So I just finished the End of Evangelion. Spent about an hour staring at the ceiling. Deprived of all language, like an animal. Still feel profoundly changed. Anyone wanna talk about it? What was it like for you when you first saw it? Is it plebcore over here or something?
pic not related
>>134941750
>blogging on /a/
New to anime and 4chan, I presume?
>>134941750
Some consider it a piece of trash, some consider it the greatest anime movie ever made, most agree it's a complete masterpiece. Also, >>134941805
Try the thread again, and this time don't forget your 'What the fuck did I just watch?'
>>134942046
What did you think of it?
>>134941750
Exactly like you described. No other piece of media has gotten me like that.
Here's something for you to think about:
Evangelion's ending makes clear that Shinji Ikari must choose whether living is worthwhile, even in spite of the pain and suffering it'll cause, even in spite of the fact that his attempts to get close to others may well fail.
The attempt is worth it all on its own. To connect with other people, to live life, is worth it even if you fail.
So how could a message like that be held true if our hero made the decision, and then magically things were better? If he went out and succeeded right then, got the girl, got happy, and all he needed was a little fucking epiphany, and all he needed was a fake warning about risk that never played out.
It'd be a falsehood. It'd be a lie. It would be pat and insipid and Evangelion is better than that.
So Shinji gets back to the world and it's a fucked sterile wasteland because that's how it was before he escaped it. And the first person to come back, potentially the ONLY person to come back ever, is that bitch who told you, essentially, how much she fucking hates you.
So, Shinji strangles the shit out of her, because by this point Shinji is NOT A GOOD PERSON and not in a good place, and no fucking "It's a Wonderful Life, guest starring your two fuck buddies" epiphany is going to immediately unfuck you up.
But human contact is made anyway, and she caresses his cheek, showing some small measure of humanity in the midst of a shared, deeply intimate destructive spiral, and Shinji breaks down crying.
And she still hates him. And maybe she always will. And instead of another pat cliche, the "Adam and Eve ending", we get the denial of that.
Humanity ends with them. Maybe. Certainly if it survives, it won't be them that saves it, it's up to whoever else has the will to come back. But then, Shinji's had enough time to put up graves for everyone he knew (remember the shot, Misato's cross is placed on one of those cenotaphs. (continued)
>>134944366
continuing:
Also note one of the posts is broken. Asuka's, probably. (Hell, I AM cheating a bit: in another draft of the ending, what I said is precisely what happened, and Asuka kicks down the post herself, while saying she won't let Shinji kill her).
Shinji decided that even if it could mean failing, he had to go back, because life was worth the risk.
So we had to see him fail, to emphasize that EVEN WITH THIS, it was still worth it to try. And anyway, it's not like the world's ended just because he failed, right?
...wait.
>>134944366
>she still hates him
Nah. The last line is almost an inside joke between friends, like saying "don't think I'm still not the old fiery Asuka, Shinji"
>>134944554
Maybe! And maybe seeing the dub first when I was younger colored my opinion. Its an ambiguous end.
>>134944706
I actually haven't seen (heard) the dub. The delivery in the sub version is very soft, like a playful jab. In my opinion it's obvious Shinji cares for Asuka or he wouldn't feel so hurt by her. It's not as clear how much Asuka cares for Shinji but I think there is an obvious relationship between the two that is deeper than simply "bully and wimp", after all why would she caringly touch his cheek if she really did hate him?
I agree on the ambiguity 100%. It's what makes the ending so powerful.
>>134941750
Came here to make the exact same thread. Are you a wizard, OP?
Well, I didn't like it. Maybe I'm too much of a pleb to "get it", but I really had wished for some more traditional storytelling and a satisfying resolution. Not the mindfuckery of episodes 25 and 26 with more action scenes and nipples.
Anyway, three things I didn't understand, maybe you can help me out:
1) Why were Seele and Nerv waiting for the Angels to arrive? Were they needed for Third Impact in any way? How?
2) Why was Seele fighting Gendo? Didn't he try to achieve Third Impact as well? In the end, shortly before Shinji deciding "Fuck it, undo", Seele's plan was being fulfilled, right? What would Gendo have done differently?
3) So after the whole Anti AT field thing, humanity still exists, just all fused together. And because Shinji decides he wants to live after all, it basically dies out with the last remnants of humanity being him, Asuka and Eva 01. Didn't he basically commit genocide because on a whim he decided, "Oh nvm, changed my mind, I *do* want to live"?
Help me understand, /a/. I really want to like it because the episodes up until the end were great, but I feel like it completely dropped the story it was telling just to fuck with everyone's minds.
>>134941750
It honestly sucks to have seen the End of Eva so long ago. It gets tiring talking about the same thing over and over, so when I see a thread like this I wish I was excited about it as you are so I could talk to you about it.
I loved it. Masterpiece, completely captured the problems of loneliness in the most concrete symbolic way possible. I mean literally I cant think of a better way to have it in any written or visual work, the Human Instrumentality Project was what put EoE over the top.
>>134945436
The Dead Sea Scrolls tell how the timeline of the human instrumentality project must go. Nerv and SEELE both try to change this to fit their agendas especially towards the end of the series.
They were needed to be killed so that reactions between Adam or Lilith would go by the dead sea scrolls. Basically the angels could fuck up their plans so they had to be sure they were dead. That is why as soon as the last angel is killed, SEELE betrays Nerv.
Yes they were both trying to achieve third impact in different ways, different timelines like I mentioned. Gendo wanted control, SEELE wanted control, Gendo ended up with Adam and Lilith by the end so Gendo had won just before End of Eva takes place and SEELE invades Nerv.
Gendo wanted to reunite with Yuki. That was his goal. SEELE wanted all of humanity to be reunited, however that might mean all of humanity united without EVA 01, meaning Yuki. It is a bit hard to say but Gendo going after Yuki is what set Gendo aginast SEELE. Also Gendo didnt need to do anything differently besides get Rei to accept him. Besides that his plan worked out pretty well, he got very close to being with Yuki, whereas Shinji was the one who was given the option to be with his mother again, which he rejected.
No, all humans could have choosen to come back. The only humans who clearly decided to come back are Shinji and Asuka, it is not clear if everyone else decided to take the easy way out and remain in the project or if the movie cut short before everyone else started showing up in the red ocean.
>>134941750
>entire series of mecha
>cool battles lots of fun action
>annoying cast of children which is bearable for the action and 2deep story
>enter EoE
>entire plotline that was built up for 24 episodes coming to a climiax
>Shinji masturbates to Asuka within the first 15 minutes
>rest of EoE after pretty nice
>series clinching moment
>"Gross"
How to ruin a show in less than 3 seconds: by making the entire plot irrelevant and into a child's joke about masturbation.
>>134945915
shouldn't you be watching Star Wars?
>>134946099
>somewhere between a /tv/ and a /v/ rebuttal
Sasuga crossboarder.
>>134945824
Thanks for the explanation, anon! Although I find it hard to believe that the only people with the will to come back are the two whiniest cunts on the show.
>>134941750
That picture is spooky. What's the context? Is it a poem, or a passage taken from something longer?
>>134946164
/lit/, actually. fucking depressed that nothing in the western canon affects me as powerfully as a japanese cartoon
>>134944366
The tang is full of people who can come back to individuality if they choose, and many probably will. I don't know if it's fair to say that Shinji chokes Asuka because he's a bad person. He probably felt scared of her ability to hurt him, and he had reason to act irrationally.
>>134945436
Eh, Evangelion was never, ever traditional. Look at episode two's structure for an early example.
1.) Angels were trying to reunite with Adam to reset life on Earth to follow their blueprint. So if the giant dodecahedron Angel won, you might eventually have octahedrons being hunted by six-sided dice in the African Serengeti.
If NERV or SEELE tried to activate Third Impact before they were all dead, one might just come up and go all "im in ur impact, killing ur d00ds"
2.) Gendo wanted to bring his wife Yui back, fuck the rest of humanity. If that meant she came back to Earth, cool. If that meant the world was fucked, but the two of them were together, cool.
SEELE just wanted to mush all human consciousness together as a form of immortality, filling in all the gaps and weaknesses together. Basically, they didn't want to die and found a way more effective way to continue living than even Dick Cheney got when he was given a fucking heart transplant.
3.) Well, Shinji decided some aspects of how Instrumentality went, and ultimately decided that, since it couldn't be undone, at least people could choose to leave if they wished. Humanity was effectively erased no matter what he did, but this way, some people could choose to return. That was a choice none of the other actors would have done. And even then, it required Rei and Kaworu to play "It's a Wonderful Life" on him, and show him how maybe staying as a sterile, single, unified consciousness was a bad idea.
If anything, Shinji saved humanity, or at least gave an option for it to be saved. Whether anyone actually came back... I like to think no, because sometimes your attempts to do good simply fail, even though it was truly better to try.
>>134946275
One of Franz Kafka's fragments. You may know him as the "bug guy", but he's very important to world literature. Many consider Kafka one of the greatest writers to have ever lived. The only author with more theses written on his works is Shakespeare. After he died, his entire family was killed in the holocaust, and the civilization that he grew up in (the Austro-Hungarian empire) was destroyed. Many believe that his works anticipated both the holocaust that decimated the European Jews and the inhuman, bizarre bureaucracies that sprung up east of the Berlin Wall after the second World War.
He told his best friend to burn his works after he died, but he refused.
My favorite stories of his are his shortest fragments. Though they were all written in german, I believe that the sheer supernal beauty of the prose shines through translation.
More fragments here: zork.net/~patty/pattyland/kafka/parables/parables.htm
>>134946276
That means you're a loser anon. Have fun dying alone.
>>134946372
Fair enough, calling him a bad person was a little unfair. Any decent defense attorney could get him off on temporary insanity, because seriously.
ITT: Otakus still think EVA has depth
lel This is why the industry is dying.
>>134946509
I fucking know who Kafka is, you dipshit. Try being a little more condescending next time.
>>134946572
Better that than shitspewers who've got no better passions than vomiting opinions like it's their mountain dew-induced acid reflux disease.
>>134946652
You mad and butthurt. Nice. I'm back off to /v/.
>>134946633
sorry, I guess I just reverse my own ignorance of anime and assume that people know as little about literature. didn't mean to be condescending
>>134946633
you're a fucking dick man. he was just trying to be helpful
>>134946761
>you're a fucking dick man
Most people who enjoy Evagenlion are since they suffer from autism.
>>134946492
>If that meant she came back to Earth, cool. If that meant the world was fucked, but the two of them were together, cool.
Hold on. I understand Gendo wouldn't give a fuck because he's a fucking sociopath, but what about Fuyutsuki? It's obvious he cared a lot about Yui, but to the point of dooming humanity just to reunite her with her punk-ass husband?
Eva is normalfag shit faggot take your cheap biblical symbolism to Reddit
>>134944366
Never noticed that before. Never thought of the ending in that cruelly harsh reality kinda way about the message about interpersonal connections
>>134946572
>>134946691
Oh look, it's this guy
>>134941750
You're actually really lucky anon. This is one of the first Eva discussion threads I've seen in a while that has bothered to offer you depth and interpretation about the show rather than spam post "worst show" "worst anime" then ship fag homos flood the thread w/ 300 posts. I was gonna suggest /r Eva for discussion but this thread for some reason has decided to be nice to you
In the process of adding subs to the video versions of 25' & 26', will upload at a later date.
Eps 25 & 26 are shithouse, EoE (aka 25' & 26') is much better ending
>>134948426
You're a god send anon
>>134948252
Yeah, it's a pretty brutal ending. But it's thematically sound, anyway. The whole series is about the hedgehog's dilemma. How the attempt to get closer to people causes pain, so how do you find the right distance? Close enough to love, but still not get hurt?
Well, you have to fucking go out there and try! But failure still sucks. But even though failure sucks, that does not invalidate the good of going out there in the first place.
>>134948385
Think of it as my Christmas gift to OP.
