Rodan56 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 28, 2019 1:28 pm
Look, maybe it would be best if YOU explain what EVA means to you. What are its themes? Why do you like its characters? What about the narrative sticks in your mind? How do you reconcile some of its more questionable decisions? You clearly have an opinion and I honestly want to hear it. Maybe it's time to ask a fan for their take instead of looking for random hot ones. It's worth a shot in any case.
Well, if you're asking me, it's kind of a unique one. I didn't grow up on Evangelion like I'm sure a lot of its advocates did, and the first time I watched it, maybe five or so years ago, I really did feel confused. I failed to absorb a lot of what it was saying, feeling genuinely frustrated in my efforts to comprehend it all. But I knew that the things it was saying meant something, that the imagery might be abstract and in places incredibly hard to stomach, but that it was for more than its own sake. And that the Judeo-Christian imagery probably should've been taken with a grain of salt, since a nugget of accepted truth I held back in the day was that sometimes, animators create strange imagery separate from the writing staff "because they're bored", or rather because they've been given creative license to go wild with shorthand and iconography as long as it didn't conflict with the script, and who knows? Perhaps those wild drawings could even end up enhancing the storytelling if you're clever or lucky.
I only ended up really appreciating Evangelion some years later, after consuming a ton of other experiences. Watching other anime and Japanese-made video games that gave me similar experiences, most notably Revolutionary Girl Utena, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, and Madoka Magica - all of those eventually becoming works that I shall forever hold up as pinnacles of amazing storytelling. Absorbing countless essays, wiki articles, Youtube videos, and more that I came across in my search for stuff that captured my interest and related to my pre-existing interests. Becoming fixated with a rotating cast of Youtube personalities and their content before eventually becoming disenchanted with nearly all of them, since I eventually realized that a lot of what they were saying was spouted from positions of ignorance, emotional immaturity, contrarian peacocking, comedic obligation, and even just sheer madness.
Out of all those experiences, all that research, all those shared opinions colliding with my own, I began to finally form a mental state in which I could comprehend all these works. I managed to eventually gleam emotional maturity from these works, and even used them to help form my personal worldview and morality. But the sad fact remains that it was still
personal growth, and that I really can't fully express all this to anybody else, not least of which because, even if I could remember all the steps and pieces, it'd just sound incomprehensible out loud. Like how one of my first and largest steps into understanding Eva after watching it came when I first stumbled across a huge essay about how one of Eva's lategame episodes deliberately told a story about women being emotionally, mentally and physically tormented by the circumstances they ended up trapped in due to misplaced loyalties to people who didn't really care about them, and was presenting it as the legitimate tragedy it deserves to be treated as.
In short, I managed to undergo legitimate life experience and improve my emotional maturity, just by trying to figure out how best to enjoy a fucking anime. In effect, while I didn't age with it, I still grew up with it. That might actually be part of your problem, Rodan: You're already grown up to the point where you can't see the value or message of works like this. Or perhaps you just came to the assumption that you wouldn't like this show anyways after watching Chuck's videos here, and then got immediately hit with a bunch of miscommunicated attempts at meeting halfway from me and Mithrandir. Either way, I beg you to just watch the actual show, and then start looking for answers afterwards, because I promise you there are legit answers to all of them and that it isn't just a really drawn-out version of that really stupid scene from One More Day.
