the famous LCL transformation scene all of the characters featured meet their loved ones and are at a moment of happiness and peace before they die/reborn, except for Shigeru Aoba, who hides under a table terrified at the army of Reis, showing that throughout his life he never found a single person he ever loved.
• Two Words: Goodbye, Mother. Every single time.
  • The sad, minimalistic piano piece playing during this scene just nails it home. If you don't tear up at it, you officially have no soul.

Rebuild of Evangelion

• The entire Take My Hand Finale of Rebuild 2.0, though the tears you'll be shedding will be those of joy and triumph. Despite the fact that they basically causing Third Impact, it's just that powerful. The music playing under the scene (Give Me Wings) doesn't help either.
• The sequence where a dummy plug - controlled Unit 01 rips apart the Bardiel - possessed Unit 03 piloted by Asuka, to the tune of "Today is the Time for Goodbye". All the while Shinji is trying to stop the thing, but his hands are literally tied to the controls, and he's screaming "STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!" over and over again. It's capped off by Unit 01 crushing the entry plug in its mouth, while you hear, overlaid with Shinji's scream, a woman's high - pitched death cry. Finally Megumi Hayashibara finishes: "...until we meet again", as we see Unit 01 kneeling in the sunset, a rainbow of blood in the background.

Manga

• Misato's death. An epic Taking You with Me and Go Out with a Smile Dying Moment of Awesome but I'll be damned if there wasn't one eva fan that shed a tear on the inside. I'll go cry now
• After Unit 01 rips apart Unit 03, the rescue team reaches the entry plug and finds that Toji is dead. We then see Hikari smiling and planning the lunch she's going to make for Toji. This is one scene where the manga manages to be even more emotionally wrenching than the anime. "This time he'll like my lunch for sure... I can't wait to see his face..."
• Kaji's Backstory in the manga. He was orphaned by the Second Impact and put into an orphanage, which he escaped with five other kids, one being his little brother, to go around stealing things to survive. They found a military base and began robbing it for food, until one day, Kaji was caught. He was beaten by a soldier and asked where his friends were. When he didn't say anything, the soldier threatened to use deadly force on him, pointing a pistol with a trigger pull of two-and-a-half kilos at his head. Kaji was so scared of death he told where his friends were. The soldiers went to find them, he knocked out one of the soldiers guarding him, and ran. When he finally found his hideout, the soldiers were already leaving. He peeked inside...every one of his friends had been summarily executed, including his brother. They died so that he may live. The saddest part is, this is probably what would really happen in a post-apocalyptic situation such as this. It's enough to make some of the most hardened of us well up.
  • Although he doesn't show it, it's revealed in an artbook (and in the manga version) that Kaji is a self-hating mess. In the manga, he describes himself as "someone who does not deserve to be happy" (which is the reason for his extremely dysfunctional relationship with Misato).
  • While Kaworu was definitely more of a villain here than he was in the TV series, his death is actually pretty tragic, probably more so here than in the show, primarily in how it's setup. While in the anime it's set up as a self-sacrificial moment, in the manga it's very clear that Kaworu just wants Shinji to Mercy Kill him, since SEELE will do it anyway if he doesn't initiate Third Impact, which is, of course, his only other option. Shinji doesn't want to do it because he doesn't want to lose anybody else, even though he continually made it clear that he didn't like Kaworu, but he complies. And instead of showing Kaworu's head falling into the LCL pool, we are treated to Shinji's perception of how he views the scene, which involves him personally strangling Kaworu to death in the very place they first met.
• Gendo is an irredeemable asshole in the manga - power-hungry and ruthless, and a world-class nihilist to boot. The assumption that, like in the anime and EoE he might feel remorse for the way he treated Shinji, despite his reasons is shattered when, upon the anniversary of Yui's death, he notices Shinji wanting to reach out to him and shoots him down saying: "Don't try to think that we can understand each other. For some reason, people think they can do that. Remember that they can't. Never completely, never enough."
  • It gets sadder toward the end: Gendo DOES end up feeling remorse for how he treated Shinji... as he's dying. And as he dies, he remembers that when Shinji was just a baby, he DID feel love for his son, but was too scared of the notion of being a father to become close to him. He regrets this deeply, and his last thoughts are hoping that Shinji survives and lives a better life.
• In the anime, Gendo dropped Shinji off at a train station for him to be taken in by Shinji's "sensei" (a teacher or possibly a caretaker whose name and gender are never mentioned even once). However, in the manga, Gendo drops Shinji off to live with his uncle and aunt. When confronted by Misato at the train station, Shinji says, in tears, that he "doesn't want to go back to where he was." We are shown in a later chapter that one, he didn't live in the house itself, as his uncle and aunt saw fit to make him a room in the backyard shed, where he stayed, contributing to his feelings of abandonment. Second, there is an incident where Shinji finds a bike lying in the trash, picks it up, and a nearby police officer takes him in for theft. Gendo doesn't come like Shinji was desperately hoping him to, and when his aunt and uncle come, they scold him for stealing the bike and don't believe him when he pleads with them that he didn't steal it.
• In the manga after Asuka speaks to her stepmother on the phone, she runs to her room and throws herself on her bed. She stares into the dark for a while, then says 'mommy', with the most heartbreaking expression on her face. It just really hits it home that for all her bluster Asuka is still just a kid who wants to be loved and comforted. Even though her mother died ten years ago, Asuka still desperately looks to her for guidance.