I’ve been working on my own human instrumentality project for years to make daphny admit that eva is hella cool but also kinda sucks. the third impact is finally here baby
thanks for watching my favorite anime daphny
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dont get used to it
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evangelion isn’t deep enough to have discourse about it and I don’t know whats up with weebs obsessed with it, its just a dumbass anime with a beer drinking penguin and nerdy references and that’s cool
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Yeah I just finished my Evangelion Rewatch. My response now is the same as it was back when I watched it in highschool: This is a mess of ideas thrown at a wall that is occasionally compelling, with moments of really excellent animation, surrounded by a lack of clarity about what it wants to actually say. The show doesn’t seem to know where it wants it’s characters to end up, and can’t seem to stick the landing at all.
End of Evangelion has a lot more gorgeous moments, but is even more confused to what to say about Shinji and Asuka?
A lot of the depression bits where just them repeating the same ideas over and over again until they get suddenly ‘resolved’ in both versions of the ending. The more ambiguous nature of End was a lot better because it might just mean Shinji’s stuck in the same cycle.
I dunno, some gorgeous animation and all but I was left feeling hollow, and not in a good, disquieted way. Just…I wish there was more to it, or perhaps maybe less to it?
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It actually made me think about how much I like Zeta Gundam’s approach to showing what happens to the cast Mobile Suit Gundam when they got older, and who could move on, and who got stuck in the past. And how much Evangelion’s early episodes remind me of patlabor, with their gorgeous establishing shots, goofy tone, and a lot of focus on the logistics of Giant Robots existing in the world.
It’s just…Eva kind of moves away from all of that as it goes and eventually just turns into a monster of the week show interspersed with slices of people being lonely and depressed. And sometimes, it doesn’t even have the lonely and depressed part.
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Yeah but there’s better monster of the week shows than Eva.
I say this as a big fan of monster of the week shows.
To say EVA is just a bunch of references feels to reductive. After seeing more of what fed into it I know that Anno was mostly copying and reframing his consumption of media but I still think it asks some interesting questions. But it only really does just that. Ask or frame some ideas with out really trying to deliver any answers or thematically resolve any of them and just opts to end it all by overwhelming everyone with more of it. Thank God he finally got to make a Godzilla movie that actually had a message and managed to be resonant.
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I am very excited to see his modern take on ultraman given how much he loves ultraman
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ive never been interested in arguing if teenage melodrama is deep or not, i just really like how it went all out INSTANTLY. the destruction is like getter robo armageddon levels but even more and i love that shit. and how I didn’t need any context to understand shitty father made a child bride clone and hes gonna kill everyone to bring dead wife back, its pretty straightforward
just stoked to understand some more memes now
there’s too much shit in this that sucks ass and the people who made it dont deserve much more of my brain power devoted to their creation hmph
that dedication card
‘ID LIKE TO THANK THE ARTISTS THE WRITERS AND EVERYONE WHO WORKED HARD ON THIS AND OH YEAH THE FIVE WOMEN TOO’ like fuck off already you goddamn misogynists
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I’ve never seen a full Ultraman series. Just a few episodes and movies in passing so I don’t know what big ideas it’s ever played with but I feel there’s fertile ground to play with identity of heroics. Given that Ultraman is usually about a human playing host to an aliens power you can ask is the human the hero or the alien? Does the human even want to be a hero and just plays the role given to him etc. But knowing Anno it will most likely be framed around the support crew and I’m kinda into the idea of an Ultraman movie where all the giant action is played in a backdrop to whatever the support crew are doing. Like a Cloverfield but with characters that have infinitely more agency.
I love Evangelion a lot, man it’s got its flaws and bad sex stuff, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show do a better job with its world-building. The world of Evangelion is extremely well-realized and one of those things you could never do outside of the medium.
I love the design and look and function of basically everything. Also a huge sucker for how every thing they do in the show requires a massive engineering project and the flawless cooperation of an entire city to succeed.
It has weirdly TNG vibes to me in that way where all adults in the show are these top-of-their-field professionals. In Eva, the adults are all attempting to combat the actual end of the world, and they keep the kids as ignorant of the stakes, the risks, and the true nature of their work as much as possible. There’s an element I love where the adults are obsessed with this grandiose project, because it absolutely must succeed, and it causes them to use the careless kids as tools. From the kids perspective, they rightfully don’t trust any adults - the adults are the ones that caused the world to be fucked beyond repair, and the adults have essentially never been honest with them. Misato’s as close as they come to being honest, and she gives them like 1/25th of the real story.
One of my favorite bits from that show is the scene where Shinji runs away and attempts to leave the city, and it slowly becomes apparent that he’s monitored at all times by suits, and ultimately prevented from leaving the city limits. He never had the option of choice to begin with.
Anyways the Rebuild movies are spotty, but I’d absolutely say they’re worth a watch when you’re done. 1.11 is like… a crappier, more compressed version of the show, but with a vastly higher budget. 2.22 I loved, as it goes in a lot of new and weird directions. 3.33 is kind of a miserable mess, but interesting all the same.
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If you haven’t read it before, you should totally check out Moyoco Anno’s Insufficient Direction It’s all about Hideaki Anno being a huge, endearing otaku who still gets up at 7 am every day to watch new episodes of tokusatsu as they air on tv
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slowly drowning out the sounds of evangelion discourse with increasingly loud audio of Shinji wailing in the cockpit of Unit-01 until i feel hideaki anno’s hand on my shoulder and finally experience real peace
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I guess the reason I’m approaching it from the angle of narrative depth and novelty is because if we’re just going by execution…I mean it has it’s moments but it’s hard for me to say it has more great moments than a lot of shows I’ve watched?
Like staying in the gainax family the gutpunch at the end of Gunbuster completely works for me, and that show also has stunning animation throughout.
It’s fine if folks like it, I’m just trying to express my personal dissatisfaction with the series, and trying to articulate why it didn’t connect.
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one of the story modes in tech romancer is a combined evangelion/ultraman pastiche
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im watching the whole show now and i have a bunch to say but im only gonna say it if we dont have to have the arguement about whether the show is good or not
okay anyway i didnt realize asuka was trans non binary being held back by all the things she thinks women are supposed to do, and of course shes going to egg shinji on about gender, he has what she wants and also she knows hes trans. thats my current headcanon
fuck kaji, but the epsiode where misato has a breakdown (NOT HIM KISSING HER, EVEN THOUGH ID ALSO BE AN IDIOT AND FALL FOR SOMEONE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF A MOMENT OF VULNERABILITY WHILE I WAS DRUNK TOO) made me cry. sorry, i guess i just had a similar breakdown last week! WHOOPS! i love being a trainwreck!
i cant deal with how asuka stands exactly like me (hands on hips, always getting onto objects) i cant wait to be completely fucking called out by her mental breakdown
i understand what happens as the show goes on and i will report with how much i do or dont like it. oh OH! one of the coolest moments in the show was when the 01 unit got all fucked up and they were carring this HUGE HUGE melty chest piece with holes in it, and earlier that day i was ASSEMBLING THAT SAME CHEST PLATE PIECE on a robot, and i instantly imagined like, the scale of the rest of the robot, how small of a piece of the eva that HUUUUGE PLATE WAS and got this rush like when you look at a really tall redwood
episode 16 was great. its starting to finally get weird
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yeah prepare for it to get great and then misunderstand what made it great and flounder trying to recapture its own energy while possibly fucking up in also interesting ways
or uh, don’t. honestly the worst thing about the show was just trying to shut all of the inane online commentary and OPINIONS i’d absorbed out of my head while i watched, because the raw experience by itself is still far more interesting than any discussion i’ve read about it
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i have been trying to avoid exposing daphny to internet commentary about eva so they can just make up their own mind instead of hearing the result of decades of insufferable anime nerd arguing because experiencing it pure was very nice when i watched it for the first time as a teenager
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