Misato has ice, snacks and 50 GALLONS OF BEER in her fridge lmao. Mood. Her car is wrecked and there’s a monster that might kill her and all she can think about is car payment loans lol. She’s just like me fr. Well, except for the groomer vibes she’s giving off.
I’m sure it’s gonna get depressing very soon, I hear all the characters suck and half of them are sexpests. Seems like you get a pretty decent understanding of why they suck though. I already dislike Shinji though, dude get in the fucking robot the world is ending. I guess sucking is hereditary, because his dad sucks too, fucking dumbass. Dude if your son is “the chosen one” when it comes to piloting these things and you’re all “I must sacrifice everything for the mission” then sacrifice some free time to be with your son so your top pilot is less psychologically messed up.
NERV is in dire need of a psych team though, insane that there isn’t a dedicated therapist to help the pilots deal with trauma.
Also it’s so beautiful! I miss old anime like this and Akira, everything just gets to breathe. It’s so pretty every frame is a painting. The women have noses and they look like women, which is also impressive. Sadly there’s still only one body type women can have, but at least they can look humanoid.
Anyway, bit idea: Guy who only watches Evangelion for the fights.
Edit: Okay so Shinji managed to make two friends and they get sent away. The dude needs a support network, how incompetent can his dad be? “Huh my best pilot is getting some friends? Can’t have that, we need him to be as mentally unstable as possible!”
Dude needs to be fired.
Double edit: Now on an episode where an EVA goes berserk and tries to attack the dad and he just stands there looking at it and then when it breaks thru to him he’s shocked. The guy is absolutely not beating “himbo, but not actually hot, just dumb” allegations
Yeah there’s people telling me why he doesn’t wanna get in the robot, and I get why he doesn’t wanna get in the robot. It’s like they miss out on the fact that I’m describing the very first scene and then they just take all the discourse from the entire show and assume something about me.
It’s cool that this is a deconstruction, but should I watch a mecha anime to hvae something that can be deconstructed? Should I watch gundam and if so, which one?
Ok so this is kinda a big topic but I’ll do my best to break it down. To cut to the chase I think Eva stands on it’s own reasonably well, although maybe knowing the general history of the genre or having a passing familiarity with the tropes may enhance your enjoyment of the show.
Mecha as a genre starts with Super Robot (Tetsujin-28, Mazinger Z, Getter Robo), as an extension of the kinda Sci-Fi stories made popular by the likes of Astroboy. To broadly generalize these are (usually) Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff, adjacent to tokusatsu (live action special effects shows, think Power Rangers and Ultraman) so it’s all simplistic young protagonist saves the world from the forces of evil with their cool giant robot Modernist Power of Science and Progress power fantasy (but also some of these original shows go into WILD places because basically if your writing Sci-Fi in Japan in the 70’s you’re some kinda Leftist). Imo you don’t have to go watch these old shows, just knowing that they very much directly inspire Eva should give you all the background you need here.
As we get to the 80’s, we get to the Real Robot split. Basically creators decide that they’ve had enough of writing Saturday Morning Cartoons, they want to write real hard Sci-Fi like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark and Robert Heinlein… and then finding out the only way to do that is to make animated toy commercials. But they manage to despite this commercial limitation, so you get shows like Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato which are nuanced meditations on the nature of war drawn from the lived experiences of the generation that survived WW2, and they express their anti-fascism very strongly in their art.
I highly recommend the original Mobile Suit Gundam (UC0079). The compilation movies (Mobile Suit Gundam The Movie, Mobile Suit Gundam II: Soldiers of Sorrow and Mobile Suit Gundam III: Encounters in Space) are great watches and condense the series into a decent runtime, although you will definitely miss some stuff from the series. It serves as a pretty decent baseline for what Eva is critiquing, although even here there’s more nuance than “Gundam Tropes Bad”, where Eva is more in a dialogue with things Gundam’s doing as a story that’s evolving beyond the kinda pulpy Saturday Morning Cartoon roots of the genre.
Mecha as a genre is compelling because the Giant Robot is such a potent visual metaphor and storytelling vehicle. But I think what’s special about Eva, and why it has lasting power as a story, is because up till that point no one had ever bothered to question if the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about our technology and our wars were worth telling in the first place, or if they’re just comforting lies designed to fill a vacuum in our souls. I think Eva still stands up well even without the larger context of the deconstruction, just from it’s sheer brazenness in being willing to break down every single tiny aspect of it’s characters and dive into their psychology, while avoiding easy answers, to show human beings as the messy imperfect creatures that they are- it’s more character study than anything else.
(And, like, it’s extremely wild that this kinda injection of Postmodern literature is happening to… what isn’t really that far off from a Saturday Morning Cartoon, but the 90’s were the Wild West of animation, History had Ended (thanks Francis Fukuyama) and um, the director of Eva really suffered from severe depression so… hey, I guess poison pilling existential dread into your Giant Robot show is a winning formula or we wouldn’t be talking about it now.)
P.S. Gurren Lagann is my favourite show of all time (or close to it) but I’ll strongly recommend you watch it after Evangelion. Basically the staff who worked on that show were the protege’s of the staff who worked on Eva, and Gurren Lagann was them saying “Hey you were right to question all those tropes, but the underlying principles the genre is built on, Hopefulness of the Future and a Belief in the Human Spirit (I’m trying to be as vague as possible to avoid spoilers) aren’t bad things and are worth preserving and we’re going to prove it with this show.” It’s a continuation of that larger meta-dialogue all this art is having, and imo it’s best experienced in order.
I like your whole writeup just gonna toss in a joke that after watching evangelion going to gurren lagann would be such a whiplash in terms of vibes you’d better protecc that necc
Never been a huge fan of mecha anime, but Gurren Lagann is pretty fucking good
Thanks for the recommendation!
yeah, gurren lagann is evangelion if it were actually any good
Or if he wasn’t emotionally abused and was encouraged instead
and also if the plot and the mythology made any god damned sense instead of being vaguely judeochristian-colored BS put in a blender and smeared over the screen.
anyway, yeah, i know art can be uncomfortable and shit, but i hate watching a show where the main selling point is “look, abusing a kid is bad and it fucks them up”. i already know this. watching it just makes me feel awful, and with the shitty ass ending of NGE, there’s not even any point to anyone’s suffering. it’s the equivalent of someone scraping their nails on a blackboard for 20+ episodes, watching you writhe in pain, for no reason at all.