Thoughts on Evangelion (original, end, or rebuild)
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Show was nice, all endings were pretentious bullshit that largely invalidated the entire show. At least Rebuild's ending involved some agency of the characters involved.
Hmm, interesting take... what makes you say that the ending of NGE/EoE removed the agency of the characters? Because it all came down to Shinji’s choice to reject Instrumentality or not?
He rejected it, and thus gets left on a destroyed earth to starve with Asuka somehow. The ending has nothing to do at all with the evas or their fight with the angels, the villains are never confronted or even discovered, and the entire show was utterly pointless. The ending in EoE was just watching a prepubescent boy reject being raped by a goddess who harvested the souls of humanity, killing the goddess and leaving earth as a desolate hellscape.
At least in rebuild, they actually confront the villains throughout movies 3 and 4, and the final ending has the protagonist unsubtly saying EoE was bullshit.
After he rejects it though, it’s stated that anyone with a strong enough desire/will to return can also reject it, hence Asuka coming back after him. You could imagine that happens to others, or you could imagine a new Adam and Eve scenario, both of which are intriguing in their own rights.
You’re totally right about the plot structure going semi-haywire (villains left unconfronted/discovered, and never really getting the kind of perfect/complete breakdown of their methods & motivations we rationally desire) - BUT - that’s from the perspective that seeks control (total knowledge) or seeks to dive in to “escapist fantasy” completely, and I think that in fact one of the most powerful things NGE as a franchise has to say is on the rejection of complete escapism! Both the original show and the rebuilt series end by showing the real (non-anime) world, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Shinji’s choice is ultimately one between “comfortable” fantasy of total ego dissolution, and (the sometimes harsh) reality, where the only way to connect with others involves making yourself vulnerable.
:)
By dub standards, they were much better than most.
English dub was pretty good except for Shinji's feminine voice. The French dub was all-around great.
Story time:
I was at an anime con back in the '00s. Spike Spencer (Shinji dub VA) was one of the guests.
He was generally annoying and disrespectful to fans the entire time, but then he proceeds to get up on stage and say something like "thanks to you guys I get to party with Van Halen, so..."
The words "cringe" and "weeb" were still a few years off at that point, but imagine a room full of thousands of cringing weebs. Not a single clap - just a low murmur with that "what an asshole" air about it.
Yeah I’ve never been a purist about that stuff. If anything, I like having both subs and dubs, as you don’t just get two (similar) versions of the script, but you also get a new, third perspective in the ability to compare the two... but uhh yeah, I certainly can’t help but giggle at the odd line delivery here and there
Trigun is the only anime I’ll ever need.
I'd make the case for Bebop, but I'm gonna let it slide because you aren't actually wrong.
The original Evangelion/EoE is about the struggle to achieve self-control and self-realization and the value of relationships despite the difficulties involved. It's a masterpiece and one of two anime series that share the #1 rank and transcend their genre (Cowboy Bebop being the other one).
The Rebuilds were the hate letter to the fandom that everybody thought that EoE was. They're less of a real story and more like a polemic. Anno might as well have had Asuka yell at Shinji to touch grass.
Some people here seem to be confusing the 2DEEP4U groupies with the actual story. I used to complain about the reckless use of religious imagery, but when I watched the original series as an adult I realized that there is no pretense involved. The iconography simply frames the moral and existential nature of the show, as opposed to the temporal conflicts in a regular mecha show.
Evangelion was always trash. Everyone just thought it was deep and meaningful because they were a retarded teenager when they watched it. It does not hold up.
The penguin was the only character I ever gave a shit about. I think that really says it all.
Was Akira trash too?
The movie? I wouldn't say it was as bad as Evangelion, but it definitely gets more hype than it deserves. Mostly it was bad because it tried to adapt way too fucking much source material. The source material was fine. That is not the problem Evangelion suffers from. Evangelion is just trash bags all the way down.
Hmm ok so you aren’t opposed to cerebral media in general, just NGE... I have a few questions if you want to share:
Do you recognize a value in the impact a piece of media has in spawning/inspiring other media? Akira for example, being very influential on not just later anime but cinema itself in multiple ways? Or is the value (or lack thereof) of a piece of media entirely contained within the media itself?
Roughly, are you old enough that you grew up with these media, or are you “looking back” at them from a purely modern perspective? What I mean is, are you the kind of person who can appreciate a black and white film, or something otherwise “dated”, with the acknowledgement that the art form in general has “improved” since?
What did you discern as the message of NGE? Do you find no value in that message, or do you believe it didn’t convey that message adequately, or what?
To your first point, it's something I admittedly have not given much consideration. My evaluation is purely on the artistic endeavor's own merits rather than an analysis on the influence it projected onto the rest of society. Magnitude of influence does not warrant adulation or praise however, for there are many things that project a malignant influence. I haven't given it enough thought to properly identify and evaluate the lasting influence that Evangelion produced. I maintain my stance that as a piece of art standing on its own merits...those merits are severely lacking. To my understanding, Akira's influence had a lot to do with the fact that it was one of the first anime movies to make it to western shores and introduce an audience to the artform as a whole. It that regard I'd say any anime could have been the one that accomplished that, Akira just happened to be the one that was in the right place at the right time.
On the second point, yes I am old enough to know the struggle of trying to download episodes of Trigun over a 56k dial up connection while praying that it finished before someone decided to use the phone. I missed the boat on Evangelion when it was initially airing because I didn't have cable, so no Toonami for me. When I was finally able to pick it up later in college, I found that it did not hold up to all the hype my friends had given it. At the same time I was also getting caught up on Cowboy Bebop, which I did find lived up to its hype. My conclusion at the time was that the people who had told me about their enlightened consciousness altering experiences, their divine revelations and their mind trips of watching their hand go through the screen when they went to turn the TV off after watching the final episode...those people were all dumb 14 year olds who thought the pretentious philosophical masturbation that Gainax had been putting on display was somehow anything other than pretentious masturbation.
Evangelion did not have a message. It was just Gainax luring the audience in with some giant robot fight scenes and then proceeding to wank off in your face and pretend it was philosophy or something and people, being stupid teenagers, decided it must be deep and insightful somehow and then proceeded to spend the next several years reinforcing each other's incorrect interpretations.
Well, fair enough on the first two points, absolutely fine takes to have, just not ones that really need any further discussion, so I’ll just skip to 3, and keep focused on what the message of NGE is, contained within the media itself (so no, I’ll try not to reference the Japanese only PS2 game(‘s bonus content, lol) that sometimes gets brought up) - have you read my other comments to other users in this thread? I think they have some useful context for what my thoughts on the “message” of the series could be. But to boil it down, I think both the God-Tier (Adam and Lilith, first ancestral race, spears, eggs, etc) plot and the Civilization-Tier (Seele, Nerv, Instrumentality, Tokoyo3, etc) plot shouldn’t be regarded as the core of the message, but rather as symbolic elaborations on the core message (which I think is Shinji’s personal journey, which isn’t just about the external, “larger” plot lines alone, but also clearly deeply related to his “internal drama” of fear of rejection, and tendency to withdraw or run from situations that present even the possibility of rejection or disappointment).
So that’s just a lot of words to say that, while you can totally be annoyed that the show’s plot “went haywire at the end” or “conflicts/plot elements were left without perfect knowledge on their origin and outcome being given”, those are both, effectively, “missing the point” of the show. The Evas, the Angels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Seele, all the various sideplots (MAGI and Ritsuko, Misato and Kaji, the school kids, etc) serve their purpose of facilitating and birthing the real story, the real message, which is effectively about Shinji’s (and thus every member of the audience’s) responsibility to not run away from the gift of life, but to embrace it entirely, aware that the lows are what make the highs.
IMO anyway! I’d be interested in your further thoughts!
Edit: one further thought, we could have had a show that was exclusively about the Adam and Lilith plot line(fruit of life descendants vs fruit of knowledge descents fighting over a planet they both landed on) - that would be cool in its own right, if a little lacking in meaning. We could also have had a show entirely about the human-scale machinations, of Seele, Nerv, Gehrin, Marduk, and other groups, seeking to bring about Instrumentality in different ways for different end goals - that would have also been cool in its own right. And finally we could have had a show about the challenges of one boy trying to find realization in a world that sometimes doesn’t care about his struggles. What we actually got was 95% of each of these shows, all in one! That’s part of why, for me atleast, I can rave about the show, compared with the vast sea of “meh” out there before and since.
Meh, if you say so. It's been over a decade since I saw it so I might be wrong. However, I'm not really willing to entertain that possibility. Gainax masturbated directly into my face and I didn't care for the experience and have no real desire to revisit it.
I love the original anime, and The End of Evangelion. The manga was good too, though I didn't agree with all the changes that it made. It's definitely not for everyone, though. Hideaki Anno, himself, was shocked that it had any success outside of Japan, as he thought the story was too dependent on the Japanese culture to succeed elsewhere.
I could not get into Rebuild when I tried, but I may give it another shot now that its finished.
I highly recommend it, 4.0 ties it all together quite beautifully.
Edit: I’ve never read or read about the comic, is it also it’s own take on the story or is it basically the show?
My thoughts on Evangelion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGMuaXIlckU
pretty much
Just finished the Rebuild series last night. Wow.
Which version spoke most to you? Did you see past the facade of big robots fighting to hear the message? What message did you hear?
I’m still kind of stewing on it all
I've only seen the original series and I didn't get anything out of it but giant robots and confusion.
Yeah, you’re definitely not alone there... if you’re looking for something a little more digestible, the 4 movie “Rebuild of Evangelion” series is a bit less abstract and slightly more willing to “come out and say” its message (however the message of Rebuild is not quite the same as the show or as End of Evangelion, the movie capstone of the show).
It’s possible that you had already come to learn the lessons present, and thus the media has nothing to offer you, but if you were just too young or distracted and think you missed things, I recommend giving it another shot, as I feel these pieces of art are a wellspring of insight on the human condition
Rebuild was sick, but I personally couldn’t see past the robots fighting for most of it. There’s some good YouTube videos out there that explain the themes and it’s kinda amazing how well it was done imo
This might sound silly to some, but for a while now I’ve thought of NGE as almost “biblical”, like in the way it layers and intersperses meaning and symbolism throughout deeply personal stories, told under the auspices of world-ending cataclysm. And that’s before even discussing the “actual” “religious” elements of the plot, which are interesting in their own right - but which I’ve seen the creator downplay in an interview, which I find intriguing given what seems to be his overall message of rejecting “total escapism into fantasy”
Nah, it's not silly. I'm a Christian, and End of Evangelion made me reckon with the Second Coming and the end of all things (more the second than the first) in a deeply affecting way that I can't compare to many other experiences.
tumbling down tumbling down tumbling down