30000th poster gets a cookie (cookie thread (Part 7)) (Part 10)

General
#26796

at any rate it is widely-known (and not contested by anybody with any merit to be having such a discussion) that the christian symbolism throughout Evangelion is there purely because it looks cool

but I’m just confused why that’s an issue for you

NGE is a deeply personal exploration of Hideaki Anno’s struggle with depression and escapism, it’s not about Christianity at all and was never trying to be so i dont really get why you’d find the show borrowing visual elements from religions it’s not talking about problematic unless you were like “that’s blasphemous to do” which I cannot imagine is where you take issue with it

1 Like
#26797

feels like being upset with ghost in the shell because the weapon designs don’t say anything about modern day weapons manufacturers when the movie itself is an exploration of entirely different material

#26798

if you want the christian symbolism to have meaning then hoo boy is angel’s egg for you btw

#26799

My college’s career center had a Wrapped.
Everyone wants to have a Wrapped.

3 Likes
#26800

Can’t imagine Evangelion as a movie experience. My friend said once that Evangelion will frequently have an episode where it’s just Shinji sitting on benches the whole runtime and I feel this is true and it is both essential to the anime and also must be its own self-packaged deal

2 Likes
#26801

It has to be slow and you have to watch it kinda slowly

2 Likes
#26802

I wouldn’t say it was mind-blowingly incredible (haven’t watched End of Evangelion though obviously) but it was Pretty Good

1 Like
#26803

Before I watched it I saw a tweet that says “maybe the angels would have won if they had started off with the twink strategy instead of wasting time with the acid spider” and I think knowing exactly this much information about the plot was highly beneficial to my viewing experience

3 Likes
#26804

Hideki Anno said of NGE, “it’s not that deep.”

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#26805

Idk I don’t like Evangelion because it’s ‘That Deep’ it’s something else

2 Likes
#26806

Or rather… like, I don’t think it’s That Deep about Society or Christianity or The Future or whatever. Not Deep on a macro scale in the ways that people usually mean it. I think what it does that I like is successfully reflect a lot of ways that you can be a kid and respond to expectations and shit. The stress everyone’s under feels very genuine, it’s meaningful to me because it depicts many personal experiences

2 Likes
#26807

I think you probably went into Evangelion with mismatched expectations?
Like, it’s not doing some master grand thing with its Christian symbolism and references, but even if that all was there, it’d just be flavoring for a show that’s ultimately not about that.

Evangelion is fundamentally a show about broken people trying to push forward, and I’d argue that it succeeds at it. Anno’s own struggles with depression bleed into his characters and world, and Gainax’s struggles to keep up with the show mirror its increasingly dark tone as the animation itself seems to unravel under the weight of what it must do. Its use of visual language (especially color) to convey those ideas is stellar, and its willingness to let its protagonists be deeply flawed people is something I greatly admire.

I’m not gonna say that it invalidates your experience - I have a solid list of media that people seem to universally love that I’m firmly meh on - but I do feel that judging Evangelion based on “oh, its Christian symbolism is meaningless, so everything else in this show must also be equally meaningless,” discounts a lot of what makes the show good.

2 Likes
#26808

yeah.

It is very much not deep at all lol

It’s literally just spitting his depression out all over the screen and not really much more than that.

If that doesn’t click with you, that’s fine, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge it mainly for not being about things it was never meant to be about

1 Like
#26809

It’s a story about people who are doing things. It’s not about Christianity or climate change or society, it’s just about the experience of being a person, with the set being basically an exaggerated world where the experience of being a human being can be magnified and displayed via robot

2 Likes
#26810

I liked it very much from that perspective, wasn’t disappointed with it for not being deep enough on a symbolism level, but I did have mild disappointment with… like, the way it handled its mysteries, because the things it was hiding kinda set up for it being a Clever Mystery Twist but it was mostly more set dressing for character exploration. And the character exploration was good and I didn’t dislike it, but it was a mismatch of expectations.

However I’m gonna judge it for what it is and not what I thought it’d be

2 Likes
#26811

I think you and others are over indexing on how much the Christian mythology being meaningless is the primary source of my opinion versus the reality which is it was an easy to communicate example of something that seems to invite interpretation but was just meaningless.

1 Like
#26812

baki is an evangelion like

1 Like
#26813

i think most of our comments do not lose any real weight even if we entirely drop the subject of the christian imagery in particular and expand them out to the abstract idea of “things that might seem to invite interpretation but aren’t actually meant to”

Evangelion is deeply, deeply personal to Anno’s feelings

Stuff that’s in because Anno thought it was cool may not have much, like, “meaning” in the traditional sense, but it still ultimately expresses the feelings of the man behind the work (even when those feelings are just “this looks cool”) in a far more direct manner than most other works of similar scale could ever hope to even begin to approach

And as has been mentioned that really shines brightest in his character exploration, and when matched with the studio’s issues with management and time as the production went along, nothing else that has ever been made really feels like it

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#26814

at its core though eva is basically just a story about hope

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#26815

most things beyond that are set dressing

1 Like