Submitted by hollyhoppet in anime4unme (edited )

I would first like to start by saying that yeah, this anime does a lot of shitty tropes and doesn't treat women well in a lot of ways. It also has a few really awesome female characters, which is a bizarre dichotomy that I don't really know will be reconciled. But yeah I cannot stress enough how problematic many parts of this anime are.

Also probably important to note is I'm 8 episodes in so if there's some even bigger bullshit that comes up I'm unaware of it yet.

One of the things the show does have going for it though is a masterful use of the language of film. There are a lot of shots and scenes that don't really do a ton of shoehorned exposition or world building in the typical overblown anime way. Instead there's a lot more focus on the interiority of the characters and they convey it really well.

One such scene is the one which the protagonist Shinji is in his robot and stabbing an Angel (the big bad aliens) with a techno-knife. The whole time just letting out this blood-curdling scream that captures his frustration at and defiance toward... well basically everything. Nobody really says "oh he's an angry frustrated kid in a lot of ways" but you just know because of everything leading up to the scene before hand.

I get now why the show is such a big deal to some people. There's a lot of nuance in a lot of the scenes, even in some of the goofy slice-of-life ones. I would definitely not call it a masterpiece because it has some major flaws but I can understand why it's considered such a foundational text, particularly in the mecha subgenre.

I don't really have anything to weigh in on the new dub or music choices cause I'm watching older subs since I don't have netflix lol, but I hear there's a ton of Discourse about it, most of it not great.

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ellynu wrote

it is weird how that dichotomy is because when you look at specific scenes and some shot choices and merchandising the way they treat women is so fucked up but the women in the story are really interesting and complex and an important part of the story to me at least was how they get mistreated (mostly by men). like if the protagonists are shinji and misato, then the biggest people around them story-wise are rei and asuka, and ritsuko and kaji (and the adults/teens reflect each other in neat ways, most noticeably with the protagonists)

evangelion has a lot of problems but it was super impactful on me as a young teenager so it still holds a place in my heart. its just hard for me to ever really recommend it to anyone without some caveats. >.<

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voxpoplar wrote

going to mention some nasty concepts in this post but I won't describe any specifics

the back half of the series actually has less "fanservice" IIRC but also does this somewhat by engaging in a bait and switch against it's audience and having some really nasty sexual assault imagry so be prepared to deal with that

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