As a fan of Eva, I honestly agree. Eva always seemed way more like a uncharacteristically realistic & dramatic mecha series than a deconstruction to me. (Never mind that this site's definition of "deconstruction" is far different than, say, Wikipedia's, which is mostly incoherent.) I'm not well versed in mecha shows besides Eva, though, because I'm not really a fan of mecha anime in general.
EVA isn't even necessarily the first to apply Reality Ensues for Mecha-based shows, hence the eventual distinction between "Super Robot" (utopian, optimistic, power-of-whatever) shows and "Real Robot" (distopian, cynical, war-is-hell) shows, so which tropes of which genres is EVA deconstructing or reconstructing? Sure, it plays a lot of character tropes for drama rather than comedy, and things go horribly, horribly wrong more than they go improbably right, but in the end, at least Shinji stops being the narrative punching bag and earns his happy ending, esoteric as it may be. "Life sucks, but it's also worth living" isn't exactly some downer anti-moral.
My problem with "Evangelion is a masterpiece of deconstruction" is that they're actually talking about Grimdark rather than "tropes used realistically" which is Not A Deconstruction.
Is this tread's purpose to talk about such issues or are we going to take some kind of action eventually?
(Posted this is Ask the Tropers on account of not knowing any better, but reposting it here.)
The concepts of "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" on this site are ludicrously vague to begin with, and Evangelion is one of those series that, while good, also ends up having people project a lot of assumptions on it that aren't necessarily true. And the whole "deconstruction" thing isn't the only bit either, tons of people were really anal retentive about the religious symbology until Anno or whoever just came out and said they were doing it because it was exotic and sounded cool.
A lot of the concepts in Evangelion that people seem to think are revolutionary and "deconstructive" were already thoroughly explored, warts and all, in the genre's infancy in the same way that people find so amazing in Evangelion itself. Astro Boy, Great Mazinger, Zambot 3, Ideon... Hell, even Combattler V which wasn't that much to write home about still could've been argued to "deconstruct" the combining mecha subgenre it set up in its first episode when the leads weren't able to actually combine and work together as a team because they had only just met and hadn't bonded in the slightest. I think the real cause for this is simply Evangelion was one of the highest-profile mecha series of the 90s and one of the ones most likely for people to see one way or another. And from it and its dark subject matter, assumptions were made about the old mecha shows of the 70s and 80s and somewhere along the line, bam. Deconstruction label got slapped on it and everyone just assumed it was true when, as far as I can tell, there's never been official recognition and confirmation of this idea. Same with people thinking Metal Gear Solid 2 was supposed to be some amazing masterpiece of Post-Modernism.
Granted there is still a mountain of analysis to it especially in the final third when Anno really got into the concept of psychology as he was coming out of his depression. But every time I see a page where something in Evangelion is marked as a deconstruction, or that Gao Gai Gar was meant to rebel against its trends and Gurren Lagann in turn was in turn Gainax recognizing that they got the message, what that's really telling me is someone is making a lot of claims about the genre with a lot of undeserved, unwarranted, and unfounded certainty.