Trawling through the last week's worth of my web-server logs tonight, I've found an amusing flurry of activity hitting my NGE pages. Not only was there one chap with a Brazilian IP address looking for Asuka/Kaworu lemons* (a forlorn hope - having written half the A/K fics I know of, and neither being lemons), I was hit in response to

http://www.google.com/search?q=evangelion+Asuka+strangling

Looking to see what else turned up on that search I found this wonderfully tangential analysis - Saving Humanity through Gender Reversal: A Feminist Interpretation of Shinseiki Evangelion.

What surprises me most about this is not having run into such a thing before now.

* as well as the usual run of unfulfilled Misato/Hyuga and Misato/Shinji traffic

I've read that essay before, but I found it hard to take her ideas seriously insofar as she gets so very many things wrong (e.g. Misato killed Kaji, blah blah blah...)

Let me make it clear that it is the tangential (missing the point) nature of the essay that I find to be something to wonder at : it's more bizzarely disconnected from reality than outright wrong-headed, despite the commonplace Misato-killed-Kaji and Shinji-accepts-Complementation-in-26 mistakes.

Hence chit-chat rather than discussion.

I did stumble across this one long ago. I was initially bemused that someone had in fact written quite a serious and citation filled paper on evangelion.

While I would concur somewhat on the line of thought that Shinji and Asuka are in some sense gender reversed, I was perturbed by the thought of Evangelion as

...an evangelist for radical feminism – radical because it suggests the total destruction of patriarchal civilization and replacement with a reversed arrangement of everything

I feel the author may have missed the real message, and simply taken an oppertunity to use their favourite show in a paper, which in and of itself, isn't such a bad idea. I think there's a decided lack of serious academic views of evangelion, given the myriad of interesting concepts and questions it brings up. I think the "cartoon" label throws many off.

Edit: And what do you know! I read it right her on Eva Monkey , minus the citations.[/url]

I read this crap like a year age and glady forgot it after words its not . . .whats the word good?

I think this person either watched eva one and wrote a paper on it or watched eva once HIGH and wrote a papers on it the next morning. :P

Essay, meet Recycling Bin.
Recycling Bin, met Essay.

*click*

Gainax promoting feminism? The same company that produced Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden?

Gainax promoting feminism? The same company that produced Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden?

Uhhh...well maybe Mahoros actually a dude in disguise and Sugurus really a woman...hey there was one episode where he got boobs :shock:

wow..
now that is an wonderful example of...strangeness
lol
that and the surprise that someone would make a really proper looking paper to discuss feminism in eva...
wow again

While I don't feel like reading any essays at the moment, it's true that NGE does question traditional gender roles, and, among macho-nacho westerners, it does provoke quite a reaction... Too bad so many people completely miss the point: "omfg shingi neds 2 gro a pare!!!111"

Too bad so many people completely miss the point: "omfg shingi neds 2 gro a pare!!!111"

LOL
however, there are cases where he could, arguably, have some more guts...

Given the influence of Gnostic and Qabalistic references in the text of NGE, it may not actually be too much of a stretch to wonder whether there might be an actual allusion to the Gospel of Thomas, which includes an exhortation to the effect "Not until the male becomes female, and the female male, will you enter the Kingdom."

That isn't cited in that essay, but it is almost recaptilated in its closing paragraph.

It was alright going into it. Though, there were some rather n00bish, if you, will mistakes. Excuse my l33t. I lost some interest after she said Misato killed Kaji. I lost the rest of it about 3/4s of the way through when the author decided that the problems of the world were the fualt of those vile, evil, cruel men, I gave up. I can't take a person seriously when they tell me that everything wrong with the world is on my shoulders because I have a penis.

Oroboro wrote:I lost the rest of it about 3/4s of the way through when the author decided that the problems of the world were the fault of those vile, evil, cruel men, I gave up. I can't take a person seriously when they tell me that everything wrong with the world is on my shoulders because I have a penis.

See that's why I never bothered to read it.

Oroboro wrote:I can't take a person seriously when they tell me that everything wrong with the world is on my shoulders because I have a penis.

If that came as a surprise to you, then clearly you didn't notice the key word in the essay title.