#i had to rewatch them recently so like...my passion has been renewed

[asuka--langley--soryu]

@kuribo4indahouse I’m screenshotting your response bc I lost the ability to reply directly somewhere in tumblrs new updates, and also I want to clarify what I mean by ‘waste’ publicly in case other people have questions. 

I agree with you in some ways regarding the general idea that often a scene is never a real ‘waste’ and that they can contribute something to the plot even if they are comedic in nature, but I do want to specifically address why I think that, actually, there are a lot of wasted scenes in 2.0. Under a cut for length!

I’ve spoken at length about what I find to be disappointing about the characterization of Shikinami and won’t talk too much about that side of things. That is, I’m not going to criticize here the content of the characterization, but rather its effect and, more importantly, its absence. My overarching complaint about what scenes like this do to the narrative, and why I think they’re ‘wasteful’, is that they result in a film which gives the audience absolutely no reason to be invested in Asuka.

I think these scenes are ‘wasteful’ because they add nothing to a character who is already starting the movie at a disadvantage. Asuka is completely absent in the first film, which is obviously meant to represent her later introduction in the series and which is understandable to that point. The intention of 1.0 was clearly to be a pretty clean reprise of the first few episodes of NGE, so Asuka not being there makes sense (although, they do have Kaworu appear, and that appearance is, I think, actually really successfully done and beneficial to his characterization and they 100% could’ve done something similar with Asuka...but I’m trying not to digress lol). The downside of this choice is that, unlike the series, we don’t have 20+ episodes to learn who Asuka is and come to care about her as a character. We have a 2 hour movie. 

When I rewatched 2.0 a few weeks ago, it became clear to me that if I did not already know who Asuka is and if I was not obviously already incredibly invested in her, then I would have no reason to give a shit about what happens to her in this film. She is introduced with one short but vaguely cool fight scene (which i liked!) and then just sort of floats around for the rest of the movie being occasionally snippy. As far as characterization goes, we have the doll scene (ew), the scene with her and Shinji in bed, the elevator, and the ‘deep chat’ she has with Misato over the phone (wherein she seems to come to a realization about the nature of her interactions with others which feels...completely unearned at that point and incredibly sudden and like. why is she saying this to Misato? What bonding moment have they had that would make Asuka, whose primary character trait at this point is ‘mean’, willing to open up this way?). Then Asuka is torn to shreds and we’re all supposed to care because....? Vaguely, yes, we would care because she’s a human being and its sad and awful that Shinji is made to tear apart a human being, but the scene doesn’t have the impact it should because the movie has not presented the audience with a reason to be actually, genuinely invested in Shikinami. If I had not watched NGE before, I would assume that she was always meant to be a kind of throwaway love interest made expressly to be killed at the end of the film. To be honest, the scene would probably have been more effective if they had kept Toji as the pilot (which they almost hint at in a REALLY weird moment of like...fake-out foreshadowing), seeing as the audience has spent more time with him at this point then they have with Asuka. But i’m digressing again!!

In order to make the moment of Asuka getting torn apart in the corrupted eva to be emotionally impactful for the audience, or for us to be invested in her continued story line, there needed to be MUCH more work done within 2.0 to lay the groundwork for her character. Not to say that there is no room for comedy, or that comedic scenes can’t establish characterization, but more often then not the Asuka moments rehash the same shit that we know about her: she’s moody, she likes Shinji, and she doesn’t get along with people. We don’t even really get to know why she wants to pilot! Which is like, I don’t know, incredibly central to her character. The bed scene is more about Shinji than it is about Asuka, so I wouldn’t really count it--though it does, I guess, give the best indication. The elevator moment begins to touch on this, but then again shifts towards the romance subplot. Instead of this scene being about Asuka’s insecurities and trauma, as it is in the series, it is used to reinforce the like...half-assed love-triangle of the movie. It adds nothing to her character, and, once again, provides no impetus for investment from the audience. The elevator scene is not ‘wasted’, but its moments like it that puts more and more stress on every other scene featuring Asuka. 

Because this a movie and not a series, it needs to do a lot of things at once. 2.0 makes things much harder on itself by trying to accomplish the work of almost 20 episodes--it introduces several new characters (including one that is completely new to the visual NGE canon), attempts to introduce the concept of beast mode, further develops and complicates Human Instrumentality, and still needs to further the already established character storylines (of which there are...a lot). When you are trying to do ALL of these things in a single movie (which is then necessitated by the time skip at the start of 3.0--that is, we need to know what all these characters are doing and reach at least partial resolution because we will never be in this moment ever again) it becomes important to use every scene you have available to you wisely. Because Asuka is not the only new character and she is someone important to the series and it’s trying to pull off an emotional twist for her in the third act and it intends for her to continue to be a major character later, the film had a LOT of work to do in terms of establishing characterization for her. There wasn’t really time to spare on silly fan service scenes which gave us no further indication as to who Asuka is and why she’s interesting or important (beyond what we ALREADY knew about her by this point, which is, to reiterate, that she’s a tsundere love interest) but they...did it anyway. For some reason. And it didn’t pay off. It never does, imo. They don’t make up for it with several interesting moments of character interaction later, or with an elucidating conversation about something that isn’t Shinji, or with another moment of her in her eva. They just continue to do silly inane shit and then she gets torn up and now she’s cool eyepatch girl!! How fun!! 

 I really, truly believe that if you have not been exposed to evangelion before the rebuilds then there is literally no reason given to you as to why you should care about Asuka. And this is coming from me! Someone who cares like....the MOST about Asuka. I want to like her in these movies even if I don’t like the movies themselves, but they make it literally impossible because it doesn’t even seem like the film likes her or is even remotely interested in her at all. She never grows beyond a one-dimensional character and so fan service scenes just seem even more egregious because their inclusion means even less work spent on making her a genuine character. 

This is very long and I’m sorry for that!! I also am not like...distinctly disagreeing with you or attacking you or anything and am very sorry if it seems like that. I am. very passionate about Asuka and about what they do to her in the rebuilds, and I also, obviously, don’t know anything about brevity or restraint lol. 

[blee-bleep]

Though I disagree vehemently about your take I'm also very curious of your arguments for why you think Akko is such a bad character?

Anon, you have no idea what you just fucking asked of me. Time for a review! This is going to be hella’ long. 

Vanilla Character that insists that she has personality

So the one thing I’m going to start off with is; The Relatable/Vanilla Protagonist Syndrome. This is the syndrome that is used for most main characters in order to have a clean-slate character that is basically the audience in order to promote the world-building in the series by having them absolutely no clue of what is the world around them. That is what Akko exactly is, and that is what Trigger abuses her out of. 

Little Witch Academia is an anime that focuses solely on world-building, so much so that they’re willing to pile over their characters in order to show what magic can do. 

(And apparently for Trigger, world-building also means learning who the author of a 200-yo Twilight spinoff book is and who was Holbrooke’s dad)

But the point is, the anime is a pile of boring trash fire that focuses on world-building, even from its original exposition of the OVA. It uses the pattern of ‘theme/problem of the week’ in half of the series with arcs going nowhere for a while and suddenly rushes an epiphany in the last few episodes. *cough ep 15*

The point with world-building serialization is that it needs a way to be promoted, and what way for it to promote is to get Akko to fuck around with it. As her job as the protag, that’s exactly what she does for more than half of the series. She’s like a stretchy character that is carried by the plot with gross insistence from the show that she has character (which is being stubborn and clumsy that is written off as ‘passionate’).

What’s worse is Trigger has all these ideas yet none of them are polished to its fullest (like the political divide between witches and modern government) or is overlapped by some bullshit to add because Japan. (seriously, a hunting-themed episode with cool lore, and yet a third of the episode is all about robots and building it? What the fuck?)

See, that’s why I think Akko is a horribly written character, not her character itself (if that were the case then I would’ve ditched the show the first episode) but because how she’s executed with it for the show. She’s constantly pulled by different bullshit the show comes up and makes her pull the answers the episode needs out of thin fucking air just because the writers said ‘fuck you’ to development and that they need to end the problem at some point right?

If characters can’t be tied correctly to the worldbuilding then there’s a chance that the character themselves would break, because it just can’t often work with what you’ve already placed in the previous episodes you’ve set up in the first place. Arcs overlap with each other and LWA doesn’t do shit for that until it needs a banging climax. 

Akko is constantly renewed and she learns nothing from what she learned (or at least hints of it), except for the metamorphosis bullshit and Shiny Rod. Which brings me to my next point on why Akko is such a horrible character.

Shiny Rod is a Leech

This thing is basically the plot device that Akko is so tied to. If there’s ever an episode where it solely focuses on Akko herself, it’s often related to either Shiny Rod or Chariot du Nord, which is the shittiest way to limit a character with so much exposition with everything the series has thrown at her. The only other way the series doesn’t do this to her is Diana in episode 12, but it isn’t even focused on her, it’s focused on the cabbage and her Draco Malfoy syndrome.

Anyways, were an episode be connected to Akko in some way, it’s always limiting to her duty as the holder of the Shiny Rod and the occasional situation from Chariot. Not from her friends, who she clearly relates to and has more history with, but with the Shiny Rod and Chariot.

The series lazily signs this as Akko’s resolution to her character by the last episode (FUCK THAT) and does nothing else with her relationship with other characters outside of Diana and Chariot. Honestly, you’d expect that after going through Sucy’s mind and visiting Lotte’s hometown, she would’ve grown as a better character and more than being a two-dimensional ‘chosen-one’ character who only gets an episode if it focuses on the plot-device that pulled her in the magical world in the first place. 

But no, Trigger is still insisting pies, weird shops, and other boring stuff needs to be shown for the series to make it interesting, and dumps the idea to the next. An arc is never properly made for all the shit they let Akko go through because the series is so fast-paced in the wrong places. And when it does focus on what is important (more important than finding about Nightfall’s author), it’s usually done spontaneously thus eliminating the suppose suspense that the single important thing is supposed to do *I HATE EPISODE 15 WHAT THE FUCK*

The point is, Akko is just a ‘believing heart’. A holder of Shiny Rod, who managed to get under Chariot without her knowing. It’s like she’s Midoriya (My Hero Academia) but much watered down and if you take that away from her, she has nothing, when out of all the stuff she could’ve had.

What LWA’s writers hadn’t realized is that what they actually wrote for Akko is what could’ve been her focus but Trigger insists for the world-building theme is that Akko’s arc should only come in the climax and the filler episodes are for her friends because you know, it won’t be more interesting that way and now they have a main protagonist that’s actually interesting beyond their design and suppose-personality. 

Thus I’m next to my last bullshit:

Akko, the Wasted Potential™

I recently rewatched Citrus lately, and though the show is much narrow than LWA’s world of magic, I realized what actually makes it better than it in ways that the latter fails. And it’s their protagonist.

I know you guys will trash about Yuzu being a simp and all, and I absolutely agree with that, but what makes Yuzu better than Akko is not because she’s more down-to-earth, but she has a three-dimensional mindset, a mindset which is the very thing kept away from Akko. 

While Yuzu may not have been pushed into a world of magic by the neck and gets dragged by the plot as violently as Akko (and the two very different themes of the two shows of course), but if you pull those away, their passion are nearly built the same. What differs them both is that Yuzu actually acts out what she needs to do and builds a steady relationship with the other characters around her, even if it’s very subtle and small. (Like, Harumin being her wicked hot sidekick? God yes, top-tier Gyaru)

Akko, on the other hand, literally goes into one of her best friend’s mind in a poison-induced coma and gets shoved into her other best friend’s culture by visiting her hometown. You might think she’d grow from that and realize what it takes to be a better character, right? WRONG.

Of course, Trigger uses these things as filler episodes and nothing more. It doesn’t reflect on Akko’s character because she’s not allowed to think like it should. Though the show would insist she has personality, it does the opposite when Akko’s only character is only used as ‘believing heart’ for the Shiny Rod and nothing much else, because the only times when they do get her a new attitude is dropped off right after.

It would’ve been cool if they dropped the world-building theme for a bit and focus on how they should make the characters much more interesting than having their personalities as the root problems of episodes. 

When I first watched LWA, I had so much more expectation for the characters themselves, especially Amanda O’Neill after her introduction in episode 3. But came episode 5 and then she… didn’t really matter that much despite being in half of the episode. And she didn’t have another one not until 11 episodes later. Imagine making and hyping up such a unique character and barely giving her screentime of three episodes! That’s one of the grossest things you can do in baiting lesbians, Trigger! 

And it doesn’t stop at Amanda; it applies to almost every other character. Chariot is the pink-print disappointment of a hyped character that didn’t have enough time. She’s a plot-device character that everyone was anticipating but she’s barely given the after of a shitty episode 14 (that has another completely different problem altogether). Episode 15 was literally the worst you could’ve done to make a twist because a) the development leading to that revelation was undercooked, and especially shitty because the show basically used Croix as a plot device, b) it’s done nearly towards the end of the series so the timing for her hype was weirdly placed, and c) Chariot’s personality from that episode is being used repeatedly just to let Akko become a sitting duck. 

So yeah, Trigger was so focused on the concept of world-building and making magic look as interesting as possible that the idea that maybe the characters would flat-out look bleak was not in their cone of vision. Akko was fundamentally a boring protagonist because she keeps getting pulled apart and has not ingrained anything in that, and to rub salt into the wound, she becomes so used to it that when Croix set her up with the Wagandea trap, Chariot has to intervene and at the cost of her flight powers, which does not help their characters one bit.

Akko is a shitty protagonist Trigger shredded apart just for their sake of world-building and she has learned nothing from what the show has thrown at her because the writers didn’t think she needed it, because, in the first place, it’s not about her. It’s about the Shiny Rod and completing Chariot’s story (which is half-assed in its own way). Lord knows how they botched her to the point she’s blank. She’s nothing more than a ‘believing heart’ and if Trigger just keeps there, that’s forever what she is. And that, in itself, is why I think Akko is a horrible character.

[thegottabe]

*So I just finished season 11 of The X-files...*

I didn’t watch any of the revival episodes until recently (for several reasons, the simplest of which is that watching week to week is the worst and I feel much more frustrated by a bad episode if I have to wait a week for the next one), but since they announced they aren’t renewing the show for the time being, I felt like now was the time to rewatch the entire series, from beginning to end. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the new seasons, mainly because - as usually happens on the internet - the haters are the loudest when expressing their opinions and everything I saw about them was negative. However, after watching them for myself, I have to say I kind of loved them. Not the mythology episodes, mind you.

The whole conspiracy mythology should have been wrapped up and dropped a long time ago, long before season 9, let alone 10 and 11. The fact that Chris brought it back after all these years only to make it even more convoluted and silly was a terrible call. Really terrible. Not that it wasn’t a pleasure to see William B. Davis on my screen again, but CSM should never have come back. It made no sense whatsoever, considering the last time we saw him he got blown to smithereens. I mean, yeah, I know Chris has always said “no one on The X-Files is ever really dead” but the man took a freaking missile to the face. He was very dead and should have stayed that way. And don’t even get me started on how stupid Reyes’ storyline was. Besides not making any sense character-wise, it was badly written and well... just stupid. And the final episode was beyond ridiculous. Skinner, Scully, Mulder... these characters I have loved and carried with me for over 20 years deserved so much better. Especially Scully. It was devastating to watch, honestly. It certainly goes on my list of Worst Finales Ever of All Time. As I do with HIMYM and a few other shows, in future re-watches, I’ll pretend the last episode doesn’t exist. The last ten minutes, especially. That said, the rest of the revival episodes were super enjoyable to me. I was never bored, often amused and my love for Darin Morgan was rekindled immediately. He is brilliant. I only wish Vince Gilligan could have written as well. His episodes were always wonderful to watch. As for the little critiques, I know a lot of people really disliked Einstein and Miller, but I found them pretty entertaining myself. They’re no Scully and Mulder, but I enjoyed them and their bickering. I also loved seeing Mulder’s inevitable evolution into a Grumpy Old Man who hates new-fangled electronics and grumbles about “kids today.” And Gillian, as always, nailed all the emotional notes of Scully (after the first episode of season 10, anyway, which was rough for everyone). Nothing could possibly have saved the end of the season 11 finale, but if anything came close, it was David and Gillian’s acting. The lines were terrible, the plot was terrible and the overall episode was terrible, but despite that, the emotion felt real. They took one of the silliest, most overly-dramatic scenes written since the daytime soap Passions and managed to make it moving despite it’s idiocy. So yes, I have to say that overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the revival and I’m glad it happened. There were several times while watching I felt the same magic I felt as a kid watching the OS. Mulder and Scully’s bantering and bickering were as beautiful as ever and the poignant moments were just as bittersweet as they used to be. I went into it expecting to hate it and fell in love all over again instead, and that was a great experience. As far as Chris Carter goes, I’m not going to hate on him too much. Yes, I think his episodes were by far the least enjoyable and most frustrating, but - as long as I ignore that last episode - I can truly say he didn’t ruin the series for me at all. I’ve always had great respect for him as a show runner for several reasons, the first of which goes all the way back to season 2, when he flat-out refused to fire Gillian because of her pregnancy, despite pressure from the higher-ups. Not only was he excited for her, but he found a way to tie it into the show and created some very interesting plotlines as a result. Very few show-runners are so kind to pregnant actresses (see: faux-feminist Joss Whedon’s treatment of Charisma Carpenter). Beyond that, Chris Carter created in Scully one of the first well-rounded female characters I ever saw on television. She was tough yet vulnerable, kind yet assertive, sentimental yet reserved, scientific yet religious, ambitious yet maternal.  Though she struggled between her love for Mulder and her loyalty to her own identity, she was never written as just a love interest or sacrificed on the altar of man-pain like so many other female leads. She felt like a real person I’d want to have lunch with. She was wonderful, and Chris Carter made that happen and I will always be appreciative of that. I also appreciate Chris because of his openness of mind to let other writers take the characters places he didn’t personally want them to go. He was always for a platonic relationship between Mulder and Scully, yet he still listened to feedback from both the actors and writers and let them do what they felt was right. That’s not a common thing. As a writer myself, I know how threatening it feels when someone takes characters you’ve created and feel you know so well and tries to convince you that you’re wrong about them. For Chris to allow his writers the freedom to do that really earns some respect for me, because that’s extremely hard to do. I’m not saying I’m happy with Chris. I’m furious, honestly. I was horrified at the end of the finale and I hated it. Scully’s attitude at the end shows that Chris, at best, has absolutely no understanding of how the female mind works when it comes to maternal feelings. Why he wanted so badly to screw those incredible characters he created over will be forever beyond me and I’m sad that it happened. But even so, his present choices, however horrible, aren’t enough to make me any less thankful for the joy he bought to my life by creating The X-files. For that, I’ll always respect him, though I can’t say I still trust him as a writer. I guess I’m just writing this because, overall, the revival was a positive experience for me. I got to spend several more enjoyable hours with characters I’ve loved all my life and I adored seeing the older versions of Scully and Mulder together. I got all kinds of new shippy moments that made me flail in fangirlish rapture :D Trivial critiques aside, most of the revival was just as fun to watch as the original series once was, and that’s something I truly treasure and didn’t expect at all. ♥