Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

To no one's surprise, Evangelion is a good show. I was surprised by how much I liked the adult trio (Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji). I expected the teenage pilot trio to take up the majority of the spotlight so to see that Misato's arguably the second biggest character in the show surprised me. I thought Misato was the best character in the show. You get time to see her for what she is, flaws and all, and like yeah, maybe she is a hot alcoholic MILF, but damn it, she's more than that. Historically speaking, I'm not a huge fan of tsunderes so I expected not tolike one of the girls responsible for it being so huge in anime but Asuka's actually pretty well written? A good show does tsunderes better than some forgettable dreck, shocker of the century, but she's actually a pretty decent character and I'd argue a necessary addition to the cast. Adding a firecracker like Asuka to the cast made it so much more dynamic when the other 2 pilots are pretty passive. I think if this show just tried to coast on Shinji and Rei being the only main pilots, it would not be nearly as good.

The action is pretty decent. For a show in the mid 90s, you get your money's worth. I don't think it's the highlight of the series but if that's your style, you could do much worse. I thought there were some cool-ass Angels in the mix which it could have just been like some Power Rangers-ass "Eva vs. giant kaiju monster" 17 times, but it's a little more unique than that, which is much appreciated.

However, I think it serves better as a study of all the characters in the show. I think this is no better reflected than the ending (which, coincidentally, is partly why I like the TV show ending more than the movie ending). I'm kind of obsessed with the fact that they were like "fuck! we're out of budget and time... uh... fuck it, we ballin'". Maybe this is in part because I'm not a teen in the 90s and I know what happens in End of Eva so I can have the luxury of seeing the TV show ending for what it is, but idk, I just think it's so cool what they did, they could have easily, like, Xenogears or whatever'd it (I think it's Xenogears that has the PowerPoint or whatever, you know what I'm talking about, right) to where they just try to quickly run through the bullet points of what they wanted to do. If you can successfully do some bullshit Gainax Ending(tm), I consider that a success. That takes courage and skill.

I think my biggest issue is I wish Kaworu was in the show more. Really, my whole perception of how much of each character (except Shinji for obvious reasons) we'd see was flipped. I thought we'd see more teenager and less Misato, Asuka doesn't even show up until like episode 8. I didn't mind how much Asuka/Rei/Misato we got but Kaworu was underutilized, I thought.

Otherwise, yeah, good show. Great characters, solid action, looks good, I'm sure I'm the only person who took this long to watch Eva but if you haven't, it's worth checking out.

Also there's a penguin