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He abandoned his will to live, clinging instead to a false hope.
You did nothing wrong, Shinji.”
SHINJI (OFF):“You're cold, Miss Misato.”
UrsusArctos: This is bad advice by Misato and it doesn't help Shinji one bit, for reasons that I'll come to in the additional comments.
Additional Commentary
UrsusArctos: Kaworu chose to die so that Shinji and all humanity could live, but that's something that Shinji is too messed up to process or understand intellectually or emotionally, and Misato blunders by giving Shinji the wrong explanation. She's trying to answer Shinji's question about why he's alive while answering her own question about why she's alive instead of Kaji. "Clinging instead to a false hope" does not work as a coherent explanation for Kaworu's choice to die, but it works perfectly for Kaji, who died in the hope that Misato could know the truth - which she hasn't found at this point. Kaji's death, at this stage, could indeed be interpreted as giving himself up to die while clinging to a false hope.
It also represents a fundamental error by Misato in comparing Kaworu to Kaji. Yes, Kaworu and Kaji indeed have something deep down in their attitude to life that makes them very much alike, and Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 pairs the two together on purpose. Misato should be comparing Kaworu to the man who almost certainly gave him his DNA - Dr. Katsuragi, her father. Dr. Katsuragi died willingly so that Misato could live, an act of selfless love, and if Misato had used that as an analogy, she would have given Shinji a reason to accept Kaworu's death.
That might have given her a reason to connect Kaworu to her father much like Shinji connected Rei to his mother, but she sees Kaworu as an Angel and an enemy and can't make the connection with the one person whose death inspired her entire desire for revenge against the Angels in the first place...how deep the irony truly runs! Misato's incapacity to connect the dots spirals downwards to the horror of EoE, but our commentary sends us to Episodes 25 and 26 first...
