End of Evangelion: THE HELL WAS THAT?

[bluepilot]

I love this show. Nobody wins, nobody gets what they want, and nobody can make any decisions.

A lot of us want to be great heros and save the world and stuff, but Evangelion tells us that we are just whiny little bitches and even if we are given are giant robot we are still whiny little bitches. Heck, even if we have a giant robot and happen to become the messiah, we will not be able to do that right either.

Evangelion is all about people and how insignificant we feel and the different ways in which we cope with insignificance. This collection of movies and the series is telling us to grow up, to stop escaping in our own masturbation material and accept life for the messed up place that it is. A messed up place where we will try hard and fail, try to be happy but end up depressed, a place where we are no more significant than the person next to us. There are no heroes, there are no lucky breaks, there is just fucked up you and fucked up everyone else. Somehow, you are going to all have to get along because it is not like an angel is REALLY going to merge us all together.

 

[vasiD]

The movie was a brilliant stroke. Giving fans all the shit they wanted to see out of the ending but didn't get because the creator was trying to have a nice happy ending, but adding a little fuck you to every part of it.

Next part has a spoiler but as this series is, what, 20 years old now?, I'm not going to give it a tag, so fair warning if you're reading this.

My favorite example was getting to see Asuka fight, going all out and being a bad ass, but then she's horribly murdered.

 

[Redryhno]

I love this show. Nobody wins, nobody gets what they want, and nobody can make any decisions.

A lot of us want to be great heros and save the world and stuff, but Evangelion tells us that we are just whiny little bitches and even if we are given are giant robot we are still whiny little bitches. Heck, even if we have a giant robot and happen to become the messiah, we will not be able to do that right either.

I kinda think Linebarrels of Iron did a better job of telling people that even if you get a giant robot, you're still the same person with the same internal problems, despite beating down your personal bullies. At least the earlier episodes did, in my opinion.

Now I've never watched any of the Eva movies, mostly because I disliked the series for being as simplistic and predictable as it was. I went in knowing about whining Shinji, and that was it, so I fully expected the whining, what I didn't expect was that there's not a single character that doesn't have, AT THE LEAST, two episodes of them doing nothing but feeling sorry for themselves (the last two don't count). And so many of them flip-flop on choices so often that I can't take any of them seriously. First Shinji say no to piloting, then yes, then no, then yes, then no once again, and finally comes back and never whines about piloting again really. Asuka's development was really little more than a mind breaking apart, quite quickly I might add(It takes place over eight months being the absolute max, I think, and she comes in around 3/4's of the actual story being told), and Rei's....well, Rei. In fact, I found the side characters so much more interesting than the people the story's about. I get that Anno's mental state basically deteriorated as the series went on, but it suffers so much that I can't see Eva actually being as loved if it had gone the exact same way, but without the creator going through as many problems as he was at the time.

Despite the huge flaws in the story, characters and setting, I find the last two to actually be the most, if not entertaining, intriguing. If it wasn't for the "you are going down a mountain path in the middle of the Peruvian jungle" soundtrack that played for the entire thing and the congrats scene, I'd be inclined to call them my favorite episodes of the bunch. The whole message to me, is that you might have problems, you might be breaking down, you might be fucked up beyond all recognition, but it is YOUR choice to be happy. You can look all day for reasons to hate yourself, but it's at the cost of overlooking all the good things in your life.

A pretty standard Saturday morning cartoon message, but done very well in the last two episodes. The rest of the series is like some of the absolute worst filler to me, not wholly interesting, beyond the attention to detail on the Evas, they feel shoehorned in, and there's nowhere near enough Gendo, Toji, Kensuke, or Pen Pen, the last being completely unforgivable!

 

[Nouw]

It was also a callback to Shinji's first (physical) meeting with Rei, when he holds her and he has her blood on his hand.

That damn hand shows up a lot throughout the series. Probably because Yoshiyuki Sadamoto just likes to draw hands.

Hey, if I could draw a hand properly I'd plaster it everywhere too . Also, very nice observations there.

 

[mitchell271]

I couldn't even make it through the first few episodes of NGE.
SHINJI's FATHER: Here is a giant mech. I want you to save the world and blow shit up with this.
SHINJI: But I don't want it because you abandoned me!
SHINJI's FATHER: Fine then. Here are 3 teenage girls who all want to jump your bones. They will live in the same house of you.
SHINJI: But I don't want it!

SHUT UP SHINJI

 

[ThatLankyBastard]

I loved it!

Bought it on DVD, brand new for 120$ as soon as I watched it from a download..... have watched it many times since, and have noticed something new, or put something together more clearly every single time.

It isn't something you can completely get on the first time, you have to literally stop and take notes, or discuss it with friends in real time to get the full story and hidden meanings behind it... Even the little details are important!

My suggestion: Rewatch the show and then rewatch the movie before judging it...

 

[xplosive59]

What you just watched is one of the finest pieces of animated cinema, I would rank it as highly as 2001: A Space Odyssey and is still today one of my favourite films. You have to watch the series to understand it, also saying you dislike the characters is not a criticism as they are supposed to be horrible people.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

I get the deconstruction part. I LOVE deconstructions when they're done right. I even think, at first, that Evangelion did a decent...not great, but decent....decon of the mecha genre like you described.

But there's deconstructing with a blade, and there's deconstructing with a hand grenade.

Im sorry, but while there was a lot I liked about Eva, the setting especially, it went from simply deconstructing the tropes and cliche's to wallowing shamelessly in a whole new set of cliche's and unpleasantness. I didn't find it the least complex, and certainly had nothing to say on sexual frustration, guilt, and parental neglect that hasn't been said much better elsewhere and with a whole lot less pretension. A story with that goal should not have you saying "OKAY, WE GET IT ALREADY!!!" so early on.

It's a fair criticism. I don't know how much of it is due to Hideaki Anno's depression, but the series goes way overboard in the last ten episodes, in a way that's almost harmful to its ostensible goals. But I have a high tolerance for faux-philosophical bullshit, and I like to think that the core message retains its value, even buried beneath the inappropriate religious symbolism and the meandering monologues.

I think it basically boils down to how forgiving you are of pretence. I like to think every reasonably intelligent person in the world has been a pretentious git at least once in their lives, so I'm more willing to say "eh, whatever" when I perceive a piece of work as pretentious. Glass houses and all that.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

SHUT UP SHINJI

I lol'd

 

[Xanadu84]

Eva is an art film, and un-apologetically so. It's loaded with abstract religious and psychological allegories all brought together in one amalgamation of incredible depth and confusingness. If that's not your cup of tea, that is absolutely fair. If you say that it makes its point in an unnecessarily obtuse way, hey, you have a good argument. And if you have better things to do then dig deep into obscure Freudian theory and cross referencing that with Kabbalah mysticism while combing Paradise Lost, who can blame you? But it is what it is, and it does what it was trying to do in a way that makes the people who want to talk about it have endless things to talk and think about. Its kind of like getting your mom to like, "Painkiller", only replace unnecessarily dense allegories with blasphemous ultra-violence. You can bang on about its merits all days, but if your not into its deal, then nothing is going to warm you up to it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

 

[Johnny Impact]

What was that? It was The Trope Namer, my friend. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding

I'm told it was caused by the studio running out of money as much as by any psychological imbalance on the writer's part. They couldn't actually finish the series so they built the last few episodes mostly from preexisting art and just dubbed in new dialogue.

Yeah, it wrinkled my brow the first time. And the second. I respect the series for being different, but it's not really my bag. I like characters to be at least a little relatable and likeable, and a story that makes some kind of sense. Eva doesn't have those things.

 

[Flamezdudes]

I couldn't even make it through the first few episodes of NGE.
SHINJI's FATHER: Here is a giant mech. I want you to save the world and blow shit up with this.
SHINJI: But I don't want it because you abandoned me!
SHINJI's FATHER: Fine then. Here are 3 teenage girls who all want to jump your bones. They will live in the same house of you.
SHINJI: But I don't want it!

SHUT UP SHINJI

You clearly don't understand the show.

The mech is a fucking torture device, you feel everything that happens to it as if it was on your own naked flesh. Stuff like getting your eye pierced or being stabbed in the stomach among many other horrible things. Fun eh? Plus, he's being guilt-tripped into having to fight giant alien beings he knows nothing about and has no experience against.

You think any decent, sane person would want that?

My only gripes about the film was that unexplained scene with Shinji in the hospital... with Asuka... (no seriously, what the hell was that?! I doubt that was symbolic, that was just gross). How the character's development through out the series felt dropped from the canon, the story was a bit of a mess, and how the ending wasn't anti-climactic, just very very unexplained and bizarre. So in a nutshell I felt like I was watching Akira for the first time again.

Shinji masturabated over Asuka who was was at the time catatonically depressed. What's so hard to figure out? Shinji was pretty much at his breaking point, this was a way of showing that.

True, would have made much more sense if they featured a similar scene like that later on that adds closure to Shinji's character instead of at the VERY BEGINNING. That scene is why people are so turned off by it, the tone that scene has can completely negate interest in the rest of the film. The fans during the time also hated the ending before the film, I bet they didn't take that scene lightly either. Plus like I said, gross.

There was another purpose with that scene. It provided some visual foreshadowing for later on in the film, regarding Gendo and Adam.

Oh, you think I'm kidding?

Spoiler

It was also a callback to Shinji's first (physical) meeting with Rei, when he holds her and he has her blood on his hand.

That damn hand shows up a lot throughout the series. Probably because Yoshiyuki Sadamoto just likes to draw hands.

Hands in Evangelion also represent decision making, as you see whenever Shinji is having trouble making a decision or is getting nervous, his hand twitchs and goes limp. Then, when he chooses to make a decision you can sometimes see him clench his hand into a fist.

That's one personal interpretation anyway.

 

[Murrdox]

I love Evangelion.

Now, that said, I'm not very fond of the End of Evangelion. Why? Because the characters for the most part get lost. Asuka has an interesting final character revelation and I feel as though she "completes" her journey. Gendo's plan is finally revealed and he gets his comeuppance.

However, the other characters are all passive, and for the most part the entire movie is mostly concerned about going nuts with the MYTHOLOGY of the series, completely forgetting about the characters. It just gets so wrapped up in 3rd Impact that the characters get lost.

This is best exemplified by Shinji Ikari who just gets dragged around the entire movie, until he's finally in Unit 0. But even then he doesn't actually DO anything as Unit 0. He just sits there and screams for 30 minutes while we get absorbed in all the Third Impact imagery that's going on.

This same thing happens to most of the other characters as well. Rei even BECOMES Third Impact imagery, completely losing her character in the process.

I think this movie is essentially fan-service to people who wanted a lot of Mecha action and wanted to see a huge conclusion to the Mythology of the series. The movie did a GREAT job with this. I just wish the CHARACTERS had more to DO while all of this was going on.

 

[dscross]

I only just finished watching the series and EoE and I loved it. But I MUCH preferred the original Ending...let me tell you why.

EoE was a great film, don't get me wrong, but I think it spoilt what otherwise would have been a great commentary on the ego (in spiritual terms) and what humans should strive for in their lives. Many people dismiss the whole series as 'f**cked up' but, for me, that simply isn't the case.

Many people hate themselves to varying degrees, but most people don't vocalise it. It's that voice in the head - your thought processes - created when you form an identity using the social mirror (ie, trying to meet what you perceive to be society's expectations of you). Shingi is an extreme example - but everyone does it to a degree.

What the original ending does, through the medium of the human instrumentality project, is convey that we can transcend our egos and learn to love ourselves and other people - and then, life becomes all good man. Shinji, makes peace with himself and realises we are the same when it comes down to it.

The ego can be a great teacher, but only if you realise you can?t fully trust it - which leads to an uneasy relationship or truce. You can learn a lot but it?s never comfortable. The ego has the will to survive, it is Darwinian, and it operates competitively towards ?survival of the fittest?. Ego is most provoked when its capacity to survive and to be on top is threatened. It feels most safe when others suffer...or it makes you suffer and forms an identity out of that, blaming everyone else for your misfortune.

And yet it is possible to feel great tenderness for the ego, for my ego and for yours. The ego may be a doorway or a gate to something other, as the ego is connected to a deeper sense of wholeness in the self and others. Perhaps ironically, the ego?s own resistances can protect and connect us to a deeper sense of Self.

I really think a lot of people missed what Anno wanted to convey here. It's an important life lesson, and I feel the EoE obscures the message a bit. I imagine Anno was thinking a lot about how to self actualise when he was coming out of his depression.

What do you guys think?