LogFAQs > #970768952

(Another write-up that's earlier than usual because I knew it'd be too long to do on my phone at work. On Monday we had 1200 words about a new 10/10! Now it's time for 1000 words about a show that's... not even close to a 10/10. I'm sorry HBJDubs. Just like with Psycho Pass, I hope my dislike of an anime you enjoy doesn't offend you.)

BONUS. Neon Genesis Evangelion
https://myanimelist.net/anime/30/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion
Fall 1995 (26 episodes) plus 1 movie
My Score: TBA, MAL Score: 8.34/10
Best Character: Katsuragi Misato
Recommended by: @HBJDubs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fShlVhCfHig

Premise: Mysterious beings called Angels are attacking humanity, and humanoid robots called Evangelions are used to fight them. Ikari Shinji is one of the only people who can pilot an Eva, which forces him to reunite with the father who abandoned him years ago.

The Good: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime. It has a lot more going on than just that one genre tag, but, after struggling for ten minutes just to write that mediocre summary for the premise, Im officially giving up on wrapping my head around this show. Since this is the good section, Ill say that the story had some interesting ideas. I enjoyed the first half a lot more than the later parts or the movie, mostly because it was more straightforward and used fun concepts to differentiate the angel battles. I really liked that episode with the power outage, for example. It was neat seeing them get into the base through maintenance corridors and such. While Im obviously thirty years too late to truly appreciate it, the animation was also pretty good.

The Bad: I hated Neon Genesis Evangelion. Now that Ive said that, let me clarify it before fans accuse me of sacrilege. Im not claiming it was objectively bad or anything. In fact, unlike all the other anime that I hate, NGE didnt offend me at all. There are some anime that feel as if they were designed to appeal to me specifically. In AICO, for example, every aspect resonated with me. This anime was the exact opposite. NGE felt like it was designed not to appeal to me at all.

For starters, Im a big fan of stories where character capabilities and enemy dangers are made clear. In Knights of Sidonia (another mecha anime), I understood the alien Gauna, what their weaknesses were, how the human mechas worked, and so on. NGE felt like it went out of its way to obfuscate as much of these aspects as possible. Ill be the first to admit that I can be an idiot sometimes, so theres a chance a lot of this just went over my head, but I never understood the capabilities of the Evas. Sometimes they were downed in a single blow and sometimes they could withstand an intense beating. Sometimes they got strange new powers but other times they didnt. The Angels were all different, and what they could or couldnt do felt random so there was no way to really plan against them. While the battles were well-animated and unique, the flow of the fights felt constricted by the whims of the plot. I could never guess whether an attack would succeed or just bounce harmlessly off the Angels mystical shield. Im not a fan of that.

As for the characters, I struggled to pick a favorite because I didnt really like anyone. They were all interwoven into the themes. Since the themes didnt resonate with me, I mostly just felt annoyed at everyone for being mopey or hesitant or callous. The setting had some interesting ideas. I like the concept of humanity rebuilding while fighting an unknowable foe. Sadly, most of those ideas were confusing or never explored. One conversation near the end made me laugh because they threw out a half dozen new bits of terminology like White Moon or whatever, and none of those words were ever explained. What even is the Spear of Longinus and why did it do the things it did? I dunno, and I could say that about almost everything.

What really dragged NGE down in my ranking, though, was just the overall way the story was presented. The last few episodes and the movie were peak nonsense, but, looking back, the whole show had varying degrees of this narrative style. I simply didnt enjoy stuff like the way it repeated things for thematic emphasis, the ill-fitting religious symbolism (which, now that Ive looked it up, apparently didnt actually mean anything), or how it frequently felt like it was using insane imagery seemingly for the sake of it. The entire climax of the movie was mind-boggling in a bad way because, while I think I understood what happened on a surface level, I have no idea how the things that appeared onscreen represented it. For example, why did it lapse into real-world footage for a bit near the end? I dunno, but that shot of a real-life cat was cute at least.

Overall: I feel bad for having such a negative opinion for Neon Genesis Evangelion, because I know a lot of people really love it. I struggle to understand why (and not just because I didnt enjoy it personally, its just difficult to imagine something as weird as this appealing to a mainstream audience), but I know this anime is exceedingly popular. Sadly, it didnt appeal to me at all. I could see someone loving this if the themes resonated with them or they related to the characters or if they enjoyed the strange visuals and the way the story presented itself. For me, though, all of those aspects were handled in a way that seemed designed to push me away.

Still, Im glad I finally watched this, if only because now I can better understand its influence on anime. For example, it turns out everything I hated about Darling in the FranXX was ripped off wholesale from NGE. Thats good to know! Thanks for recommending this, HBJDubs. Much like Psycho Pass, however, I hope you arent offended that I didnt like it. Akudama Drive aside, it appears that we have very different tastes in anime! This will end up ranking in the 1/10s alongside Darling in the FranXX, but, like I mentioned at the start of the bad section, NGE didnt offend me. Most of the 1/10s are shows that did something that disgusted me. With this anime, it simply didnt appeal to me at all, and I couldnt justify ranking it any higher because of that.