Blockio wrote:It also strikes me as ironic at the best of times to claim that "your" side of an argument is the reasonable one that doesn't do adhom, and then immediately go on to characterize the "opposite" side as being the worst at every opportunity presented

Not the opposite side, a subsection of the opposite side of which I've experienced many, many times. It's specifically those that use "Thrice is positive, follow it as life advice" as a cudgel and then proceed to leap past cognitive dissonance and insult others that I find fascinating. I don't use Discord, so maybe that's why I have a warped perspective here, but was said user calling others defective, or merely attacking the films themselves?

Perhaps it's off topic to take note of fandom behavior at large, but it definitely informs my impression of NTE as a whole and its impact.

As for MAL, I find plenty of nuance. I mean, the topic I shared, aside from those two posts, has plenty of people on both sides with just as much nuance as exhibited on EGF.

This is a thread about reception of the movies, so within the scope of reason, talking about the larger reception is perfectly fair game.

Axx°N N. wrote:I don't use Discord, so maybe that's why I have a warped perspective here, but was said user calling others defective, or merely attacking the films themselves?

The whole thing took place before the release on Amazon Prime and was based entirely off of leaked scripts and footage/secondhand reports, and most if not all messages from said meltdown were bulk-deleted with the ban, so I can't say for certain anymore what the exact wording was (I was also not online for a large chunk of it, and only returned after they were already axed, so there's that as well), but for the parts of it that I was there for and do remember yeah, that description definitely fit the bill.

In my experience, there is something of a bell curve to how much people like the movies; outliers in either direction obviously nonwithstanding, a general trend I've observed is that at least in my places, the people on either extreme end of investment in the franchise tend to like the movie overall, while those in the middle tend to dislike it more often than not; whether that's a matter of normies with no discerning taste/people with a critical eye for details/people too invested to admit its flaws or a matter of those content with the surface level/overly cynical types that wouldn't be pleased with anything the movie could have done/people appreciating the larger elements of it is going to remain contested for a long time I wager, and is not a fight I have any interest in fighting; in my opinion if you feel the need to put down someone over their liking of Shin, you have already missed the point of it, if not that of Eva as a whole.

But either way, back on topic, ish. I don't doubt that there is a fair share of sampling bias going on on my end - I make it a point for myself to cultivate spaces for myself where positivity is the default assumption, that the burden of explanation is on people not liking something rather than those liking something, for the simple reason that I quite despise the online phenomenon of ironic enjoyment and needing to justify having genuine fun with a piece of media; so naturally, pretty much the only people who I ever see get toxic about things (barring blatant trolls, but those are not relevant for our purposes here) are those who either really hate a thing and didn't get the memo about positivity, or those who take any criticism of the things they like as a personal insult.

What that means for Shin in particular is that given the weight of expectations that almost certainly haven't all been fullfilled 100% to how any given person wishes they were as well as the recency preventing the usual pitfall of nostalgia goggles, I don't see many people who base their entire personality around it and would fall into the latter category, so combined with the fact that disliking something to the point where you go to the internet to post your strong opinions about it has a lot lower a barrier of emotion than liking something to that point, most people who get toxic about the movie are those who really don't like it, far more often than not because it defied their preconcieved notions in something, primarily shippers and untenable lore theories.
I don't doubt that there are places online where that ratio is reversed, but by that same token, I know why I choose to spend time on the places that I do, and don't spend time on the places that I don't.

As for MAL; the reason I say it lacks nuance is not because of an imbalance in directionality of opinion, but rather in the absence of gradients. It falls into that same part-whole fallacy that most pop culture discourse eventually devolves to, that something has to be either the best thing or it is the worst thing, now pick your side; same story as the ever-obnoxious topic of powerscaling, where the concept of outside influence, advantages or disadvantages, human error and the hundreds of other factors that are deciding on a real battlefield seem to not exist in the heads of people regularily engaged in it; that there is no balance of one thing being good at exploiting the weak spots of another, only a strict hierarchy, and if you're on top you always win no matter what, and if you're on the bottom you always lose.
This is obviously an extreme example and it's usually not quite as bad as that when it comes to discussing media properties on the whole, but the general sentiment of 10/10 best thing I've ever watched, you're wrong and stupid if you give it anything less or 0/10 this is an affront to my very dignity, only an idiot would enjoy this are unfortunately still the most commonplace opinions in debating the quality of anything on social media-type platforms of any form, MAL included

Axx°N N. wrote:This feels like semantics and a cudgel against anyone who finds the Neon Genesis reality reform to fall flat. The poster themselves anticipated this by saying it's inaccurate but doesn't matter, and I have to agree; frankly, I find it a stupid storytelling choice and so it doesn't really deserve splitting hairs. In effect both the reformed world and a reset world have the exact same problem for those it doesn't jibe with as a creative choice: actual reality can't be reshaped (just as it can't be reset), and so it doesn't have any applicable meaning outside of itself, and it falls under the same category of contrived storytelling omnipotence. NGE and EoE featured reality melting (and the latter the promise of reconstitution), but it felt grounded (or at least restricted in any way) and like it was an analog to something real.

I agree that NGE and EoEs' affects on reality were more restricted than the world-rewrite in Thrice. But (admittedly without reflecting on it at all) I don't see how those affects are an analog to something real, either absolutely or relative to the world-rewrite, and I don't see this addressed in the rest of your post. Can you expand on this?

Axx°N N. wrote:And I'm not alone; no Eva fan I know in life (which is more than a handful) described Thrice as anything but painful.

I recall you have a creative writing background. Out of curiosity, does your group of IRL Eva fans share it? I'm trying to figure out if the Thrice-is-painful attitude clusters by background, or comes from across the spectrum.

nerv bae wrote:But (admittedly without reflecting on it at all) I don't see how those affects are an analog to something real, either absolutely or relative to the world-rewrite, and I don't see this addressed in the rest of your post. Can you expand on this?

It's kind of what I was getting at later on by referring to my dislike of Gendo's redemption, and how it operates, and how it feels unhinged from how this kind of dynamic can resolve in life. I feel like that's the lynchpin, and my elaboration will get a little abstract but eventually return to the absurdity of Gendo's function as I see it:

Shinji's reality is set to rights because he confronts the overarching evil responsible for bad things; he undoes the self-administered grip Gendo has on himself that has caused pain across the entire globe, and his self-administered solution (understanding, empathy, forgiveness, recognition of the self in the other after a wedge has for far too long been cemented there) is a solution which applies on a universal scale to everyone. Maybe if we take everything in Shin as allegory for a very specific, very individual mental block and incapability of extending grace toward others because it has a vice-grip on you and you fixate on it at the expense of all else--there's where I can draw a connection between what's being displayed and something real. But it's not an elegant allegory and it feels like too many elements are worse than unimportant.

On a literal level, Gendo is the capital E force of evil for the entire globe, but the way he's redeemed doesn't fit the context. Evil, much less discomfort, can't be fixed with This One Solution Evildoers Hate. And it really chafes me that all sense of potential discomfort is scrubbed out of the tone of the narrative for the last couple minutes, no indication whatsoever that what happened wasn't "everything is good forever now, the end." All the worse because NTE's lens spent too much time on raunch and romp and didn't let it linger on anything that would get across, in a genuine way, the actual implications of the destruction Gendo is supposed to have unleashed. Neither evil deeds nor their solution get examined beyond the level of known fact. There's a responsibility (as I see it, at least) to do justice to the severity waved around on-screen that feels totally waived, and it's done so without justification; it's drawing carnage on screen just to get that across real quick, as if there might as well have been a flash of text reading Murder & Destruction, without showing the actual human fallout. While we have clearly traumatized characters and hardship-hardened ones--eg, we get Hikari crying into a stern Toji as the sky swirls, we get an angry Midori and Sakura--we don't get more than these brief demonstrations or single-sentence explanations. We see them snap, but they tell us why they're snapping as they snap. They don't get any build-up that immerses the audience into the reality of the situation ahead of time.

But far more than that, I don't just mean the lack of characters believably distraught, I mean there's a general lack of believability to the function of Gendou as a villain in a logistical sense. Real-life figures who go to the top of a hierarchy and can be said to be hugely responsible aren't the sole arbiters, pretty much ever. They're a byproduct of a culture, if you snipe them out their torch will be carried on, there's deeper roots that reach from them into society and back and those roots are not wrapped up and entirely contained inside of them as a single, super-important self-propelling individual, otherwise they would wither. Gendo is the only negative force, all other countries have been disposed of, Seele has been shut off, and his second-hand man is working out of his own totally individualistic motivation that merely aligns enough with Gendo's purposes. Nothing operates like this. Not unless you take Gendo as allegory to some kind of extremely insular, solipsistic mental dynamic, reducing everything down to being a passion play of Shinji's mind. But this is unsatisfying, too, because all I can think of at the end of Thrice is, "okay, that's all resolved now, inner mental block dissolved--now what?" Thrice is so unconcerned with exploring the nuances of what might have all been an internal complex that I can't fathom anything interesting or nuanced out there in the new externality it presents. Its hybrid live-action, 2D, CGI cityscape feels like it must be empty. Contrast that to NGE and EoE, and you don't have this rampant, absurd shrinking of everything down to a palmful of characters--not until reality itself is involuted, and that's a far more elegant approach (external is turned inward, reality is turned unreality). Prior to that, you have Gendo actually struggling against anything at all, countries still exist, Seele is acting as outside forces do in life--often contrary to our desires or needs. And even then, they and world governments find themselves scrambling too and have to concede with contingencies.

Unlike Eva's being quantum'd away, I don't feel like there's anything in reality that can be removed in an ontological sense ala Thrice. Closest I can come up with is it's meta for Anno moving on from Evangelion the franchise, but it's inelegant because he's not doing anything close to erasure irl, as there's still the multimedia empire he spearheads. I don't put much stock in it, but many fans take it as a "move on from Eva" message, but I don't see the point of moving on from deeply moving art, which is what I take EoE to be; why is maturity never watching something you like ever again? Aren't they releasing a bluray eventually? Do we move on after that? I find there to be more stock in the idea that it's more exactly referring to some kind of co-dependent relationship some subset of fans have, but if that's truly the message, said media empire is enabling it anyway, so what's the deal? Compare that to EoE, which by way of destruction and rebirth analogy is merely suggesting an acceptance and open engagement with the cycle of pain and joy that is clearly how life operates, our stirring brains, their moods, mental pits and peaks. It's a novel use of a sci-fi conceit to deliver, at the same time, a story of growth and a suggestion that a person's insular pain can also be a tool for understanding others. But what's the loaded meaning of the Anti-Universe? Closest thing I can come up with is it's a meta reference to film itself, and just like how it allows Gendo to communicate to Shinji without pretense (and yet, paradoxically, with unrelenting pretense, as any possible imagery can be conjured and is), it allows Anno to say what he wants unfiltered without the obligations of storytelling convention. Unfortunately, nothing he says feels novel or like it requires this kind of expository collage. EoE's imagery cacophony, the mental breakdown self-talk, the rhapsodizing Shinji does with Rei, all feel like internal monologues--they feel insular in the same way thought does. So does NGE's last 2 episodes. I can't say that for Thrice, where the talk is restrictive instead of wandering and open, and Shinji's recommendations of attitude and administered epiphany feel declarative; the characters when they extrapolate (the ones that get to, as Asuka is instead jettisoned in stunned silence) seem like they're reaching permanent, unalterable summits. It almost feels like Thrice is proudly presenting what it thinks is an unheralded new formulation of philosophical remedy the likes of Descartes failed to uncover, when what Anno actually cooked up are garden variety nostrums. And I find that these gestures of finality are the most off-base of all, because of course, nothing in life is final. EoE gives me a feeling like I'm at the base of a mountain when it ends, but Thrice seems like it wants to shut my mind up and force a kind of mental place it deems "not to be questioned," and in that I find there to be a bankruptcy of truth.

Perhaps you could frame things in NGE and EoE as inelegant and NTE in an elegant way where the allegory makes sense and there aren't useless elements taking up space. But how I feel when I watch is that what I see on screen with EoE is direct and can be related to something readily experienced daily, and that NTE is strained and presenting things that either feel false or aren't established or reasoned enough, or are purely fantasy in an ideological sense.

nerv bae wrote:I recall you have a creative writing background. Out of curiosity, does your group of IRL Eva fans share it? I'm trying to figure out if the Thrice-is-painful attitude clusters by background, or comes from across the spectrum.

Nope, my friends are all STEM.

@Zoop
For all intents and purposes this place is an archive. It's also a good place for online friends to chat. I think that's the vision the modding team shares around here. I remember discussing this matter with Ursus and others around January. That's why inactivity is not a concern, per say. Quality > quantity. We get a lot of visitors, but few people post. Last time this place was busy was in August. I believe most people come here to read these great old threads. It's a literal archive, yeah.
For a while there, my ideas were more contested. I wonder if it's because I became a Mod last year. I hope not, really XD

@Axx°N N. interesting response, thank you. Some brief comments below:

Axx°N N. wrote:On a literal level, Gendo is the capital E force of evil for the entire globe, but the way he's redeemed doesn't fit the context. Evil, much less discomfort, can't be fixed with This One Solution Evildoers Hate. ... All the worse because NTE's lens spent too much time on ... didn't let it linger on ... drawing carnage on screen just to get that across real quick ... brief demonstrations or single-sentence explanations ... don't get any build-up ... the reality of the situation ahead of time.

Reminds me of our conversation about pacing in NTE.

Axx°N N. wrote:But far more than that, I don't just mean the lack of characters believably distraught, I mean there's a general lack of believability to the function of Gendou as a villain in a logistical sense. Real-life figures who go to the top of a hierarchy and can be said to be hugely responsible aren't the sole arbiters, pretty much ever. They're a byproduct of a culture ...

I think there are different schools of historical thinking about how great, evil men get to the tops of their societies to do great, evil things. Here you're expressing the view of one such school but I think another would disagree and explain, with plenty of real historical precedent, how sometimes one individual can be the sole rudder steering an entire society towards bad ends. In that light Gendo seems more plausible to me.

Axx°N N. wrote:Thrice is so unconcerned with exploring the nuances of what might have all been an internal complex that I can't fathom anything interesting or nuanced out there in the new externality it presents. Its hybrid live-action, 2D, CGI cityscape feels like it must be empty. Contrast that to NGE and EoE, and you don't have this rampant, absurd shrinking of everything down to a palmful of characters--not until reality itself is involuted, and that's a far more elegant approach (external is turned inward, reality is turned unreality).

Regarding the hybrid live-action, 2D, CGI cityscape that feels like it must be empty: you're referring to the post-train-station-scene view of Ube? Well, that might be a deliberate feeling if the scene is meant to be in the anti-universe. I think this scene will continue to be interpreted here and elsewhere.

Axx°N N. wrote:Unlike Eva's being quantum'd away, I don't feel like there's anything in reality that can be removed in an ontological sense ala Thrice. Closest I can come up with is it's meta for Anno moving on from Evangelion the franchise, but it's inelegant because he's not doing anything close to erasure irl, as there's still the multimedia empire he spearheads. I don't put much stock in it, but many fans take it as a "move on from Eva" message ...

Me neither. I wonder if the "move on from Eva" message has any basis in staff interviews or production materials, or is just fanwank.

nerv bae wrote:I think there are different schools of historical thinking about how great, evil men get to the tops of their societies to do great, evil things. Here you're expressing the view of one such school but I think another would disagree and explain, with plenty of real historical precedent, how sometimes one individual can be the sole rudder steering an entire society towards bad ends. In that light Gendo seems more plausible to me.

That's a good point, although I still think Gendo is truly without precedent. I think it's true that single individuals can and have had tremendous and irreplaceable significance for their cultures and societies, so much so that their deaths leave a vacuum; failson as a word would have no root in actuality if it weren't the case that there are once-in-a-lifetime figures, and that situations occur where there's no torch carrier. But in these cases, there's still a society that persists after the unfortunate death of someone who's the lynchpin and glue keeping everything together, it's just that the society might lapse, regress, scramble or completely shutdown. But it's still an entire apparatus external to that one individual, from which that one individual arose. In NTE there's only Gendo and Fuyutsuki. I'm not sure if I can think up a precedent in other anime, tokusatsu, or any fiction, really--in tokusatsu especially it's usually a dastardly cabal of villains, and far more colorfully manned. It's not something I think is inherently wrong, in fact I want to find it interesting that the cast is so uniquely reduced, almost to the point of being mythic. But Gendo's omnipotence doesn't engross me, and his backstory emotions feel like they fit Anno but not a genocidal leader.

I feel the same way about the village, too; it's set back to square one in a radical way, and the way Shinji reconciles with this setting and establishes himself within this setting is really only applicable to a certain stage of development on a societal progress scale. There's so much complexity about modernity that isn't part of the picture here, which is strange for what on the surface is a future sci-fi setting. You could say its real concerns are post-apocalyptic, but the reason things are post-apocalyptic don't have any relation to what might ruin the actual world in an ecological sense. Gendo's a classic archetype of 'obsessed scientist who goes too far because he can't let go,' not anything close to the root cause of our actual civilization declines. Really, there's only the aesthetics of futurology, but the dramatic core is divorced from the real world, and I find it curious. The setting of NTE post-timeskip is "huge chunks of society are missing," but I can't help but feel that instead of being a storytelling hook or premise the writers intended to explore and utilize, it's more like a cheat in order to not have to deal with or address anything that gets in the way of Shinji's recovery.

nerv bae wrote:Me neither. I wonder if the "move on from Eva" message has any basis in staff interviews or production materials, or is just fanwank.

You know, that's a great question, and I have no idea. I haven't thoroughly read or watched all the official material, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone but fans insist on the moral message having something to do with walking away. My impression has always been that they're extrapolating from a very real "moving on" tone, but that that tone is more having to do with Anno's personal feelings about his franchise. I get the feeling from the way a lot treat the ending that there's this widespread idea that Eva was inherently toxic and negative until Thrice had its happy ending, and I don't find that very accurate. Every Evangelion ending has included growth, progress and the reframing of negativities as something to be managed and resisted, if not merely warped perspectives.

I think the whole “Anno is telling you to move on from Eva!” is as fanwanky as people who say about NGE “Anno is telling you to stop being an otaku!”. So, very.

Maybe it’s something that comes from a cynical current-year Western perspective where “““the message””” is the most important part of a story (…instead of, ya know, actual qualities that make for an engaging narrative) and writers are constantly chasing “““the message””” because they see it as an easy road to critical success. And because that’s the kind of media Western fans are familiar with, they project that idea of a subversion-loving, fandom-hating auteur creator onto Anno while ignoring the fact that Evangelion was written in a vastly different time and culture.

I think what makes Evangelion special is that it feels very sincere and personal - it doesn’t feel like it was written to lecture the viewer or deliberately planned to impart some message, but that it came directly from Anno’s feelings. I like to contrast it to Madoka Magica (which don’t get me wrong I also enjoyed), which I think provides a good foil as a work that feels more constructed and deliberate in its themes/message.

I absolutely think 3.0+1.0 is about Anno personally moving on from the work that will forever be recognized as his magnum opus. However I seriously doubt it was written as a way to tell fans that they should move on from Eva, not the least of which because if you want your incredibly lucrative IP to keep making money, it is astoundingly stupid to make a movie whose core message is “you should move on from it”.

The "message" of Shin Evangelion is not as universal as I once thought it was. When I first watched the movie last year, I was in my best of times. I was going out more, working more, almost getting to the point where I started dating and was simply happy. So, in that context, the movie made a lot of sense to me. I understood that it was about moving on from things and trying to find happiness in living the moment. That said, as the months went by, everything fell apart big time and, thinking about the movie now, it's not as universal as I once considered it to be. When you're living the time of your life, it's easy to look at it and say: "Yeah, it's all about learning how to love life and all. So good." When you're living in hell, it comes off as something quite unrealistic. So it all depends on your mindset.
I guess that goes for pretty much everything, but EoE's message continues to make sense and be "useful" to many almost 25 years later. It doesn't really matter if you're suffering or not, you can understand that life sure isn't perfect, but it's worth living. It's better to live in pain than to live a lie. Someday, things might get better and then worse. It is how it is. That's the beauty of it, I guess.

Archer wrote:I think what makes Evangelion special is that it feels very sincere and personal - it doesn’t feel like it was written to lecture the viewer or deliberately planned to impart some message, but that it came directly from Anno’s feelings. I like to contrast it to Madoka Magica (which don’t get me wrong I also enjoyed), which I think provides a good foil as a work that feels more constructed and deliberate in its themes/message.

I absolutely think 3.0+1.0 is about Anno personally moving on from the work that will forever be recognized as his magnum opus. However I seriously doubt it was written as a way to tell fans that they should move on from Eva, not the least of which because if you want your incredibly lucrative IP to keep making money, it is astoundingly stupid to make a movie whose core message is “you should move on from it”.

Damn, I think the way you put it is so absolutely spot on. I recognize that what I love most in works of fiction is that sincerity of the writer coming through, even when it's something I don't necessarily agree with. I just like empathizing with another's viewpoint. With Evangelion, it having been with me for 24-odd years now, I felt another's journey come to a beautiful summation with Thrice and it's one of the (many, many) reasons I love that movie and it resonates so much with me. I also agree that "the message" is too inflated when it comes to analysis (of both NGE and NTE), implying that it's all some kind of lecture, which I doubt Anno ever intended. I think that Evangelion has always been about what Anno is feeling at the time and how he expresses it but then he leaves it up to you with how to interpret it and what to do with it.

Archer wrote:I think what makes Evangelion special is that it feels very sincere and personal - it doesn’t feel like it was written to lecture the viewer or deliberately planned to impart some message, but that it came directly from Anno’s feelings.

I agree with this, but unfortunately for Shin Eva, I think Anno's feelings or objectives (or lack thereof) swamped the project and took precedence over the actual project.
To me its like going to school to learn science but instead en up listening to the teacher's personal life.

Archer wrote:I like to contrast it to Madoka Magica (which don’t get me wrong I also enjoyed), which I think provides a good foil as a work that feels more constructed and deliberate in its themes/message.

This is exactly the polar opposite in organization. In Madoka everything was meticulously crafted and laid out from beginning to end. The advantage of such an approach is that it created an organized story that could reliably be built upon. 1.0 and 2.0 were more-or-less going in that direction, but Anno's "changing mental outlook" made it impossible to center around anything.

SEELE-01 wrote:This is exactly the polar opposite in organization. In Madoka everything was meticulously crafted and laid out from beginning to end. The advantage of such an approach is that it created an organized story that could reliably be built upon. 1.0 and 2.0 were more-or-less going in that direction, but Anno's "changing mental outlook" made it impossible to center around anything.

Not sure if you misread me or if I’m misunderstanding what you wrote, but… it looks like we agree on this.

I should also say I’m just generally referring more to the original NGE with my post, except when I’m specifically referring to 3.0+1.0. I agree that probably the biggest detriment to the Rebuilds as a story is that they majorly switched tracks at least twice in development, but were already locked into what the prior movies had shown.

BernardoCairo wrote:I guess that goes for pretty much everything, but EoE's message continues to make sense and be "useful" to many almost 25 years later. It doesn't really matter if you're suffering or not, you can understand that life sure isn't perfect, but it's worth living. It's better to live in pain than to live a lie. Someday, things might get better and then worse. It is how it is. That's the beauty of it, I guess.

I think our feelings about EoE depend on our mindset too. Many people still consider EoE too depressing to find the message compelling (or even understand the message).

I really like 3.0+1.0 ending, but I suspect one of the reasons why this ending is so popular between a good amount of people is beacause the tone is the opposite to EoE ending.

Archer wrote:Not sure if you misread me or if I’m misunderstanding what you wrote, but… it looks like we agree on this.
I should also say I’m just generally referring more to the original NGE with my post, except when I’m specifically referring to 3.0+1.0. I agree that probably the biggest detriment to the Rebuilds as a story is that they majorly switched tracks at least twice in development, but were already locked into what the prior movies had shown.

Yup, we agree.
Madoka was planned properly, in contrast with Rebuild's "on the go" development.
After 2.0's CRC's interviews were translated I began worrying that Anno and co. had started Rebuild with no clear idea or goals on mind, and that it was slowing, for not saying hurting, the development of the movies.

Zoop wrote:A place like EvaGeeks is a whole lot more difficult to create than a Discord server. This is oldschool, good old forums with moderators who aren't complete halfwits.

Yes, this is so true. Although I don't always find myself agreeing with peoples' opinions here, Evageeks commands respect among the fandom for being a genuinely good place for discussion. I do remember some YouTube videos that came out after 3.0+1.0's Japan release that were basically meme'ing on the forum, but I think that was done more out of jest than actual malicious intent.

I can't speak for Discord... but jeez, the Evangelion groups on Facebook are atrocious now. There used to be some decent memes on them a few years ago, but they have degenerated into bad faith arguments and name calling. There are a lot of people in these groups on both the pro and anti-NTE sides of the fence that conduct themselves terribly, and in a way that would be considered unsightly on these boards. I talk more about that and my theory as to why here.

First two movies: "What if Evangelion, but with less filler and much better animation?"

Fourth movie: "What if Evangelion, but the ending almost made sense?"

Third movie: "FUCK YOU, AUDIENCE! LOL" - "FUCK YOU TOO, ANNO!"

For real, though... going from 2.0 to 3.0 sort of reminds me of going from Star Wars Episode 7 to Episode 8, where effort had been put into setting up future plot developments and building a story that would lead to those developments, and then someone new came along and knocked it all down and shat in the audience's popcorn for the sake of "SuBvErTiNg eXpEcTaTiOnS"

Overall, I consider Rebuild to be very slightly better than NGE/EoE, but it could have made the improvements that it made without sacrificing as much as it sacrificed.

baldur wrote:For the life of me, I will never understand people that view the timeskip as Rebuild's biggest mistake and not its most vital and redeeming feature.

To be fair, there was nothing wrong with the timeskip. It was the 90 minutes of bollocks after the timeskip that really dragged it down.

SEELE-01 wrote:Unlike NGE+EoE, in which every watching reveals some new perspective, Shin only shows more and more flaws.

Rewatching NGE+EoE reveals new perspectives AND more flaws. I'm now quite convinced that while Anno had the basic plot sketched out ahead of time, he made up the mythology as he went along, which is why it's such a confusing and self-contradictory mess. The Director's Cuts and EoE only worsened the situation by retconning the mythology with so much extra mythobabble (Anti-AT Fields, the White and Black Moons, imitation Lances, the LCL Sea...)

ArtyumR wrote:3.0+1.0 became a complete mess of pseudoscience, nonsensical vaguely Christian babble, and people infodumping stuff the previous movies should have established earlier

So in other words... it's just like EoE?

Axx°N N. wrote:To me it's a ramshackle built out of janky technobabble, weightless action scenes with no tension, flanderizing exposition, unexplored characters, platitudes, and a flimsy worldbuilding transformed into a deeply unintelligible new world.

So in other words... it's just like EoE?

Zoop wrote:Back in the day (god do I feel old) we had dedicated servers for our Quake, Unreal, Counterstrike, Modern Warfare etc. You found a favourite server, and frequently join the same one. Frequently meet the same people, have conversations in game chats. Toxic people getting kicked/banned by a moderator (more importantly, cheaters get delt with instantly). Thats like these boards.
Noways, games like that are all matchmaking. Just joining randoms. Had a good game with someone? Too bad, next game they're gone. Cheaters only get banned in banwaves after they have already ruined several of your games. Only remedy against shitty brats claiming to have had sex with your mother is to mute em. Cut yourself off of that "community".

I realize this is thoroughly off-topic but I agree a million percent. I cannot describe my disappointment with the post-2006 first-person shooter genre. We went from medkit-based healing, where every bullet and point of health mattered, to being Wolverine from X-Men. We went from a REAL load/save system to checkpoint bullshit. We went from carrying as many guns as you could find, which REWARDED EXPLORATION, to a two-gun limit. And yes, we lost the ability to set up our own servers with our own custom maps and rules. For that matter, I'm disappointed in post-2006 internet in general. Trading Myspace for Facebook was a horrible deal. Trading the old file-sharing networks for Youtube was a bad deal. Gaining Subreddits and Discords at the expense of dedicated forums was a bad deal. Hell, never mind the internet - every version of Windows has sucked since Vista (which came out in 2006), it's impossible to find fullscreen monitors (and I could go into a multi-page rant about why fullscreen is better than widescreen), and Intel hasn't come out with a new microarchitecture since 2008. I'd say that everything is just a die shrink of Nehalem, but new process nodes aren't even smaller than previous ones anymore, or at the very least, their numerical designations (like "7nm") no longer have anything to do with transistor size.

The whole world fucking sucks now and I want to go back to literally any year before 2006. Does anyone have a Negative Universe and a couple of spears that I can borrow?

BernardoCairo wrote:EoE's message continues to make sense and be "useful" to many almost 25 years later. It doesn't really matter if you're suffering or not, you can understand that life sure isn't perfect, but it's worth living. It's better to live in pain than to live a lie. Someday, things might get better and then worse.

That's an interesting interpretation of a movie that ends with all life on Earth being exterminated except for two people who will die in a week anyway due to the lack of fresh water (and in a month due to the lack of food, if they were to somehow find water). The only way Earth's biosphere will ever recover from that event is if Asuka and Shinji brought their gut bacteria with them when they emerged from the LCL Sea, and those bacteria eventually evolve into new forms of life billions of years after Asuka and Shinji have died.

WDS wrote:First two movies: "What if Evangelion, but with less filler and much better animation?"

You could maybe make a case for 1.11, but 2.22? It's more like: "what if we take 10+ episodes and try to put it all together into one movie, while also taking everything that makes Evangelion unique to begin with?" To be fair, even 1.11 suffers from this a bit...

WDS wrote:That's an interesting interpretation of a movie that ends with all life on Earth being exterminated except for two people who will die in a week anyway due to the lack of fresh water (and in a month due to the lack of food, if they were to somehow find water). The only way Earth's biosphere will ever recover from that event is if Asuka and Shinji brought their gut bacteria with them when they emerged from the LCL Sea, and those bacteria eventually evolve into new forms of life billions of years after Asuka and Shinji have died.

Well, that's literally what the movie (and, frankly, both endings) are all about. Shinji literally comes to this realization on screen, while talking to Kaworu and Rei (in one of the best and most emotional scenes ever, in my opinion). I've already said this so many times, but it's been a while. EOE can be interpreted in so many ways and most agree that it's a positive ending. Is it happy? No. But it's positive. It's not as idealized as EoTV. It's more grounded, like life.
The first half of 2021 was not easy for me as the pandemic was having this side effect of getting me addicted to the internet. I could have done nothing, but after the vaccine I started going out more, I got a girlfriend, I started working for real... Then 2022 came around and, for various reasons, things didn't go the way I wanted. A lot of shit has happened and I'm not necessarily in a good place, but it's not the same place I was at the beginning of last year. I went through these good and bad experiences and it all changed me. Again, I could have done nothing. I could have just moderated this forum, helped Felipe with the wiki and continued living without much ambition until the end of 2021. But I took a risk and it paid off in some areas, not others and temporarily in a few. All I can say is that my journey in this life is less mediocre for it.
Everyone who has watched this movie seriously understands that this is the message being conveyed. Shinji could have stayed in the LCL sea forever. He could have chosen a life without ambitions, obstacles, other people... He could have remained inert in himself and his consciousness would have dissipated amid so many others in that sea. But he chose to live for real, even though he knew he could be betrayed and hurt again. He knows life out there is hard and unfair. We know that. But it's better than not living, not experiencing. Because sometimes something good happens. A kiss, a date, a party, a friendship, a trip to the movies, a cake you bought in downtown, a mountain you climbed on an ATV (and flipped over at the end of the descent lol)... life. Pleasures are in the little things. And yes, other days you will be depressed, homesick, feeling lonely, having to take a test or attend a boring class. But all this is temporary. Life is a cycle of good and bad things that define us as human beings and the important thing is to never give up, no matter how hard it is.
Shinji and Asuka want to live. They have strong personalities. Asuka faced nine EVA units (all equipped with S2 engines and longinus spears) alone, while having a time limit. She fought until the very last moment. She fought for her mother, she fought for humanity, and most importantly, she fought for herself. She died, but managed to come back. That's how much she wants to live. It doesn't matter what will happen next, that's up for our imagination. But I can only assume they will make it work and that's why I fell in love with Evangelion. That's why it's helping me now to deal with my anguish and it will tomorrow and the day after that.

WDS wrote:So in other words... it's just like EoE?

Not at all, no, at least not to me. I worded that how I did to express how I feel Thrice is the exact opposite of the qualities I perceive NGE and EoE to hold, so I'm not sure there's much if any utility to feigning ignorance or turning it back around on someone it doesn't apply to in the first place. I could go in depth here but it would be a repeat of my post history. I'll keep it short and just say: admittedly, the lore has never mattered much to me other than what it facilitates, so I'm not arguing that there aren't overwhelming similarities in style and method between the two. I don't disagree with what you're getting at fundamentally. The difference is more specific: I cared about what happened to the characters in NGE/EoE, but I don't care at all for anyone in Thrice. Asuka's fight against the MPEs continues to grip me every time I watch, whereas Thrice's action scenes actively bore me. I found it clever in NGE/EoE that the lore was consistently built upon in a way that justified, at least by sensible pacing and space given to set-up, that the plot nosedived into psychodrama. I can't say that I feel Thrice justifies any of the cards it pulls from its sleeve, especially at the rapid and abrupt fashion it does so. NGE/EoE's instrumentality felt like it married to the themes, and I cared about its effects on the drama. I can't say I get why Thrice's anti-universe exists other than to expand the power level of the zany stuff going on and dial things up to eleven for the nth time, and as a consequence of finding it extraneous as a conceit, I find myself less able to care about what it allows for dramatically. I can understand your qualms about NGE/EoE's plot holes and reliance on exposition, I'm not saying they're free of all warts, but I find them far better executed and far more excusable than Thrice, which feels to me as if it has zero breathing room away from its faults.

Here's another way to put it. From my experience of watching with others, I'd say EoE is a film I expect to have to pause so certain scenes can be digested. Misato's exposition about what's really been going on the whole time doesn't work unless you freeze frame it, it's way too much to absorb at the speed it goes. But it's an interesting scene with a somewhat noir intrigue, it has tone and great visuals. Yet in Thrice, no attempt to digest Ritsuko's exposition about the ark or Gendo's spiels about his machinations make them work; they're totally inert dramatically. Not with lack of trying, but the amount of exposition is such a slog that it seems impossible to view Thrice without just giving up at a certain point and letting the runtime play itself out. That's me and my friends' experience at least.

I found it clever in NGE/EoE that the lore was consistently built upon in a way that justified, at least by sensible pacing and space given to set-up, that the plot nosedived into psychodrama. I can't say that I feel Thrice justifies any of the cards it pulls from its sleeve, especially at the rapid and abrupt fashion it does so. NGE/EoE's instrumentality felt like it married to the themes, and I cared about its effects on the drama. I can't say I get why Thrice's anti-universe exists other than to expand the power level of the zany stuff going on and dial things up to eleven for the nth time, and as a consequence of finding it extraneous as a conceit, I find myself less able to care about what it allows for dramatically.

This, pretty much. In NGE, the lore is cleverly used to “explain” common mecha tropes that are usually left without a valid in-universe explanation. And, like you say, it’s not dropped on you all at once, but continually builds on itself to “explain” the further questions that get brought up, in a way that all eventually ties back into the themes of the story.

The best example of this relates to the Evangelions themselves. Why exactly are Evangelions used to fight angels? It’s pretty much common knowledge that giant humanoid robots would be incredibly ineffective combat machines in real life. Well, it’s because only Evangelions can generate AT fields. Which, on the surface, just seems like a fairly hand-wavy bullshit justification which just leads to more questions… for example, why the hell are Eva’s able to generate AT fields anyways? Well, it turns out it’s because they were cloned from Angels, and are actually giant human/Angel hybrids! Which itself leads to more questions, like how the hell are humans able to be hybridized with a literal eldritch alien race? Well at the very end it’s revealed to be because humans and Angels are actually the same kind of being. Incidentally this also gives an in-universe justification for why Eva’s are humanoid: it wasn’t an intentional design feature, it was just how the cloning turned out. The AT fields themselves, while seeming at first to just be a convenient plot device, are later revealed to be the psychic manifestation of the psychological barriers between people, which directly ties into the core themes of the show. And the thing is, at the end of the day, the only thing that actually matters is that bit at the end about the AT fields - everything else is just icing on the cake, and has pretty much zero relevance to understanding the story and themes.

The lore in the Rebuilds is, generally speaking, more or less equally irrelevant to the overall story and themes, but unlike NGE it also doesn’t contribute to coherent worldbuilding, and instead of being small hints in the background that you might not even pick up on even your second watch-through, it’s in-your-face and impossible to ignore.

BernardoCairo wrote:

SPOILER: Show

Well, that's literally what the movie (and, frankly, both endings) are all about. Shinji literally comes to this realization on screen, while talking to Kaworu and Rei (in one of the best and most emotional scenes ever, in my opinion). I've already said this so many times, but it's been a while. EOE can be interpreted in so many ways and most agree that it's a positive ending. Is it happy? No. But it's positive. It's not as idealized as EoTV. It's more grounded, like life.
The first half of 2021 was not easy for me as the pandemic was having this side effect of getting me addicted to the internet. I could have done nothing, but after the vaccine I started going out more, I got a girlfriend, I started working for real... Then 2022 came around and, for various reasons, things didn't go the way I wanted. A lot of shit has happened and I'm not necessarily in a good place, but it's not the same place I was at the beginning of last year. I went through these good and bad experiences and it all changed me. Again, I could have done nothing. I could have just moderated this forum, helped Felipe with the wiki and continued living without much ambition until the end of 2021. But I took a risk and it paid off in some areas, not others and temporarily in a few. All I can say is that my journey in this life is less mediocre for it.
Everyone who has watched this movie seriously understands that this is the message being conveyed. Shinji could have stayed in the LCL sea forever. He could have chosen a life without ambitions, obstacles, other people... He could have remained inert in himself and his consciousness would have dissipated amid so many others in that sea. But he chose to live for real, even though he knew he could be betrayed and hurt again. He knows life out there is hard and unfair. We know that. But it's better than not living, not experiencing. Because sometimes something good happens. A kiss, a date, a party, a friendship, a trip to the movies, a cake you bought in downtown São Paulo, a mountain you climbed on an ATV (and flipped over at the end of the descent lol)... life. Pleasures are in the little things. And yes, other days you will be depressed, homesick, feeling lonely, having to take a test or attend a boring class. But all this is temporary. Life is a cycle of good and bad things that define us as human beings and the important thing is to never give up, no matter how hard it is.
Shinji and Asuka want to live. They have strong personalities. Asuka faced nine EVA units (all equipped with S2 engines and longinus spears) alone, while having a time limit. She fought until the very last moment. She fought for her mother, she fought for humanity, and most importantly, she fought for herself. She died, but managed to come back. That's how much she wants to live. It doesn't matter what will happen next, that's up for our imagination. But I can only assume they will make it work and that's why I fell in love with Evangelion. That's why it's helping me now to deal with my anguish and it will tomorrow and the day after that.

This is one of the best posts on this forum. Bernardo really captured how I feel about EOE