Please endure to the end. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.
Today’s article is a discussion of the anime Evangelion. I apologize for the blunt introduction, but I’m eager to begin. So shall we?
I finished watching the last episode of Eva last Wednesday. The appliance I use to play DVD’s is in my basement, and it was quite late when I finished. Both my parents were asleep. Nevertheless, I lumbered up the stairs and into my room with all the grace of a rabid buffalo. Then I fell into bed and proceeded to toss and turn for the next three hours as my thrice-damned mind churned, denying me sleep.
I would love to say I was pondering the deep philosophical implications of the show. I would love to say I was admiring the structure and intensity of the characters. I would love to say I was analyzing the smooth and wondrous flow of the plot.
I would love to say any of the aforementioned things, but it would be a blatant lie.
I was, in fact, struggling to put my dislike of Eva into words. Some of the points I crafted, actually, are evident in this article.
Frankly, I’m astounded that it has gained such a wide following. The plot is messy, jerky, and nonlinear. The voice acting gives new meaning to the word “pathetic”. The art is, well, let’s leave that for later, shall we? The music is – well, I’ll leave that for later too. And, last but certainly not least, the characters are incredibly overrated.
The plot lacks a consistent pace. The important pieces are greatly outnumbered by the scenes which are complete gunk. For example, there is a scene in Episode 3, I think it is, where Shinji and Misato are standing in line in a grocery store. For nearly a minute of valuable screen time, they just stand there. The only acts of any consequence are people muttering incoherently in the background and Shinji turning his head occasionally. That’s it. That’s all.
The plot is also bad because it doesn’t do a particularly good job of letting the viewer understand what the hell is going on. (I myself managed to stumble through it only because I was fortified with a few summaries I had read about a year ago.) Oh, sure, the basic premise is fine – powerful beings called Angels are attacking humanity, and the Evangelions are the only things capable of stopping them. Sure, sure. That’s fine. No problem.
However, instead of leaving it relatively clear, they begin to dump pollutants into it. NERV, the organization created to defend against the Angels, and who control the Evangelions, is actually working for a group called SEELE who has shadow motives of its own? Okay, I can handle that. The Angels are attacking because they’re trying to reach the part of NERV headquarters called Central Dogma? Erm, okay, fine. Once they’re in Central Dogma, the Angels will fuse with the first Angel, Adam, who was the one who caused the so-called “Second Impact” fifteen years ago that obliterated the continent of Antarctica, and by doing so trigger a “Third Impact” whose consequences are never specified but are assumedly bad? Ugh. Could you recommend me to a good psychologist?
In truth, it’s not really that these elements are too confusing, but it’s that the show does a really bad job of tying them all together into something coherent and understandable. This is increased by the fact that they spend about three minutes each episode discussing these story elements, and the rest of them is mostly composed of expositions of the main characters’ weak personalities. It’s hard to concentrate on incorporating what you’ve just learned into your overall knowledge of the plot when onscreen Shinji is whining and ranting about not running away.
The voice acting is, well… in truth I’d rather not dwell too long on this topic. I just didn’t particularly like it. Misato’s voice actor especially seemed to have a tendency to overdo her part… ah well. Let’s move on. (And no, it not having Steve Blum and/or Crispin Freeman is
not one of the reasons I dislike it.)
The art is as inconsistent as the plot. Some of it could have been done by Picasso at the peak of his ability, and some of it…
Grondring: =asleep=
Hideaki Anno (Eva’s creator): “Hey! Wake up!”
Grondring: “Ugh. Huh? Who-er-you?”
Hideaki Anno: “Never mind. Here, draw me a picture of Shinji Ikari in plug suit.”
Grondring: “Bleargh, as long as you let me go to sleep afterwards.” =draws a stick figure=
Hideaki Anno: “Eh, it’ll do.” =vanishes in a puff of smoke=
Grondring: =sniffs the smoke, chokes, and goes into a coma=
And that, I think, is all I need to say.
Now to talk about the music. Truthfully, there were only two songs in the entire repertoire that I liked – A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (the opening theme) and the Hallelujah Chorus, which, obviously, they didn’t even compose. In fact, I think the number of original songs actually used by the show number around four or five. Music is, in my opinion, the greatest creation of man, and it has the distinction of being the best instrument to use in changing the feelings of people. I can guarantee my professional opinion of Evangelion would be much increased if it had mustered a better
score (definition 8).
And finally we come to the characters. For many others this has been the saving grace of the entire show. I do not deny it; the depth of their personalities is astoundingly deep. They are truly well crafted, and their tragic lives are quite amazing.
Ahem. So what?
The depth of personality they illustrate is amazing, but only in the context of TV shows. Stick a camera on my head and have it follow me around for a month or two, and you’ll just as easily be able to perceive the depth of
my personality. For imaginary characters they’re pretty good, but the mind of the average human is still infinitely more complex than these proxies, these shadows of mankind.
Another reason I don’t particularly like them is because, to me, they seem pretty much hopeless. Fear not; I shall elaborate.
I am, if I do say so myself, well versed in many stories, both from books, movies, television, et cetera. In these stories, I have found many characters who have garnered my liking and respect. In many cases, my choice of characters would be rather surprising.
Take, for example, Fullmetal Alchemist. My favorite character from that particular series is Scar. Scar is, as I believe many of you know, a villain.
What the hell? You say.
I like Scar, even though he’s a murdering villain.
Would you like me to give you the number of a good psychologist? You say.
No thank you. I have a perfectly good reason for liking Scar, which is because I see in him qualities that, if not yet outweigh, at least prove a sharp contrast against his less savory qualities. Murdering, yes. Hypocritical, yes. Vengeful, yes. But also determined, yes. Courageous, yes. Selfless, yes. Unbearably cool, yes.
The point is that though part of his personality may declare him a villain, the other part is good and gives me a sense of hope for him. The same goes for all the villains that I like; Darcia, Chainer, Schwarzwald – they all have something good in there along with the bad.
To me, though, nearly all of the Evangelion characters seem absolutely hopeless. To be fair, this is mostly because they spend about ninety eight percent of their time showing how obscenely pathetic they are, one percent showing their good sides, and one percent doing other stuff.
I suppose this was done with the intention of making the few instances of their good qualities more significant, but at least for me it fails utterly. These good moments are easily swept aside by the oceans of bad moments.
What does this matter? I’m going to digress for a little, but it’s a relevant digression. (I know that’s an oxymoron. Bear with me.)
I’ve always maintained that the main task of a storyteller is to get his audience to feel for his characters. (Yes, I have, I just haven’t been very loud about it.) At first the plight of the characters saddened me, and I felt pity for them and hoped they would get better. Then, when I saw more of their personalities, I glimpsed how hope
less it was. And instead of hating them I just gave up on them.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the worse response possible that can be given to a character in a story. Even hating the character is better because it shows you have some sort of feelings concerning them. But to not care at all about them? That means the storyteller has some serious work to do. It is, in truth, a challenging task due to the natural callousness of humans – if we cared about everyone, we would burst into tears every time we watched the evening news.
But we don’t. The job of the storyteller is to make us feel for his or her characters enough so that, if one of them dies, we feel sad. If one of them succeeds in a task, we feel happy. If one of them fails in a task, we feel disappointed. Even villains have feelings directed towards them – usually hate, scorn, disgust (and in odd instances such as my own, fondness), but at least feelings.
Evangelion totally failed in getting me to feel, to care for its characters. I did, admittedly, feel contempt for a while, but even that passed. Let me give you an example.
A few nights ago I was watching an Eva episode for the first time. It was almost one in the morning, and I had just about reached the climax of the story. Asuka was getting the tar beaten out of her by an angel while the Hallelujah chorus was playing in the background. Then I happened to look at a clock and think, hey! It’s almost one! Adult Swim’s got Wolf’s Rain reruns on!
So what did I do? Did I keep watching Eva to see the fate of Asuka? No. I didn’t. I paused the DVD and watched the Wolf’s Rain rerun.
Let us consider the significance of that. Instead of watching the climax of the episode, which I should have done if I cared about the characters, I instead watched a
rerun of Wolf’s Rain. The episode of Wolf’s Rain being showed wasn’t even on my top ten list of favorites, plus I owned that episode on DVD, so it wasn’t as if it was my big chance to see it or anything.
That is absolutely not supposed to happen. But it did. Why? Because I didn’t give a damn about the people there. They appear hopeless to me.
Spoiler coming up. Highlight to read.
And then, guess what they do in the last episode? They take the most hopeless one of them all, Shinji, and have him suddenly undergo a revelation and become not hopeless. You’ve got to be joking. They’ve never shown me anything coming close to a solid hope for Shinji’s redemption, and then in the space of half an hour they redeem him and expect me to believe it? I bet whoever wrote the script for that one had a few dozen coincidentally empty bottles of sake by him at the time. There. Five pages of ranting about why I don’t like Eva. I’ll give you a moment to absorb all that.
Ready?
Now that all that has been solidly ingrained in your mind, I’d like to tell you that – are you sitting down? Of course you are, you’re at a computer. In case you’re not, though, sit down.
I rather like Eva. I actually do.
I’ll give you another moment to digest that and perhaps curse in bewilderment for a little.
Done?
No, maybe I’ll give you a bit longer.
…
…
Done?
All right, good.
I’m sorry to say, though, that I really can’t rationalize why I like it. A few ideas have popped into my mind, but they are all vague and pale in comparison to the multifarious points of why I dislike it. I’ll share them with you anyway.
One is that hindsight is more generous than, um, present sight. When I was actually slogging through it, I didn’t like it, but after I’m done with it, I look back and think, hey, that wasn’t so bad!
Another possible reason is that I’ve gone past what I call the “pity point”. This is best exemplified by Gundam Seed; for the first twenty plus episodes, I absolutely despised it. My attitude towards Kira and his gang was much like my attitude towards Shinji and his group.
Another spoiler, this time for Gundam Seed.
But when Nichol died, my opinion of Kira changed from “stop whining, ya putz,” to “Wow, that’s harsh. I feel sorry for this guy.”It might vaguely be possible that this is the same reason I like Eva. However, it must be said that Kira had much more hopeful qualities than Shinji, yet Seed managed to break past the pity point in less than twenty-six episodes while after twenty-six episodes of Eva I still didn’t care about Shinji.
In truth, it’s probably a mix of those two. Ah well. Life goes on. I hope this article has given you some insight into not only my opinion of Evangelion but also how my mind works. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have writing to do and schoolwork to blow off.
A Happy New Year to all of you. I wish you, your friends, and your kin all the best.
Grondring wants you to know that no, being insane is not another possible reason for why he likes Eva. (The psychologists never listen, though. His mailbox is crammed full of ads from them.) Also, he’s got a super brand spanking new email account at Grondring@gmail.com! Much thanks to AT for this. Mad Mod wants to kill himself for accepting this job. Six pages, dude. Six pages.