#that just imploded. it had a level 5 nuclear meltdown

[princesssarcastia]

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[paulisweeabootrash]

First Impression: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Get in your robots, audience, it's time for Paul is Weeaboo Trash!  And today, I'm finally watching a show it seems like everyone just... assumes I must've seen:

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Episodes watched: 8

Platform: Netflix

The idea of something being a "classic" may be in decline in the anime fandom, or at least be getting very specialized, since "anime" no longer implies a narrow interest in specific sci-fi and fantasy subgenres like it used to, but certain shows still manage to pervade the pop culture indirectly.  Neon Genesis Evangelion is one such show, enduring in the modern fandom and general internet culture because of its status as one of those old sci-fi anime classics.  It has contributed memes — not just as in image macros or running jokes, but as in units of culture in the form of iconic quotes or character designs or elements of the plot — to the point that you have certainly been in some way exposed to them without any knowledge of the source material.  But despite its reputation as a must-see cultural touchstone, it has been out of print in America for years.  Used copies of the DVDs sell for absurd prices, and I don't think I knew anyone who owned it when I was a young weeb in the mid-2000s.  I'm fairly sure my family did not have cable during the one specific season it was on Adult Swim, and there's no chance I would have been up at 12:30AM on Thursdays to watch it anyway.  I am not much of a fan of media piracy and wasn't even aware of that option when it was apparently everyone else's favorite pastime to ruin their computers with sketchy torrents.  So there was never a reasonable way for me to watch it, only for me to be dimly aware that this was An Important Show I Need To See.  Until now.  Because it's on Netflix.  As if I hadn't already been awaiting it, I was aggressively reminded of it, because social media and geeky news outlets were soon blowing up with retrospectives and Very Serious Analyses — and fans of the old ADV translation were offering hot takes on how Netflix's release compares.  So let me finally check this out for myself.

We start out in the distant future of... 2015, where UN forces are defending Tokyo-3 ("Old Tokyo" is mentioned and depicted later; no mention yet of Tokyo-2 unless I somehow already forgot it) against an attacking "angel", an immensely powerful alien with barely-comprehensible powers.  Meanwhile, an officer of a UN agency called NERV, Misato Katsuragi, brings our main character, 14-year-old Shinji Ikari, to an underground NERV base under Tokyo-3 on the instructions of Shinji's father Gendo, who runs a secret research project.  Shinji has been brought there to pilot an Evangelion, or Eva for short, a giant robot operated by some sort of neural interface.  In combat.  With no training.  He is, understandably, not happy about this.  After seeing how badly injured the other available pilot, Rei Ayanami, is, however, he agrees to do it — and it works far better than he or anyone else expected.  He apparently has an innately great ability to "sync" with however exactly the Eva's interface works.  But this only gets him as far as starting the thing up.  When he actually engages the angel, he has trouble just getting the Eva to walk, and he feels the pain of the Eva taking damage once attacked, a frankly horrifying feature of the interface.  We cut to him waking up in a hospital, but having surprisingly won because his Eva "went berserk", operating on its own.  A flashback later shows what happened when he lost control of the Eva: it fought the angel by itself, but also took heavy damage, and we see its visor? faceplate? sōmen? of the Eva's armor come off to reveal a fleshy-looking face and a very biological-looking eye.  At this point Shinji blacked out, which is really the only reasonable response to this situation.

Over the next several weeks (the time scale is vague, but since Rei apparently fully recovers from the injuries she had when we first saw her before the time she and Shinji are both deployed, it must be at least 3 weeks between eps. 1 and 5), more angels appear, to the surprise of civilians and UN forces alike.  The Evas continue to be excellent weapons against them (though Shinji himself is still, uh, not great at using them), but despite having now killed several angels, the Evas are considered a ridiculous boondoggle by personnel of other UN branches, and Gendo's sinister superiors seem to be losing patience with his project.  In the words of... uh... that UN navy guy in ep. 8, "Shit!  A bunch of kids are supposed to save the world?"  The alternatives are wildly ineffective conventional weapons and a remote-controlled nuclear-powered giant robot that almost had a literal Chernobyl-style meltdown, which was averted by Misato and Shinji.  Although repairs are expensive, injuries common, and pilots in short supply, Evas indeed seem to be the only effective weapon against the invading cosmic horror, the barely-comprehensible aliens that are impervious to ordinary human technology and also don't fit our concepts of life or... uh... possibly physics.  So, instead, in the words of Misato later in the same episode, "This plan may be insane, but I don't think it's impossible."

While this is going on, Shinji has been adjusting to this new life poorly and slowly.  Despite being a pilot, he is still after all a 14-year-old, so he is enrolled into the same class as Rei at a local school whose student body has dwindled as more people evacuate over the initial angel attack.  He also needs somewhere to live, so Misato arranges for him to move into her apartment.  Some of Shinji's classmates think he's incredibly lucky to live with her, and spend a good deal of their screen time drooling over her, but Shinji is highly uncomfortable around her not just because Captain Katsuragi is his commanding officer, but also because she has a tendency to not wear much clothing around the house and is, er, a bit of a drunk and a slob.  Oh, and she has an inexplicable, clawed, beer-drinking penguin.  You know, all stuff that would make a nervous, lonely, scared 14-year-old completely at home.

Neither NERV training nor school guarantee a community, though, and Shinji, isolated and confused, could sure use one right about now.  He seems quite likely traumatized from the first battle.  He keeps ending up in situations that make him wildly uncomfortable while other characters take them in stride.  He repeatedly attempts to quit NERV or at least defy orders before backing out (or... backing back in?) at the last moment.  It would frankly be bizarre that they accept him doing this, except that (1) nobody really seems to take Shinji that seriously anyway, (2) he's the boss's kid, and (3) most importantly, it seems that only a small number of pilots, all the same age as Shinji and Rei, are even capable of using Evas.  (Wife and I are starting to suspect reasons why this might be, especially given the whole cyborgs with neural interfaces thing, but... uh... let's not embarrass ourselves with public speculations about the plot of a ridiculously famous show almost as old as we are.)  He only slowly gains any support or comfort from his new classmates and colleagues.  They don't reach out to him, and he certainly doesn't reach out to them, because who is he supposed to talk to?  His roommate/commanding officer who is twice his age?  His classmates who treat him as a celebrity, not a person, once they find out he's an Eva pilot?  Even if his default state since the very first episode hadn't been basically imploding into despair with no idea how to communicate that anything's wrong, there's nobody that really makes sense for him to try to communicate it to.  Except one person: Rei.  He notices that she's also isolated at school, and especially after seeing her dark, miserable, unmaintained apartment, he attempts to be friendly towards her.  I thought this might be a hint of growth indicating that he understands she is possibly the only person more isolated than him and the only one who might be able to relate to him, but then the next time he threatens to quit NERV after that conversation, he explicitly claims she doesn't know what he's going though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he just has bad social skills.

Sigh.

Shinji does start to make friends with Aida and Suzuhara, two of his classmates, though.  And it's interesting because they contrast against him in their reactions to the conflict outside.  Aida roleplays being in the military and finds Shinji's role as an Eva pilot glorious and enviable.  Suzuhara is initially furious at Shinji because his sister was collateral damage — she was injured when Shinji fought the angel — and his mind is changed only after Shinji rescues him (and Aida) from an angel.  Shinji, though, having been thrust into a role he doesn't even understand and about which he is ambivalent and unstable, lacks Aida's optimistic admiration of his role and a full appreciation of either Suzuhara's resentment or gratitude.  He not only rejects their praise, he calls himself a coward during (sigh) one of his attempts to quit NERV.  It occurs to me that this could be seen as indicating different perspectives about the military (ask any American vet who's sick of being "thanked for their service"), or even different perspectives about adulthood itself — I'll bet any millennial who did not achieve their dreams can recognize Aida's "wow this is amazing I can't wait to be a grownup too" roleplaying vs. Shinji's "I am doomed and isolated by the responsibility that has been thrown at me" actual experience in NERV.

Also thanks to the school scenes, we start to learn some backstory, including the famous "Second Impact".  A catastrophic asteroid impact in 2000 melted Antarctica's glaciers, which led to unprecedentedly rapid sea level rise, leading to mass extinction, including that of half of humanity through not only direct climate change impacts like displaced populations and crop failures but also conflict stemming from it.  Or so the official story goes.  It is later revealed that the Second Impact actually involved somehow the previous arrival of angels on Earth, although this has yet to be explained in detail.  (Actually, I accidentally saw spoilers about more detail about this while revising this review, because I went to sanity-check myself about some other detail on one of the fan wikis, so I know part of where this is going, but only part.)

Over the first eight episodes, which must be several weeks at least after the start of the show given that Rei has recovered from her initial injuries (although the time scale is very vague), Shinji fights four angels total and gradually improves, but the biggest improvement comes not from him being an individual hero but from finally working well with others.  For example, the octahedral angel that drills into NERV's base has incredible abilities to detect and counter incoming attacks.  It kicks Shinji's ass on the first attempt, because duh.  But Misato devises a plan to test its abilities and concentrate the power of... uh... Japan's entire electrical grid(?!) at it from a safe distance, and the plan succeeds only because of Rei giving Shinji cover.  An angel attacks a UN ship convoy transporting the third pilot, Asuka Langley Soryu, and her Eva, and she and Shinji fight the angel together in a ludicrous fight that involves both cramming in to pilot the same Eva together (which, interestingly, requires them to give it the same, or maybe just compatible, instructions together in the same language for it to work... yay neural interfaces).  So maybe/hopefully the direction this is going is "the chosen one is a stupid idea and even talented people need both training and cooperation to not suck at things"?

Episode 8 leaves off with Asuka joining Shinji and Rei's school class, and with the dramatic and creepy reveal of an embryo encased in bakelite which is described by Gendo as "Adam, the first human"...  Well.  That comes off as the kind of thing that would drive the future plot, and hopefully all the Biblical imagery will finally start to converge into something coherent instead of just sort of serving to draw extra attention to the fact that the humans refer to the aliens as "angels".  I've been wondering about that since the beginning.  There's the title, of course, but also the sefirot in the opening and on Gendo's office ceiling, the first angel's attacks using what appears to be a directed energy weapon which invariably forms glowing crosses, and the fact that most of the angels themselves are wildly non-humanoid (a choice which echoes the rather... eldritch... classical depictions of angels — see also the seraph in the opening).  NERV's motto is even explicitly, well, monotheistic at least, if not sectarian: "God's in his heaven.  All's right with the world!", which is counterintuitive at best with the idea of calling the alien invaders "angels".

Well.  I'll find out, and I plan to write a followup like I did with Re:ZERO, going into the broad swaths of the rest of the plot and my overall impressions of how they handled things.  Especially given that this show has a famously-controversial ending.  I jumped into this determined to watch the whole series, so I'm not backing out.

I'll just threaten to quit repeatedly then almost immediately come back.

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W/A/S: 4 / 3 / I feel kinda bad about this but 4?

Weeb: I mean, anything with giant robots fighting giant monsters deserves a few points just for that, right?  I don't think this requires much by way of Japanese cultural references or assumptions to watch, though.

Ass: Nudity so far has been brief, partial, censored by convenient angles and object placement, and not remotely sexy.  Thanks to another contextless spoiler I happen to have picked up, I expect an infamous later scene that is clearly supposed to be sad and disturbing in context, which is, again, not the kind of thing this scale was originally designed to describe.

Shit (writing): Even though I tend to overall like their plots, I always sort of sigh and eyeroll at the "let's put children/teens in combat and/or experiment on and/or just plain torture them to force them to become powerful" storyline formula that’s been semi-popular for the last few decades, and Evangelion is definitely in that category.  Friends have said the story is confusing or poorly-paced, and I kind of agree but also think some of the confusion is warranted by the choice to enter the story in media res in order to reveal what's going on to the audience at about the same time it's revealed to Shinji.  As for the tendency to have some long shots where literally nothing happens, that does get annoying, and I suspect its primary motivation was to save money, but I think it also usually emphasizes how lonely the whole situation is, at least before Shinji starts to warm up to Misato and Rei to Shinji in the last couple of episodes I've watched so far (which have, appropriately, had much more action and interaction).  Mainly, my writing complaints are actually about translation, because there are some noticeable and consequential differences between translations for the sub and dub.  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of the love vs. like thing everyone on the internet is already upset about, but I haven't gotten to that episode yet.  I'm talking about things like Misato saying "it will work!" in the sub vs. just "okay!" in the dub when Shinji is first able to control his Eva, a choice which suggests very different things about both her level of knowledge of the project and why Shinji has been called on for it at all.  The new dub also feels... uh... too at home as a dub of a '90s anime, as it prioritizes matching lip flaps over flowing like believable speech.  Having not seen the old dub, of course, I can't make any kind of judgement about whether this is a step up, down, or sideways from how ADV did it.  And the sub has many on-screen captions in Japanese are left untranslated — not things like signs in the background, but actual captions the audience is meant to get information from.

Shit (other): Maybe we're spoiled in this age of computer-aided art, but i's surprising to see a show with such limited animation — speech conveyed only with lip flaps, obviously reused shots within the same episode, foreground objects gracelessly sliding against a background to indicate movement — and so I'm willing to give the show a pass on most of that, especially since the characters are distinctive and the setting and aliens and robots so interesting.  Much of the limited animation actually serves to show the vast scale of NERV's facilities and the Evas vs. the humans and/or to emphasize loneliness like the pacing.  But there really are some painful mistakes from time to time in the art: objects and faces that look utterly wrong, like the artists just did not successfully figure out how to draw that particular character or vehicle from that particular angle.  The legendary opening theme is certainly catchy — it’s been stuck in my head almost continuously for the past week — but I just don’t think I enjoy it as much as other people do.  Some of the immediate complaints that were apparently worthy of news media attention were about the replacement of Fly Me to the Moon with a piece from the show's soundtrack as the ending theme.  I understand why people would be upset by that kind of change, but I am willing to take the controversial stand that it's not a bad change.  The piece they chose as a replacement is haunting and tense, which fits in with the mood of most of the episodes so far, while Fly Me to the Moon feels to me like an inappropriate mood change from that.

Content: Actually among the least graphic of the various shows I've covered involving violent or horrifying elements.

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Stray observations:

- God it was weird to write this by constantly abbreviating “Evangelion” as “Eva”, considering that Wife's name is Eva.

- A lot of people seem to hate Shinji as a character, but I find him understandable in a way that probably implies uncomfortable things about my own sanity.  I just... I understand that sheer degree of doom and misery and indecision and inability to articulate any of those.  Man.  Ugh.

- I don't know if you've ever seen an undisguised angel, but trust me: they're horrifying.  (link NSFW)