About

Shinji in a Chair refers to an image of Neon Genesis Evangelion character Shinji sitting in a folding chair, his head buried in his hands. The image originated from episode 25 of the original series and has been used as an image macro, a pop culture reference and a reference for redraws, starting in the late 2010s.

Origin

The scene comes from episode 25 of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The character Shinji is seen in with his head buried in his hands as he suffers from guilt (scene shown below).

The image of Shinji in a chair became an iconic shot from Neon Genesis Evangelion and began seeing use in redraw and parody memes starting roughly in 2015. An early known example of the image being used as a redraw meme was posted on September 10th, 2015 by Tumblr^[1] user nightmargin posted a crossover redraw with Gravity Falls characters, gaining over 6,300 notes in seven years (shown below).

Spread

Through the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, Shinji in a Chair remained a popular meme as an exploitable and redraw template. Some popular redraw examples include an October 13th, 2021 Twitter post by user @Bacon_Strips_MA^[2] showing VTuber Ouro Kronii in the pose, gaining over 560 retweets and 4,000 likes in one year (shown below, left). On February 14th, 2022, Redditor TheNerdsdumb^[3] posted an example using Jon Arbuckle from Garfield, gaining over 2,000 points in nine months (shown below, right).

Popular exploitable usages of the image include a December 17th, 2021 post by @westernunion2k^[5] showing the women of Neon Genesis Evangelion yelling at Shinji, gaining over 17,000 retweets and 129,000 likes in one year (shown below, left) and an August 15th, 2022 tweet by @RamenNamenn^[4] posted an edit with Shinji sitting in the Froggy Chair, gaining over 12,000 retweets and 75,000 likes in two months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References