Misato has ice, snacks and 50 GALLONS OF BEER in her fridge lmao. Mood. Her car is wrecked and there's a monster that might kill her and all she can think about is car payment loans lol. She's just like me fr. Well, except for the groomer vibes she's giving off.
I'm sure it's gonna get depressing very soon, I hear all the characters suck and half of them are sexpests. Seems like you get a pretty decent understanding of why they suck though. I already dislike Shinji though, dude get in the fucking robot the world is ending. I guess sucking is hereditary, because his dad sucks too, fucking dumbass. Dude if your son is "the chosen one" when it comes to piloting these things and you're all "I must sacrifice everything for the mission" then sacrifice some free time to be with your son so your top pilot is less psychologically messed up.
NERV is in dire need of a psych team though, insane that there isn't a dedicated therapist to help the pilots deal with trauma.
Also it's so beautiful! I miss old anime like this and Akira, everything just gets to breathe. It's so pretty every frame is a painting. The women have noses and they look like women, which is also impressive. Sadly there's still only one body type women can have, but at least they can look humanoid.
Anyway, bit idea: Guy who only watches Evangelion for the fights.
Edit: Okay so Shinji managed to make two friends and they get sent away. The dude needs a support network, how incompetent can his dad be? "Huh my best pilot is getting some friends? Can't have that, we need him to be as mentally unstable as possible!"
Dude needs to be fired.
Double edit: Now on an episode where an EVA goes berserk and tries to attack the dad and he just stands there looking at it and then when it breaks thru to him he's shocked. The guy is absolutely not beating "himbo, but not actually hot, just dumb" allegations
He's a child suffering from PTBS and depression. He barely has the spoons to do anything but lie flat on the floor, yet he is supposed to save the fucking world. ofc he struggles under that weight, that's the normal and expectable reaction in that context and it's honestly surprising that given the enormity of what is asked of him, he somehow manages to pull through. Which he does. He just (very realistically) suffers like a dog while doing it instead of being some dumbass superhero fantasy who always keeps his toothpaste smile in spite of seeing everything he knows being flattened under an apocalyptic onslaught.
The show is a callout of a toxic culture that demands duty and functionality at all times, no matter if the person in question is even remotely capable of it. I don't know if somebody without a history of depression, ADHD or other issues that can actively destroy your ability to perform even the most trivial everyday tasks is capable of understanding this, but it's actually ableist af to expect a boy like him to get reliably retraumatized over and over again without ever complaining about hand-to-hand combat against giant cosmic horrors that need to be drawn with a dwarved aircraft carrier group next to them to demonstrate their mind-rending scale . Shinji acts heroically because he almost always does what is needed, but he doesn't perform the aesthetics of what we think heroism is supposed to look like, he is visibly vulnerable and struggling instead of bottling up his pain and hanging in there for the job and because the show dares to take the needed time to appropriately portray that fight with himself, this has led to several generations of reactionary incels getting mad at him.
Not calling you a reactionary incel, mind you. I understand how you arrive at your impression, i had the same when i watched the show for the first time when i saw it on nighttime TV back in the late 90s and had only the faintest glimpse of what severe executive dysfunction looks like. But that this view is so widespread is a sign of the ableism and toxic masculinity we've all internalized to some degree.
When the Japanese military did a blue curtained rollout of the Evangelion theme with its orchestra, I found I had an extra layer of Joker paint on me.
yeah I know, now get in the robot.
I've got both ADHD and depression, I know what it looks like. I am also capable of observing very obvious signs of trauma, like most people. If you're going to start a discussion, please assume that basic shit isn't lost to me, just because I don't share your point of view.
I've talked to most of your other points a bunch already in this thread. I am neither denying nor downplaying his mental state. I think most people would balk at the idea of going inside a giant robot which will almost certainly kill you, but it is still funny to say "get in the robot". That funny comes in part because the world is seemingly about to end, so buddy get in the robot FFS.
I get it and i'm sorry if i've come across as looking to start a fight. I just feel this stuff needs to be pointed out when there's an Evangelion thread.
No worries, I also apologise for the hostility in my response. I just feel like there's some people who have had the "get in the robot" discussion with chuds a bunch of times, and now I become someone they can unload frustrations onto. So I feel a need to set some very clear boundaries.
I think the show is kinda challenging itself due to the stakes of the world. It's very hard to sympathise with Shinji being afraid to get in the robot, when the entire world is at stake. It's hard to sympathise with him being afraid, when the alternative to getting in the robot is also him dying. On a larger scale I really think his dad doesn't just suck as a father, but also at his job. Dude really needs to be there for his best pilot and the fact he isn't willing isn't a great seal of excellence.
My frustration with Shinji is mainly in the first episode. That's where I'm (internally) screaming "holy shit dude shut the fuck up and get in the robot and then figure out all this shit if you all survive afterwards but get in the robot please".
And then finally the whole arguing from the position that I don't understand basic stuff, but that's in large part me projecting my insecurities onto you and me taking frustrations from the general vibe of discussions on hexbear and generalising my interactions.
I'm sorry for that, but also kinda not. Says something about the duality of man.
Ok you're being sufficiently clear here.
See I find it incredibly easy to sympathise with St. Shinji in this situation because the entire world is at stake, the enormous pressure on the shoulders of some "literally me" mentally fucked up kid with crippling insecurity, mediated only by the disappointment of the absent Father. "Realistically" how would you know that he is even capable of piloting the evil doohicky without any training to even save the world?
"Its hard to sympathise with him being afraid, when the two choices from his POV in the moment both lead to suffering and a painful death."
Ok.
Furthermore:
Its a bit unfair to say that some relatively normal socially estranged 14 year old with chronic insecurity "sucks" because he reacts in a reasonable way to the proposition of fighting to the death with some lovecraftian entity because his deadbeat nutjob dad said so with the weight of saving the literal world on his shoulders.
In this universe, NERV and the UN classify as an "advanced civilization that is too stupid to exist" for making the necessary set of strategic blunders that result in a the fate of the world lying squarely on whether an emotionally unstable chronically insecure untrained 14 year old (famous for being reliable individuals) who needs a loving family more than his own personal nightmare engine will not act like an emotionally unstable chronically insecure 14 year old. Even from the 1st episode, I would say this is reasonably clear.
Your frustration implies that you expected differently.
*>inb4 "yeah i considered all of this but Shinji still sucks."
"Muh both sides". In this situation, I blame civil society, moreso than the individual pilot for the fuckery at hand. Therefore, I think civil society sucks, not the pilot. Nuff said.
Lmk how I misinterpreted "Shinji sucks because he didn't want to get in the robot to save humanity."
Which is strange, because he actually did end up "getting in the robot" at the end of the day, and jobbed hard in EP1 (as expected), so in the end the robot did all the work and we got a sick fight scene.
spoiler for End of Evangelion, SA
That said, Shinji is also a fucking sex pest who masturbates to completion standing next to Asuka's comatose body and when the film calls him out for being a sex pest, it does so with an endless horny fanservice montage of Asuka's, Rei's and Misato's asses, tits and feet. Because anime."This is not being condoned by being presented in the fiction. Now that that's been established, gobble up your not-condoned-but-still-sensationalized hog slop, hogs!"
This is my problem with the Rebuild of Evangelion movies
That really is my biggest problem with Evangelion, it wants to critique the cake and dissect its inner workings but also eat the cake too
Feeding the hogs is profitable, even under pretenses of scolding their hog feeding.