I can relate to that loser in many ways, but I think the biggest hurdle that prevented me from fully taking the show seriously or it having any impact on me was the scale of the larger problem.
Like yeah, he was depressed, lonely, and abused, but at the same time… there are also literal demons about to the end the world. Yes, yes I know they’re metaphors for whatever. But come on. You cannot make the problem so grand, so earth shattering, and expect me to care about his depression. It’s the equivalent of feeling sorry for Jesus because he got nailed to a cross - suck it up, or else we all suffer.
Unironically, get in the fucking robot.
Though I guess this circles back to the problem of Omelas. Hmm
. I looked this up to see if anyone had made more coherent analysis comparing the show and story, but surprisingly, not many."I would like to end the world because my father is a dick"
Get in the robot Shinji. This is literally the fate of all mankind, including yourself. Your options are to let everyone die and then you die 3 minutes later or get in the robot, be scared, and possibly live.
if we have to conscript child soldiers and we choose to conscript child soldiers maybe all mankind should fuck off
I don't care if the Nazis razed their homes, killed their families, and will literally kill them tomorrow unless this position holds, I will not have a 14 year old boy join the Red Army. - robot_dog_with_gun
Child soldiers suck but if the only other option is literally just them being killed it's a moot point.
meh, if it's gotten to that point, we're already doomed. every institution has already failed to leave that choice to a child. at that point I'm less interested in the psychology of the kid (who's obviously fucked mentally) and much more interested in the story of how things got to that point.
IIRC child soldiers weren't the only option.
But then NERV was never about saving the world, it was about fighting back juuuuust enough to create an opportunity for the absolute and final domination of the collective souls of humanity by a shadowy cabal who would be the immortal rulers of paradise. And also Gendo's big widower energy.
I think that's part of it? Like I haven't seen it but Shinji's choices are objectively wrong but also make sense because he's a flawed human. So you're supposed to disagree with him but also sympathize but also disagree with him.
I definitely agree. I can understand why people relate with him now that I think about other morally gray characters I can empathize with. For example, Joel from the TLOU. He basically doomed mankind, but if I was in his situation I would’ve done the same exact thing, even if I had the knowledge of what the consequences would be.
I can relate to that loser in many ways,
the fucking shooter whaaaaaaat?
I think the biggest hurdle that prevented me from fully taking the show seriously
oh
So people making the objectively wrong choice and putting everyone and themselves at risk is too unrealistic too you?
No, it’s not unrealistic. But I feel like something high stakes like this would resort in extreme measures. Mr. Robot is basically Hacker Evangelion, and I think it shows a tad bit more realistic situation - the protagonist and his colleagues are constantly tortured, harassed, manipulated, etc. to do something because the stakes are high. Similar things happen in Evangelion but I don’t know, maybe i expected humanity to treat their teenage saviors like Jesus.
I wanna make a show called Evangelion Proto-Revelation, where Shinji REALLY WANTS to pilot a giant robot but his loving father won't let him cuz it's too dangerous. Also he has a healthy relationship with his red headed roommate despite the mild sexual tension between them.
ASUKA HELP ME PLEASE ASUKA HELP ME YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN HELP ME (SINCE I DON'T KNOW WHERE REI IS)
REI is just down the street but how would a snappy pair of Lowa hiking boots have helped Shinji
Asuka condemns Hamas, but only because Asuka condemns everyone who isn't herself.
This is the parkland shooter interrogation, the kid was a fucking piece of shit. I believe in restorative justice, not for him. I dont care about what led him there.
I often can't believe some Japanese guy thought of this and was ok with making it. Like, really dude?
Then I think of some American guy who wrote the book "It".
[CW: child SA]
spoiler
JAPANESE CHARACTER AFTER JERKING OFF IN FRONT OF A COMATOSE GIRL: "God I'm so fucked up"
AMERICAN CHARACTERS AFTER HAVING A CHILD GANGBANG: "This was totally a necessary scene"
American author being interviewed about writing that scene: "I wrote that? Jesus I need to quit cocaine!"
In the corgi dimension all the corgis are on the other side of a wall with only a small narrow window to look through so you can't even see that many of them at once
Do people argue that that scene in It is necessary? Cuz I've never seen it included in any adaptation or reference (thank god)
Does that really happen in the anime? I watched the anime series (no movies) and I don't remember it at all thankfully.
It's in the End of Evangelion movie. It's not in the TV series, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the comic.
The comic technically started release first, but didn't finish until like 2013. It has little differences throughout, and it's ending is pretty similar to EoE. If you are into the franchise enough to watch the rebuild movies, it's probably worth a quick read.
I cut things off at EoE. That and the series are a full story and I ain't need more.
Valid! I only read the comic because they talked about it on the Ghost Divers podcast lol
There are a lot of things I'll check out extraneous stuff just to see what's up. With Eva it feels like I'm doing it a disservice. The same 22 year old Japanese co-worker who wasn't aware that Kurosawa was well known outside of Japan and has seen all the extra crap exemplifies why not. When she found out I was familiar cause she was humming the theme and I joined in she asked who my favorite character is. I don't have a favorite character in this, it's a story about people thst are pretty hard to like. She's s big Asuka fan and it shows and we've had running gags over who is who, our Shinji is a 35 year old dude who is basically Rich Evans cause it would be funny. I'm Misato and Peddy who's Phillipino, doesn't talk much and is an absolute powerhouse on the line is Rei
Actually, rebuilds are their own story and worth the watch. Third one went off the rails into Gurren Lagann and ending of the fourth was a nice final ending of entire franchise.
tbh every time I worry I'm writing something that's too weird for people and everyone will think I'm weird for writing it I should probably remember that that scene went through a bunch of drafts and multiple rounds of editing before being published a bunch of times and the novel sold like hotcakes and spawned multiple film versions and stop worrying
I think the publisher assumed nobody would get to that scene cuz who the fuck is going to read that big of a book about a murderous clown?
The explanation I've always heard was that it was his response to otakus jerking off to anime characters. I.e. women who can't hurt you with rejection. This is who he sees them as.
From an article in which he is interviewed:
Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.
Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”
Holy SHIT that is a reactionary ass take.
"Waaa we can't murder and kill people for our fascist country and that's why people read Dragon Ball in the subway." grow the fuck up dude, not a single functional adult cares about someone reading Dragon Ball in the subway.
I mean, most functional adults care about people reading pornography in the subway, but the misogynistic norms that imperial Japan
probably I don't know history that wellreproduced had a lot more to do with that being a thing than any vague non-materialistic idea that not being able to have a standing army magically lead to people acting like children.Also who cares if they're "children", ffs. Not a remotely materially relevant thing. Just a vague distaste for someone's vibes.
“Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains
They lost it to China and the Soviet Union. But maybe losing the inter-imperialist rivalry hit them different.
The Americans occupied them and rebuilt them into the neoliberal monstrosity they are today.
The US specifically wanted to avoid the Soviets from entering the Pacific Front because they didn't want them having any possible claims to Japan and potentially having to split the land akin to Europe. Pretty quickly after the US occupation there was a sizable communist movement seeking to gain power through election where they expected the US to hold up their public statements of freedom and democracy. In the end though the US cracked down on the leadership and essentially destroyed the movement. Though pretty pathetic now, the Japanese communist party still receives a decent chunk of the vote, though obviously nothing to actually disrupt the neoliberal hell.
the US specifically asked the soviet union to enter the war in the pacific at the Yalta Conference
The admin was still under FDR at Yalta. Truman was on a very different page than FDR about the Soviets, which led to dropping nuclear weapons to end the war before Soviets could get more involved in the Pacific
You missed the part where the JCP tried to start a Protracted People's War on Stalin's orders, but the completely war-weary Japanese population totally rejected them and they ended up just giving the occupiers an excuse to crack down on themselves. Basically every leftist in Japan was considered a terrorist by the average person until the 80s when enough time had passed that they could rebrand as pacifists, but by that point the political machine of the Liberal Democrats had become all-encompassing.
i think destroying the fleet of an island nation and blockading it was pretty major when japans armies were overseas
The difference is that Evangelion is actually good unlike anything King ever wrote
King is hit or miss but by sheer quantity he has more great books than many writers in their whole catalogue
The Dark Tower series is fantastic. Also, you're in a definite minority. Steven King is well known as one of the greatest authors alive. He's wrote duds but much of his work is regarded as great, like Pet Cemtary, Christine, and Salems Lot.
I read The Shining and The Green Mile and they both sucked ass + L + tchncs.de user
I get that you have fond memories of reading his books but "one of the greatest authors alive"? Really? It's horror schlock for teenagers, it's fun but it's not this groundbreaking literature you're making it out to be.
Lol. The dude literally defined a genre. Why do you think he's got like a dozen movies made based on his books and several TV series?
Amount of books sold and movies made doesn't make him one of the greatest authors alive. Harry Potter sold well too and tbh they're kinda mediocre books now that I'm an adult. Also by your metric the Twilight series is one of the greatest book series ever made.
All of those are books for kids, maybe young adults, and those demographics don't really have the greatest taste in art.
Steven King is well known as one of the greatest authors alive
Your argument would be more persuasive if you knew how to spell his name :)
He has a book On Writing that is very, very good. He goes through his writing process, discusses other authors, gives advice of the trade, etc. He openly admits he's merely okay/good at writing and that there's eons of better authors than him. He is being humble, but he's not the greatest writer alive by any means. He talks a lot about luck, name recognition, etc. that continue to propel him, and other shit ass authors, ahead.
The Dark Tower series is fantastic.
Dark Tower rules. I still think Complete/Uncut The Stand is, bar none, the best shit he's ever written without a doubt. I haven't got to Fairy Tale yet tho.
The Dark Tower series is fantastic
i keep hearing this but i swear king has the dullest writing style of any author i've ever read. i suffered through the entire first book and when i got to the end all i could think was that i had picked up the wrong book by mistake bc there's no way people could be lavishing praise on that shit
to each their own ofc but king feels like one of those authors whose work is conceptually interesting but terribly executed imo
He may not be your cup of tea, but he is for millions of others. I just looked up his total books sold. It's currently around 400,000,000. One of the top 20 fiction authors of all time.
did you think i was unaware of who i was criticizing or something? "the bible has sold the most out of any book ever, so that makes it the best book of all time. the super bowl routinely ranks among the most watched programs ever, so that must make it the best television ever aired"
none of these are the arguments for quality you seem to think they are. popularity and quality are not the same thing. i already said i don't begrudge his fans, i just don't understand them. i've tried reading a handful of king's books but i find i'd inevitably rather be nailing my dick to a wall every single time
See the turtle, ain’t he keen? All things serve the fuckin’ Beam.
I do love the DT as a series, but I certainly like some books more than others. The Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass are among my favorite fiction novels, while I’m not crazy about of Song of Susannah.
And the patron saint of Hexbear, Matt Christman, is a Dark Tower fan.
Stephen King struggle session! Stephen King struggle session!
I’m not going to defend that part of It, of course. And he’s written a ton of crap that tends to follow along with when he got sober (good for him, but bad for his writing). But I gotta say, books like The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and the first 4 Dark Tower books especially 1 and 4…. more than any other books I’ve read, I was unable to put them down. Like, I would try and find time on the toilet or waiting around some to find out what happens next. He absolutely knew how to tell an engaging story. And as someone else said, like him or not he defined the modern horror genre.
Tbf the whole point of that movie is that Shinji is a horrible person who ends up totally broken due to his inability to even try and confront any of his demons.
That movie was an anime series with a few repeat like filler movies made afterwards, but yeah.
Shinji is a horrible person who ends up totally broken due to his inability to even try and confront any of his demons.
Or he's a very traumatized child who has been thrust into an extremely unhealthy environment, and manipulated every step of the way, and that eventually breaks him. I'm not saying he's a great person, but it's pretty clear that he never stood a chance from the get-go. He still chose to do what he did in that scene, but it's not done in isolation with everything else he's been through.
I don’t think the show ever sympathized with Shinji. Well, at least I don’t sympathize with him and I didn’t interpret the show that way.
Nah. Shinji was definitely not someone to be sympathized with.
Kids nowadays know everything about evangelion but nothing about John the evangelist 🙏
The Shinji pose is so funny and I've seen so many cosplays of that one specific pose
mostly drawing a blank but i really enjoyed bloom into you, gay romance rocks
prove me wrong
Promised Neverland and Made in Abyss
I'm not sure why people are obsessed with Evangelion, what happened to make it some sort of "meme anime"? I never found it to be remotely popular while growing up, or even in the early 2010s when I did a lot of anime watching
honestly, I've found revolutionary girl utena did everything evangelion was trying to do better. but it was aimed at girls so no one talks about it.
It has a better movie than Evangelion, too.
Madoka is the Evangelion of magical girl anime. It's the one that people approach like "
actually, this one subverts the tropes of GENRE," but the genre has been doing the "damn, it's kinda abusive to expect a kid to be a hero" since the 70s (if not earlier).It's really annoying when people are like "why are these kids saving the world in children's media?" The whole point is to give the kids a power fantasy they can project into while showing good moral actions. The shows that deconstruct it like eva or madoka are useful because society does place a lot of pressure on kids to solve their parent's problems(or the world's problems more generally) and these shows can be used as an example of that, but it makes sense kids wanna see other kids like them with the power to protect themselves and others.
Same goes for people who think it's stupid when Goku makes friends with most of his former antagonists, like Piccolo or Vegeta. It's YA fiction, they're trying to teach these kids that you can find things in common and make friends with people that you used to dislike!
Besides, everyone they murdered got wished back to life eventually. No harm, no foul.
People will never forgive steven universe, a children's show about tolerance, forgiveness, and talking through your problems, for ending without the child killing his family.
The kids thing does intersect with several sets of problematic ideas Japan has though.
it definitely can, that's why the deconstructions are worth something, but that's a problem tied into the society as whole, not a problem of having kids media about kids having adventures.
I was thinking about hoe Japan considers childhood ending way before we do and then the soul crushing exploitation meaning freetime is seen as uniquely adolescent experience
even in the early 2010s when I did a lot of anime watching
I think it was because it was accessible in the early-mid 00s, had great animation, and was edgy enough for the time. It's a great series, but it's definitely derivative of a lot of Tomino stuff.
I've never seen it so i don't know
What I'm talking about is why did it suddenly become an internet cult classic in the last 5 years?
Big expensive sequel movies being completed after a long hiatus, plus the original TV show being available on one of the most popular streaming services.
Edit: Bolded for emphasis since being accessible is a big thing. For teenage me watching it on mailed DVD rentals, and for the teenagers today stumbling upon it on a major streaming service that isn't specifically catering to Japanese animation. Like you have to be a big weirdo to hunt down the original UC Gundam shows - you can just use your normie streaming service to watch Evangelion.
Interesting. Do you know when netflix (I'm assuming this is the service you meant) started hosting evangelion?
There's a new English dub that they did - so it looks like 2019ish
ok that makes perfect sense and lines up with when I noticed this trend, thanks
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
A show called made in abyss about exploring a maiden's abyss is not as god a pun as it seemed years ago
studio trigger has some bangers. kill la kill and promare stand out as amazing leftist anime that directly call for revolution.
one piece is also leftist and clearly calling for revolution but it's long and will take a couple more years to wrap up.
Would not call Kill la Kill ‘leftist’. Heard that before and tried watching with a girlfriend and had to shut it off because it’s WAY too horny for seemingly underaged girls.
Read a bit about it afterwards and something said the writer liked how Fashion and Fashism sounded similar and so the show is maybe against fascism but the horny talking sentient 400 year old clothes that occupy a teen girl and give her powers is creepy and we noped out.
Can’t imagine there’s any sort of actual leftism in the show, and if there is it shouldn’t be bundled with sex pest demon clothing.
I almost stopped watching for the same reason but let it play for another episode because it came on the recommendation of a good friend. there's a particular conversation in 3rd episode that changed my mind because it recontextualized what was happening from the sexualization of girls to the same girls dealing with being sexualized while grappling with their own sexuality. you can decide for yourself whether the way the show handles it works for you but, personally, the show went a long way towards getting me to stop caring about how others saw me as a then baby trans. there's also a noticeable change in how the camera (and the bystanders) treats the characters after that conversation -- it stops leering at them and starts to behave more the way you'd expect from like a Shonen battle anime. desexualized nudity is rather the point of the show, what with demon clothing trying to eat everyone -- no one gets to keep their clothes past a certain point. it doesn't have to work for everyone, it just did for me.
as for the leftism, it's not just because they're fighting fascists -- the show is critical of capitalism, shows it's decay into fascism, and spends a lot of time on the internecine squabbles between different kinds of leftists, before the eventual revolution.
Steel Ball Run
I guess there's nothing more modern than anime that is going to get adapted in god knows how many years into the future.
Golden Kamuy is excellent. Made for a mostly adult audience iirc, but not in a horny way.
Remember seeing that as an 8 year old and thinking it was sweat lmao I only found out after reading a summary ten years later.
Tbh it felt to me like tons of symbolism to hide a lack of actual depth
AFAIK it was more like tons of symbolism to hide a lack of budget and time. It got janky and weird because they literally weren't given the resources to finish it properly. But then they were also trying to be weird and obtuse in general as an aesthetic, to the point where there really couldn't be a satisfying and comprehensible ending because you can't explain what was going on because that ruins the whole baffling mysticism feel and you can't just sort of resolve the tangible material conflicts without addressing all the weird mystic shit either, so instead they just went off the deep end and made completely incomprehensible nonsense with a shoestring budget and became iconic for it, so they just leaned into it even harder when they were given the resources to do more.
so instead they just went off the deep end and made completely incomprehensible nonsense with a shoestring budget and became iconic for it
Just look at Space Runaway Ideon's TV ending if you want the "try to stick the landing with the budget we have left." It's mid, and Tomino was lucky to be able to do a double-movie to fix the ending (the second movie is probably one of the best sci fi anime movies).
The TV ending for Evangelion is hands-down one of the best things they did in the franchise.
so they just leaned into it even harder when they were given the resources to do more.
To see what they do when they actually have money, check the rebuilds, which have a very different kind of resolution, but I find them pretty good, too.
Have those finished yet? I think I saw up through the third one, then the next one was delayed by like 5 years or more.
what can I say?
