Evangelion

Visual Novel Community Anime/Otaku Discussions
#1

Okay… so I’m finally sitting down to watch all the various incarnations and remakes of Evangelion, because it’s something I’ve needed to do for years now. Seen the original TV version, watched the movie remake of the ending, played the Iron Maiden alternate universe setting, and currently reading the manga adaption. I’ve got a long list to follow, so it’s gonna be awhile before I finish this thing.

Anyways… Something that I haven’t caught on to yet, and hoping someone can answer, is this: Why are the Angels attacking?

I get why Steele and Shinji’s dad are interested in the next Impact… I get the whole metaphysical choices Shinji can make, and why Rei gives him the choice to make it… but what I don’t still don’t get is why the hell the Angels give a crap about it, and what do they gain if they succeeded.

What’s the next Impact to the Angels and why do they bother to appear after being dormant for millions of years? Why not attack when humans were in the stone age or something?

#2

The Angels were inactive because Lillith (and I think Adam as well) were basically sealed in Antarctica; I don’t think a reason is given as to how or why that happened. Waking Lilith up caused Second Impact which started the whole Angel thing.

As for what’s in it for the Angels. This is just a theory, but remember in End of Evangelion Misato explains to Shinji that the Angels are basically versions of what humans could have been, meaning they’re basically rejects. Starting Third Impact, assuming one of them was able to, would basically make them “complete”.

#3

Don’t ask me, my personal opinion is that Evangelion is vastly overrated and more stupid than it seems :roll: .

#4

My thoughts exactly.

Surely, it’s not that bad of an anime, and definitely worth watching. Great character design, and some nice thoughts on life, death and interpersonal relationships. But that’s all there’s to it. Most people seem to think that Evangelion is some kind of masterpiece, but they’re probably just overthinking those strange ending episodes.

#5

Evangelion strikes me as… well… interesting I suppose. I’ve come to see it as Mazinger Z with too many religious terms drowned in a sea of Sigmund Freud insanity. It does have it’s moments though: especially in the mecha battle… and while I think her taste in men is highly questionable, Rei is a hot Ice Queen.

I don’t see the anime as some massive introspective epic though, and I agree that people are over doing the hidden message thing. I feel the same for Xenogears and Chrono Trigger though. Still… it’s a decent show. Lots of plot holes, but other than the reason for Angel attacks, I can ignore them.

However it does piss me off slightly, that the whole point of the series, is to make Shinji’s life suck.

He falls in love with a girl who loves him back, and she dies (and comes back as sorta like Rei but not really)… just after the other love interest is reduced to a gibbering zombie. His mommy is the big inhuman robot he’s been piloting. His father treats him like dirt, and when daddy finally figures it out, he dies without his son ever knowing he’s sorry for being an ass. Then the world goes boom, God-mode Rei gives him the chance to reboot Creation as he sees fit, and Shinji still manages to screw that up. I mean I’m for sad ending and all… but Jesus… give this kid a break.

The remake movies aren’t any better either… having seen 2.0 and all, with Shinji and Rei being all lovey-lovey more so than the original incarnations, it’s going to suck hard balls when she obviously dies in the upcoming 3.0. Well… maybe Shinji will at least bang her first… wait… nevermind… this is Shinji.

Of course if Shinji had a spine, maybe it would have turned out better…

I do find it amusing how Rei, Shinji, and Asuka share the same core personality disorder (a need to be loved).

#6

I’ve only seen the series a single time. Personally, I enjoyed the psychological aspects, but other than that I’m not sure what I think of the series. It sure as hell isn’t among my favorites. When it comes to stuff Gainax has done (in terms of anime) that I have seen completely, I think I prefer This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Now if, on the other hand, someone were to try and say Ghost in the Shell (movies and series) wasn’t fantastic, I might take issue. :stuck_out_tongue:

#7

Behold, the awesomeness, that is … Eva Thumbnail Theatre!

Shinji, you suck. Get in the robot. [EDIT: This whole thread is spoileriffic, but HUGE SPOILERS! Thumbnail Theatre so funny because of how accurate it is.]

As for why the Angels are attacking … As far as I understand it, they want to get Adam back. They attack Nerv HQ because almost all the angels believed that Lilith (in their HQ) was Adam. (Only magmafisher and the Leviathan angel are really exceptions, and Adam was on board when Leviathan attacked, and magmafisher got attacked.)

The series heavily implies that this is the reason the Angels only ever attack NERV. If they wanted to crush humanity, well, there are more Angels than there are Eva units. They attack greater than three metropolitan areas, not giving time to evacuate first, then say “Give us the Eva units, or we start mowing down major population centers”.

#8

The entire point of Evangelion is that the entire cast (and by extension, everyone else) is exactly the same way. They did an exceptionally good job of running this thru the whole show and making it a central theme. In fact, the main plot (we should fix this by taking humanity to a new, different state of being) wouldn’t work if the cast were as well-adjusted as the cast of Azumanga Daioh or Cardcaptor Sakura.

Gendo is just as messed up. And so is Misato. And Ritsuko. In general, the more screentime you have in Evangelion, the more messed up in the head you are.

#9

Ya gotta admit though… at least Eva gets the visual eye candy and audio bliss correct. :slight_smile:

I remember Misato saying that each country could only build 3 EVA units. It didn’t matter if the EVA’s were destroyed or functioning. Three was the limit… which is why Japan only had 00, 01, and 02 despite obviously needing more – and why they just couldn’t replace them with new ones when heavily damaged. That was why it was such a major deal when the US gave up EVA 03 when the accident with EVA 04 occurred, and Japan didn’t turn it down.

Of course Steele cheated with EVA 05 to 13.

My understanding is that the Angels didn’t care if civilians were there or not… it’s just that Angels take their sweet ass time when doing anything, because they have no concept of time (the whole immortality thing). They just pondered along to Japan. The only ones that seemed to rush to Japan, were the ones who were naturally fast to begin with. Some Angels seemed to totally ignore the military attacks on them too - they only universally paid attention to the EVA’s showing up. Otherwise they just seemed oblivious or uncaring to everything else around them.

I kinda thought there was some sort of contrasting between Angels and Humans. Angels took their time and generally moved slowly to get somewhere. Humans on the other hand, were always under the clock to get the EVA’s fixed and the whole 5 minute power limit. Humans were rushing to a countdown; Angels were causing the countdown.

#10

It’s been awhile, so I can’t remember if it was just Cutter Boy, but I believe several of the Angels demonstrated an unwillingness to kill. At the very least, Cutter boy gave Asuka multiple chances to stop attacking it by deliberately striking to incapacitate, only going for the kill when Asuka insisted it was nothing but a flesh wound. Likewise, it could have butchered Rei’s kamikaze attempt, since Unit 00 was defenseless, but it opted to allow the suicide attack to proceed, merely protecting itself. You could even argue that when it was about to blow up the NERV control room, it deliberately made a show of charging the attack to allow the room to be evacuated (since – it’s been a long time – but I seem to recall it using the beam cutter almost instantly at other times.)

Cutter boy at a minimum, was only attacking because it had a specific objective (implied to be Adam); it actively attempted to minimize collateral damage. Other angels, I seem to recall, made a point of showing up, waiting for the Eva units to launch, and then starting the fight.

#11

Well, there are actually three main groups at play here. SEELE, NERV, and the Angels. NERV (controlled by Gendo) was actively working against SEELE, who suspected (but couldn’t prove until it was too late to do anything about it) and therefore attempted to restrain NERV by imposing a series of seeingly strange restrictions, such as NERV HQ deliberately not being set up to defend against being invaded by hostile human forces, only against Angel attack. Also, the only way they ever got the Evas to work at all was to fuse people’s souls with it, then have the units piloted by someone connected to that individual. Or just be Rei (and in fact, the Dummy Plug System was based on putting a clone that had been modified to be computer-controlled inside a plug - either of Rei or Kaworu, I believe). So they couldn’t actually replace unit 1 or 2.

The five minute thing was both because SEELE didn’t trust NERV, and because they lacked S2 engines at first. (The production models did have S2 engines, which is why in End of Eva, Asuka has a limit but the mass production models do not).

#12

Hmm… I don’t know… I think those actions were just one of the things about the Angels that didn’t make sense, and you were to just roll with it. Had the Angel won, the story would have ended there, so it had to lose. Like how the masterminds don’t kill James Bond or John Rambo, when they obviously have a shot to do it, and lock them up or let them go (aka Plot Armor).

Naw… I see this all the time in Japanese entertainment. Voltron or the Power Rangers never get hit when uniting. No one tries to sucker punch a magic girl when she’s transforming. No one rushes the samurai warrior until AFTER he draws his sword or has it unlocked from his scabbard. The Evil Emperor sends his weakest minions against the low level heroes, instead of killing them himself or sending his almost as power second in command, letting them “level up” as the battles go on.

I don’t think it’s the Angels playing fair – it’s just a cliche Japanese convention in storytelling. Plus Evangelion is just those 1970’s robot anime in modern form… some of which Gainax owned the IP rights too, so that comes as no surprise…

#13

There is a certain amount of truth in what you’re saying, however, Evangelion is capable enough in plenty of other places at being subtle, that I think even though this is a stock trope of in particular Japanese anime, it seems to me that Gainax took that and worked it into the series as a plot point.

This is one of the reasons I hold Eva in high regard; things like this actually work in context, instead of being a trope everyone uses because it’s just the way things are done.

#14

The most oddest moment I ever had in FFXI was when me and 2 friends were doing a a fight at a Burning Circle. We zone in and the group that was already in there was talking in local chat about Evangelion. The conversation was going around how Shinji’s Mom was the soul of his EVA. So I said “The NERV of some people” and yes, you had to be there lol.

#15

Yea… I can agree with that to some extent, but at the same time, I really feel that Gainax also made it up as they went along. It’s obvious that Hideaki Anno had an underlying idea of where he wanted the series to go, but he had no conception of how that journey would exactly be followed. Sorta how George Lucas had no idea that Vader would be Luke’s father (or Leia would he his sister), until he got to those points. You see all the evidence with the constant reimaging: especially in the Eva movies.

Gainax had an in-depth setting, but people are making it more grandiose that Gainax, and the company takes credit for fan made ideas or quietly adapts them. I think Eva is no more epic or filled with hidden greatness than Scrapped Princess, Magic Knight Rayearth, or Record of the Lodoss War. It’s a detailed world - but gets too much credit for being more detailed than it really is.

I LOL’ed… :lol:

#16

Maybe it is that I have only seen the series and none of the movies, but I don’t understand what is so detailed about Eva. In my eyes, Scrapped Princess had much more detail to it than Eva, though I’ll admit the whining and and acting like a brat of Pacifica kind of gets on my nerves, making it fall a little short of greatness for me. From what I’ve heard, a main reason the End of Eva movie was made is because the fans were pissed at how the series ended things. I seem to recall some mention of flashes of hate mail and death threats being in the film. In any case, it seems weird that it would be treated as being the actual story when it seems it is more like catering to the fans.

#17

All that quasi-religious nonsense actually makes sense when you throw out the real world meanings and have access to one of the NGE production books: there were multiple versions sold in bookstores throughout Japan for a time. The whole timeline of events, state of the world, political machinations, and fake science/technology are pretty interesting and well thought out. The whole thing about AT Fields takes up almost three pages.

What end? :stuck_out_tongue: The original ending to Eva was a bunch of psychedelic nonsense that was utterly innate. Take out the NGE characters and it has NOTHING to do with NGE. Then Hideaki Anno came out and said, “the ending is what you make it.” Which is a lame reply, because he gave different interpretations in different interviews, which means [u]HE[/u] didn’t have any idea what it was to be. The super fans tried to translate the chaos into something coherent, but they were as reliable as someone transliterating Nostradamus predictions. NGE had no ending, because Hideaki Anno had no ending to give, so he made this metaphysical statement about an ending.

FAIL.

After all these years, the NGE movie remakes ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebuild_of_Evangelion]Rebuild of Evangelion[/url]) appear to be what NGE should have been. They’re more coherent and make much more logical sense, but Gainax made it a major point to mention, that Hideaki Anno will NOT be in charge of the conclusion. I understand that good story doesn’t have to have a happy ending, but a good story needs a good ending. There’s a distinct difference: and the original NGE tremendously failed in delivering that. So assuming the final NGE movie remake is released in 2012 - which makes sense with their current progress timeline and the whole Mayan End of the World as a marketing ploy - it will have taken Gainax 17 years to actually finish what they started.

I doubt they’ll go with the proposal of a Yanda-Rei ending though…

Or how about a conclusion of Who Needs Shinji?

Kinda NSFW

Hit the blue bar there. :o

#18

Just curious, but has anyone here seen RahXephon? If not I highly reccomend it if you at least like Evangelion. A friend of mine who introduced it to me called it “Evangelion done right”.

#19

Loved RahXephon, most awesome WTF moment ever when you figure out / Information is spilled on why Haruka is so interested in Ayato … Although was uberly pissed about Elvy’s cheap death, She deserved an awesome death scene in accordance to her hotness!

#20

I dont think every one dies at the end of evangelion Narg.:wink:
My question is, since Kaworu is an angel who possesses adam’s soul. Rei possesses Liliths So does that mean she is technically the 19th angel?