Opinions about the manga and the originals?

[IpPo2911]

maybe a more Raw analysis from my awful destroyed mind LOL: To be honest, the manga definitely tightens up some of the more jarring elements of the anime, like the pacing and the character arcs. But here's the thing: that very messiness—the lack of answers, the discomforting silence in certain episodes, the way things just fall apart—is what made the anime hit so hard. It feels like you're in the chaos with the characters, and that existential dread is felt rather than explained.
The anime isn't neat, it doesn't wrap up everything in a satisfying bow, and that’s what makes it so emotionally powerful. You’re left hanging, questioning everything, and feeling the despair and confusion of the characters. The manga, on the other hand, tries to give more closure and a bit more comfort—especially with the characters' developments, and yeah, while that's nice, it kinda takes away from the punch. You can see the progression, the resolution, but part of NGE’s beauty is that lingering sense of being unfinished, of existing in that uncomfortable space between answers and questions.
Also, let’s not forget that End of Evangelion literally defines the series. It's the culmination, the pure distillation of what NGE is about—an absolute mind-blowing conclusion that hits in a way nothing else in the franchise does. If you're into closure, yeah, go for the manga. But if you want to be shook by something you can't even begin to process, anime's where it's at.
In the end, they both have their strengths, but for me, the anime’s rawness, its emotional brutality, and the sheer genius of End of Evangelion makes it irreplaceable. The manga? It's good. It's just... safer. And Evangelion isn’t about being safe.

[gloomyAmateur]

I think the manga works well as supplementary material for people who are craving for more Evangelion content. It doesn't quite have the same impact as the original series, and doesn't really have any standout "WTF" moments like the series does. It's a good alternate take on the story, but I agree that somewhere it loses what makes the Neon Genesis Evangelion series so special. It feels almost like fan-fiction at times. The majority of important/prominent characters have wildly different personalities in the manga, and it seems to have an urge to clear up almost anything that could be considered ambiguous. It doesn't challenge Anno's vision or direction in any way, and only seems to serve as "bonus" content or a "re-take" from a different perspective. I disagree with a lot of Sadamoto's takes on certain characters and creative changes and he doesn't seem to fully understand Evangelion.
It feels more "shounen," if that makes sense.

[IpPo2911]

Yeah, totally agree. While I think Sadamoto did improve on some aspects—like Rei (I’m not a fan of how he handled Kaworu, though lol, even with the added development. I feel like it wasn’t necessary for his character. Kaworu comes in as a messianic symbol of unconditional love and leaves the same way, without providing much explanation. That’s what makes him so intriguing to me)—it’s clear that Sadamoto didn’t quite grasp a lot of what Anno was trying to achieve with NGE. Probably because he doesn’t have Anno’s twisted, insane genius mindset.

What really bothers me is how Sadamoto discarded certain key traits of the characters just because fans “didn’t like” them. For example, Shinji’s personality in the manga sometimes feels like “Asuka 2.0,” and I REALLY don’t vibe with that. Shinji wasn’t designed to be likable; his “whiny” personality is one of the things that makes him impactful as a realistic, relatable character.

Speaking of Asuka… they absolutely did her dirty in the manga. One of the most interesting things about NGE is the parallel between Asuka’s and Shinji’s insecurities and how they both spiral in similar yet distinct ways. In the manga, they reduced her to this generic “crazy tsundere” archetype, which is such a disservice to her complexity as a character.

[gloomyAmateur]

I agree completely. Shinji has a lot more "edge" in the manga, being more tough and abrasive at times. He feels so much less realistic and more like a generic shounen protagonist. In Sadamoto's attempt to make Shinji more likable, he actually becomes LESS likable and harder to sympathize with. Asuka's character was practically annihilated, and she loses so much of the nuance and depth that made her character work so well. In the manga, Kaworu was just so WEIRD throughout, and he doesn't form a positive bond with Shinji, which makes his death less impactful. I also think Sadamoto's choice to make Gendo an unsympathetic antagonist (wishing to become a God instead of reuniting with Yui, and outright despising Shinji instead of being afraid to love him) was a poor one. I think every character in Evangelion (well, except Seele members, I suppose) is supposed to be likable or at the least, understandable despite their glaring flaws and negative traits. While I can't say I like Gendo as a person in the anime, I can at least understand why he is who he is. He's Shinji if he never solved his problems, sinking deeper into his own bubble of isolation, shutting out all human connection due to his fear of rejection. His manga counterpart, however, appears to be a heartless villain who wishes to become a God, caring none about who he hurts or what he destroys in the process.

[IpPo2911]

Everything that makes Gendo such an interesting character is his cold personality paired with the deeply sentimental reason behind the atrocities he commits. It’s rare in mainstream anime to actually sympathize with a villain. His motivations are the complete opposite of his cold demeanor. If I’m remembering correctly, he even admits his regrets with Shinji at the end of EoE, and whether you hate him or not, you feel that in your heart. BUT NAAAAAH, in the manga, he’s just a villain with a god complex.

[C.T.1290]

Anno did made the series as a deconstruction to the mecha genre and anime as a whole, so his goals was to bring down the whole industry. Yet, his work influenced some others, wasn’t sure that was his true intentions or not. But EVA ended with the world coming to an end. And the whole world of Evangelion was such a mess, that it was probably for the best for that world to be destroyed, and the flawed characters with it since there was no hope for them anyway.

For example, Shinji’s personality in the manga sometimes feels like “Asuka 2.0,” and I REALLY don’t vibe with that….Speaking of Asuka… they absolutely did her dirty in the manga. One of the most interesting things about NGE is the parallel between Asuka’s and Shinji’s insecurities and how they both spiral in similar yet distinct ways.

How was Shinji similar to Asuka and vice versa? Aside from their traumas?

Asuka's character was practically annihilated, and she loses so much of the nuance and depth that made her character work so well.

What kind of nuance did she have?

[BernardoCairo]

My opinion is that the manga is good on its own, but is bad when compared to the anime. I still think it's an important work and that it carries more weight than other spin-offs, but I don't really like the direction Sadamoto took the story. Also, without Anno's direction, the visuals took a hit, obviously. The manga is beautiful (Sadamoto is a great artist and character designer), but it lacks that trippy/surreal look that the anime has at times.
When it comes to the characters, it's worth remembering that this is Sadamoto's take on them. There's a lot of talk about all the characters being inspired by Anno, but that's not the case in the manga. Some things are carried over from the anime and some are completely different. I think that's what creates that "strange feeling" some people get when reading the manga.
Anyway, I think all the characters are worse in the manga (especially the pilots). However, I do like some of the additions Sadamoto made. I think volumes 4 and 6 are very good in the manga. In fact, I think the EVA 03 incident is better in this version of the story than in the anime and movies.

[C.T.1290]

Anyway, I think all the characters are worse in the manga (especially the pilots). However, I do like some of the additions Sadamoto made. I think volumes 4 and 6 are very good in the manga. In fact, I think the EVA 03 incident is better in this version of the story than in the anime and movies.

How are characters worse?

[Kendrix]

IMHO the manga adds some nice extra 'missing scenes' that I love and have integrated into my headcanon (and I don't doubt that he probably contributed good scenes to the OG as well), but the whole/gesamtkunstwerk doesn't quite together without Anno so that its is weaker overall.

The characters are either exaggerated (Asuka's two facedness, Ritsuko's jealousy, Gendo) or lacking teeth (Shinji, Rei).

And yes, Rei is actually very much included in that.

There's a lot of little decisions that water her down & take out the eerie quality of the character, from having the clones not smile & react more appropiately to their destruction, to making the first Rei talk to Naoko out of sympathy, not bratty child behavior & generally act like the others instead of intriguingly different, having her hate the room she was made in rather than deliberately copy it, (which in a sense represented Anno's own preference for in-organic things over living ones), making her shoot down Gendo with far less damning words, the cringy 'made of straw/you taught me so much' monologue as if she was some convenient blank slate. Plus Shinji comes up with "i gotta find out why I have this hand" on his own rather than it being her line, Instrumentality is much less of a dialogue.

Kaworu basically got Asuka's part as the toxic crab bucket quasi love interest that Shinji feels drawn to even though he also hates them & who's the 'safe' option due to lacking compassion / validating his worldview, but that leaves Asuka with less things to do & a sad lack of Kaworu's actual role.
Though I guess trying to make him more 'inexperienced'/monstery was at least a deliberate decision rather than just watered-down ness.
Another great example is how Shinji's motivation for TI is altruistic rather than spiteful.

The characters seem more neatly sorted into nice & mean, and the mean ones become ridiculous while the nice ones don't get to be ugly.

I'm the resident Reishin nut here but the appeal for me is that even a weird person who may feel alienated can be loved & some of that is just lost & watered down if she's made more 'normal' in the way that most of her various knocksoff are.
Eg. Manga Rei is more like Yuki Nagato or Inori Yuzuriha than she is like anime Rei. (Contrast Lain who was come up with by a guy who hadn't seen the series but was a similar flavor of crazy operating in the same zeitgeist)

The man himself have stated that he & Anno had interpretations here & Sadamoto for his part has maintained that he sees EVA as being about motherhood & that being some quality he tried to give to Rei. (which he doesn't see as conflicting with clearly writing Rei as a love interest particularly with how he speaks of the Kaworu situation)

Sadamoto is a conservative guy (even getting hot water for saying nationalist stuff) and has that baseless flavorless idealization of "family" or "motherhood" that conservative guys often have where it's just this vague non-defined goodness that doesn't really require a personality because it's just a symbol. He's made some other works idealizing the concept of family like the one with the werewolf kids.(not that that one was bad on its own merits as a movie)

The OG series is barely actually about mothers at all in the end, Yui & Kyoko are minor side characters at best, (whereas the most prominent 'maternal' character is Misato, a very flawed & human and non-idealized figure), actual parenting isn't a theme (as expected for something mostly written by non-parents) in the end 'return to the womb' is a metaphor for self-isolation and all the Freud was just aesthetic windowdressing or maybe initial ideas that went into the basic setting crafting, but in the end not being anything like his mother at all but rather being his subconscious & so she ends up being a representative/expression of this very specific personality type & the struggles of that, and no less on point for that for being depicted somewhat metaphorically with phantastic elements (it's not like a genius prodigy with leet kung fu skills & model level looks is remotely realistic)

Of the ppl that end up having an emotion over the series most do it over how it covers the topics of maturity/responsibility, isolation, self-worth etc. but there's no parents bawling their eyes out over anything it says about parenthood, in the way there is with that Pixar film where a robot adopts a goose, for example. The main thing it says about parents is "we don't get the contradictory decisions our parents made & have to cope with it somehow", very much from the PoV of the offspring. Misato tries & fails to take in some kids but a key part of that is she doesn't feel too mature herself, she comes off more like an overwhelmed older sister similar to Nani in Lilo & Stich. She's too young to have actually birthed Asuka & Shinji and didn't choose to have them, they were abandoned.

The connection between Rei & Yui mostly existed as a greek tragedy style "haha they're doomed" & indicative of Gendo's folly - it was always considered that Rei herself would 'liberate herself from that Karma' & establish herself as her own person. The point there is that Gendo tried to pull a necromancer & failed and he doesn't get that because he's a fool. He loses because he doesn't get that they're different. (which Rei actually gets to tell him in the og version of eoe)

Generally her own character with her own story & interiority rather than just a symbolic standin for this & that.

(& just under 5% part of appeal of ReiShin for me is that it affirms her as her own person, big obvious proof that she's not Yui, as Yui would obviously not make out with her own son. Not that you need a guy for that (its being done in other ways, too with the huge cynic/optimist contrast going on & Yui being feminine & charming vs Rei's asocial androgyny, among other things - Gendo is also someone they have very different relationships with, not that Gendo's noticed. ), but it's punchy & visceral and therefore evocative & cathartic - "See this is just how much they're not the same" )


Basically, like yes, I love me the garden scene & the tea scene & other individual tidbits, but when you put it together there's something missing.


Same reason I didn't really like "going another way" though it's hailed as a classic. I want my Rei fanfic to, like, actually have Rei in it not some blank slate that ends up being made to act conventionally feminine. Like, amigo, she lives in a dump, wear unfashionable socks & ends up massacring her poor hands the one time she tries to cook. You would end up getting the Gendo treatment with that attitude and you would deserve it.


In sense both Asuka & Rei may be obtained by gender-flipping some common male archetype (the asocial shutin & the emotion-crushing "alpha" tough guy) but it's a lucky accident since personality types aren't really that gender specific & you're providing a scarce resource as not so many ppl are talking about 'tough guy complex' girls or asocial shutin girls. 12 year old me gratefully lapped it up and now I have a prominently displayed Rei figurine in my living room to this day, so, trick did work.

Plus any romance worth its salt that wants to cause emotion not just do "hot reward of vaguely desirable goodness" knows the love interest also has to be able to be identified with. The Twillight fangirlies want to BE Edward as much as they wanna fuck him. if you can indentify with them "from both sides" it just means more profit.



Shinji for the most part doesn't strike me as AS watered down because it's probably just Sadamoto writing him more as himself, so hes more simply legitimately different than a discount version of himself, but defanging the Third Impact decision stands out as a definite coward move, especially since the option was right there to simply go with the TV ending variant where he just does nothing (but is still held just as culpable as if he had pulled the trigger)

[asakuraikun]

I like the manga quite a bit to be really honest. Of course, I also realised that if the manga were the only thing to exist Evangelion would not be as relevant or remembered as it is today. Sure, Sadamoto's drawing is stunning, the story is nice and also are the characters, but of course it lacks the things that made the anime special and legendary.

There are many good scenes on manga, and here and there it may even be somewhat better than the anime version. The anime is simply composed of many other things that the manga obviously doesn't have - the soundtrack, the voice acting, the animation, all things that are very important for Eva in the broad picture. All in all, as long as your read knowingly it is something separate, it is all right.

About the other things such as "Shinji Ikari Raising Project", I have an impression that people feel that those characters are SO hurt, that they wish they could see those characters well, just living a normal life. And that's from where it comes from. I've read it, it's quite fun as additional non-canon content, but obviously nothing something I'd read were it other characters.

[Axx°N N.]

I think the manga has pros and cons, but I don't think any of the pros transcend the fact that it's one creator's spin on another's output. Eva had its chutzpah because so much of it was bled out of Anno, and you just don't get that from the manga. What you get is similar to Rebuild's long-term delays, a project that was trickled out because it lacked the drive and the exterior parameters (airing schedule, studio obligations, etc.) that made the original so flawed but potent.

I greatly dislike that, as you read, you're seeing the result of that delay gradually as the chapters proceed. Compare chapter 1 to the last chapter--the character designs go from NGE's to NTE's, and I greatly prefer the former. It's almost odd seeing the EoE plot beats in the more modern art style. Personally, I find that some 'soul behind the eyes' goes out at some point, and while I think some of that is just my preference for the earlier art, it also kind of makes me think of Shinji's abruptly-assumed stoicism in Thrice, in that at some point, the manga just goes on funeral-march mode to finish itself off. There's some sense of care that disappears. To be less vague, the characters all start to have these kind of absent-minded expressions.

Another part of the morphing into NTE, I really don't like the bonus chapter with Mari. I don't feel it adds anything to either the manga or NTE, and it contributes to the sense that the manga is this strange project that spanned multiple decades on life support, and had a confused sense of its own relationship to the franchise.

I do like some of the backstory additions, detail changes, order of event switcheroos, etc. I particularly like, for instance, the manga's version of Instrumentality--all the word bubbles at once in that double-page spread is a brilliant use of the format change, and couldn't be done in any other medium. Also, as a happy ending redo route, I genuinely think the manga's version is better than NTE's, even though I still dislike the idea inherently as a concept.

[dzzthink]

I do like some of the backstory additions, detail changes, order of event switcheroos, etc. I particularly like, for instance, the manga's version of Instrumentality--all the word bubbles at once in that double-page spread is a brilliant use of the format change, and couldn't be done in any other medium. Also, as a happy ending redo route, I genuinely think the manga's version is better than NTE's, even though I still dislike the idea inherently as a concept.

The manga ending definitely gave Shinji another chance in a more realistic way rather than NTE, which seemed a bit departed with a whole new reality being created and what not.

Most often, the case is that the manga is created first and then the anime, so Eva is a rare exception in that the anime was made by a sole member of the staff involved in the anime, so for that the changes and effect are definitely obvious. Mainly the story telling is very different in that sadamoto employs a more dialogue heavy, structured and standardised approach to Evangelion compared with the experimental and often abstract nature of the anime, which would use X to talk about Y, or even talk completely out of sequence with some episodes delineating from the previous episodes, giving the audience a feeling of "what on earth is going on?". Although there are instances that Sadamoto experiments with plot aspects like actually adds on layers to each character, making Kaworu's character more nuanced, going into Shinji's childhood, using some imagery (Kaworu killing the cat), it never really felt like it was crazy enough to make it an original project.

I quite often think this, but I truly think that Chainsaw man is the manga version of Evangelion anime in terms of being something very original, abstract and with a wtf style that makes the audience shocked. Ironically, whenever I watch the Chainsaw man anime I always feel that the manga is better and that the heavy visual effects and structure takes away from the unhinged nature of the manga, where there are some chapters with rarely any dialogue or there are scenes that go completely out of context.