Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Trigger warning: unpopular opinion Evangelion is not amazing. It's not even good. It's a mess of unintelligible symbolism and characters that are so over the top that it becomes immersion-breaking. The first half of it is just Angel of the Week. The only good I can say about it is that the angels at least looked kinda cool since they were designed by Mohiro Kitoh, author of Bokurano. But even that gets stupid after a while. Like here’s an angel that's a computer virus. And here's an angel that's a shadow thing. Points for creativity I guess. Something I hear this show getting praised for isits symbolism, which baffles me. There is so much symbolism that means nothing that it just gets ridiculous after a while.
“But didn't you like Penguindrum? Didn't that have excessive symbolism in it too? How can you call Eva bad when you said penguindrum was good?”
The difference is that penguindrum feels like it's trying to say something with its symbolism. In Eva it's just confusing and pointless. Why is there religious symbolism? Why are they called angels? When is there this thing called “Adam” that’s never explained? There’s so many attempts at sounding deep and trying to be smart and symbolic that it just gets laughable.

Not to say that it has no redeeming qualities at all. The midway twist of the Evas being angels was really cool and didn’t come out of nowhere like it would have in some other anime. It wasn’t like every other mecha show out there, which is more than can be said for anything else besides Bokurano. Unfortunately, it did get predictable after a while. Like oh no, the Eva went out of control during testing? Oh no it did again? And again? It just got old after a while.

Who knows, maybe I just don’t understand the depth and complexity of the story. Maybe the symbolism all makes sense. Maybe the ending isn’t complete and utter shit. Oh yeah, did I mention how confusing the ending is? Like the fucking chair scene that was supposed to be deep and philosophical or whatever but ended up being so retarded that I ended up laughing through the whole thing. Quite the psychological drama if I do say so myself.

To conclude, Evangelion is a grossly overrated series. It is by no means a “bad” show, but does not deserve the amount of praise it’s given. 8.32, really? Why the fuck is this rated higher than Penguindrum? I don’t understand.

tl;dr anyone who gave Evangelion a 10 really has no idea what makes a good story