bye-bye, all of EVANGELION

On reflection, there is a category of critical language where the audience is specifically implied to be inferior, e.g. “pablum.” When we call something a piece of shit, we should take care to make sure we are not also calling someone a piece of shit. There’s no situation where “pablum” is strictly necessary unless you are talking about the audience.

(not to pick on @Tegiminis who is clearly not directing it at present company)

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Yeah. It’s definitely not directed at anyone present. I also mean it in more of what I consider to be “directorial intent” rather than audience taste. It’s a textural thing for me, feel-good plot that just makes me feel hollow instead.

am i the only one who found all the male-gazey stuff in the original series perfectly aligned with the tone and story being conveyed? like the protagonist is a deeply repressed 14 year old boy of course that stuff’s in the back of their mind at all times

idk i’m a baby weeb so maybe i haven’t seen enough anime to know when it’s hornt for horn’s sake. i’m still scandalised by this one pussy shot from Stand Alone Complex

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It’s more the constant leering camera angles that made the tv series feel male gazey, and I feel like End of Eva existed in part to criticize this reflexive horniness of the tv series.

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no, that’s how I take a lot of it as well. which is why I think it feels so egregious in Rebuild 4. that movie feels less concerned with sexuality than the show so the tiddie shots of a 4,000 year old witch in a 14 year old’s body hits differently for me.

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You can sort them into shots from Shinji’s extended POV (e.g. walking in on Rei, as implausible as grabbing a breast to break your fall is) or the camera leering. I think it’s also worth distinguishing between Asuka/Rei as the subjects and Misato.

In 4.0 the angles are so weird and technically complex that it doesn’t feel diegetic or sensual at all and it’s so ostentatious it’s impossible to ignore. There’s a shot of Asuka in a shirt and panties where the camera is sitting on the bottom corner of her futon pointed between her legs and we watch her toss in her sleep.

I feel vicariously mortified with male gaze when it’s not expressly consensually erotic, though.

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wait a minute this is a Seinfeld bit from the Teri Hatcher episode

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Screen Shot 2021-09-30 at 9.37.09 PM

that rapscallion

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next time i watch original series eva i will probably try to focus mostly on the backgrounds and graphic design and maybe frame-by-frame some of the animation instead of overloading my mind with the plot

it still looks so much cooler than the overly glossy and abstract rebuilds (as much as i love 4D Ramiel)

this was really nice to do in my last viewing. I had just got into Ozu movies and was making a lot of connections between NGE and a early Japanese cinema.

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I myself am an experienced purveyor of male gaze and when Eva opened with 14 year old Shinji getting a sexy pic of 20something Misato with a big circle around her tits saying “Check these out!!” even I was like “uh oh”

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i can’t believe this is the hill i’m brewing my hemlock on, but

like on the level of the character or the show? coz her biggest failing as a person is definitely her leaning on sexuality to connect with people, especially her wards, and that’s not the worst of what she does to Shinji
like it kind of read to me as ‘uhh shit what do teenage boys like. boobies?’
(wait who wrote the text on the photo actually)

as the first image of another person in the show other than the so-far-blank-slate of the adolescent protagonist… ok yeah good point actually that’s a lot lol

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the photo’s covered in hearts and lipstick so it definitely feels diegetic

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“it is a fitting punishment for eva fans to have to watch a movie that places their beloved teenaged brides into marvel movie dogshit”

Who exactly was this directed at

I have zero interest in ever watching this movie. I love shitting on things I hate. That quote is the exact kind of comment I’d make. But I also know once someone drops a bomb like that you can’t accuse other folks of being “reflexively defensive of media properties” or whatever. This thread got uniquely hostile and downplaying that is absurd.

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Let’s please move past this poster’s history - they’re indefinitely suspended and the post you quoted is six weeks old. There’s nothing to be done about it now.

If the posts upthread continue to derail discussion it might be best to lock this thread and start anew. That’s kind of fitting, I suppose.

I think that’s probably best, yes. I suppose reading from the start, it’s still casting a pall on the rest of the discussion despite its age.

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New thread here: New! ευαγγέλιον

Please feel free to discuss concerns about this thread with staff or elsewhere but do not bring meta discussions about this thread to the new thread.

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image

There’s a few things I want to note as kind of a post-mortem of the near-end of this thread.

  1. If you feel someone is antagonizing you, please flag the posts or @moderators in a DM so that we can see it and help remedy the situation, whether that is clarifying misunderstandings, setting boundaries, censure or whatever. @moderators is generally best for everything but the truly egregious this-is-hate-speech-and-needs-to-be-gone-now posts, just because of the way flags work. We aren’t always all looking at all the threads and it’s good to get multiple perspectives on this stuff. (I’ve only poked my head in this one a couple times as I’ve never watched any Evangelion.) I think the repeated references to “strawmanning” off the bat were (accidentally, but still) inflammatory and created conflict where none was truly meant. It brought a bit of a debate club feeling to what seems to me like a very heartfelt desire to begin to discuss what about 4.0 they found lovely and touching. Rudie’s excellent later post expanded on this, but was ultimately only really half-acknowledged before things went further off into debate territory. Which sort of brings us to point #2.

  2. Doolittle mentions tone a few times in different posts in ways that might be construed as tone policing, in retrospect. This is a reference to something the mods discussed as a general source / amplifier of conflict, which I’ll just quote myself from:

“Rollicking discussion” vs. “heartfelt passion project thread” is a really useful way to frame the two different modes of discourse we see most often. It might actually be helpful to codify it a little bit to expectation set, because for a lot of this stuff a discussion could start in the mega thread, split off once it’s clearly meriting a more serious discussion, and still have the link between the threads via an overlapping/quoted post to preserve context and direct people appropriately.

I don’t think people really do treat the threads any differently at the moment until someone gets upset, because they’re approaching a topic seriously and the person who engages with them is being more frivolous and they never really reconcile the tone/framing difference.

Maybe it seems patronizing in practice and was a bad idea? If so, our bad, let us know so we can course correct. In this case, this is the rowdy rollicking discussion and the members who were seeking more serious / heartfelt discussion were repelled by an inhospitable atmosphere. We feel like both modes of discourse are valuable in their own ways but unfortunately don’t usually seem to mix very well in the same thread, so we’d like to encourage people to branch off and make new threads if the current one doesn’t have a tone appropriate to the type of conversation they’re pursuing. Chances are there are other people looking for the same sort of conversation as you.

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