Seele00TextOnly wrote:People insist on laying blame with this new faction for trying to put some safeguards in place to make sure another Impact isn't triggered. It's beyond baffling that such measures end up putting them at the end of the wrath of legions of the very otaku for whom Anno's message here of growing up and taking responsibility seems to be falling on deaf ears.
There's not much baffling about it. NGE Shinji's near-constant victimization led people to automatically sympathize with him (not in the sense that they find him to be a good person since the prevailing sentiment in that direction was and is "what a pussy lol amirite :dildos:" but rather in the sense that the audience is deliberately led to think about Shinji as a victim of circumstance for the vast majority of the show, and consequently does): it's only in the last few episodes and in EoE that Anno really tears into Shinji (and himself as well), a change to which most people respond with simple confusion. EoE in particular is enough of a clusterfuck on a textual level that its subtext simply goes over the head of its audience, who are more concerned with trying to figure out what is actually going on than they are with trying to parse out psychoanalytic bullshit/genre cliches/avant-garde nonsense/occult shit. And so, because Shinji was working for Nerv, people miss the fact that Nerv was kind of evil all along, even if the rank and file were pretty well blameless and the opposition they faced was every bit as evil if not more so.
Rebuild of Eva is much more obvious about it (although clearly still not obvious enough for some). There is very little pretense on Anno's part that NME's Shinji is a sympathetic character and by the time 3.0 rolls around there's almost no pretense that Nerv are anything but bad guys. As it turns out, being vaguely pathetic and the center of attention is enough to qualify you as a heroic protagonist in the eyes of anime fandom, even if you're also working for the evil cult mastermind and literally out to destroy the world to make yourself happy. And if some lady says she's gonna blow you up if you try? She must be the real monster here. In a way it's quite interesting that Anno has managed to elicit hate for Wille, the obligatory secret institute of super robots dedicated to saving the world from alien monsters, simply by setting Shinji on the other team. When the existence of Wille was first revealed in spoilers I pointed out that it seemed pretty significant that Anno's favorite characters get put on the same team as the girl whose purpose as a character is to destroy Eva - and of course they get set up to fight the Ikari family. I still think it's significant, but with everything else that's come out about the film I think the significance is utterly goddamn transparent. If anyone is seriously suggesting that Wille are bad guys or that Misato is genuinely "wrong" to threaten to blow Shinji's head off if he winds up doing such-and-so (
which he actually does later in the movie), they are being denser than they have any right to be. Which is not particularly baffling.
And yeah, Gendou and Seele certainly are reprehensible people for scheming their way into getting Fourth Impact, but at the risk of turning this into another derail about Shinji being a contemptible shit, all Shinji had to do to stymie their plans and fuck the bad guys in the ass was, y'know, pay attention to the mystic alien kid and not fuck around with superweapons he didn't understand.
