3.0 as Anno's criticism of classic NGE fans

Discussion of the new series of Evangelion movies ( "Evangelion Shin Gekijōban", meaning "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition"). The final instalment made its debut in Japan on March 8, 2021.

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Postby Mr. Tines » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:04 pm

View Original PostSachi wrote:something along the lines of "Anno saw everybody else making Eva fan fics, so he decided to make one of his own!" :lol:
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Postby pwhodges » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:15 pm

View Original PostChaddyManPrime wrote:Actually I wouldn't mind Anno scolding us again, it'd probably be the most interesting thing he did since EoE

Why do fans want to make it about themselves, is what I want to know.
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Postby ChaddyManPrime » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:18 pm

^
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Postby Chuckman » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:27 pm

View Original Postpwhodges wrote:Why do fans want to make it about themselves, is what I want to know.


Storytelling is a participatory, communal experience. The fans want to make it about themselves because good fiction becomes part of who you are.
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Postby Rei IV » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:34 pm

I don't know about fanfiction but the movies feel more Sci-Fi/Fantasy-like than the original NGE, which is funny because it's part of the mecha/giant robot genre.

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Postby Chuckman » Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:36 pm

I think, in part, some of the aesthetics of the original are abandoned because they horribly date the series. NGE is definitely a sufferer from "hyper advanced technology and corded phones" syndrome.
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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:05 pm

View Original PostMr. Tines wrote:You mean the installment that has been described as "Eva for people who didn't like Eva"?

That’s a really odd statement, especially when you consider that Episodes 7-12 of NGE are also in that same vein of “Eva for those who don’t like Eva.” Remember, Eva doesn’t get its lasting identity from the fun early episodes where it was just monster fights and boobs. It got it from the last few episodes and EoE. That's what Eva is like to most people, a deconstructive look at a certain anime genre. People who consider Eva to be all dark, twisted, and well written don’t take into account the earlier episodes unless they end up foreshadowing something later on in the darker half of the series.

2.0 is the same way. It’s “Eva for people who don’t like Eva,” which is to say “It’s Eva for people who don’t like the last few episodes of the original show.” Like Episodes 7-12 of Eva, it’s all monster fights and boobs. And since those episodes weren’t the installments that defined Eva anyway, it’s technically okay to pull inspiration directly from those episodes of the show itself while still calling it an “Eva for people who don’t like Eva.” And so far, like the early episodes of NGE, it hasn’t been taken too seriously unless it’s tied into something in Q, and potentially something later on in FINAL.

View Original PostChuckman wrote:It is weird, though, how NTE so far mirrors the plot arc of 90% of the fanfic out there.

It’s amazing how much variety of materials can be written by fans when they have 12 years to do so before Anno remakes everything. Something is bound to be in both NTE and a fanfic, even if by accident. It’s a statistical impossibility at this point to not have small things mirror the new work in some way. Heck, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had that same issue with Sherlock Holmes during his life time. (Arguably the series still suffers from that same problem with all of these new television shows and such.)

The way I see it, the only way for Anno to not have something in his Eva films mirror some sort of previously written fanfic is if he were to pull a George Lucas on us and make something that absolutely no one liked, adding in Jar Jar Binks-like elements all throughout the script and generally actively pissing everyone off. (I say this under the assumption that there is no fanfic of Jar Jar prior to the announcement and/or release of The Phantom Menace movie. Afterwards I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a “Jar Jar is Love, Jar Jar is Life” fan fiction out there.)

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Postby Warren Peace » Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:09 pm

If the whole "fan fiction" angle is to be seen as something beyond just sour grapes, referencing specific works of fan fiction that have specific parallels with Q is necessary. If it's just, "well, some people have written NGE fics with a post-apocalyptic flavor" or "fan stories have expanded upon the Kaworu/Shinji relationship", that's thoroughly flimsy.

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:22 pm

^ I agree. Especially since a few years from now it will be the Q and FINAL films that will be considered the essence of NTE, just like how the tone in Episodes 18-26 + EoE are considered the essence of NGE.

View Original Postpwhodges wrote:Why do fans want to make it about themselves, is what I want to know.

It’s post-modernism. People feel as though they have the right to interpret a work free of artist’s intent, rather than consider the art an embodiment of the artist's intent.

I have a very mixed and nuanced opinion about it myself, dealing with everything from whether or not film is voyeuristic in nature or projectionist in nature, how author’s intent is important even though ultimately it will be the audience's interpretation that will remain, and whether or not a film really had an auteur figure to begin with.
(Most Hollywood productions I see as having "too many cooks in the kitchen," as it were, so I don’t consider most of them as having strong auteur figures in the making of those films to begin with. It’s all just a director squeezing in what little he can while appeasing 12 different producers, who are in turn wanting to appease several different studio heads, all of which want different things incorporated in the filming of a script and an intellectual property they’ve already forgotten about outside of name and casting.)

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Postby Chuckman » Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:48 pm

It's not "sour grapes" fanfiction is not a pejorative term to me.
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Postby Atropos » Tue Aug 26, 2014 9:01 pm

Getting a budget and unlimited creative freedom was the worst thing to happen to Hideaki Anno. It means the unique directorial style he developed as a result of the demands of the network has fallen by the wayside in favor of straightforward (bland) storytelling—sure, the story is the same, but the presentation just ain't NGE.

Anno better get Ikuni to be a creative consultant on FINAL. It's the only way to save the franchise.

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Postby ObsessiveMathsFreak » Tue Aug 26, 2014 9:07 pm

View Original PostChuckman wrote:The scene to which you refer there is so painfully aimed at the audience that the only way it could be more aimed at the audience is if it was intercut with Russel Crowe.

If Kaworu's words were aimed at us, then they blew right past me for one. I'd have pointed to Mari and Asuka's words to Shinji as being Anno's pokes at the audience, but Kaworu's words about replaying the past just don't seem to fit.
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Postby Lennik » Tue Aug 26, 2014 11:06 pm

View Original PostAtropos wrote:Getting a budget and unlimited creative freedom was the worst thing to happen to Hideaki Anno. It means the unique directorial style he developed as a result of the demands of the network has fallen by the wayside in favor of straightforward (bland) storytelling—sure, the story is the same, but the presentation just ain't NGE.

Anno better get Ikuni to be a creative consultant on FINAL. It's the only way to save the franchise.


If by that you mean they no longer have to compensate for running out of ink, then I agree. Otherwise, I think this entire statement is bunk. The franchise doesn't need saving. It's very much alive.

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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Aug 27, 2014 2:14 am

View Original PostFreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:That’s a really odd statement, especially when you consider that Episodes 7-12 of NGE are also in that same vein of “Eva for those who don’t like Eva.”
Episodes 7 and 11 turned on the background conspiracy material, which is something that NTE has lost -- the two strands were kept distinct if only by dropping those episodes entirely.
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Postby ElMariachi » Wed Aug 27, 2014 3:29 am

But the conspiracy material was here in 2.0, with the Cold War between Gendo and SEELE sabotaging the hell of each others, while Kaji spies on both sides for an unknown third party and Mari being apparently associated with him.

The only (big) thing is that all this spy and conspiracy stuff got its big showdown and resolution during the time skip, and we are in the aftermath of all this by the time we get back on the story.
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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Wed Aug 27, 2014 5:52 am

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:The only (big) thing is that all this spy and conspiracy stuff got its big showdown and resolution during the time skip, and we are in the aftermath of all this by the time we get back on the story.

And even then it might be replaced with hints that Kaji might be working on developing Wille in the background, maybe even recruiting Mari in the first scene of Ha for that cause. (Those lines the two shared about not wanting to use one another for their own plans and such.)

There are other threads here that discuss these conspiracies more thoroughly, but the point is that Ha doesn't completely leave us without conspiracies with which to interpret Q and FINAL. The problem (again, just like Episodes 7-12 of NGE) is that one actually has to wait for the rest of the series to come out before one has the possibility of seeing everything come together.

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Postby Bagheera » Wed Aug 27, 2014 6:41 am

View Original PostLennik wrote:If by that you mean they no longer have to compensate for running out of ink, then I agree. Otherwise, I think this entire statement is bunk. The franchise doesn't need saving. It's very much alive.


I agree completely. The new movies are very different from their predecessor, and I disagree with some of Anno's choices, but I have to admit the choices I would have made would have made for a much more mainstream story. But Anno doesn't want that -- he wants to challenge and/or subvert expectations and get people involved and talking, and both Ha and Q did a pretty good job of making that happen. Is it for the best for the characters and the story? I dunno. But he already gave the characters their due in NGE and EoE, so perhaps it doesn't matter in the end.

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:But the conspiracy material was here in 2.0, with the Cold War between Gendo and SEELE sabotaging the hell of each others, while Kaji spies on both sides for an unknown third party and Mari being apparently associated with him.


He means Seele's conspiracy. It dominated the background story in NGE, but in the new movies the timeskip effectively kills it. There were hints of some sort of political wrangling between Seele's minions and the IPEA, but now it's just Nerv and Wille and all semblance of background story is effectively gone.
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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Wed Aug 27, 2014 7:03 am

View Original PostBagheera wrote:He means Seele's conspiracy. It dominated the background story in NGE, but in the new movies the timeskip effectively kills it. There were hints of some sort of political wrangling between Seele's minions and the IPEA, but now it's just Nerv and Wille and all semblance of background story is effectively gone.

Political wrangling is not the same things as a conspiracy, so the absence of political wrangling from the IPEA in Q is not the absence of a conspiracy from Seele in Q.

Granted, though, Seele's conspiracy seems to have dramatically changed in 3.0. I don’t know if it kill the notion of a conspiracy, per se, but it much certainly alters it to such a point that most of us are left wondering why any of it in Q has to do with what we see in Jo and Ha.

But then, since we never knew (even in Jo) what the conspiracy was in its entirety thus far, it's a rather premature and ill studied conclusion to come to that Q kills it all or even alters any of it. There are elements foreign to typical Eva mythos introduced to the conspiracy as early as Ha, with the Key of Nebuchadnezzar is Ha and a strange looking Ark in Q, elements which had to have stayed consistent with any sort of conspiracy Seele or Gendo would have otherwise they would exist in either film to begin with. That, and we’re still not sure what the contract with Lilith mentioned in Jo contained. It could be that Lilith wanted to die, and this was the only way to do it. It could also be that Seele’s contract agreement with Lilith only went so far, or would only be fulfilled if Lilith upheld a certain end of the bargain. We don’t know.

We don’t know.

We don’t know.

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Postby Angel of Will » Wed Aug 27, 2014 7:05 am

I have the impression that "Killing God" is a heck of a background story for 4.0 to take up. That's if you subscribe to the interpretation that by 'God', Seele and Gendo did not mean Kaworu. (Not to push us off-topic).
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Postby Bagheera » Wed Aug 27, 2014 7:23 am

View Original PostFreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Political wrangling is not the same things as a conspiracy, so the absence of political wrangling from the IPEA in Q is not the absence of a conspiracy from Seele in Q.


Seele's dead. You can't maintain a conspiracy if you're dead.
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