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 In the manga, they actually made it even worse:
 * The anime also has shots of
 * 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.
 * The manga version of the above episode is even worse for a lot of people, as.
 * And in Rebuild
 * 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 . Even worse when you realise that . God, it sucks to be Shinji!
 * Depending on how you see it, it's either a Crowning Moment of Awesome for, who , or his version of Mind Rape on Shinji.
 * ... can't it be both?
 * The end of episode 21 deserves a mention, too - namely,.
 * It's worth mentioning that
 * 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.
 * For me, this particular scene was awful since was playing in the background. To top it all off
 * It's even worse in the manga.  Wow.
 * And of course, Ritsuko's.
 * 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,
 * How's about "Zankoku na Tenshi no Teze"? That stays upbeat right through the series.
 * Asuka at the beginning of episode 23.
 * Episode 25 when Misato says that
 * 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 -

End of Evangelion
"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?!"
 * 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


 * If you know it's coming, 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.

"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.)"
 * (especially with ).
 * Also consider this: the event took place at midnight, on New Year's Eve, 2015. Humanity didn't see 2016.
 * Gendo's part in this scene.
 * You can also see that scene as
 * 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:.
 * I will always cry when ;_;
 * "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:


 * 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
 * Like much of End, the very last scene is both disturbing and heartbreaking:
 * Pen-Pen is usually the Comic Relief in the series. However, his appearance in the movie, just somehow seems to hammer in how depressing it gets.
 * During the famous
 * Two Words: 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.
 * 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, 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,  . 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

 * After, the rescue team reaches the entry plug and finds that  . We then see Hikari  . This is one scene where the manga manages to be even more emotionally wrenching than the anime.
 * Kaji's Backstory in the manga. 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,
 * 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:
 * 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.
 * 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.