Neon Genesis Evangelion

Crosspost and Double post:

I know that Bennett the Sage has a terrible reputation among fans of Evangelion but this video is an update to that analysis. You may not agree with his conclusions in this new video he made but it is much better and more thought out than his last one. This video is an update to his last review and one that is well researched as well as showing how much he has changed.

Do any of the nameless female Nerv operators' designs remind you of characters from other works, especially from ones that were contemporaries or predecessors to NGE? The one at the bottom right of this image◊ and dominating this one◊ has the Hot Blooded Sideburns that are the hallmark of many a Go Nagai character, mostly males but even some females. And the one at the center of this image◊ bears an uncanny resemblance to Nabiki Tendô from Ranma ½, which started publishing in 1987, well before NGE.

For the curious, I'm trying to come up with names for these characters, and while I can just randomly assign WW2-era IJN ships for their surnames, I'm interested in seeing how many I can come up with given names for that aren't also IJN warship names (Ibuki sets an existing precedent for both of her names being warship-themed).

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 15th 2022 at 4:05:10 PM

Looks like your links are broken from here; they all just lead straight to the NERV wiki page.

Nope, I'm desktop too. Maybe if I look at it through another browser it'll be different.

[LATER] Shit, that didn't work either...

Edited by JakesBrain on Jul 15th 2022 at 12:35:08 PM

Odd. They're working perfectly fine on my end. Are you accessing it on mobile or desktop (the latter for me)?

x2 Hmm... By "wiki page", do you mean Evangelion Wiki main page, or page that has the image? 'Cause the latter is where the links go to.

I'm also getting the wiki page for Nerv as well. And I'm using mobile.

So, I was playing online multi-player on Halo Infinite when I saw a weird Evangelion shout out. On the Streets multi-player map there is small pixelated image of Unit 02's head . . . on top of a pigeon's body. I wish I had an image to show because it is a weird place for a reference.

https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesX/comments/qxsug2/evangelion_easter_egg_in_halo_i_love_it/

No wait, I found an image of the easter egg. Here is the reference I was talking about.

Edited by Digitalhero93 on Jul 15th 2022 at 6:03:51 AM

Alright, screw this, I replaced all the links with Imgur ones.

Now that I can see the images, I see what you're getting at, especially the one that looks like Nabiki.

Great! What about the others?

Just from the little bit of familiarity I have with Go Nagai's works, I think you're on to something, but I can't say with absolute certainty that the similarities are 100% on point.

Edited by Willbyr on Jul 18th 2022 at 11:29:07 AM

Well, try as I might, I couldn't find any Go Nagai female character whose hairstyle even remotely resembles that Nerv operator's own better than Hikaru Makiba, and that was only with the sideburn-like bits curving below the ears; nobody had even remotely similar bangs.

I was watching Bubblegum Crisis:Tokyo 2040 and Spike Spencer voices a character there. And yeah, his voice acting tends to make characters hard to like.

On the other hand, I've watched shows (Gunsmith Cats, Battle Angel and Sukeban Deka) where Amanda Winn Lee dubs, and I find that she has a very unique voice. It kind of reminds me of the old Sailor moon dub, in which some voice actors tended to have very peculiar accents.

Edited by Bornstellar on Jul 27th 2022 at 11:32:30 AM

HEY! His voice acting on Star Ocean Second Evolution was epic. And pretty hilarious too.

Don't know if it's already been discussed, but apparently, there's a wikihow article on how to be like Ikari Shinji. Instructions include:

• Act shy
• Seek love and approval.
• Apologize often
• Debate with yourself about almost everything you do

I finally watched the Rebuild films

Props to Anno, he finally managed to wrap up the orignal story(They seem to nearly confirm the Stealth Sequel thing) with an ending that mostly makes sense

And it only took 20 years

Something really bugs me about the setting that I only realized just now. According to information from both the show and supplemental materials (including the Classified Information entries from the NGE2 game), Seele had worked hard to push the world towards the point of accepting a radically reorganized UN as the font of political leadership with a near-total monopoly on military might (i.e. a world government in all but name), with the implication that this was achieved with the Valentine Treaty that was signed in February 2001, right after the Second Impact-induced chaos came to an end.

And yet this is contradicted by the fact that China and Vietnam were able to go to war with each other (implying they still had control over their own military forces) over the Spratly Islands just two years after the Valentine Treaty's ratification with seeming impunity, as well as the fact that the Japanese government saw fit to re-establish its own independent military capabilities in the wake of said conflict breaking out, in the form of the Strategic Self-Defense Forces, which is clearly a combined-arms fighting force. Apparently the National Diet of Japan did not trust the UN to be able and/or willing to protect the country with its vast military forces, despite the fact that it had its literal HQ moved from New York to Japan's new capital Tokyo-2.

What are your thoughts?

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 18th 2022 at 11:41:49 AM

I don't think the creators put that much thought into the global situation.

That's what I was thinking; from I gathered over the years, Anno in particular didn't really care about developing the world of NGE, viewing it merely as a device to frame within it the characters and their interactions, which is what he was truly interested in.

That said, I'm more interested out of curiosity in what handwaves any of you could think of for the above issues that don't break Willing Suspension of Disbelief, because I certainly can't think of any that don't sound too ridiculous and/or don't just raise at least as many questions as they answer.

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 18th 2022 at 4:05:47 PM

Even then, eventually the characters and their interactions with each other become less natural as it goes on, as Anno starts to use them as little more than vessels for him to philosophize and lecture the audience on what he thinks they need to hear.

World Building is not NGE's strong suit. I could be wrong but it seems like the implications of NGE's have not been explored very thoroughly. NGE's focus is mostly on the characters and their interactions.

I think the simplest handwave is just that the UN's monopoly on military power was more on paper than in practice.

That doesn't really make sense, considering how the lore stresses that the UN becoming the international font of political authority was the result of Seele working behind the scenes, in order to make it easier to enact their plan; that makes perfect sense, since working through a rather centralized — even if federalized — global government would be much easier than trying to navigate the heavily decentralized mess that is the real-life system of international politics and diplomacy.

The only explanation that I could think of is that the UN being the supreme global authority — especially over exericse of military force — was initially more in theory than in practice, and the Sino-Vietnamese war over the Spratly Islands happened when the reorganization of national militaries into a global force answering mainly if not only to the UN was still underway. Perhaps it was even the case that the PRC refused to sign the Valentine Treaty in the first place, which may have taken a few years to be ratified (and thus enter into force) by all the countries that did sign it in February 2001 ^note this would be realistic; treaty ratification can take much longer than it did getting the countries to sign it, since it typically requires approval from the legislature or even a referendum, and it's only after the war's conclusion (and presumably a change in the Beijing regime, bloody or not) that China was finally brought into the fold and the actual process of putting all national armed forces under UN control.

The sole exception to that, the newly made JSSDF, may have been excluded as a compromise with Japan, if there were security guarantees provided to Japan beforehand to convince it to sign the treaty (the plan to move the UN headquarters from NY to Tokyo-2 by 2007 may have sweetened the deal further) that have been basically proven "worthless" with the outbreak of the Spratly Islands war, and so the SSDF is maintained under Japanese control to assure its government and people that they retain self-defense capabilities.

You know, I'm actually wondering if the SSDF answering to Japan rather than the UN is not unique to said state, and perhaps other world powers have established their own equivalents on similar rationales. It would be like the state defence forces of the US states but much more scaled-up and comprehensive, wouldn't it?

I’ve been watching this show as part of the fun of the Halloween season. I can’t believe I forgot how good it is. ^_^;;

What's the current situation with the dubs? Is buying the blu-rays a bad idea currently?

I've seen people take issue with this statement about NGE on Genre Turning Point.

They contend that said concept had been already done by the Gundam franchise several times, starting with Amuro Ray in Mobile Suit Gundam (aired from 1979). What do you think? Personally, from my experience, "piloting really sucks for Amuro" isn't what most people think of when they describe MGS, unlike with NGE. In other words, the deconstruction of the trope seems to have been overshadowed quickly in MGS, while NGE made it front and center to the point that it became inseparable from its identity.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 15th 2023 at 2:58:12 PM