Controversial Anime Opinions

[unz]

Just going to say you don't find many cyborgs like evas around and that would've been enough reason to watch the show at that time. The psychological thing, that was Anno sacrificing the tv show to what he cared about. At least that's why I took the Rebuild as a retribution to action fans at first but in time it got more and more busy not simply cannibalizing over the old eva material at disposal.

[Bagheera]

But yes Imo the only reason why reality didn't get rewritten in eva is is because Shinji chose not to. It was stated he could make reality whatever he wanted but he decidd to go back to the regular earth. And it actually did get rewritten in the manga.

Manga aside, that's a misinterpretation re: EoTV and EoE. In EoTV he's told he can make reality whatever he wants, but what that means (as evidenced by Ritsuko's analogy of rainy days) is that he can make the best of a bad situation if he wants. Just because reality is shitty doesn't mean your life has to suck; you can make the best of it and enjoy what you have. See Yui's bit about "anywhere can be Heaven" in EoE.

People extend this to the notion that Lilith (let alone Shinji) can rewrite reality somehow, and that's just not true. What we see in EoE is proof of this: he can't remake the world, but he can choose to make the best of things in the world as it is. That's the whole point of the story. Rah, by contrast, is explicitly about remaking the world such that things are better for everyone involved. Rewriting reality is a core conceit of the show, in a way it explicitly isn't in NGE/EoE.

That's essentially what I was arguing that is was, just that those things happened to mostly be Raideen and eva. See I was totally and completely right, and there's no reason at all any of this should be controversial! Damn I'm good!

Heh. The thing is, none of it's really a ripoff per se. If you look at Anno and Izubuchi in that interview they're clearly riffing off of one another, geeking out about older anime series, and looking at ways each referenced them in their respective work. It's not "Rah ripped off Eva" so much as "Eva ripped off this and Rah ripped off that, and aren't we cool for incorporating such cool stuff into our own works!" If you asked either of them if Rah copied Eva they'd be like, "well, kind of? I guess? I mean, Elvy has a cross necklace right? So that's something, even if she's not the Misato expy."

[NemZ]

Can we all just agree that RahXephon was clearly influenced by Eva and leave it at that?

[Enki v.2]

If you want to compare the two, look at the only thing Eva did that was truly novel: present us with a realistic take on how dysfunctional characters would react to having to pilot super robots. That's Eva's thing. That's what sets it apart from the rest of the pack. The Evas are meaningless. The Angels are meaningless. Seele, HIP, Impacts, and all that rot are meaningless. What makes Eva stand out is its treatment of its characters, and that is nothing like what we see in Rah. Rah's characters are (largely) well-adjusted and stable, and are pretty much standard anime faire.

I would disagree strongly with the notion that Rah Xephon's characters are largely well-adjusted and stable. However, Rah Xephon's characters are dealing with a very different set of circumstances, and thus have very different kinds of mental and emotional problems.

In Evangelion, we're dealing with the aftermath of a large-scale man-made environmental disaster. You could make the argument that, like Godzilla, Evangelion takes the idea of a nuclear blast and scales it up while personifying it: the awakening of Adam in Antarctica makes the entire area unlivable for decades and tears the flesh off the people who are too close. We look at the environmental impacts 15 years later and they are, essentially, a simplified version of global warming (note how in the immediate aftermath we see storms and large-scale flooding from the polar ice cap melting). The manga focuses a bit more on some of the social aspects in terms of every-day life, in its coverage of Kaji's childhood; nevertheless, even the political machinations are made possible by the fact that an angel attack is less like a war and more like a natural disaster. You cannot engage in espionage or propaganda against the angels because they aren't human. We have exactly two angels who pass as human; one is an emotional kamikaze who attacks by killing himself and producing grief, and the other is unambiguously working for (if not the side of light) the same agenda as our protagonist. We're talking about fighting against forces of nature, or against weapons that are so far beyond human scale that they might as well be natural disasters. As a result, science is a *huge* part of Evangelion.

On the other hand, Rah Xephon is about a more or less conventional war against 'aliens' who are very human but who have control over technologies far beyond the humans. Rah Xephon plays with time dilation and such, but we also have to keep in mind that a lot of the ostensibly human characters are actually failed experiments in genetic engineering, and that there's a familial relationship between pretty much every major character on both sides. While there's a giant robot involved, there's relatively little meaningful giant robot fighting; primarily, the Xephon is a piece of Mulian technology that can be used to get in and out of the time bubble, and the meaningful events that occur range between shades of espionage and emotional epiphanies.

Evangelion takes man's inhumanity to man and juxtaposes it with an inhuman-scale threat, and it takes literally destroying the world for Shinji to start to come to terms with how self-destructive his way of relating to other people is. Rah Xephon, on the other hand, is about old grudges and stupid escapist fantasy can grow into a monstrous new social order, and how the ties between people can be both empowering and restricting.

Rah's virtues are its time shifting shenanigans, the Mulian conspiracy, the Mayan influences, and the whole overarching theme of song and sound. These are what make Rah stand out from the pack, and they are, surprise surprise, nothing like anything we see in Eva.

Well, we see no time-shifting in Eva, but one oopart is as good as another; the Mayan angle isn't all that much stranger than gnostic christianity. Where Eva deals in waves, Rah Xephon makes those waves out to be more clearly sound waves. And, instead of Mu, we get ancient aliens and the hollow earth. Those things are *still* window-dressing, and while I appreciate Rah Xephon's tendency to be more explicitly fortean than Evangelion, I don't think it does enough to distinguish it. (Rah Xephon is less fortean than the Master of Mosquiton OVAs, or, for that matter, Heaven's Lost Property -- both of which are arguably variations on the harem genre with some fortean/fantasy trappings.)

Instead, we can focus on the message. In the end, what does our main character learn the value of?

Ultimately, Shinji becomes aware of identity formation, and how his identity is formed through interactions with other people. He learns about responsibility by realizing that doing as he is ordered is a cop-out; to the extent that he does as he's told, it's his decision to do so.

Ayato, on the other hand, learns the value of creativity. He keeps his flexibility, and thus avoids the particular kind of trap that the primary antagonist of the series fell into. He remakes the world in a way that's preferable to him, rather than creating a flawed fantasy and escaping into it until he forgot that it wasn't real. And he learns (multiple times) that the way to do that isn't by turning off his heart or by ignoring his feelings but by listening to them intently and deciding what to do.

[Bagheera]

Just so, Enki; I think you've hit what I was aiming at, but fell far short of. Nicely done.

[Enki v.2]

Can we all just agree that RahXephon was clearly influenced by Eva and leave it at that?

We could, sure.

But! Just as picking apart the things that influenced Evangelion is interesting, picking apart the things that influenced Rah Xephon is interesting too. Things are more enjoyable when you overanalyze them ;-)

The thing is, while Evangelion certainly influenced Rah Xephon, it's both the most shallow and the least interesting influence. (I also don't consider Raideen a particularly interesting influence, although my familiarity with the history of mech shows is a lot more limited than my familiarity with the history of occult pseudoscience.) When someone claims that Rah Xephon 'ripped off' Evangelion, that's essentially saying that all of the interesting connections Rah Xephon has are also had by Evangelion, which is plainly untrue and discourages taking the analysis seriously. Even if the plot was taken from Evangelion (which it wasn't) you can still have a world of difference just by switching up the aesthetic influences and thus the symbolism.

For example, take Mysterious Girlfriend X. If you strip out the content and condense the plot to a single sentence, it's basically just a 13-episode meet-cute. Lots of shows are like that, and most of them are totally uninteresting. Mysterious Girlfriend X, on the other hand, warps the plot in an interesting way, bringing in shades of Cronenberg's early film Crimes of the Future (in which a person develops a strange skin condition that causes him to produce addictive hallucinogenic fluids from sores on his body, to which the remaining staff at a hospital of dermatology are hopelessly in thrall) along with an ambiguous extraterrestrial angle, a whole dream cosmology, and a whole lot of fan service for drool fetishists. Sufficiently reduced, though, you could make the argument that it's a rip-off of Love, Chuunibyo, and Other Delusions despite coming out earlier. Obviously, to someone who cares enough, they are very different shows and they appeal for very different reasons.

[Defectron]

Manga aside, that's a misinterpretation re: EoTV and EoE. In EoTV he's told he can make reality whatever he wants, but what that means (as evidenced by Ritsuko's analogy of rainy days) is that he can make the best of a bad situation if he wants. Just because reality is shitty doesn't mean your life has to suck; you can make the best of it and enjoy what you have. See Yui's bit about "anywhere can be Heaven" in EoE.

This is now a Rahxephon thread.

Anyway getting back to altering reality in the evangelion universe. While you are right about the symbology and message of those scenes, I think there's some debate about how literal Shinji's ability to shape reality could be. The whole sequal theory for rebuild is based on the premise that Shinji had the ability to literally shape reality into what he wanted it and reset things to how they were before the series. Now I'm not saying that theory is right, but it is a theory which means it is neither proven nor disproven as of now.

[Bagheera]

Anyway getting back to altering reality in the evangelion universe. While you are right about the symbology and message of those scenes, I think there's some debate about how literal Shinji's ability to shape reality could be. The whole sequal theory for rebuild is based on the premise that Shinji had the ability to literally shape reality into what he wanted it and reset things to how they were before the series. Now I'm not saying that theory is right, but it is a theory which means it is neither proven nor disproven as of now.

No, there's no debate about that. There is no evidence whatsoever that Shinji (or anyone else) has the ability to reshape reality in NGE/EoE. The notion that he can is purely fanwank; it is made up based on misinterpretation of that scene in EoTV. This is a big part of why the sequel theory is bunk (though there are many, many others).

Simply put, the Rei/Lilith/Kaworu entity has the abilities it actually displays onscreen, and no others; reshaping reality is not among them, so it follows that it does not have that ability.

[Enki v.2]

There is no evidence whatsoever that Shinji (or anyone else) has the ability to reshape reality in NGE/EoE.

Everyone has the power of solipsistic delusion! However, neither GNR nor being tanged was ever a prerequisite for living in a fantasy world.

[unz]

Ssssoooooo...
I've just found out about the manga thing introducing Mari. Sucks you have to go through different medias to find out your piece of puzzle.
Buuuuut if she is older than she looks, if she plays the reversal (in math terms) of Shinji's character, if she exists in both manga and rebuilds and doesn't matter if she is not shown in the tv series cause she's in england blahblahblah wtf is the actual ending? To stay IT how much did they damage the tv thing assuming they did?

[Bagheera]

Ssssoooooo...
I've just found out about the manga thing introducing Mari. Sucks you have to go through different medias to find out your piece of puzzle.
Buuuuut if she is older than she looks, if she plays the reversal (in math terms) of Shinji's character, if she exists in both manga and rebuilds and doesn't matter if she is not shown in the tv series cause she's in england blahblahblah wtf is the actual ending? To stay IT how much did they damage the tv thing assuming they did?

None at all. The manga's a different continuity from NGE, so anything that happens there has no bearing on NGE/EoE. It has no bearing on the NTE either, for that matter. Mari might easily have a completely different background in that continuity (remember, in the manga Asuka's a test tube baby, while in the anime we know who her father is. If she can be that dramatically different between continuities there's no reason Mari can't be as well).

[unz]

Heh I was about to throw some IF argument but then I read about Asuka.
Never read about purgatory loop theory but I can guess what's that about. I still wonder if Mari was something cut off from the tv series and then kaworu became the gay char along with a nerv woman.

[Defectron]

I still wonder if Mari was something cut off from the tv series and then kaworu became the gay char along with a nerv woman.

There isn't really any evidence of that I know of for Mari being a thing during original eva production but I have a hunch about where the names of Mari, Rei and Asuka may have come from. In Raideen the two female leads are named Mari and Asuka Rei.

[unz]

Yeah not sure what Anno likes but it's something post apoc too as far as rebuilds go (I go with nausicaa).

[Enki v.2]

Ssssoooooo...
I've just found out about the manga thing introducing Mari. Sucks you have to go through different medias to find out your piece of puzzle.
Buuuuut if she is older than she looks, if she plays the reversal (in math terms) of Shinji's character, if she exists in both manga and rebuilds and doesn't matter if she is not shown in the tv series cause she's in england blahblahblah wtf is the actual ending? To stay IT how much did they damage the tv thing assuming they did?

Wait what? Mari was introduced into the manga? I thought the manga had gotten to EoE territory, like, in volume 11 or 12, a couple years ago. It'd be *really* late to introduce a new pilot.

[Bagheera]

You are late to the party.

[unz]

Wait what? Mari was introduced into the manga? I thought the manga had gotten to EoE territory, like, in volume 11 or 12, a couple years ago. It'd be *really* late to introduce a new pilot.

Yes.
I mean the "anything goes" argument doesn't really engage this issue but I guess that's an option too, I never read the manga, guess I'll have to settle for my fav version or something.

[pwhodges]

It'd be *really* late to introduce a new pilot.

That's not what happened; she's in a bonus back-story.

[unz]

Not in the manga but through different medias, it kind of begs for parallels with the rebuilds but so far I've read of weird choices.

[pwhodges]

In Raideen the two female leads are named Mari and Asuka Rei.

That seems a real possibility as a source, though Yuusha Raideen is more often quoted as being an influence on RahXephon.