Kind of a bizarre question but fuck its Friday and im bored. Serious Evangelion spoilers below, possibly other nerd shit.

So it's been a minute since I've seen all of Evangelion, but I'm familiar enough with Anno's own history and past works to have a somewhat conflicted reading based on what I've remembered about the end. So I always remember hearing before watching it that the endings of Evangelion are pretty strictly anti-collectivist as a lot of the series seems to reject the notion that you can't really ever truly connect with another person and that a forced connection to people that sacrifice people's individuality is a world with no meaning and thus Shinji embraces individuality in order to stop Instrumentality. One particular article I've read, which I don't particularly agree with but I find interesting in its subject matter, discusses the Denpa phenomena in both otaku and their culture. Namely how japanese work culture, a country that is largely low-crime and industrious, has created a particular subset of people who have become intensely socially isolated and have fallen down into extremely dark and isolating rabbit holes that occasionally just explode into intense violence. Denpa is a type of horror sub-genre that trys to capture this extreme pseudo-psychosis caused by social isolation mixing with obsessive otaku culture and trys to commit in ways to diffuse it and Evangelion is generally considered to be the seminal work for it. However from my semi-limited experience with other Denpa, especially in the last year, while a lot of is genuinely trying to diffuse harmful attitudes in otaku particularly misogyny, a lot of it just re-establishes intensely misanthropic internalizations of human interactions and how one relates to the world. Which turns my attention to Evangelion because I do sort of understand how one can come to that conclusion. Keeping in mind Anno was SEVERELY depressed during its production, is an infamously introverted otaku, and some of his earlier works have like weird nationalistic undertones you can read into. But as a socialist seeing the world as portrayed in Eva, how characters often fail to relate to each other in meaningful ways out of fear of rejection rather than an intrinsic futility, and what exactly Instrumentality really is which is just force mashing everybodys consciousness together rather than what anybody would really call collectivism, I've never really seen the ending as being extremely individualistic. But again, how much is just me properly seeing an answer to the problem Anno was describing and the different conclusion he came to?

Here's the article btw, interesting culture read anyways even if i don't particularly agree with how a lot of the art is portrayed. Namely one of the vns below Subahibi, while definitely very intriguing in some rights, also just embraces incredibly nihilistic views on humanity and despite the main villain being deeply misogynistic in a way thats meant to be critical of otaku, the actual story itself is inadvertently pretty sexist in my opinion. https://ontheones.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/on-denpa-a-guest-article-by-kenji-the-engi/

Anyways why did i write this