neon genesis evangelion

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

good lord watch serial experiments: lain next!!!!!

kill la kill had similar abrupt tonal shifts -- is this just a thing that anime does sometimes?
ok 6-7 episodes left and I just dl'd End of Evangelion so I'm prob gon finish this today
clouds tyvm bcz I'm just like "oh fuck, what do I watch after this???" and I'm halfway thru Paranoia Agent and then I have no idea what else is actually good

I guess I should finish Bebop too

kill la kill had similar abrupt tonal shifts -- is this just a thing that anime does sometimes?

eva's kind of ground zero for this. a lot of shows afterward absorbed the approach though

then you have shows like rahxephon which outright steal from it

steve have you seen flcl

I'll second the FLCL and Lain recommendations; also, Revolutionary Girl Utena (currently up on youtube in its entirety) has a similarly dreamlike and tonally slippery quality, and has the advantage of being practically drenched with queer subtext.

ya FLCL was maybe the v first anime I ever really watched, and I just revisited it a year or two ago, it was my fav until NGE. I think I've only ever watched:

FLCL
Cowboy Bebop
Kill la Kill
half of Paranoia Agent (which I'll finish after NGE)
most of NGE
oh I tried to watch the first few episodes of Sailor Moon a year ago and hated it!

I've only sought out "serious anime" that has a reputation for being really unique or subversive or groundbreaking and as a result I don't have a v good understanding of basic tropes or conventions, so a lot of the meta/referential/satirical stuff in FLCL and Kill la Kill goes over my head.

maybe all/most anime is like this and I just write it off bcz I don't know any better??

maybe all/most anime is like this

in my experience it really isn’t

for more arty stuff i've never heard of see Anime for people who hate anime

animation is such a bigger medium in japan that it really is hopeless to consider anime as any kind of genre. 95% of it is schlock for desirable demographics the same way 95% of american TV is schlock for desirable demographics. i faded out of anime fandom in the early 2000s just cause i was in college and suddenly had a bunch more stuff going on, but i think the glut of available product in the post-DBZ era would have killed me anyway - one positive of the 80s/90s fan culture was that people were not going to bother fan-subbing and VHS distributing completely generic forgettable shows (except ones with a lot of violence and smashing things). so the genre work that came through tended to either be of really high quality within the genre (escaflowne) or somehow weird and exceptional to the genre (evangelion, utena) or just memorably bizarre (kodocha).

even so, a fair amount of stuff that i don't think i could really defend as being above b-movie grade writing got its foot in the door, because it was animated sci-fi and geeks like me were in love with that - bubblegum crisis for example. sailor moon, which i loved, was a pretty darn good magical girl show... but its real advantage was that the dub got syndicated on american TV, and thus created a whole new anime fanbase. if some other magical girl show had paved the way i'm not sure US sailor moon fandom would ever have developed the way it did solely on the merits of the show. this is all thinking about TV series though - movies kind of circulated differently, with stuff like akira having gotten arthouse/college attention much much earlier.

point is: there are probably other shows you would dig if you love eva! though few that i've seen make quite the swerving and mind-bending turns eva makes. so from around the same period, my memory is still very fond of escaflowne if you can dig fantasy-world giant robots, and utena if you can dig boarding-school fencing melodrama and wonky intense choral music. i think if i'd been more open to beige-colored feudal-japan adventures, fushigi yuugi might have meant as much to me as it did others...

ok I just finished the last episode and I am so dissatisfied

haha seeing people react to nge for the first time is always great. the original ending is good i think but mostly because it exists in tandem with end of evangelion, i doubt i'd like it as much if it was all there was.

there's really nothing else quite like nge despite the huge influence it's had unfortunately. as far as other arty interesting stuff goes i agree with the lain & utena recommendations, and also recommend looking into things directed by masaaki yuasa. kaiba is probably his best but everything he's done is at the very least interesting with gorgeous, stylistically diverse animation. as far as more standard action-adventure anime goes, fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood is good as it gets.

i love episodes 25-26, but i say that as someone who has not actually sat through them in nigh twenty years. possibly it's just a mess wrung out of them running totally out of money. but it worked for me? agreed though that it works best as a parallel ending with EoE. it was a weird period when we had the one but not the other yet. (death and rebirth was out in japan but we only had summaries and that only gets you through the first chunk of EoE.)

the amazing thing is how even though the movies came in to address fan dissatisfaction and deliver a conventional, kick-ass high-drama ending, they're still batshit insane and actually more confusing in a way, tripling down on angel developments and the Human Instrumentality Project, without actually explaining a lot of it on camera or delivering much of what you'd normally expect in the way of payoffs from the dark government conspiracy side of the show. hope that's not a spoiler for Stevie, who should totally watch EoE - just be aware that while it swings away from "slideshow of text and psychological imagery" it's still not exactly a 'conclusion' to episodes 1-24.

occurs to me now for the first time that Twin Peaks must have been on Anno's radar.

Stevie you might want to read up on the behind-the-scenes drama of how the last episodes happened

but not until you see End of Eva.

episodes 25 and 26 are classic

25 and 26 actually feel much more satisfying than EoE once enough of the pieces are in place, but I'm glad both conclusions exist.

I rewatched some (half?) of this during college and watched End of Eva on its own a few times but otherwise I basically haven’t revisited the whole thing since high school. I enjoy the dim specificity of my memories of it.

It’s funny how Anno keeps remaking the ending, like a scab he can’t help picking at.

end of eva is a masterpiece and one of my favorite movies ever but 25 and 26 work just fine on their own, stranding you in stray thoughts and unfinished universes and individual consciousnesses bleeding into each other. it’s instrumentality! the viewer feels as recombined into the universal brain as shinji, asuka, and rei actually are

though technically rei is both within and without the universal brain

if you're into the space age christianity of evangelion, i recommend the VALIS trilogy by philip k. dick (valis, the divine invasion, the transmigration of timothy archer), which was a big influence on anno when he was making eva.

guys did you know abt this https://wiki.evageeks.org/Girlfriend_of_Steel_2

“The story is set in the alternate-universe that Shinji Ikari sees during Episode 26 of the original series, with Tokyo-3 at peace and Shinji (who acts the same as his Episode 26 AU counterpart) going about his daily life.”

It’s an ASUKA/REI/KAWORU DATING SIM

wowwwww i forgot all about being really intrigued by the original Girlfriend of Steel even though all we had were like two lo-res creenshots and almost no plot summary. a whole new pilot character!!! wow. if the Rebuild movies had come out a few years earlier I would have devoured those for the same reasons obviously.

only ever heard that guardian of steel is super boring

lol girlfriend of steel*

(Iron Maiden)

i'm on the 25/26 are awesome train, btw - loved it the first go-around, but it's even better after you see the movie imo

i’m so fucked up

Yesssss

Congratulations!

Congratulations!

i found copies of the blu-ray rips of the series and i guess i'm rewatching it again

i'm also really particular about the translations of this show (original adv subs >>> the retranslation they did for the platinum edition, the syntax is all wonky) but whichever i'm watching now is really working for me

I still think Asuka is annoying as fuck

https://www.the-fanboy-perspective.com/uploads/1/7/3/8/17382151/i-ll-kill-you-i-ll-kill-you_orig.gif

that whole sequence is so fuckin intense and metal, justifies the movie imo

i cry every time

fyi the anime that tonally most feels like the latter half of NGE is masaaki yuasa's ping pong. this is just a fact

I want a shirt that says

Absolute
Terror
FIELD

I have a NERV logo shirt that I treasure

I want a NERV mug!!!

y'all just made me remember i had a NERV logo shirt in high school! wow i forgot that completely. i was a pretty cool nerd. B^)

stevie i think u will also appreciate the VERY 90s lilith fair vibe of the theme song to lain

do you think he'll seem to understand?

a shame, he seemed an honest man

tum
ba-ling
down
tum
ba-ling
down
tum
ba-ling
dooooooooooooowwwwn

i want to finish Paranoia Agent but I am still like in shock from EoE

Oh, just wait till you get to the second Rebuild movie.