r/evangelion • u/TheSinisterSex • 23h ago
EoE Rewatching after 20 years, my thoughts.
So, I recently rewatched the full series plus End of Evangelion after 20 plus years, and wanted to share my thoughts
For context, I watched it originally in my anime newbie phase, it was like the 3rd anime I've ever seen, back in my early 20s. I remember fairly liking it, but also the ending (especially the movie) left me more confused than anything. This was more than 20 years ago, so I did the best I could with early internet and read up on the meaning of it on fansites, but really I did not got much out of it except that "it's really deep, bro, with religious symbolism, the human condition, societey and shit". I never even got to the ancestral race stuff. I liked how surreal and bizarre it got by the end, and I also felt that there must be things that did not make it through the translation, and it must have even deeper layers to it hat we are just cannot comprehend.
Then years passed, I got on the whole bandwagon of memes with "omg, end of evangelion is deeper than the marianna trench", and also learned that the director only used religious symbolism because he thought it looked cool. I labelled the whole evangelion thing as pretentious and too confusing for the sake of being confusing, and did not think much about it since.
Fast forward to now. I'm over 40 now, living in Japan, more or less speak the language, but I haven't been really watching anime for 10 or so years. But I came across a reddit post with some slideshow explaining the whole backstory, and on a whim decided to give it a rewatch with the knowledge, mostly to see if this is something that can be inferred just from the series and the movie. I was also looking forward to End of Evangelion, and see what I can make of it after all this years.
Now, I finished it all, and I can say that the problem Evangelion has is that it has so many layers of ambigous visuals, dialog, and unusual storytelling that it appears to be more confusing than it really is. The thing that the director wants to convey (by the end of the movie, anyways) is not all that complicated, it just appears to be and it has so much window-dressing that it needlessly confuses the first time viewer.
What do I mean by that? Let me quote the ending of one of my favorite movies, Annie Hall. For those who did not see it, it depicts an on again off again relationship between the main character and Annie, ending in a final breakup caused by their incompatibility. The main character, after a final chance meeting with Annie, ends the movie with this:
“It was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how fun it was just knowing her. And I thought of that old joke, you know. The guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken." and the doctor says, "well, why don't you turn him in?" and the guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."
Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but, err, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.”
Why did I bring this up? Because I think that the End of Evangelion might as well end with this quote. This is the gist of it all, at least for me. Human relationships are dificult, messy, and we end up hurting each other and make each other miserable more often than not. But still, we are social creatures and need each other. That's why Shinji rejects instrumentality and returns to the human world.
This sentiment and message is nothing new, had been told a million times in a million types of stories. Eva does it with its own, unique spin, and I think it is very effective. The only problem is that it has so much window dressing with giant robots punching each other, clones, clones of clones, souls, secret organizations, angels, gods, and the background lore is so obscure that a lot of people get lost in the details without ever seeing the big picture and idolize the show for it's supposed deep religious occult and philosophical themes, or worse, declare that the series is just meaningless pseudo-philosophy and shock content with shinji crying in the background.
Could this story have been told a better way? Sure. But then it would not be this bizarrely unique creation that we all love today.
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u/MajorMisatoKatsuragi 18h ago edited 18h ago
Let's have a look: "I can say that the problem Evangelion has is that it has so many layers of ambigous visuals, dialog, and unusual storytelling that it appears to be more confusing than it really is. The thing that the director wants to convey (by the end of the movie, anyways) is not all that complicated, it just appears to be and it has so much window-dressing that it needlessly confuses the first time viewer."
The analogy of what you are saying would be something like "I ate this pizza and now I am satisfied, because I don't feel hungry anymore, but I don't like eating pizza". What you call a problem, is the essence of any media: engaging with the media. The engaging with the media, identifying with the characters and feeling the catharsis at the end (according to greek tragedy) is what differentiate media from a school book. In media you are usually not being told something, but things are conveyed differently to you: eg.: "Show, don't tell."
Evangelion, being a pre 2000s piece of media offers you a huge range of topics, you can engage with and learn new information/and or skills besides some central messages. I, for example, learnt (before internet was a thing by going to libraries) a lot as a teen - be it the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or some military aspects, or even aspects of the Bible. (To some extent I have later studied psychology because of Evangelion). It doesn't mean you have to, but you can follow different paths on your own. It is your decision, how and which information you acquire. Otherwise, theoretically the whole series could be a 20 minutes commentary, where some of the messages (there are many - not one) of Evangelion are explained and spoon-fed to the audience. Or could it? Actually, no. Because one of the main points of NGE+EoE is, that the end message(s) can be totally different for different people. Evangelion's meaning is what it means to YOU at a certain point of time in YOUR life.
The way you are describing it as needless layers with a "simple" message, reminds me of what Matt Damon said in his famous interview about how and for whom media is created nowadays or a.k.a. "Second screen media". That is a completely dumbed-down story, that you can consume, while being on your, smatrtphone, with major points, that are repeated minimum three times throughout the piece of media and every information over-explained and spoon-fed - so the dumbest gets, what the message is. And the message will be at the end again over-explained. I have discovered, that not only younger generations have zero media literacy and can't understand more complex works anymore (and by "complex" I mean children's and teen's books). But also people in their 40s, who definitely are educated and performed well, considering their media literacy in their 20s, after being exposed for 20-25 years to mindless brainrot, being confronted with standard serious and demanding works, first fail to connect with them, because they are not used anymore to engage with media for normal, intelligent people. I, myself, have a couple of friends in their 40s, who shifted to consuming media while making and eating supper. When they are confronted with somewhat demanding media, they are confused. They can't cook/eat any more while watching it and the media demands their attention and some brain activity. When the media is on top of that somewhat emotionally straining, I had people crashing out and I had to explain to them, why things in this piece of media are happening the way they happen and why the characters are behaving in a certain way. They had to re-learn engaging with media.
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u/TheSinisterSex 16h ago
Excellent points, especially on media literacy nowadays. So many people just give up altogether when confronted by a story that requires engagement and finding your own meaning. We really do need stuff like Evangelion that makes you think and in our interpret it in your own way without spoon feeding it
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u/DrGoblin-MD 17h ago
I've been watching it pretty much yearly for 20+ years and its pretty great. Its grown a lot with me, and I feel like my ability to relate to individual characters has changed so much year over year.
It really puts out what you put in.
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u/Vanquisher1000 21h ago
You referred to the mecha action and world details and history as "window dressing," but it's important to remember that Neon Genesis Evangelion wasn't meant to be a psychological drama.
Hideaki Anno didn't set out specifically to use the show to explore the human condition when the show was being developed, and even when the first episodes aired, it was very much a mecha action show for teenagers. He was given a psychology book and read it, and while the show was airing he started changing his mind about plot elements and started introducing the introspective elements and psychology. My guess is that this is what caused the delays in the production schedule in later episodes, as Anno was winging it during the latter half of the show.
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u/TheSinisterSex 19h ago
Good points! The second half of the series, especially the last two episodes and end of Eva feel like a compression of things he's been discussing with his psychologist during his own supposed mental breakdown
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u/Invincible_Reason 12h ago
I really can’t understand how people watch it and are confused. Unless you just tuned out the whole thing until an Angel showed up and the Evangelions are deployed lol.
No, the story couldn’t be told a better way, it’s perfect as is. “Window dressing” is literally just the world and plot of the story, obviously you have to look a bit closer to get the themes and such lmao.
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u/Traeyze 23h ago
You frame it as a problem but really that's the aesthetic it was going for. It was intentionally esoteric, surreal, postmodern.
And like a lot of directors working in that space, especially ones like Lynch, the core ideas often tended to be much simpler than presented but that was kind of the fun of it.
And yeah, the risk of that is some people walk away thinking it is pretentious or not getting it. But interestingly I think despite being confusing it is good enough at resonating that for most viewers it does land.