… That’s the thing with fantasy/sci-fi, if the characters - almost everyone in NGE - have suffered due to many occasions they had no control of, I can’t just brush them off as metaphors for the human condition. It may make me worse, actually, like, those characters suffer more than I ever would and I’m still so fucked-up. Of course, they’re fictional characters, but you always find RL people with more complicated lives who seem to have dealt with it better than you with your privileged life.

I think this really needs to be said on that matter: You don’t need to be a carbon copy of a character to relate to a character.

That being said, there’s a lot about Shinji which makes him relatable as well as any of the Evangelion characters. I’ve already gone over his awful relationship with his father (awful is an understatement), whose interactions honestly are a good example of emotional abuse. He’s hardly selfless, his go-to way to solve his problems is by running away from them. He’s a character who desires validation and it’ll do for anyone (sincerity isn’t even considered). He’s still making sense of the world, slowly trudging onward, and being that he’s roughly midway though adolescence, of course he (and other characters) is going to have a trove of misguided ideas.

Some people find Asuka relatable. Considering she puts on the idea of independence to mask her massive insecurities (and traumatizing childhood), I think she’s pretty relatable. This is especially because she received no closure about her mother before EoE comes around. When she recovers from her lowest point, her will to love reignites, and when she receives closure, she’s able to grow more as an individual. 

Some people even relate to Rei, and considering her identity is forced upon her and not really given any exploration of it, I think she’s pretty damn relatable as the others. I mean, you don’t have to achieve actualized deityhood to find Rei relatable. You don’t need to have the ability to travel through time and space (Quantum Rei) to find her arc about stifled identity exploration something that hits close to home.

It’s these struggles, personalities, and choices which make people in real life bond with these sorts of characters. It’s a big reason why people have an emotional bond with those types of people.

Most people have gone through these things and relating to a character isn’t trivializing their struggles. 

I mean, this are just small examples, but part of what makes Eva so good is that any character is relatable because of how real they are. I also don’t really ascribe to the idea that Eva is of the human condition, considering the AT Field encompasses both humans and angels, both literally as well as metaphorically.