What would be a good review to show to get somebody interested in Sfdebris?

[K.E. Schwartze]

If you wanna Market SFDebris specifically to Anime fans I'd say start with his Madoka reviews or maybe War in the Pocket.

But do NOT let his Eva stuff be any Anime fans first exposure to him however, they will be unintentionally offended by those.

The problem with the Eva reviews is twofold.

1. He went into them cold (post Gundam/Pacific Rim, he would have had a much better grounding in what is being taken apart).
2. They'd given him the movies (1 isn't too different from the T.V. Series, but the pacing seems to be off. 2.00 is interesting, but it's riffing on stuff he's never seen). He actually kinda liked 2.00, but you could tell just how lost he was. The movies are not really a substitute for the TV series.

By comparison, MM has him follow the show, which makes finding the seams of deconstruction much easier. Chuck had never seen say Sailor Moon or Card Captor Sakura, but he CAN tell when a TV show is building to something (Eva 1.00 doesn't have that feeling from the first 6 episodes, it just looks better).

Plus, having done quite a few shows now, he does pick up on some things pretty readily (like exactly where Kyoko was coming from in her introduction scene).

I don't view Madoka a deconstruction which is why I'm glad Chuck's perspective if as an outsider, and that he actually argues it's not that Dark.

The discussion of Madoka within the Anime community has become so polarized. Fans of traditional Magical Girls shows who feel it and it's imitators are some insult to the genre. Magical Girls fans like me who see it as an important growth for the genre. And the alleged existence of people who like it because they hate normal Magical Girl shows.

Chuck just reviews it as a show, without concern for how it related to anything else. And that perspective is important for some shows.

But not for Eva, Eva is a dates show you only should ever watch because of it's important to other Anime. On it's own it doesn't hold up.

Eva the TV series does rather more than "hold up" it's still quite deeply written. It's hardly "dated", it does suffer from being the single most influential show of the the last 20 years (a LOT of shows have used a LOT of bits from it). You could say it "suffers" from having all sorts of hoary old Super Robot cliches in it, but really that's sort of the point.

Madoka Magica, whether it's a true "deconstruction" or not has held popularity for the better part of a decade because it's a Magical Girl show that you can like, without feeling too "childish" (Utena has a similar audience). For as much work and cost it is to get hold of, Madoka has a HUGE cosplay presence at Cons. It works both ways, I think a fair amount of the Card Captor revival is MM fans looking at one of it's big "ancestors".

Eva's single biggest issue is that the TV series has been out of print as it is getting hard to acquire for less than crazy money. This really cuts down its access to "casual" fans, which leaves it with a really large percentage of "hipster" viewers (ideally Eva kinda sneaks up on you). And the movies are OK, but they don't hold a candle to the TV series (they aren't as deeply written and/or plotted, and 2.0 spends too much time going "gotcha").