Gendo'sPapa wrote:If someone only really puts their focus & attention into unchallenging narratives about how they're "little sister can't be this cute" or how being a pervy photographer makes girls go crazy for you or how random adorable Mecha Pilot finds himself in a small town beach community surrounded by half naked girls who fawn over him then it shouldn't be expected they'd react well to being shown something dark, unsafe & quite challenging. Especially if said work is also an anime & is a part of the all towering largest anime franchise of them all.
I do enjoy a fun narrative that isn't all that challenging from time to time. Every film or TV show cannot be a work of art. If you come into a theater or watch a show constantly expecting that, then you might as well not watch stuff at all. (In fact, I may actually own a season of a narrative about how "my little sister can't be this cute.") I hardly watch stuff like that an episode or two a week, though. Shows like that can lose their fun and charm quickly if taken in large doses, and certainly aren't something that should be devoted to in terms of a time given to it in a marathon or large amounts of money in purchasing a copy. (I think I got Oreimo for $15 or something. I watch it once every couple of years or something like that while avoiding illegal torrents.) It also helps that most Japanese shows don't actually require that much time from the viewer, as they're usually done in 13 episodes anyway. (Unlike American shows, which try to make an unchallenging pouch of ideas last long enough to become an American life-style and tradition.)
That being said, I do agree that most people do spend more time on narratives such as that then they should while "running away" from more challenging narratives. I'm watching through Clannad right now, and, while there was some attention given to character backstory, the personalities of the characters (mostly female, BTW) can be blandly segregated into two safe categories: "The Loud Ones," and "The Quite Ones." In contrast, most of the stuff in my collection of TV shows or films is full of challenging narratives, as those are the most interesting to re-watch and study. As uncomfortable as my experiences marathoning NGE have been, I've gained much more insight into the show and had much more fun following each detail of the show in that context then I would any other show. This is probably why NGE has become as popular in the anime medium as it has, because people can devote more and more time into the show and find more new aspects of the show than they noticed in previous viewings.
Well, there are two strikes against that argument.
1) The characters in 3.33 do flow logically from 2.22. I'd give you instances, but then I'd be recounting the entire series of events of the movie at you, and I assume you've already seen it.
2) I'll admit the drastic changes made at NERV in the past 14 years are a bit confusing. But that's part of what makes Evangelion what it is. There are large portions of the TV series that also feels incoherent until the last batch of episodes. (And, heck. Even then most people couldn't get past how incoherent EoTV felt until EoE was screened in theaters.) There's always confusion before clarity. If there was clarity without there first being confusion, then there would be nothing special about Eva's narrative.
Also, having absolutely no change to NERV or the presence of Wille in 3.33 would negate the reasons for having a 14-year time gap to begin with. If there was 14 years between the films and nothing had changed, then it would become a useless story-telling maneuver made only to arbitrarily confuse the protagonist. Adding these massive changes gives definition and reason behind this choice made in writing the narrative, making the viewer more intrigued in the plot behind the characters than what was presented to us in the first two films. This works perfectly well in 3.33, and complaints like yours are proof of it. If there was no confusion in 3.33 for you to complain about, then there would be no desire or urgency to watch 4.0 for clarification, now would there?