^ But Shinji did choose to be a pilot. Gendo gave him that choice by giving him the option to leave if he wasn't going to pilot Eva. Granted, all of his choices were guided or heavily influenced, more or less. But the were still given to him, even from the very beginning.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:^ But Shinji did choose to be a pilot. Gendo gave him that choice by giving him the optio. To leave if he wasn't going to pilot Eva. Granted, all of his voices were guided or heavily influenced, more or less. But the were still given to him, even from the very beginning.

Is "everyone will die, including you" really a factor that allows choice?
Maybe in EoE, where he's gone mad, but not in NGE1.

And let's not forget that bringing in a bleeding injured Rei was almost certainly on purpose to manipulate Shinji's choice.

is Evangelion feminist? Well, yes, obviously. It treats its characters as people and not as gendered stereotypes, so in that sense it is feminist by definition. Is it activist feminism? No, it's not. It doesn't deal with feminist issues directly, though it does challenge genre conventions by subverting expectations at every turn. With that out of the way:

Mr. Tines: That's a great article, but it's also depressing. I am not a very good writer; I can do dialogue, and keep people in-character, but that's about the extent of my abilities when it comes to fiction. I absolutely suck at plot. And yet, what she's saying there is so damn basic that it boggles my mind that people who can handle plot, and action, and intrigue, are so inept at handling female characters that the work of Schmitz is treated as groundbreaking and novel. To all the SF authors out there I say: "if you can handle things that complex, why the fuck are women so difficult for you?"

Ray: The notion that Anno doesn't punish his female characters is laughably absurd. One need only look at Asuka's arc to see that he puts women through the wringer just as much as men, if not moreso. When she acted "manly" she was crushed. Her spirit was broken vs. Zeruel, she was mindraped by Arael, she was rendered impotent by Armisael, and she was disemboweled and killed by the MPEs. If you think Shinji got a better deal than her in any way we were definitely not watching the same anime. And that's just Asuka! What about Rei? She died five times over the course of the show, man. She's used as a tool of the Ikaris throughout, and when she's no longer useful she's killed off. At the end she's reduced to a ghost watching Shinji drive himself bonkers. It's hard to say she got a better deal than he did at that point. Your entire argument here just doesn't hold up.

Clover wrote:Is "everyone will die, including you" really a factor that allows choice?
Maybe in EoE, where he's gone mad, but not in NGE1.

EoE was a similar choice. He chose not to let everyone die in NGE1. In EoE, he thought it would be nice “if everyone would just die.” If we’re going to count death as a choice in EoE, we have to count it as a choice in NGE1 as well, while also recognizing that it’s a choice that Shinji turned away from in NGE1.

These aren’t nice choices, and like I said, these decisions certainly were manipulated, which still plays into UrsusArctos’s post about the perceived “free will” of these characters. But it’s a more nuanced game than just saying “There was absolutely no other choice to be made,” simply because that other choice was death. Remember, in EoE that choice Shinji made that you referred to is the fact same one he didn’t make in Ep 1.

Bagheera wrote:Ray: The notion that Anno doesn't punish his female characters is laughably absurd.

You don't even need to look at either Asuka and Rei. Misato and Ritsuko are "punished" in many ways in the series/EoE and I especially put emphasis on Ritz unless you believe Seele left her completely unscathed during the interrogation after Rei's death (episode 23) and she DIDN'T have breakdown that descended into madness and attempt to blow up Nerv in EoE.



Then there's Misato.....Yeah, self-loathing drunk/acholic who thinks she's a slut and goes through her own many struggles/trials and loses the one person she really loved and is a lot like the Shinster.

Aside from Maya, how are ANY of the female characters not "punished".

Rei IV wrote:Aside from Maya, how are ANY of the female characters not "punished".

Maya has the unrequited love thing going on and gets the bad touch from Lilith, so even she didn't make it through unscathed. Hikari maybe? Her friends took some serious hits, but she seems to have avoided most of it.

That I can agree, in regards to Maya. I'm still at a lot loss how Evangelion could be considered TOO feminist.

Alarmist alarms always attempt at alarming audiences. It always makes me chuckle a bit whenever one of my friends are all like “Feminism is a scourge that should be driven from our land!” and then binge-watch and praise Miyazaki films and their messages. Usually its the term they find egregious, while unwittingly agreeing with many of the things the term stands for.

@Mr.Tines

My mind is not in the right place now but is the article about how groundbreaking the whole SF writing a female is?

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Alarmist alarms always attempt at alarming audiences. It always makes me chuckle a bit whenever one of my friends are all like “Feminism is a scourge that should be driven from our land!” and then binge-watch and praise Miyazaki films and their messages. Usually its the term they find egregious, while unwittingly agreeing with many of the things the term stands for.

The word has become equated with mad social justice, which is a scourge. Reasonable people get confused when they're screamed at for not being liberal enough, when they actually are pretty liberal. See: Joss Whedon.

As a believer in economic coercion and a strong anti-libertarian, I often don't think that a forced choice is the same thing as a choice at all. I mean, technically it's a choice to go along with a draft, but it's obvious what choice is expected to be followed. This is probably what UrsusArctos meant when he said he never really chose to be a pilot, even though the show insinuates he did. The problem is probably that I just simply don't agree with Japanese conceptions of responsibility. It would have been better if Shinji was given more of a briefing on what the consequences of not piloting were towards the beginning.

At any rate, I can't think of anyone except Kensuke and Hikari that really didn't have horrible things happen to them throughout the series. The show is feminist in the sense that the female characters are written as well as the male ones. It kind of makes sense to me that a lot of science fiction authors would not write female characters that well compared to male ones...

...not that I'm implying anything.

Clover wrote:The word has become equated with mad social justice

...by some people. Trying to discredit something by changing the meaning of words is a pretty lousy way to go about things, though all too common. But curiously, there are lots of people who still use the word to mean what it was intended to mean; and who still think that social justice is a good thing, even while people shout about SJWs (who are not) around them.

pwhodges wrote:...by some people. Trying to discredit something by changing the meaning of words is a pretty lousy way to go about things, though all too common.

The context of the term was warped by those stating their identity as feminists, while attacking anyone that disagreed with them with the eloquence of killer bees. It wasn't an enemy of feminism working behind the scenes to discredit the movement. Any movement's worst enemy is usually its own extremist segment, and that's what's happening now. We can play "no true Scotsman" all day, but we shouldn't. Those are valid members of the community, plowing an identity they've adopted into the floor. This is my last off-topic post in this thread.

@Reichu: It's difficult to not let that happen when the reasonable members begin to bow to their extremists out of fear. Ex: the Republican party, social progressives, ...a nameless group. I've heard of people acting like radical leftists in public, but regular centrists behind closed doors, just to avoid getting attacked. You have to fight to preserve your image, or get devoured.

Oh man, this thread... Not a bad topic and quite ambitious in fact, but wrapped in too much lolinternet and ham-fisting as to be a good or productive read.

Anyways, that's not why i posted here... In NGE, Shinji doesn't seem to know the very world is at stake until around ep 19 when Kaji tells him and the shock is evident, before he probably believes "only" Japan or a great part of the world would get fucked. And on the matter of him not really having a choice on whether or not to pilot, Misato made it very clear in ep 4 that he very much can leave and she'll get someone else to (kind of) cover him and -more important for Shinji- that if he's approach it that way she doesn't want him there in the first place.

I'd also like to mention that the subversive obsession is more a focus of fans than of Anno, who was too busy with his mental breakdown and accessing the rawest parts of his psyche as to concern himself (too much) with relatively trivial concepts such as gender roles.

Clover wrote:We can play "no true Scotsman" all day, but we shouldn't.

Letting extreme minorities define entire groups is perhaps the far more pernicious logical fallacy, so how about people don't do that either?

GAP wrote:My mind is not in the right place now but is the article about how groundbreaking the whole SF writing a female is?

Pretty much. "Manly engineers doing manly things" may be an exaggeration, but gives the idea of where things stood c1970. Even women writing in the field would go under initials or pseudonyms, and the assumption was of a boys' own playground. To be fair, though, it was a reflection of the times it was written in -- where there were women at all, they were stenographers, computers, secretaries, housewives, princesses or femmes fatales.

Bagheera wrote:To all the SF authors out there I say: "if you can handle things that complex, why the fuck are women so difficult for you?"

Kagan was writing 42 years ago, when she was being pretty radfem. Things have changed since then. And NGE stands in the middle, and off to one side, what with being Japanese rather than American in origin.

Clover wrote:The context of the term was warped by those stating their identity as feminists, while attacking anyone that disagreed with them with the eloquence of killer bees.

THIS. The well of discourse has been poisoned from that side.

Mr. Tines wrote:THIS. The well of discourse has been poisoned from that side.

I would argue that it's been poisoned by those who would use that as a wedge to discredit the entire movement. Real life isn't Tumblr, after all.

Last warning for this thread: let's keep our focus on the topic at hand and leave the politics for elsewhere.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Alarmist alarms always attempt at alarming audiences. It always makes me chuckle a bit whenever one of my friends are all like “Feminism is a scourge that should be driven from our land!” and then binge-watch and praise Miyazaki films and their messages. Usually its the term they find egregious, while unwittingly agreeing with many of the things the term stands for.

Just curious, which ones are you referring to? Most of his films that I've seen have more of an environmental theme than anything else.