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The coloring, fonts, monsters, sets, and UIs of NGE are so pleasing to look at. I hold NGE in much higher regard than other similar IPs, and would continue to

The coloring, fonts, monsters, sets, and UIs of NGE are so pleasing to look at. I hold NGE in much higher regard than other similar IPs, and would continue to do so even without the excellent art direction. Like many other stories, NGE asks "what would happen if a young boy with an unusual ability was entrusted with the saving of humanity?" However, unlike many other stories, the show answers "he would fail, be driven insane in the process, and humanity would fall."

dclowd9901 5y ago
Finishing 3.0+1.0, I was met with the same realization. The story is a bit Lord of the Flies with giant mecha, and I think it’s unexpected because we’re used to seeing protagonists in media being young people who are far more emotionally and psychologically developed than they have any right being. The trope leads you to believe it’s going to be one kind of show, but it ends up as something very different. FLCL, which I’m sure most Eva fans have seen, follows a similar conceit about the ineptitude of kids to cope with circumstances beyond their understanding, and is another show that I hold in similarly high regard. Incidentally, it also references Eva a lot.
- willis936 5y ago
  FLCL was a collaboration of Gainax (who made NGE) and Production IG. Also, I feel that FLCL is a more true coming of age story than a commentary on teenage psychology. You're taken along for the ride too, so the viewer can connect on multiple levels if they're also coming of age. That's in part why I enjoyed it so much as a teen.
  - tombert 5y ago
    FLCL was one of those shows I hated the first time I watched it at age 19, but I also got a vibe that there might be some subtext and metaphors that I missed. About a year later, I saw that it was on Netflix and decided to give it a second chance. I'm glad I did, because it's become one of my favorite animes at this point. I think a lot of the veiled references to erections and the analogies strangeness of a 14-year-old-boy forcing his way through puberty were lost on me the first time, and it took until I wasn't a teenager anymore to step back and view it in an almost "nostalgic" sense. NOTE: I have only seen the first six-episode run of it. I can't speak to the newer reboot series that came out in 2016.
    - coldpie 5y ago
      I'm glad to hear it. I last watched it around a similar time (15 years ago... ... ...) and was wondering if it'd hold up to a rewatch.
      - glandium 5y ago
        Never watched them, but two new seasons were produced recently.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      If it makes you feel any better, I saw FLCL at twice your age and only now that you've said it did I realize what the whole forehead-robot-bulge thing was a reference to.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    I love Production IG for Ghost in the Shell SAC. Too bad the new series is so hollow and no real substance.
    - tombert 5y ago
      I liked the first season of SAC, but it did kind of annoy me how they basically decided to put Major Kusanagi in lingerie throughout most of it. She was nude in a good percentage of the 1995 movie, but it wasn't really "sexualized." In SAC it kind of felt like, instead of being a conflicted character unsure of her place in the world, a large percentage of her character was just there as fan service/eye candy, and I thought it cheapened her as a result.
      - p_l 5y ago
        SAC and 1995 movie effectively base on different chapters of the first manga volume (all of them avoiding certain bits though, like Major's "on the side" enterprise), and the character design used in both matches the source material - just different scenes (SAC arguably follows the design more closely) EDIT: to make it clearer, Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization, but then you have to consider that some of the off-the-books income streams Major had were censored from some releases, and she definitely knew how to play off people's looks at her (explicitly called out in GitS 2.0 manga)
        tombert 5y ago
        I guess part of my issue is that I wasn't a huge fan of the manga either; it felt borderline-hentai at some parts and just wasn't my jam, I never finished it. The 1995 movie is easily in my top five favorite movies, and I think a large part of it was because I liked that specific version of her character. > Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization I mean, I guess? These are fictional characters, so these depictions are still created by people. Yes, it's the character's decision in-universe, but it's still the author's decision to put her in situations that require her to be in skimpy outfits. I don't mean to come off as super social-justicey, I guess I just never really liked the trope in anime of every female character being hyper-sexualized.
  - dclowd9901 5y ago
    100% my interpretation as well, yet it’s indisputable that Naota is vastly underpositioned for the role of world savior. But the coming of age narrative is so poignant it actually rounds the corner of touching and heart sickness. I actually found Eri’s story (the girl who was the daughter of the mayor) in episode 3 of the original series to be the most compelling. You love to see a character where you absolutely know what they must be feeling but they are clearly trying to meet some social standard of behavior (see “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”).
- danbolt 5y ago
  I remember reading an interview with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the character designer for the 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam on the idea. Him and the interview noticed a bit of a trend along the lines "the larger and more powerful the robot, the more vulnerable and neurotic the child inside is".
  - teraflop 5y ago
    And it's not just mecha anime that does this, either. https://twitter.com/curewiki/status/1180163641070346240 https://twitter.com/curewiki/status/1180163641070346240
- surye 5y ago
  FLCL was created by much of the same team as NGE, so that makes sense!
  - p_l 5y ago
    Back in ~2000 when FLCL was fresh, a common quote was that FLCL was NGE team (and Production IG's EoE team) taking a very necessary step into absurd, to decompress from having worked on NGE.
- unixbane 5y ago
  I disagree with literally everything in your take. No need to elaborate, just use negation operator on each of your assertions. New thread: Does anyone else know an anime show with hapa characters like asuka?
  - labster 5y ago
    Haha negation is a fair opinion on controversial anime. On haafu characters: Revy in Black Lagoon is. Another Rebecca at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is Becky-sensei in Pani Poni Dash.
    - unixbane 5y ago
      Nice, didn't Revy was hapa. Will check out Pani Poni Dash.
      - labster 5y ago
        I’m not 100% sure on Revy — I just got wound up in the “two Rebeccas” thing. She has Chinese ancestry, and she was born in America, and has no problem using ethnic slurs on Chinese people. She doesn’t like to talk about her past so I guess you can just tell your own story. Probably a better example would be Li Shaoran (or Xiaolang). In Cardcaptor Sakura, he’s descended from Clow Reed; in Tsubasa, it’s even more complicated. A more interesting one is Tina Foster, who is genetically 100% Anglo-American, but culturally 100% Japanese. She doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere, and the overall theme of Ai yori Aoshi is estrangement and finding one’s own family.
avhon1 5y ago
Ender's Game, too. [spoilers follow] To ensure that the young boy entrusted with the saving of humanity succeeds before he goes insane, the adults spend years (at least a decade), and incredible amounts of money and political power, to manipulate and deceive him and his cohort so that they don't understand the gravity of what they're doing. > "You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it." > "Tell me later," Ender said. His eyes closed. > Mazer Rackham shook him. "Don't go to sleep, Ender," he said. "It's very important." > "You're finished with me," Ender said. "Now leave me alone." The most-salient parts are excellently dramatized during tracks 9-12 of Julia Ecklar's "Horsetamer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD6Lj0OPZAc&list=OLAK5uy_kBD07_gy-LsxQvDAYdm4XqbYUz_E9axQk&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD6Lj0OPZAc&list=OLAK5uy_kBD... It's a shame Ender's Game hasn't received a quality visual adaptation. I think Evangellion being animated helped a lot with it being able to seriously depict children in a dark story.
- tombert 5y ago
  I never read the books, I only saw the Ender's Game movie that came out like 8 years ago. I remember thinking that the premise itself had promise, but that the movie was this rushed, hard-to-follow piece of crap that was borderline unwatchable. For years people have told me that the books in the series are way better than the movie but I still haven't gotten around to reading it. Maybe I should.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    I've only seen the movie and didn't think that much of it, since the bulk of it is a kinda cringey children's sports league movie. I don't understand why so much time was spent (in the movie anyway) on weightless lasertag before they're rushed through military command training or whatever and tasked to save humanity.
  - delecti 5y ago
    My advice is to not worry yourself with "books" when considering Ender's Game. The first book is a complete product, and it wraps up everything it needs to. The sequels are good too, but they're also unnecessary if you aren't curious to experience more of the world. The ending of Ender's Game is roughly like the slideshow epilogue of a movie saying things like "Johnny went on to medical school and got married". The sequels and side-stories go into things like what happened while Johnny was at medical school, how he met his future wife, or what their retirement looked like, but the epilogue itself doesn't leave you hanging on anything.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
Yeah, I was part of an anime club in the 90s where the main guy was importing laserdiscs from Japan, downloading fansubs, and generating subtitles with an amiga. So we watched NGE as it came out, and it was such a perfectly executed troll. It starts out as yet another anime mecha fantasy, and by the end of it is showing you what that world would be like if it was actually real in a very adversarial way. I remember when we watched the finale (the first version) one of the members of the anime club lost his cookies so hard he stood up and screamed a rant and walked out of the house in a state of rage.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I find this funny because now it’s pretty much just NGE, a deconstruction, and Gurren Lagaan (sp?) that have maintained significant cultural appeal in western audiences imo. As anime has gotten more mainstream, the original mecha shows have not. Somewhat similar for magical girls in Madoka Magica and Kill la Kill.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Yep. It's funny how so many anime follow this sort of "tropy premise with backstory strip-tease" formula, where they start out in a well-worn theme, but then gradually reveal a dark backstory. Madoka Magica is the absolute pinnacle of the form, each new revelation being as staggering as the last, and yet it never feels opaque and cryptic like Evangelion, and it all makes perfect sense together at the end. Trigun is another show that does it well. It's a sci-fi western that slowly reveals the origins of the hero and the villain and the philosophical underpinnings of their conflict, as well as the miserable desert planet all the characters live on. Elfenlied does the same with harem animes, but nobody should ever watch Elfenlied.
    - bsanr2 5y ago
      Can't forget Utena, the proto-Madoka. It IS as cryptic and opaque as Evangelion, while covering similar ground as (but also completely different ground from) PMMM. It also stands in opposition to Madoka in that it seems almost immune to ongoing commercialization: Rebellion and Magia Record, in its multiple forms, exist, but beyond Adolescence Apocalypse (perhaps in part because of Adolescence Apocalypse), Utena is probably one of the most popular magical girl franchises (very, very few anime have had as much written about it) to never be further capitalized on - and avoids thematic sliding in the process (looking at you, Precure).
herodoturtle 5y ago
This comment needed a spoiler tag. Too late to edit it now I guess.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  This anime has been out for longer than many HN readers have been alive and it's extremely well known. I think the calendar on spoiler tags being necessary for NGE has long, long since expired.
  - qybaz 5y ago
    I hadn't watched it and it was on my TODO list, but whatever.
    - Lammy 5y ago
      That’s barely a spoiler. You should still watch it :)
  - filoleg 5y ago
    Gotta be careful though, because while NGE indeed feels way past the expiration date on spoilers, the Rebuild movies definitely aren’t (the final one came out just earlier this year). And people online definitely like to bring up Rebuild movie spoilers in conversations about NGE. Mostly due to how very inter-connected, yet, at the same, disconnected NGE and Rebuild movies are from each other. TL;DR: agreed on no need to be afraid to spoil NGE, but we gotta be explicit that it applies only to NGE (+the end of evangelion movie, which is the true ending to the show that is absolutely a must-watch; also imo past the expiration date on spoilers), and not to Evangelion as a whole (which would include recent Rebuild movies). But there is no harm in putting a spoiler warning at the beginning, and that’s a nice gesture towards those who might want to watch it for the first time without the storyline being spoiled.
  - twic 5y ago
    Several years ago i went to see a screening of Things to Come, the tremendous 1936 adaptation of H. G. Wells's post-apocalyptic (and then some!) novel [1]. The writer and film critic Kim Newman gave a little introductory talk about the film. At some point, he referred to something that happens halfway through; a shout came from the audience, "Oi! Spoilers!". Newman was so thrown by the idea that talking about the plot of a famous 75-year-old film might be considered a spoiler that he stopped his talk and walked offstage. Which was a shame, as he's very interesting, but the film was great, so it was alright. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwfWEKz00U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwfWEKz00U
oneoff786 5y ago
It’s been a while since I watched it but I felt the mechanic deconstruction angle wasn’t the main point. Yeah the kid becomes really depressed and overwhelmed, but the conclusion deals with him understanding a great deal on the nature of humanity and rejecting the cynical desires of the evil cyborg puppeteer people. Seemed rather uplifting to me.
- pesmhey 5y ago
  “Humanity deconstruction”
mftb 5y ago
> "he would fail, be driven insane in the process, and humanity would fall." ...and since that is the obvious conclusion, it makes for a truly awful ending. The last 3 or 4 episodes of NGE are interminable. There are some truly exceptional things in NGE, but it's flawed.
- whymauri 5y ago
  The movie saves it for me. Like, I appreciate the last 3 episodes of NGE from a 'psychoanalysis of the writer' POV, but the real entertainment is in the catharsis of End of Evangelion.
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    Especially Asuka going John Wick on the military hardware and MP Evas... one of the best pieces of animation in the series. My one qualm with the rebuilds is that none of the fights are that good.
    - wwilim 5y ago
      I think the last fight in 2.22 tops that. It just feels very cathartic after 26 episodes and a few movies watching Shinji let everything important to him slip out of his hands. It is certainly less in the traditional Eva spirit of "everything you do will ultimately fail, no matter how hard you try"
    - Pxtl 5y ago
      The few that look cool are so dark and gloomy you can't see what's going on, at least when I watched it. Like Maru's introduction, or the launch at the opening of Part 3. I feel like the final battles of part 4 were supposed to be centrepieces but they were just too over-the-top.
      - EamonnMR 5y ago
        Agreed, and I find the trend of CGI swarms really boring anyway.
bsanr2 5y ago
I highly recommend you watch the End of Evangelion and Rebuild movies if you get a chance. Ultimately, I think Eva is ambivalent about the value of saving the world, far and away from the ability to do so. By the end of 3.0+1.0, Shinji essentially HAS saved the world, except that that's not the important victory. In the end, Eva doesn't care about canonicity, and it barely cares about narrative. It's instead more interested in characters, and their relationships to each other and the world they inhabit. Everything else is malleable to produce interesting dynamics between each actor. It's fascinating in how experimental it is, and not just because it superficially upends assumptions about how stories should play out.
lostgame 5y ago
Hey - this is massively lame in that it’s a huge spoiler for a series I have been working through. Honestly - super lame that there was no warning on that. Top comment, too. :( A downvote for you.
- db65edfc7996 5y ago
  It came out ~27 years ago. If you are actively reading a thread about old media, I think you have to expect that the audience will be dominated by fans who have already consumed the entire canon of the show.
- quacked 5y ago
  Don't worry, you can make the argument that the exact opposite things happens vs. what I said. Make sure you're following a watch order than includes the movies instead of just watching straight through the last two episodes.
- nwallin 5y ago
  Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father.
- bacchusracine 5y ago
  Snape kills Dumbledore.
baby 5y ago
I think the answer is rather “a bunch of stuff will happen and no one will understand what really happened”
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Piggybacking on this comment I think it’s a difference between western and eastern media. The western movies often have way less complexity and have less depth and fuck ups, perfect execution is the norm. I remember zombieland as an example of perfect execution, which I rarely see in eastern media it’s a comedy but in serious movies it’s happened too. 3.0+1.0 suffers from this as well, it’s tiring and boring except as a spectacle of effects like the opening and the dive, I did not at all find it entertaining after first watch, whereas EoE features plans constantly going wrong from Shinji, Gendo, Asuka, Misato and Ritsuko keeping the idea of perfect excecution away. Formulas don’t have to be boring, Chronicle was excellent despite following the classic Greek tragedy.
- numpad0 5y ago
  Don’t know Eastern or Western is the best classification but I feel one diverges from a cliche and the other converges into a cliche, as if they’re mirror images. Whichever one of it you would prefer, each ends of NGE are open ended turbulent static and never happily thereafters. Even the latest one could be a bubble of dream in the hell - no one came back out of it, and the thing in his hand might have changed the order of couple events but didn’t change the end result.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Cliche can be good like Chronicle, but usually the issue is the execution loses humanity, they act like robots. No depth stock characters suck.
causality0 5y ago
To be fair, he really doesn't have much effect on the outcome at all. He remains effectively ignorant of the multiple concurrent conspiracies for the entire show and nothing he does really determines which one wins. The coloring, fonts, monsters, sets, and UIs of NGE are so pleasing to look at Couldn't agree more. The music is also brilliant and endlessly mixable. https://youtu.be/26P1s88rDCc https://youtu.be/26P1s88rDCc

dclowd9901 5y ago

Finishing 3.0+1.0, I was met with the same realization. The story is a bit Lord of the Flies with giant mecha, and I think it’s unexpected because we’re used to seeing protagonists in media being young people who are far more emotionally and psychologically developed than they have any right being. The trope leads you to believe it’s going to be one kind of show, but it ends up as something very different. FLCL, which I’m sure most Eva fans have seen, follows a similar conceit about the ineptitude of kids to cope with circumstances beyond their understanding, and is another show that I hold in similarly high regard. Incidentally, it also references Eva a lot.

willis936 5y ago
FLCL was a collaboration of Gainax (who made NGE) and Production IG. Also, I feel that FLCL is a more true coming of age story than a commentary on teenage psychology. You're taken along for the ride too, so the viewer can connect on multiple levels if they're also coming of age. That's in part why I enjoyed it so much as a teen.
- tombert 5y ago
  FLCL was one of those shows I hated the first time I watched it at age 19, but I also got a vibe that there might be some subtext and metaphors that I missed. About a year later, I saw that it was on Netflix and decided to give it a second chance. I'm glad I did, because it's become one of my favorite animes at this point. I think a lot of the veiled references to erections and the analogies strangeness of a 14-year-old-boy forcing his way through puberty were lost on me the first time, and it took until I wasn't a teenager anymore to step back and view it in an almost "nostalgic" sense. NOTE: I have only seen the first six-episode run of it. I can't speak to the newer reboot series that came out in 2016.
  - coldpie 5y ago
    I'm glad to hear it. I last watched it around a similar time (15 years ago... ... ...) and was wondering if it'd hold up to a rewatch.
    - glandium 5y ago
      Never watched them, but two new seasons were produced recently.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    If it makes you feel any better, I saw FLCL at twice your age and only now that you've said it did I realize what the whole forehead-robot-bulge thing was a reference to.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  I love Production IG for Ghost in the Shell SAC. Too bad the new series is so hollow and no real substance.
  - tombert 5y ago
    I liked the first season of SAC, but it did kind of annoy me how they basically decided to put Major Kusanagi in lingerie throughout most of it. She was nude in a good percentage of the 1995 movie, but it wasn't really "sexualized." In SAC it kind of felt like, instead of being a conflicted character unsure of her place in the world, a large percentage of her character was just there as fan service/eye candy, and I thought it cheapened her as a result.
    - p_l 5y ago
      SAC and 1995 movie effectively base on different chapters of the first manga volume (all of them avoiding certain bits though, like Major's "on the side" enterprise), and the character design used in both matches the source material - just different scenes (SAC arguably follows the design more closely) EDIT: to make it clearer, Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization, but then you have to consider that some of the off-the-books income streams Major had were censored from some releases, and she definitely knew how to play off people's looks at her (explicitly called out in GitS 2.0 manga)
      - tombert 5y ago
        I guess part of my issue is that I wasn't a huge fan of the manga either; it felt borderline-hentai at some parts and just wasn't my jam, I never finished it. The 1995 movie is easily in my top five favorite movies, and I think a large part of it was because I liked that specific version of her character. > Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization I mean, I guess? These are fictional characters, so these depictions are still created by people. Yes, it's the character's decision in-universe, but it's still the author's decision to put her in situations that require her to be in skimpy outfits. I don't mean to come off as super social-justicey, I guess I just never really liked the trope in anime of every female character being hyper-sexualized.
- dclowd9901 5y ago
  100% my interpretation as well, yet it’s indisputable that Naota is vastly underpositioned for the role of world savior. But the coming of age narrative is so poignant it actually rounds the corner of touching and heart sickness. I actually found Eri’s story (the girl who was the daughter of the mayor) in episode 3 of the original series to be the most compelling. You love to see a character where you absolutely know what they must be feeling but they are clearly trying to meet some social standard of behavior (see “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”).
danbolt 5y ago
I remember reading an interview with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the character designer for the 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam on the idea. Him and the interview noticed a bit of a trend along the lines "the larger and more powerful the robot, the more vulnerable and neurotic the child inside is".
- teraflop 5y ago
  And it's not just mecha anime that does this, either. https://twitter.com/curewiki/status/1180163641070346240 https://twitter.com/curewiki/status/1180163641070346240
surye 5y ago
FLCL was created by much of the same team as NGE, so that makes sense!
- p_l 5y ago
  Back in ~2000 when FLCL was fresh, a common quote was that FLCL was NGE team (and Production IG's EoE team) taking a very necessary step into absurd, to decompress from having worked on NGE.
unixbane 5y ago
I disagree with literally everything in your take. No need to elaborate, just use negation operator on each of your assertions. New thread: Does anyone else know an anime show with hapa characters like asuka?
- labster 5y ago
  Haha negation is a fair opinion on controversial anime. On haafu characters: Revy in Black Lagoon is. Another Rebecca at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is Becky-sensei in Pani Poni Dash.
  - unixbane 5y ago
    Nice, didn't Revy was hapa. Will check out Pani Poni Dash.
    - labster 5y ago
      I’m not 100% sure on Revy — I just got wound up in the “two Rebeccas” thing. She has Chinese ancestry, and she was born in America, and has no problem using ethnic slurs on Chinese people. She doesn’t like to talk about her past so I guess you can just tell your own story. Probably a better example would be Li Shaoran (or Xiaolang). In Cardcaptor Sakura, he’s descended from Clow Reed; in Tsubasa, it’s even more complicated. A more interesting one is Tina Foster, who is genetically 100% Anglo-American, but culturally 100% Japanese. She doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere, and the overall theme of Ai yori Aoshi is estrangement and finding one’s own family.

avhon1 5y ago

Ender's Game, too. [spoilers follow] To ensure that the young boy entrusted with the saving of humanity succeeds before he goes insane, the adults spend years (at least a decade), and incredible amounts of money and political power, to manipulate and deceive him and his cohort so that they don't understand the gravity of what they're doing. > "You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it." > "Tell me later," Ender said. His eyes closed. > Mazer Rackham shook him. "Don't go to sleep, Ender," he said. "It's very important." > "You're finished with me," Ender said. "Now leave me alone." The most-salient parts are excellently dramatized during tracks 9-12 of Julia Ecklar's "Horsetamer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD6Lj0OPZAc&list=OLAK5uy_kBD07_gy-LsxQvDAYdm4XqbYUz_E9axQk&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD6Lj0OPZAc&list=OLAK5uy_kBD... It's a shame Ender's Game hasn't received a quality visual adaptation. I think Evangellion being animated helped a lot with it being able to seriously depict children in a dark story.

tombert 5y ago
I never read the books, I only saw the Ender's Game movie that came out like 8 years ago. I remember thinking that the premise itself had promise, but that the movie was this rushed, hard-to-follow piece of crap that was borderline unwatchable. For years people have told me that the books in the series are way better than the movie but I still haven't gotten around to reading it. Maybe I should.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I've only seen the movie and didn't think that much of it, since the bulk of it is a kinda cringey children's sports league movie. I don't understand why so much time was spent (in the movie anyway) on weightless lasertag before they're rushed through military command training or whatever and tasked to save humanity.
- delecti 5y ago
  My advice is to not worry yourself with "books" when considering Ender's Game. The first book is a complete product, and it wraps up everything it needs to. The sequels are good too, but they're also unnecessary if you aren't curious to experience more of the world. The ending of Ender's Game is roughly like the slideshow epilogue of a movie saying things like "Johnny went on to medical school and got married". The sequels and side-stories go into things like what happened while Johnny was at medical school, how he met his future wife, or what their retirement looked like, but the epilogue itself doesn't leave you hanging on anything.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

Yeah, I was part of an anime club in the 90s where the main guy was importing laserdiscs from Japan, downloading fansubs, and generating subtitles with an amiga. So we watched NGE as it came out, and it was such a perfectly executed troll. It starts out as yet another anime mecha fantasy, and by the end of it is showing you what that world would be like if it was actually real in a very adversarial way. I remember when we watched the finale (the first version) one of the members of the anime club lost his cookies so hard he stood up and screamed a rant and walked out of the house in a state of rage.

oneoff786 5y ago
I find this funny because now it’s pretty much just NGE, a deconstruction, and Gurren Lagaan (sp?) that have maintained significant cultural appeal in western audiences imo. As anime has gotten more mainstream, the original mecha shows have not. Somewhat similar for magical girls in Madoka Magica and Kill la Kill.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Yep. It's funny how so many anime follow this sort of "tropy premise with backstory strip-tease" formula, where they start out in a well-worn theme, but then gradually reveal a dark backstory. Madoka Magica is the absolute pinnacle of the form, each new revelation being as staggering as the last, and yet it never feels opaque and cryptic like Evangelion, and it all makes perfect sense together at the end. Trigun is another show that does it well. It's a sci-fi western that slowly reveals the origins of the hero and the villain and the philosophical underpinnings of their conflict, as well as the miserable desert planet all the characters live on. Elfenlied does the same with harem animes, but nobody should ever watch Elfenlied.
  - bsanr2 5y ago
    Can't forget Utena, the proto-Madoka. It IS as cryptic and opaque as Evangelion, while covering similar ground as (but also completely different ground from) PMMM. It also stands in opposition to Madoka in that it seems almost immune to ongoing commercialization: Rebellion and Magia Record, in its multiple forms, exist, but beyond Adolescence Apocalypse (perhaps in part because of Adolescence Apocalypse), Utena is probably one of the most popular magical girl franchises (very, very few anime have had as much written about it) to never be further capitalized on - and avoids thematic sliding in the process (looking at you, Precure).

herodoturtle 5y ago

This comment needed a spoiler tag. Too late to edit it now I guess.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
This anime has been out for longer than many HN readers have been alive and it's extremely well known. I think the calendar on spoiler tags being necessary for NGE has long, long since expired.
- qybaz 5y ago
  I hadn't watched it and it was on my TODO list, but whatever.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    That’s barely a spoiler. You should still watch it :)
- filoleg 5y ago
  Gotta be careful though, because while NGE indeed feels way past the expiration date on spoilers, the Rebuild movies definitely aren’t (the final one came out just earlier this year). And people online definitely like to bring up Rebuild movie spoilers in conversations about NGE. Mostly due to how very inter-connected, yet, at the same, disconnected NGE and Rebuild movies are from each other. TL;DR: agreed on no need to be afraid to spoil NGE, but we gotta be explicit that it applies only to NGE (+the end of evangelion movie, which is the true ending to the show that is absolutely a must-watch; also imo past the expiration date on spoilers), and not to Evangelion as a whole (which would include recent Rebuild movies). But there is no harm in putting a spoiler warning at the beginning, and that’s a nice gesture towards those who might want to watch it for the first time without the storyline being spoiled.
- twic 5y ago
  Several years ago i went to see a screening of Things to Come, the tremendous 1936 adaptation of H. G. Wells's post-apocalyptic (and then some!) novel [1]. The writer and film critic Kim Newman gave a little introductory talk about the film. At some point, he referred to something that happens halfway through; a shout came from the audience, "Oi! Spoilers!". Newman was so thrown by the idea that talking about the plot of a famous 75-year-old film might be considered a spoiler that he stopped his talk and walked offstage. Which was a shame, as he's very interesting, but the film was great, so it was alright. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwfWEKz00U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwfWEKz00U

oneoff786 5y ago

It’s been a while since I watched it but I felt the mechanic deconstruction angle wasn’t the main point. Yeah the kid becomes really depressed and overwhelmed, but the conclusion deals with him understanding a great deal on the nature of humanity and rejecting the cynical desires of the evil cyborg puppeteer people. Seemed rather uplifting to me.

pesmhey 5y ago
“Humanity deconstruction”

mftb 5y ago

> "he would fail, be driven insane in the process, and humanity would fall." ...and since that is the obvious conclusion, it makes for a truly awful ending. The last 3 or 4 episodes of NGE are interminable. There are some truly exceptional things in NGE, but it's flawed.

whymauri 5y ago
The movie saves it for me. Like, I appreciate the last 3 episodes of NGE from a 'psychoanalysis of the writer' POV, but the real entertainment is in the catharsis of End of Evangelion.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Especially Asuka going John Wick on the military hardware and MP Evas... one of the best pieces of animation in the series. My one qualm with the rebuilds is that none of the fights are that good.
  - wwilim 5y ago
    I think the last fight in 2.22 tops that. It just feels very cathartic after 26 episodes and a few movies watching Shinji let everything important to him slip out of his hands. It is certainly less in the traditional Eva spirit of "everything you do will ultimately fail, no matter how hard you try"
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    The few that look cool are so dark and gloomy you can't see what's going on, at least when I watched it. Like Maru's introduction, or the launch at the opening of Part 3. I feel like the final battles of part 4 were supposed to be centrepieces but they were just too over-the-top.
    - EamonnMR 5y ago
      Agreed, and I find the trend of CGI swarms really boring anyway.

bsanr2 5y ago

I highly recommend you watch the End of Evangelion and Rebuild movies if you get a chance. Ultimately, I think Eva is ambivalent about the value of saving the world, far and away from the ability to do so. By the end of 3.0+1.0, Shinji essentially HAS saved the world, except that that's not the important victory. In the end, Eva doesn't care about canonicity, and it barely cares about narrative. It's instead more interested in characters, and their relationships to each other and the world they inhabit. Everything else is malleable to produce interesting dynamics between each actor. It's fascinating in how experimental it is, and not just because it superficially upends assumptions about how stories should play out.

lostgame 5y ago

Hey - this is massively lame in that it’s a huge spoiler for a series I have been working through. Honestly - super lame that there was no warning on that. Top comment, too. :( A downvote for you.

db65edfc7996 5y ago
It came out ~27 years ago. If you are actively reading a thread about old media, I think you have to expect that the audience will be dominated by fans who have already consumed the entire canon of the show.
quacked 5y ago
Don't worry, you can make the argument that the exact opposite things happens vs. what I said. Make sure you're following a watch order than includes the movies instead of just watching straight through the last two episodes.
nwallin 5y ago
Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father.
bacchusracine 5y ago
Snape kills Dumbledore.

baby 5y ago

I think the answer is rather “a bunch of stuff will happen and no one will understand what really happened”

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Piggybacking on this comment I think it’s a difference between western and eastern media. The western movies often have way less complexity and have less depth and fuck ups, perfect execution is the norm. I remember zombieland as an example of perfect execution, which I rarely see in eastern media it’s a comedy but in serious movies it’s happened too. 3.0+1.0 suffers from this as well, it’s tiring and boring except as a spectacle of effects like the opening and the dive, I did not at all find it entertaining after first watch, whereas EoE features plans constantly going wrong from Shinji, Gendo, Asuka, Misato and Ritsuko keeping the idea of perfect excecution away. Formulas don’t have to be boring, Chronicle was excellent despite following the classic Greek tragedy.

numpad0 5y ago
Don’t know Eastern or Western is the best classification but I feel one diverges from a cliche and the other converges into a cliche, as if they’re mirror images. Whichever one of it you would prefer, each ends of NGE are open ended turbulent static and never happily thereafters. Even the latest one could be a bubble of dream in the hell - no one came back out of it, and the thing in his hand might have changed the order of couple events but didn’t change the end result.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Cliche can be good like Chronicle, but usually the issue is the execution loses humanity, they act like robots. No depth stock characters suck.

causality0 5y ago

To be fair, he really doesn't have much effect on the outcome at all. He remains effectively ignorant of the multiple concurrent conspiracies for the entire show and nothing he does really determines which one wins. The coloring, fonts, monsters, sets, and UIs of NGE are so pleasing to look at Couldn't agree more. The music is also brilliant and endlessly mixable. https://youtu.be/26P1s88rDCc https://youtu.be/26P1s88rDCc