One thing I really like about Miyazaki is that he makes his female characters actual human beings instead of the weird caricatures of women that most anime does.
Depictions of youth sexuality are tricky. Shinji is supposed to be the character the audience identifies with and he’d be as horny and confused as anyone else his age. Shinji recognizing himself as a sexual being and seeing others as sexual beings is traumatic and that’s juxtaposed with the more traumatic realization that the fate of the world is in his hands. He’s between the latent and genital stages of psychosexual development. We see a lot of the world through Shinji’s eyes and that means we see how he sees the girls and women in the world. It’s an explicit adoption of an early teen male gaze. This causes a problem because accurately reproducing that gaze requires sexualizing children. I think the show could have depicted Shinji’s psychosexual development without adopting his gaze and been just as good but I can see where the writers were coming from.
Its not something i feel comfortable going "well actually..." to, but the use of sexuality is almost tasteful by anime standards. A couple of moments made me squirm because they went too far but a lot of it had good reason to be there
I think about that shit a lot, you really make a deal with the devil when you watch anime. I pirate all my anime so at least I'm not supporting gross stuff like that
We’re the young girls actually sexualized, though? I remember thinking that as a teenager, and then on rewatch being surprised by how deliberately non-sexy everything except Misato‘s creeping on Shinzo was.
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One thing I really like about Miyazaki is that he makes his female characters actual human beings instead of the weird caricatures of women that most anime does.
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Oh shit, he did? That's both hilarious and disappointing at the same time lol. Oh well, they say never meet your heroes for a reason I guess.
Depictions of youth sexuality are tricky. Shinji is supposed to be the character the audience identifies with and he’d be as horny and confused as anyone else his age. Shinji recognizing himself as a sexual being and seeing others as sexual beings is traumatic and that’s juxtaposed with the more traumatic realization that the fate of the world is in his hands. He’s between the latent and genital stages of psychosexual development. We see a lot of the world through Shinji’s eyes and that means we see how he sees the girls and women in the world. It’s an explicit adoption of an early teen male gaze. This causes a problem because accurately reproducing that gaze requires sexualizing children. I think the show could have depicted Shinji’s psychosexual development without adopting his gaze and been just as good but I can see where the writers were coming from.
Its not something i feel comfortable going "well actually..." to, but the use of sexuality is almost tasteful by anime standards. A couple of moments made me squirm because they went too far but a lot of it had good reason to be there
I think about that shit a lot, you really make a deal with the devil when you watch anime. I pirate all my anime so at least I'm not supporting gross stuff like that
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We’re the young girls actually sexualized, though? I remember thinking that as a teenager, and then on rewatch being surprised by how deliberately non-sexy everything except Misato‘s creeping on Shinzo was.
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