Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 0.75: The Ear-Worm (Part 2)

~ InvincibleMog ~ 1 Comment

Hi, all! Here’s that second part of the opening review, as I promised. I chose to split it up because in the end, the total word count was over 2000 words, and that’s a bit much to read in one go. Maybe one day I’ll have the courage to post a 3000-word blog post, but today is not that day.

A lot of credit for this post, and the post before it, goes to my boyfriend Stryx, who gave me some of the supplementary information I’m using for this.

Edit as of September 17, 2019: Stryx is not my boyfriend anymore. We had something of an amicable breakup that I accept full responsibility for (I got really sick and could no longer talk to him on a regular basis, which probably constitutes ghosting). That being said, the information about the sefirot and all the other mystical stuff comes from him, and I am fully willing to drop his name if he wants me to.

Continue reading “Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 0.75: The Ear-Worm (Part 2)” →

Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 0.50: The Ear-Worm (Part 1)

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Remember when I said that the Opening Theme was pretentious? I’m going to explain that here in a moment with an analysis of the Opening, split into two parts. This was written after I watched Episode 1; however, I did not write it after watching any other episodes, and much of the information I have is just information I already knew from my years as an anime fan.

Continue reading “Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 0.50: The Ear-Worm (Part 1)” →

Neon Genesis Evangelion Episode 0.25: Pretension 101

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First thing we need to talk about: The name “Neon Genesis Evangelion” is pretentious as fuck.

The name also isn’t the only pretentious thing here. The opening is pretentious. Everything about this entire series seems to be equal parts pretentious and cheesy as fuck. It doesn’t surprise me that it’s popular – a lot of the nerd fanbase seems to be filled with the same kind of people who jerk off to Infinite Jest – but still, let’s be real: this show has the word “Pretentious” written all over it.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My favorite anime is Revolutionary Girl Utena, and RGU is also extremely pretentious. It’s just… there’s a balance that creators need to strike in order to create something interesting and multifaceted, and you can’t strike that balance when someone repeatedly hits you over the head with obscure Jewish occult symbolism in the first fifteen seconds.

Someone who produces a work of art needs to be aware that symbolism and depth need something to balance it out. In my opinion, “deep and symbolic” seems to work out better in Shoujo anime, where the producers are expected to give the audience character development. In Shounen anime… the concept of “deep and symbolic” doesn’t always go to shit, but it goes to shit a lot more often than you’d want it to. I made a conscious decision to avoid watching this series because I was concerned it would be 26 episodes of pretentious navel gazing, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I wasn’t wrong.

For instance, why did Anno name this show “Neon Genesis Evangelion”? Is this just an example of a Japanese animation studio using bad English to make their series “deeper” and “more interesting”, or is it supposed to mean something? Was the word “Neon” used intentionally, or did they actually mean something else? I think it’s also worth noting that they’re adding a whole lot of religious symbolism from the very beginning (“Genesis Evangelion” = “the creation of a Gospel”). This, combined with the opening theme animation, seems to imply that the creators gave this series a lot of clout and religious symbolism that doesn’t mesh well with the actual content of the series, at least from what I can see right now. It seems like it’s a bunch of window dressing.

And before you ask: Yes, I have seen the opening theme. It’s ubiquitous. I’ve probably seen a couple of episodes, though I don’t remember them (I was pretty young back then). I’m going to write a post about the opening and closing themes, but for now, you should probably assume that I have reasons to believe what I do about this show.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Cast

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Starring:

  • Shinji Ikari, AKA “A Traumatized Teenager”
  • Misato Katsuragi, AKA “Someone Please Call Child Protective Services”
  • Rei Ayanami, AKA “The Mother of a Thousand Clones”
  • Gendo Ikari, AKA “Seriously, Do You People Not Have Phones In This Universe”
  • Ritsuko Akari, AKA “You Seem Normal, Please Call The Authorities”

This is going to be fucking fun.

 

What You Should Know About Manga Publishing Companies

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So, the first thing you need to know before I start criticizing anime is that most of the manga published in the United States is published by three companies.

According to Wikipedia,

VIZ Media LLC is an American manga and anime distribution and entertainment company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1986 as VIZ LLC. In 2005, VIZ LLC and ShoPro Entertainment merged to form the current VIZ Media LLC, which is owned by Japanese publishing conglomerate Hitotsubashi Group, which includes Shueisha, Shogakukan and Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions (ShoPro).[3] As of 2017, Viz Media is the largest publisher of graphic novels and comic books in the United States, with a 23% share of the market.[4]

Technically, the Hitotsubashi Group has publishing rights to every manga published by VIZ Media LLC, which means that VIZ Media usually takes over the translations of manga that’s published by the conglomerate. VIZ Media was incorporated into a merger with Shueisha, so any manga published in English by Viz Media got the rights for it because of Shueisha’s place in the Hitotsubashi Group. Examples of manga published by VIZ Media include My Hero Academia, One-Punch Man, One Piece, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach, Rurouni Kenshin, and Naruto, but you should assume that most popular titles are published by Viz Media.

In the early-2000s, VIZ Media published a manga magazine called Shonen Jump, which became really popular and allowed VIZ Media to add a brand name to their manga that didn’t exist before. They later released a magazine called Shojo Beat, which was basically the same idea but tailored to the massive audience of women that Shonen Jump accrued over the decades. Unfortunately, Shojo Beat came out less often, was difficult to find, and cost $2 more than Shonen Jump (at least, it did in my area), so I had to settle for Shonen Jump to continue being a giant nerd.

These magazines are called Kanzenban magazines in Japan, which are different in that their primary focus tends to be manga rather than articles written about manga. They weren’t that common in the United States even before the popularization of manga upload websites. Issues of Shonen Jump tended to be really thick and contained chapters from popular manga like Yu Yu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin, which was heavenly to a ten-year-old nerd like me.

My mother shouldn’t have allowed me to read that shit when I was ten, but then again, she didn’t know what that shit was. I won’t go into detail here (you don’t need to know about the life I led with my extremely xenophobic single mother), but what I will say is that hiding things from her became a way of life. She didn’t know about how gory some of these issues were because I knew I had to hide things from her. She later confessed to me that she believed manga was demonic, which seems irrational unless you remember that she was an Evangelical Christian and that all her friends were similarly predisposed.

This is the context you need to understand. I was exposed to anime and manga only through a curated selection published in a $5 magazine tailored to young men. I got burnt out on the shonen manga genre because of course you’d get burnt out on a genre that doesn’t seem to care about the fact that you exist.

I’m just saying.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Or, The Procrastinator’s Promise

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So, before we begin: I want to be very clear that I have never seen Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE) before. I wasn’t allowed to watch it for a very long time because it was wildly inappropriate for a young child when it was released in the United States in 1998. I would have been about six years old, and though I was into anime back then, I didn’t actually know what it was or how to look for stuff that was similar to what I enjoyed. I relied on Toonami a lot back then.

When I finally had the ability to watch it on my own (i.e., when I was in college), I decided not to do so because it was not available in the United States on a platform that I could easily use. I didn’t have a television set or a DVD player in my school laptop, so I relied upon streamed episodes, and unfortunately, the only websites that streamed NGE were shady Chinese streaming sites that left viruses on your computer and took forever to buffer.

Why go to the trouble for something I probably wasn’t going to enjoy? I mean sure, there were a lot of people who claimed that I wasn’t a true anime fan because I didn’t watch NGE, but who cared about them? I knew what I was. I knew what I wanted, I knew what I was into, and NGE seemed so stereotypical to me at the time that I couldn’t even pretend that I would enjoy it for its own sake (though of course it was only stereotypical because it influenced all the other anime that came after it). If I watched it, I would be doing so for the sake of stating that I did it, and that wasn’t good enough for me to risk destroying computers that I could barely afford in the first place.

Now, however, I am 27 years old, Netflix has released the entire Evangelion series on their streaming service, and I no longer have an excuse to avoid it. I guess it’s time to stop procrastinating and earn that nerd cred.

Commonly asked questions:

“If you’re such a nerd, why haven’t you watched Neon Genesis Evangelion?”

(or, more insiduously: “You’re not a nerd, you haven’t even watched Evangelion! You’re just one of those girls who pretends to be a nerd to get attention from men!” – please note, this has actually been said to me)

I’m gonna be real with you for a minute: I’m a nerd for the things I like. The only reason I ever gave a fuck about nerd cred is because I was made to feel like I couldn’t interact with the things I like without it. And truthfully? I don’t like anime like NGE (though of course I know that there isn’t a lot of anime like NGE in the first place).

NGE is categorized as a Seinen Mecha anime, roughly speaking, though it could be mistaken for a Shounen anime. I don’t like Seinen or Shounen anime. I don’t care that NGE is a deconstruction of anime in that genre; the fact that it is still extremely popular among people who like Shounen anime means that it will suffer many of the same pitfalls. The target audience seems to demand it.

(Plus, while I haven’t seen NGE, I also do not live under a rock. I know what the Rei Ayanami Clone is. The fact that I can say that and y’all likely know what I’m talking about is probably a good indication of why I’m hesitant to trust something like this.)

I’m not saying I dislike all Shounen anime. I got burnt out on the Shounen/Seinen manga genre really quickly when I was younger because Shueisha was the most easily accessible manga company available to a young American with a limited budget, and Shonen Jump was much more reasonably priced than Shojo Beat. We’ll have to make a separate post about this later, but for now, the only thing you need to remember is that Shueisha published Shonen Jump, which was a magazine priced at $5 that was released once a month back in the early 2000s. It was basically the only way I was able to consume manga until I was about 14. It got to the point where it was more common for me to dislike a Shounen anime than it was for me to like one, so there was a long stretch of time where I didn’t consume any anime or manga at all.

I can’t think of any reason why I’d invest time and energy on something I probably wouldn’t enjoy, especially since I’ve disliked so many other “critically-acclaimed” anime in the past. I especially wouldn’t have done so when my free time was precious, when I was tired all the time and needed something to smile about just to get me through my day. Why would I waste my time on something that seems rough and pretentious to me, especially when it would require me to risk a lawsuit and potentially fry my laptop for months at a time? Fuck that noise.

Question 2: “Why do you dislike Seinen/Shounen anime so much?”

So, in order to answer this question, we do sort of need to explain what Seinen and Shounen are, what they seek to do, and what actually happens.

Seinen and Shounen are different words that mean similar things. Seinen and Shounen both are typically used to imply that someone is a young man; however, whenever someone uses the word Shounen, they are typically referring to someone who is aged from about 10 to 17, whereas the word Seinen is typically used to refer to young men who are approximately aged 18-30.

Thus, when I state that an anime is in the Seinen or the Shounen genre, what I’m saying is that the anime is specifically targeted towards boys and young men. In many cases, it becomes obvious that the producers of the anime don’t give a shit about women at all. I think they honestly believe that women wouldn’t like what they have to offer, and so they don’t even attempt to humanize us in the work they create.

Even the Shounen anime I enjoy sort of proves the rule. For instance, I enjoy Dragon Ball because of how three-dimensional the women in the story were, but I absolutely cannot stand Dragon Ball Z. I enjoyed the Yu Gi Oh! manga in the first arc, and then slowly started to lose respect for it when Anzu was relegated to a side character. Even the shows that I enjoy (Yu Yu Hakusho, Fullmetal Alchemist) sort of prove the rule, because I enjoy the parts of them that are not like other Shounen anime series.

I’ll discuss anime that’s targeted towards women in a later post (this one is getting pretty long), but a lot of men don’t like Shoujo/Josei for the same reasons that I don’t enjoy Shounen/Seinen, and that’s fine. I don’t blame them. All I’m saying is that I didn’t want to explore NGE because I knew that in all likelihood, I would probably not enjoy it, and my feelings on that topic are valid.

And before you ask: No, it does not actually matter that Hideaki Anno is close friends with Kunihiko Ikuhara, who is the creator of one of my favorite shows. From what I’ve heard, that friendship didn’t influence his style in any positive way whatsoever.

Question 3: “What kind of anime do you like?”

As I’ve stated many times before, I prefer anime that’s targeted towards women. In Japan, this largely falls under the Josei/Shoujo genres. If I do watch Shounen anime, I tend to prefer anime that falls into the comedy or action category. Things like NGE, which get really dramatic and sad, tend to weigh really heavily on me, and until very recently I had no time to gather my energy and move on with my life after watching something so sad and draining. I knew I couldn’t devote that kind of emotional energy to something I would dislike.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll prove me wrong. I doubt it, but there’s a first time for everything.

Question 4: “Well, if you don’t like NGE, what’s your favorite anime?”

Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s right up there with Serial Experiments Lain (one of the few exceptions to the rule that I mentioned) and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I have a lot of shows I enjoy, however, and I’ll be the first to admit that some of them are cheesy as hell and have some problematic undertones.

Something to Remember:

I am probably going to criticize the shit out of this anime. At the very least, I am going to criticize the shit out of the ending, which I’ve heard is some bullshit. I am not, however, criticizing your tastes, your experiences, or anime as a medium. I am opinionated, I am argumentative, I can be a little combative, but I am not cruel. If you remember this, I think we can all enjoy ourselves a whole lot more than we would if you start filling the comments section with hateful rhetoric about how Women Aren’t Really Nerds Anyway.

Okay? Okay. I’m gonna fucking regret this, but let’s do it anyway.