When did you first see it, and what did you think?
Was it your first/only anime if you did see it?
inspired by LCL vs FCL.
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All I remember is the intro song.
Same
Cruel Angels Thesis still slaps today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6wtDPVkKqI
I didnt know there was more to it than the intro.
In my spirit, keep your head above mayhen, fate, angel of doom(zeurel themes) most of the shiro ones are very good themes.
The opening is one of those things that just sticks with you. Minimalist artwork with just the studio’s name and a couple of lines sung gently… then this sick trumpet beat drops and the title flashes in the most 90s way possible.
Of course I’ve seen it. I was a teenager and it was the deepest thing I had ever seen. I don’t like the new ones.
Saw it in it’s original run. Blew my mind and I basically became the Evangelion guy for a cuple of years. I don’t think any other media influenced me more that than.
Nowadays I can’t stand it. Have some nostalgia for it, but it’s like please stop.
I watched it around the time that it was current, and had seen quite a bit of it’s contemporary anime by that point. Lots of iconic scenes and moments, until the ending goes completely bananas. The end was / is beyond my comprehension, with way too much symbolism (I assume) for me to follow.
it’s not really symbolic so much as it is just a interpretation of mysticism traditions of various major religions.
it’s kind of a pastiche of christian Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Buddhist mystic stuff.
but yeah you’d have to know about that stuff for it to make any sense, esp if you’re a teen. I watched it in college so I was a bit more fluent in these things.
While full of symbolism, there’s also a lot of weird Canon science/rules that make it all make sense in the story. Oddly though the actual Canon reasoning is more obscure than the metaphorical meaning/symbolism.
I saw it (and the ending movie) when I was a teenager in the 90’s. I found the movie to be one of the most depressing things I’d ever seen at the time, because…
Tap for spoiler
so many characters die in ways that essentially negate all the progress they’d made towards achieving their particular goals. Also, much of the series is basically watching 14-year-olds go through war trauma.
Other than that, I really liked it. Since then, I’ve seen much better anime, but Evangelion is still great and a classic.
Loved it. Didnt like the last episode.
I saw it in the very early 2000s in my 20s and it was also the first mecha anime I watched. Most of the references to other anime went over my head, and it was half boring and half exciting, and halfway through the last or maybe second to last episode we started smoking weed because it was so weird anyway we thought it would help. Definitely had a good laugh when we found out the minimalism was due to running out of money.
Definitely enjoyed it, and after watching additional anime it was even better on a rewatch. Rebirth and Death or whatever the extra things in were great as well. Asuka facing off against the white drones or whatever is one of my favorite action scenes of all time.
Haven’t watched the newer ones.
Aesthetics? 10/10
The actual show? The most boring watch of my life.
I was told it was deep comming off Psychopass and was disappointed at the end. It was a slog.
Anime’s Catcher and the Rye
OG series and the story retold both let me in a state of wtf. Its damn good - even though I do Like the first telling/ Timeline in the OG more.
Theres a Lot open in the end that is unclear and makes you think. Its hard to follow fully through and its definetely nothing to rush in a bingewatch.
LCL vs FCL? I’m OOTL
OOTL ? IDK what that is
WTF? LMAO
Out of the loop
You blew it! ou should have asked what “IDK” means!
a weird lost just before this one asking about container ship loads.
Okay I found the post and I’m still intrigued on how that inspired this
I watched it in the early 00’s. A friend at school torrented it and burned the episodes to cd for me. It wasn’t my first anime, but it was among the first I saw that wasn’t on Toonami. It was very different from the typical shounen stuff I was used to seeing and showed me that the medium could be dark.
It was the first anime series I had seen, IIRC. Maybe not the first anime anything. I saw it on VHS tapes back when it was new-ish in the US. A friend in college rented it in parts over several weekends spanning a couple months. We binged it until around 4:00am each night he could get tapes and I slept or almost slept through a few boring bits and pieces of it that are contextually important. I was all about the Eva lore and battles and liked that the Evas weren’t just robots.
I might be remembering this wrong, but the store only had the original episode English dubs, so we had to find some random on craigslist with Death and Rebirth (or was it End of Evangelion?) episodes copied on a VHS tape he just had and then borrow that, or maybe we bought the bootleg copy for like $10. Then somewhere read a text file on some geocities page about the differences to get caught up and make sure we had the right episiodes. This was before torrenting more than MP3 via Npaster was a thing, and I think I had first seen a movie on DVD a few months before this, so this was sort of our only shot.
The first ending made me so mad I told my friend I wasn’t going to chip in for the rental that time because the cellos and drawing episode was such BS as an ending. I understand why the director kept trying to redo the ending after that, it was such a confusing let-down.
Recently watched it again on Netflix, and forgot how much weird art-but-also-borderline-loli scenes there are. I was actually surprised how much I recalled and didn’t sleep through. Amazing stuff, and I certainly identified more with the 3 adults playing the Id/Ego/Superego this time around than I did the kids.
yeah i saw it on VHS from Hollywood Video when I was like 17 in 1998
But I never saw the whole thing until I got the DVDs in 2004.
Fantastic artstyle. Weird as fuck movie. Still hands down the best themesong of any anime.
I watched a lot of anime in the 90s but I had to get all of it by VHS hunting through weird hole in the wall fan stores and doing loans/trades with friends. I use to browse the website anipike (the anime turnpike) to learn about animes because it had nearly all the anime in existence listed as well as summeries and pictures. It was a roll of the dice rather the tape would be Japanese, fan dubbed, subtitled, fan subtitled, or just a random copy someone made. Wild times. I don’t even think I saw all of NGE because getting incomplete sets also common.
It felt like they were trying to pack so much symbolism in that it all got too convoluted, and I rarely understood what exactly was going on. I could tell that they were trying to say something profound, but it felt like an artist trying to make a realistic painting with fingerpaint - the medium just didn’t suit the message. But maybe it was just over my head.
You do understand it. That’s what mysticism is. An expression of what can’t be understood or be put into words. It’s not something you can talk about.
And that’s what the ending is trying to express, the mystic experience of oneness with God, etc. To end suffering, misunderstanding, achieve perfection and harmony, yadda yadda
Parmenides is another source for this sort of thing, outside of religion.
I read it as a pastiche, personally. It’s like various mystic traditions and teachings, all slapped up together, hence the references to christianity, buddism, and kabbalah. It doesn’t coherently try to articulate any one particular variety of mysticism.
I’ve been watching it with friends, and have seen about the first half of it now!
I’m pretty surprised by how little messed up stuff has happened so far compared to what I’ve heard about it, but I’m bracing for that second half! In general, I’m liking it a lot and I see why it’s been so influential in anime since it came out
