https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/opinion/harry-potter-millenials-liberalism.html
Read this and realized that I never needed Hogwarts cuz I had #Evangelion. And it ruined me just right.
Let's get something straight. Gen X didn't get a #HarryPotter. We didn't get a warm moral blanket or a chosen one fantasy, or a British boarding school wet dream pretending to be resistance. We got late-stage capitalism, dead eyed parents, Reaganomics, & if we were lucky a Walkman full of nihilism & rage.
No Hogwarts, no Great Hall, no Sorting Hat to tell us we were brave, clever, loyal or evil-ish. Just the looming sense that everything was hollow & nobody was coming to fix it. And then came Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Not a franchise, nor a fandom, but a psychological wrecking ball disguised as anime. I was 21, collecting it 2 subbed episodes at a time on VHS like bootleg prophecy. At $29.99 per pop.
Where Millennials were being gently indoctrinated into the gospel of liberal humanism with wands & whimsy, I was being handed trauma, alienation & relentless existential collapse.
Not "you're special," but you're broken, your father abandoned you emotionally & your only path to salvation is fusing with your own despair inside a screaming mecha-god.
What escapism? The writer Louise Perry wants to lament that Zoomers are turning their backs on the Hogwarts mythos cuz they've lsot faith in liberal ideals. Good. They should. They were fed a fantasy that said evil is obvious, institutions can be trusted & empathy always wins.
Soft lighting & metaphor so clean they could be printed on Etsy tote bags. NGE didn't print shit. Instead it printed on YOU.
For Gen X youth like me. NGE was the closest we ever got to our Harry Potter.... if it ended with Harry sobbing on the fllor in fetal position while Dumbledore dissolved into LCL. No triumph but clarity through failure.
We learned that our trauma was not unique. Just unspoken.
We were the death wish in flesh, trying to claw meaning out of detachment.
Millennials got Hogwarts as a mirror of hope while I got The End of Evangelion as a mirror of everything I was afraid to admit.
So no, I don't miss the magical optimism of that time. I had a much different one that shows you the void & said "you can either look away or face it. Naked, terrified & human."
I did & I came out alive.
Congratulations.
@Gotterdammerung
I fall in that weird micro gen between X and Millenial. I got to college, was introduced to Evangelion, and Harry Potter came out the next year.
Still remember how I felt after watching the end of Eva. Like FUCK...
Good stuff.
