Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Evangelion is my favorite show of all time. I absolutely love it to death. I don't think I've ever watched something that emotionally resonated with me as much as this. It's a show that is deeply, painfully human. The characters of NGE are incredibly well developed, and are also some of the most realistically flawed, compelling, and deeply traumatized human beings I've ever seen in an anime, and the way the show explores their psyche is utterly flawless. Shinji in particular is one of the most interesting and complex characters I've seen anywhere, alongside Misato and Asuka. Couple all of that with amazing writing, meaningfulthemes, and beautiful directing and you've got yourself a timeless classic.

That's not to say the show is devoid of flaws, though (except EoE, which is actually just fucking perfect). Sometimes it can be a little repetitive, and there are definitely some less than stellar episodes, like Magmadiver (and most of the episodes between 7-13, which is my least favorite part of the show). The animation also started getting noticeably recycled due to the production issues that they went through after the first half (even though the second half is by far the most intriguing and engaging part of the show), and most of all, there's the fact that a lot of crucial information about the story isn't really ever revealed and can only be found outside of the show (like in booklets and the N64 game), which is a shame, since I do enjoy trying to piece together the plot of Evangelion. I know the overall story isn't integral to Eva, and that the core of the show are its characters and themes, but I still believe that it was a bad decision to make it so unnecessarily cryptic.

But on a more positive note, let's quickly talk about the action. Even though Eva doesn't focus too much on fight scenes, it still has some of the best in the business: the animation is on point, and everything feels very visceral and brutal, which sets the show apart from other mechas since they usually have a heavy focus on being unrealistically over-the-top. I love the organic designs and overall feel of the Evangelions and monsters on the show. Not only that, but a lot of these fight scenes are heavily impactful on an emotional level. Episodes 3, 18, 19, 22, and 24 are some examples that stand out to me the most in that regard.

Now, it's no secret that Eva is a very controversial show, with a lot of people who either love it or hate it. I have a lot of stuff to say in regards to this, but I'd like to begin by giving my two cents on this whole "you just don't get Eva/2deep4u" debate. This is something that people will often hear from fans of the show when they say they didn't like Evangelion, but the thing is, I think there's a huge misunderstanding when it comes to what exactly it means to "get" Eva, both on the part of the fan and the hater. "Getting" Evangelion has a lot more to do with your personal connection to the show than it has with supposedly being smart enough to understand it. The reason people love the show as much as they do is often because of a deep emotional connection they were able to form with it, and not because they are some superior 200 IQ galaxy brain being that was able to understand some obscure hidden message giving you the answer to the meaning of life that the mere plebeians and unwashed masses weren't capable of comprehending. I've always had the opinion that in order for someone to be able to fully enjoy and appreciate Eva, that person needs to have or have had a terrible, life-crippling depression at some point in their lives. If this applies to you, then your chances of loving Evangelion become much greater (bonus points if you watch the show as a teenager, because by the time people reach adulthood they've most likely already learned to deal with these issues and so the themes of Eva aren't gonna be as impactful). It's simply not a show that was made for everyone, and this is the reason I feel a bit apprehensive when it comes to recommending the series to people, despite being my favorite anime of all time. The fact of the matter is, if you're the kind of person who's never had to deal with depression, suicidal thoughts, or issues of loneliness and self-acceptance, if you've never fallen into the trap of trying to deal with your problems through escapism and running away from reality, if you're an extrovert who has an easy time making friends and interacting with other human beings... in other words, if you're just an overall well adjusted individual with good mental health, then the whole situation may just boil down to the fact that Evangelion was not made for you, and therefore you're not gonna "get" it. It really is as simple as that. Maybe the fan understands this on a sort of subconscious level, but they often don't really know how to express it, so they just oversimplify the entire discussion to "you're just too stupid to get it", when in reality, it's just that the hater isn't the kind of person that Eva was made for, since they didn't really have to deal with these issues and life experiences that you need to have gone through to be able to form this personal connection with the show.

With all of that being said, the lengths that some people go to try to paint Eva as some terrible, pretentious, overrated, worthless piece of media can often be pretty ridiculous, and it's insanely frustrating to talk to people that didn't like the show and, instead of just recognizing and admitting that it wasn't something made for them, proceed to come up with genuinely very stupid takes to justify their hatred for it. It's very common to see people with tired and predictable opinions like "Shinji is a little bitch", "the characters are annoying", "the show is boring", "the plot makes no sense", "the ending is terrible", "the religious symbolism is meaningless", etc. Some of these complaints have merit, and some are batshit retarded. Out of these, the only two complaints that I find somewhat valid are the ones about religious symbolism (and that's simply because it was never supposed to be very meaningful in the first place, if at all, and is mostly there just to look/sound cool and give the show a unique identity. Spending time complaining about it and saying that it makes Eva "pretentious" only shows that you really did just completely miss the point of the anime) and the narrative being needlessly hard to follow (which doesn't really matter that much since, as I said before, anyone will be able to tell you that the story and lore of Evangelion aren't very important and serve mostly as a backdrop to its real core). About the show being boring, well, that mostly just tells me that you have the attention span of a toddler, but in any case, that's immensely subjective, just like saying "I didn't get invested in the plot". The complaints about the characters are what really get to me, though. Most people are basically just saying "I don't like the characters because they're great representations of actual realistic, well-written, vulnerable, and flawed human beings like any good character should be, and I want all my protagonists to just be rehashes of generic shounen archetypes with no depth who always save the world with the power of friendship", and then they usually proceed to do some idiotic mental gymnastics like "Shinji is a pussy because there are people his age that went to war in the past", which just makes you look like an imbecile and only reminds me of retards who tell you to just "get over your depression" and say shit among the lines of "you have no right to be unhappy about anything in your life because there are kids in Africa that have it worse than you". The show has always been about examining the psyche of heavily flawed and complex characters, which is something that is pretty much already established in Episode 1 and should be extremely obvious to anyone with a functioning brain. But these people, in their infinite wisdom, believe that the way to "fix" Evangelion is to take away those very important elements from the show and replace them with something much worse and less interesting, like "Eva is mainly about exploring a flawed character and what makes him behave the way he does, so how about we just take that out, transform him into an archetypical shounen protagonist, and just turn the show into generic mecha crap? Yeah, that's definitely a great idea".

So that's the thing, while a lot of people can't connect to Eva because it wasn't made for them, I believe there's a considerable group of anime fans who ironically don't like it for the exact opposite reason, which is the fact that they are precisely the kind of sad otaku who base their entire lives on escapism and running away from reality, this being exactly what the series as a whole comments on and the kind of people that it's trying to reach out to. They only criticize Shinji as much as they do because they heavily identify with him, but they're afraid of admitting it, and they don't want to put in the effort to use this character's flaws and his journey on dealing with them as an inspiration to work on bettering themselves, nor are they humble enough to admit that they see quite a bit of themselves in him and that they would act in the exact same way he does if they were put in his situation. It's pathetically childish, and only reminds me of another character from the show: Asuka. The entire point of her character is that she's extremely insecure about herself, and uses a false sense of superiority as a way to mask what she really has, which is an inferiority complex. These people are so desperate to project themselves into these flawless "badass" archetypes to fulfill their escapist fantasies that when they're presented with a character that goes directly against that it's almost as if they're being personally attacked, since they're pretty much looking into a mirror.

Okay, while I'm still worked up, let me talk about something else that I hate: the original English dub of Evangelion. I fucking DESPISE that garbage. Now, unless we're talking about supremely rare exceptions like Cowboy Bebop, you shouldn't be watching anything dubbed anyway, since it dilutes the work of the original actors and staff by replacing them with a horrible script read by D List voice actors who can't do a believable reading of lines to save their lives, and dubs often lack most of the emotional impact of the original performances. Eva's dub is especially infuriating for me though, not only due to the myriad of translation mistakes that make the entire thing unnecessarily hard to understand or the extremely cheesy and laughable acting that undermines the (mostly) serious and grounded tone of the show, but also because of my biggest problem with it by far which is Spike Spencer as Shinji. Good fucking lord, his performance actually gives me ear cancer. I strongly believe that he contributed to this senseless narrative of Shinji being a "whiny bitch". His whole performance makes it seem like he is precisely the kind of person who watched the show and came to that retarded conclusion, and he made it his mission to make Shinji sound as insufferable as possible because that's all the character was to him. I really, really fucking hate it. I haven't watched the Netflix dub, so I can't really comment on that too much, but from the few snippets I've seen of it, it seems about a thousand times better than the pathetic excuse for a dub that is the ADV one. Please, for the love of god, just don't watch Eva's old dub.

But anyway, that's enough venting for now. Let me talk about the last two episodes. My views on them are a little complicated, and have changed a lot over time. Prior to watching Eva, I had already heard that they were supposed to be terrible and that everyone hated them, so I expected very little. Once I actually finished the show however, I didn't find these episodes to be so bad. I thought they were okay. I could definitely appreciate what they were going for and could see the artistic value in them, even if I found them to be fairly anti-climactic. Maybe that's just because of my low expectations, or maybe because I knew there was supposed to be a movie which was the """true ending""" to the series after that which I guess made me more lenient towards these episodes, I don't know. The interesting thing though is that during my subsequent watches of Eva I actually kind of started loving them and being really content with them as an ending. But then, after ruminating about it some more and even more re-watches, I started having a more negative outlook on these episodes for the exact same reason as to why I loved them before: they are WAAAY too positive, which makes the ending feel very naïve. End of Evangelion presents a much more grounded and realistic ending to Shinji's character arc in my opinion, because he is actually confronted about and has to suffer and deal with all his flaws as a person, like the fact that he is extremely self-centered, always wants help and attention from others but is never willing to help them in return, since he wants others to love him before he learns to love himself. But what really makes the movie so much more fitting to me is the fact that it kind of "updates" the message of these episodes in the sense that it makes it very clear that people will still inevitably hurt and betray you, but it's still worth it to reject escapism and live within reality nonetheless, since you can't have the payoff of happiness if you don't go through painful things sometimes, that's just how life is. The show's ending might be great to help someone dealing with depression due to how positive and wide-eyed it is, but thematically speaking, EoE presents a much more mature and better written ending while at the same time providing an amazingly gripping epic finale that doesn't entirely rely on its metatext to give you a meaningful experience, which is sadly what the last two episodes do, in my view.

At the end of the day though, whatever issues Eva might have are fairly small. This show blew me away completely. It seriously changed the way I view and judge all sorts of media, since this was so unbelievably good that it made my general standards go up considerably. I would be surprised if I ever watched something that had as much impact on me as this show. Evangelion is one of the most densely packed pieces of media I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing, and is unironically a work of genius. I will probably continue to watch and love this until the day I die.