#but i think in 2021 there was a lot more abstract ideas floating around!! so many more ocs and aus involved

[mlkbwunnies]

i miss churning out fics every night in my bedroom at 16

[mil-doo]

Shin Evangelion

So I’m rewatching the rebuild movies with some friends who are more into them than me both for funsies and in hopes of gaining a more positive perspective of them. We just finished 3.0 last week and I’ve got some thoughts so far.

I really appreciate the story they’re trying to tell here. It feels like each character has an inch more autonomy and assurance than their Neon Genesis counterparts. It’s a story where the characters are able to hang on to some of the lessons they learned in NGE and EoE and take them along to this new continuity.

That’s an interesting story! I like the idea of our friends from Nerv learning a little while still clearly struggling with the areas that are still too sore to heal and with the areas where they still need to grow. It would have been really boring if we had the exact same copy and paste characters as before.

I really appreciate how early Misato starts to rely on Shinji and be transparent with him about the machinations of Nerv (to her knowledge). Similarly I love the breakdown of that trust between her and Shinji (and everyone else and Shinji) in 3.0 —a movie whose conflicts could never have happened without a failure of communication born out of long pent up and still raw emotions.

Where it doesn’t work for me is I think primarily an issue of preference. The rebuilds, Shin Eva, etc. feels excessive to me. Maybe that just comes down to my obsessive love with the 90s television series and subsequent film ending, but both the aesthetic choices of the rebuilds, as well as what they choose to use their run time on, don’t work for me as well as I would have liked (Thrice Upon a Time aside, I still want to give that one a fair shake again).

So much of the run time of both 2.0 and 3.0 is dedicated to massive bombastic battle sequences, 2.0 especially feels like it refuses to slow down for longer than a moment or two, while 3.0 has some beautiful character moments sandwiched between what feel like two massive and kind of exhausting 45 minute battles.

Don’t get me wrong, 3.0 especially is visually stunning. It has some of the most technically impressive animation out there, it really shows how well Khara has mastered CG animation in their almost 20 years of making these movies. But Evangelion to me was never really about the flesh mech on abstract terror action, that was always important and appreciated and often had a lot to add to the story but it was always in aid of it and not the central feature.

The aesthetics of 3.0’s final act also kind of looks like someone trying to do EoE again but BIGGER (and a little Micheal Bay-ified). MORE Adams, MORE lances, BIGGER cosmic crosses, a sea of eva skulls, a million billion floating blood red evas! Just give the CG team a bunch of work and make sure the frame is absolutely gushing with objects.

I’m probably sounding harsher than I intend to really come off. I do like these movies, and I respect them more on this viewing than I did before! There’s a lot that they do have to offer and while I don’t like every decision made here I am excited to revisit 3.0+1.0 in a week or so!

I went into Thrice Upon a Time the first go around in 2021 hoping it would resolve every hang up I had with the rebuilds up to that point. This time I’m willing to let the rebuilds be their own thing, with their own goals, and I’m really excited to see its final film with that mindset.