Evangelion remains the best anime series ever, although this has been disputed recently by some of the cognosenti. Shall we discuss??
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no?
I actually agree with you for once, but this thread is just asking for trouble.
After some consideration I’m reopening this thread. But be warned, don’t let this get out of hand. It wouldn’t be the first time an Evangelion thread has caused a firefight.
Can I just hear some of your reasoning, Sil/SG/all the others of this opinion? I don’t know that I disagree, Eva’s pretty good, but I don’t know that I’d give it a hands-down best, either, if only because of the variance in anime. Also because I don’t know if I’d call it the best in general.
It’s a good idea, but horrible direction, as Anno has pretty much confessed that he was doing the whole thing on the go.
If taken as what it ended up with, that being the “open up, experience the world, yada yada yada, congratulations Shinji” message, it was ok, but the problem was the whole sci-fi story that, and it’s become increasingly clear every time Anno speaks about it, was left forgotten. This wouldn’t have been such a huge issue if it weren’t for the fact that the sci-fi aspect was actually interesting. So recently we have a now more mentally stable Anno going over Eva and saying “Hey, this was actually good” and coming out with the movies.
There’s also Sadamoto’s Manga, which is convincing me to forget the anime ever existed. A good example of the same story handled by a guy who’s actually meaning to make it work as anything other than a metaphor. The result is excellent: Without changing any of the bases, Rei has characterization, Shinji is a pretty solid character, Kaworu is no longer abominably rushed and Asuka… has been getting the short end of the stick in the expansion department truth be told, but still.
Part of what I actually liked most about eva was the frantic surrealism that it was clearly made by an unstable human being, though, the same way I loved Finnegan’s Wake (even though I, as everyone else, understood very little of it), Lair of the White Wyrm, and Noir Desir’s music.
Maybe if I didn’t hate the characters it could’ve been not a craptacular series. Shinji was a wuss who didn’t try to solve his own problems; Asuka was a bitch who lashed out at everyone, preventing anyone from helping her; Rei had no personality; and Gendo was a manipulative asshole.
Destroy away.
I get that, I personally hate that kind of stuff, but I can accept someone might like it. The problem with Eva is that Anno jumped between sanity and insanity all the time, so in the end it’s neither surrealistic or realistic, but just a very forced mixture of both.
At the very least with stuff like Eureka 7 you are fully aware that there is some messed up weird shit going on all the time, so when the Acperience chapters happened, it was acceptable. Eva is constantly going from one side to the other with no warning.
Well, given that I don’t really like anime, any anime that I like automatically winds up being pretty high on the list. 
Evangelion is the only anime series I’ve ever seen.
Nevertheless, I’m guessing it has to be the best anime series ever.
So I bought all the episodes some years ago, after hearing how Xenogears, which I love dearly, was basically a rip-off of it. That was really all I was going on, other than a youthful desire to expand my horizons. I watched the entire series in two days by myself and had my mind blown. Now, a week or two ago, I began watching it with my friends (none of whom have seen any anime past Akira and Miyazaki), as a distraction from Super Smash Brothers, and I was surprised to hear their responses like “Can we watch more of this?” and “Can I sneak out [of his house] and come back and watch more of these?” Seeing as I hadn’t watch the show in years and was excited by the first few episodes myself, I obliged and watching hours of Eva at a time replaced our Smash rituals for a week. Our affections for the show have grown with each episode, and we are about to view End of Evangelion (before the final two TV episodes).
It seems that Eva is compelling for a number of reasons, as all the truly sublime must be. Most noticeably at first is the sheer intensity of the program, both in the combat sequences and the general sense of emergency in each episode, as well as the psychological issues. And I’ve found with my test audience of my three rather diverse friends that the show almost never misses: when it tries to excite, it excites; when it tries to get a laugh, it gets the laugh; when it tries to delve into abtruse psychological or philosophical theorization, it can be painful, thought-provoking, and cathartic. I do not hold out for the scientic avowal of Freud’s or Sartre’s ideas, but remain intriquing to almost everyone from an emotional stand-point, and thus make for good symbolism, the same way Christianity and Judaism have served for thousands of years. Some of those involved in the creation of Evangelion have publicly declared the religious visual motifs were added simply to make the program look cool or dense. I have little problem accepting that statement: the real symbolism was harvested from the 20th century (and the 20th century’s views of those older writings), as any astute viewer will recognize. No philosophy or psychology is validated until the creative artist uses it for his symbols, and I feel Evangelion is one of the premier validations of its founding myths.
What I hate about NGE is people calling it Eva. When I hear someone saying Eva, I think of Eve, not a short form for Evangelion. If it was called “New Birth Gospel” would people call it “go”?
p.s. I prefer the TV ending. It was a bit out of tune/sudden but making a “happier” ending wasn’t that good an idea. Though using (up) all the MacGuffins (in the movie) is a good idea.
If you’ve never seen “End of Evangelion”, have fun - I think it’s really crappy.
I’m also anti-EoE, but I didn’t like most of the movies as well as the show.
Sil: This is probably a silly question to ask, but don’t you think you shuld watch a few more shows before declaring this one the best. I mean, your opinion may not change, but it might be a good idea.
End of Eva is absolutely horrifying. Not bad, but horrifying in the sense that even thinking about certain sequences in the movie turns my stomach if I focus in on it too hard. The sequence where everyone in the world is popping into puddles of LCL is absolutely terrifying. There’s this scene of one NERV operative trying desperately to hold on to her sense of individuality and analyze what’s going on, but she can’t, she absolutely can’t. She succumbs and loses her sense of self, going the way of every other human. It’s the ultimate violation of individuality, worse so that how the EVA units are able to penetrate AT fields (which I took to be representations of a being’s individuality, of everything that even makes a person a person, once again, though I forgot whether that inference was made in the show or arrive at through external reasoning).
Yeah, go watch EoE and then come back and read that, Silhouette. My spine shivers even thinking about parts of it.
Yeah, you shouldn’t have said this. Now you have no credibility at all, as opposed to having the very little you began with. You have nothing to base your claims off of, and even if you did, I still don’t think anyone can make a claim as to what the ‘best anime ever’ is. It’s not like a genre, it’s a medium. It’s like saying a certain movie is the greatest movie ever, but to someone that doesn’t like that genre that the movie represents it’s a meaningless claim. This is one of the things that really irks me when people are taking about anime; they combine it all into one massive group with no distinguishing between anything. I honestly believe you can’t compare series like this, do you usually see people comparing books from entirely different genres and literary styles very often? No, because there’s usually no comparison to make besides quality of writing. A lot of mediums suffer this same fate, American comics and cartoons most notably, seeing as how when most people see animation or drawings they immediately assume it’s childish.
I think Kaworu does mention something about that, but the Red Cross Book has an explicit explanation. Your interpretation is actually dead on, that’s exactly what an AT Field is.
Episodes 25 and 26 having a $12 budget to work with did not lead to a graceful ending.
I think, on the contrary, that comparing things that are completely different make for the best and most interesting comparisons. If you compared things that were too similar all the time, that would be boring - you’d be comparing it to something that was, well, a lot of the same.
Now granted, I do think it’s pretty silly that Sil hasn’t seen any other anime and is making this claim; but, I think it’s a valid claim to make - not just cos I like it, but also because of my philosophy on comparing two different things. It just doesn’t hold a lot of weight, being that he hasn’t seen other anime.
…Though personally, I think he, just like me, will arrive at the same conclusion after having seen more.