Hello

Unit-99999999

Unit-99999999

Brigade Leader
Hello everyone!

I wasn’t really into anime but last year somebody at work recommended me Neon Genesis Evangelion and while I never liked certain parts of it (Religious references were ridiculous most of the time), the first 20 episodes were great. And then it kind of fell apart by the end with pretty much the worst ending of any tv series I’ve ever seen. The final movie was bizarre and left me with rather negative impression.

Fast forward to today, I forgave Evangelion for all its problems and am currently waiting for Evangelion 3.0+1.01 which is coming this Friday. The franchise is quite a mess but there are particular elements of it that are really, really good (character development, world building, music, great attention to details and some really cool action scenes).

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of people IRL to discuss it with which is why I signed up here.

Another anime series that I really liked were Sailor Moon Season 1 (I thought the female characters were well-written and the story kept me intrigued) and Darling In The Franxx (in fact, this is one of the best animated series I’ve ever seen - and I loved pretty much everything, including the ending - which is for whatever reason very unpopular opinion on the internet)

What I don’t like in anime though is gigantic series where it’s impossible to catch up (like One Piece which is 10 000 episodes long) and over sexualization of female characters (hard to give an example as it does happen quite often in the series oriented at 14+ teens, but just recently I opened Daeling In The Franxx manga and was quite shocked by the amount of nudity in it. Which also made me sad because these are great female characters and objectifying them like that is just disrespectful to fans, imo - especially after the show gave them distinct interesting personalities)

If you have any recommendations for me based on the little I’ve written here, let me know :)

Nice to meet you all!
 
Greetings, fellow fan! Welcome to the forum! You might like Princess Tutu as it's also a magical girl show directed by Junichi Sato, it's got a different vibe to Sailor Moon, but particularly since you liked Evangelion I reckon it's worth giving it a shot :)
 
Hm... Interesting. Never heard of it before. Seems like the story centered around ballet or something. I will add this to the list of things to watch. Thank you for recommendation!
RadFemHedonist said:
Greetings, fellow fan! Welcome to the forum! You might like Princess Tutu as it's also a magical girl show directed by Junichi Sato, it's got a different vibe to Sailor Moon, but particularly since you liked Evangelion I reckon it's worth giving it a shot :)
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Hello, @Unit-99999999, and welcome to AUKN.

We have some rather similar views there, it seems. The issues with the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion are indeed well documented. These days, I find it to be a fascinating exercise in damage limitation, but I'm glad that The End of Evangelion came along to replace the last two episodes. For me, the tone of the TV ending goes against the tone of what comes before it, and I find EoE to be more in keeping with the general downward spiral of the story. It does still have some issues of its own, mind.

My favourite Evangelion ending is actually the one in the manga. Have you read any of it? I could easily recommend it to you. Like yourself, I'm awaiting 3.0+1.0 imminent release on Prime Video.

Great to see that you like Darling in the FranXX. Me too. I wasn't so keen on it later episodes on my first watch, nor the ending, but I really like the whole thing now. Again, like yourself, it's one of my favourite anime.

As for the FranXX manga, I haven't read it, but I'd like to; I'd love to see it get a printed release in English. I wasn't aware of the fanservice issue with it, but I suppose it's not too surprising given that the artist, Kentarō Yabuki, also draws the To LOVE-Ru manga.

If you're looking for a quality anime free from the hyper-sexualisation of female characters, I'd heartily recommend another big favourite of mine, Mob Psycho 100. Here's a link to its listing on anime database MyAnimeList:
myanimelist.net

Mob Psycho 100

Eighth-grader Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama has tapped into his inner wellspring of psychic prowess at a young age. But the power quickly proves to be a liability when he realizes the potential danger in his skills. Choosing to suppress his power, Mob's only present use for his ability is to impress his...
myanimelist.net myanimelist.net

I enjoyed reading your post, dude. 🙂
 
Neil.T said:
We have some rather similar views there, it seems. The issues with the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion are indeed well documented. These days, I find it to be a fascinating exercise in damage limitation, but I'm glad that The End of Evangelion came along to replace the last two episodes. For me, the tone of the TV ending goes against the tone of what comes before it, and I find EoE to be more in keeping with the general downward spiral of the story. It does still have some issues of its own, mind.
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Glad to know that our views on Evnagelion align so closely! I'm thankful to you for the thread you've created and for sharing those pamphlets - it was a real surpise for me because I always knew that they had to change the TV ending because of budget or something but I've seen so many people on Evangelion Reddit actually believing that the TV series' ending is what was intended from the beginning and the movie was just way to keep angry fans silent. Somebody even said that he thinks the show was about mental issues from the very beginning and the robots was just a disguise to make it more mainstream LOL. By the way, the thing that made me believe that End of Evangelion was a real ending is that we actually see elements from it in the TV intro (you can see tree of life, Unit-01 with wings).

Now that you said it, I agree that Evangelion as a whole seems to be going downward spiral. However I still believe the movie went way too far. The hospital scene made it near impossible to root for Shinji as the character became some sort of sick pervert. I saw people defending the scene and I undertsand what it was meant to do but for me personally it served rather the opposite effect and I started dislike the guy.

Another character that was ruined by the movie is Misato. What I didn't know when I watched it for the first time is that the age of consent in Japan is 14 years old. Weird but OK. There is another problem though - Shinji never liked Misato in a sexual kind of way - and it seems like she was OK with that (in fact, I often thought of Shinji as brat for not appreciating enough what Misato did for him - which is letting him live with her and offering her support). What makes the scene even worse is that Kaji died like, what, 3 episodes before that? I thought it just made Misato look very bad.

The part I really liked about End of Evangelion is how Asuka's story has ended. Not the ending of the battle (which was heartbreaking), but the fact that she realized that the soul of her mother was in Unit-02 which helped her to regain Sync rate and came out of the lake stronger than she's ever been before. The battle that followed was very violent but it was very well done technically - animation is amazing.

Sorry for such a long post about this movie. I just have a lot of thoughts about it and it's difficut to find people who agree tolook at the series crtitically - I noticed that many fans are trying to justify every single detail and looking for secret meaning but many others label Evangelion as garbage and refuse to believe that some stuff there is really, really well done
 
Neil.T said:
My favourite Evangelion ending is actually the one in the manga. Have you read any of it?

As for the FranXX manga, I haven't read it, but I'd like to; I'd love to see it get a printed release in English. I wasn't aware of the fanservice issue with it, but I suppose it's not too surprising given that the artist, Kentarō Yabuki, also draws the To LOVE-Ru manga.
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No, I haven't read manga for Evangelion. I tend to view manga as a sort of fan-fic made to profit off the series. I don't have a lot of knowledge on how it works but I know that manga are usually written by other people. So in this case, the creator's vision was realized in the series and then the rights were sold to some publishing agency to write a manga to profit off the popularity of the show - which is not a bad thing in any way! It's just that... I finished 3.33 lass than a week ago and there is still a lot of stuff I don't undertsand about Rebuilds and even the original show. So I'm trying to focus on that first - and your forum helps me with that.

And the FranXX manga... Based on Reddit comments I've seen my opinion on it is rather an outlier and people seem to like manga's ending better than the show. Maybe you will agree with them.

P.S. I've seen some pages from Evangelion manga some time ago and the fact that Unit-01 came to the rescue in the final battle with MPEs was super duper cool. I didn't see all the details, just few pages. I think they should have done it in the movie. But maybe they tried to make it less predictable or something. Still kind of weird that Unit-01 was practically useless for the main characters.
 
@Unit-99999999:

I'm really pleased that you've found value in the Eva thread, buddy; that's a really nice compliment to get. 🙂

Yeah, those cinema pamphlet translations are really interesting, and confirm that Gainax themselves viewed EoE as replacing TV episodes 25 and 26 in the story. Another hint in those two episodes that there was something that we were missing is the two cuts of Misato and Ritsuko both apparently having been shot dead. This had no explanation until EoE was released.

As for the actual content of the film, I think that a lot of it is intended to shock and surprise. I don't actually have any particular problem with the scene of Shinji at Asuka's bedside myself, because I think it shows how removed Shinji has started to become regarding the consequences of his actions on other people. I actually take more issue with the revelation of why Gendō treated Shinji as badly as he did; for me, that kind of flies in the face of what we were shown during the series. That's just my personal view, though.

Moving on to Misato and her relationship with Shinji, the kiss is another shocking development within EoE. It came completely out of the blue to me, but there are those that will tell you that it was prefaced by episode 23, where Misato tries to comfort Shinji following the death of Rei II. See this analysis on Evageeks.org as an example:

Theory and Analysis:Sexuality In Misato and Shinji's Relationship - EvaWiki - An Evangelion Wiki - EvaGeeks.org

wiki.evageeks.org wiki.evageeks.org

I totally agree with you that many Eva fans believe that there's a great depth of significance in every tiny detail, and I find myself disagreeing with quite a lot the apparent over-analysis.

You also brought up some things about the Eva manga. There was once a time when anime series were often based on a manga; an animation studio would approach a manga publisher seeking to adapt a completed or ongoing comic into a TV or straight-to-video animation. These days, though, the manga is usually conceived at the same time as the anime at the planning stages by the production committee. Evangelion and Darling in the FranXX are but two examples of this.

In the case of Eva (and this usually is the case generally these days), the manga actually began serialisation in Japan before the first episode of the anime was broadcast in order to use it as a promotional tool. What makes the Eva manga especially interesting for me, though, is that it was both written and drawn by the anime's character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, who was given free rein to do what he wanted with its story. This is why you'll see that the characters in the manga often react to situations quite differently from their anime counterparts. For example, Shinji is more driven and decisive than he is in the anime. Asuka and Kaji also have different backstories compared to the anime.

Darling in the FranXX is another example of a manga that differs greatly from the anime, as is FLCL, another excellent Gainax anime. I'd like to go into some more detail about the anime versus the manga endings of FranXX, but this post has become long enough as it is.

I'll finish by saying that it's great to have you here as we await Evangelion 3.0+1.01, and I hope we can have some fun discussion about it. 🙂

In the meantime, I'll say that if there's anything you feel like you're struggling to grasp about 3.33, please feel free to ask about it in the Eva thread. There are a great many mysteries within the film, some that may only be answered in the finale, and some that we might never get official answers to. I'd love to discuss it with you all the same, though, just for the pure fun of it.
 
Welcome @Unit-99999999, you will find a lot here who will share your love of Eva! I am a complete Eva nut, as I'm sure you will come to see, though that is usually without delving too deeply or over analyzing it heh. But I will just add that I absolutely loved EoE, it's my favourite movie of all time, though it left me a mental wreck for a good while after I first watched it, and that is not something most art forms can easily achieve. Still, it was just so gloom-ridden and stark that I was overjoyed when the first rebuild movie was announced and instantly latched on to the fact that Anno wanted to give us a new ending, hoping for a more positive one. And so I have ever since waited patiently for the final one!

I haven't watched Sailor Moon, but whilst we're taking of magical girls and Eva, it would be a no-brainer to suggest you watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica immediately, just in case you haven't already done so heh.

Will no doubt be catching up with you on the Eva forum.
 
Hello, Hedgehog! Glad to see another Evangelion fan!

Although I do not really consider myself a fan of Evangelion. There is just a lot of things I don't like about it. But there is some super cool stuff and it keeps me thinking about it. Rest assured - I'm VERY excited for 3.0+1.0!

Geriatric hedgehog said:
I absolutely loved EoE, it's my favourite movie of all time, though it left me a mental wreck for a good while after I first watched it
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Yeah, that movie was something. What's interesting is that I thought that everyone died at the end and the only people who survived were Asuka and Shinji. I went to Reddit forums to cry about it and somebody told me "nah, there's just a line you probably missed". Turns out there is a scene where somebody says that anyone can leave Instrumentality at any point if they want. And it just happens that Shinji and Asuka were the first who have done it. So, maybe the ending isn't as bleak as I originally thought. I don't know.

Same as you I'm hoping for a more positive ending this time! And, maybe less complicated (or is it too much to ask? :) )
 
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