i’ve been thinking a lot about misato, and why she resorts to alcohol and sex, specifically as means of self-medication/preservation

obviously there’s this tendency to characterize her as this errant drunkard, despite the fact that she only saves her binge-drinking for the home. she’s smart as hell - we know that misato hates the dark, that darkness begets all these traumatic memories of second impact – and i like to think that misato literally drinks herself to sleep every night, quite plainly self-medicating with alcohol, harnessing the ways in which it suppresses debilitating memories and emotions so she can function during her waking hours, as a military officer no less: a functional alcoholic in every sense of the term

and with regards to sex; how misato’s childhood is characterized by a very conservative, purity-fixated upbringing, and then the trauma of years long isolation in a bare-bones holding cell with no means of communication, no therapeutic companionship, just a couple of toys to keep her sound. for years. sex, for obvious reasons, so intensely connecting person to person in the most tangible form… misato’s going to find that especially useful in preserving function, feeling alive (”to prove i exist”) versus the isolation symbolically associated with death. (it’s interesting, then, when misato is shoved into a holding cell again in episode 21, kaji dies the very same day.)

but much the same with alcohol, misato exerts this unbelievable amount of self-control and restricts her sexual expression to just one person - yet shame and guilt plague her still, shame that shapes and defines how she thinks others are perceiving her as a woman. misato has self-surveillance, self-awareness, and self-policing in incredible spades. she’s only allowed herself to ‘medicate’ under very narrow, very specific contexts, and that’s pretty fascinating, i think