10 Years of Neon Genesis Evangelion

smooth wombat writes "Mainichi Daily News has a lengthy, multi-part article on the history of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The article looks back at the 10 years since Evangelion appeared and how it changed the world of manga." From the article: "In a series of 26 episodes, Evangelion told the story of a 14-year-old boy called Shinji Ikari, who piloted a biomechanical combat robot called an Evangelion, which fought against mysterious extraterrestrial monsters known as Angels. But Shinji was also a regular junior high school pupil, and his school life featured strongly in the anime's plot too. As did psychotherapy and the Old Testament, which director Hideaki Anno attributed as influences while creating the series. Evangelion become a huge hit across Japan, attracting fans across generations, sparking a massive public debate over its controversial final episode -- which many criticized for leaving the work unfinished -- and sparking unprecedented merchandising sales that set the scene for the current manga market."

Comments

Thank you Evangelion

[Anonymous Coward]

For creating a generation of anime and video game creators who

• don't finish the story they started writing
• just throw in random religious and psychological references and think they have a "deep" story
• star whiny teenage wimps as the hero of the show

Moderations to Show: -1 (Overrated)

[Rydia]

I don't mean to troll, but I find zero appeal in the show. It falls in the category I call "psuedo-literature," a group which includes works that try so very hard to actually be quality literature, but ironically, trying so hard ruins the whole exercise. The writers for the show obviously through from the start that they were going to write a grand epic; they put enough twists and turns into the plot to get people convinced, even. If it's that complicated, it HAS to be good, right?

Wrong. The quality of a piece of literature isn't in its complexity, it's actually in the simple, easily apparent parts. The complexity adds dimensions to the simple story, but it does not add meaning itself, and often *confuses* meaning by adding extraneous material in the attempt to make "a really cool story."

So that leaves us with Evangelion, admired by hordes and spurned by people who are described by said hordes as "not getting it." Perhaps there's just not that much to get? Perhaps you're adding too much into a reading, because they left so much hanging you constructed around the work? That's not literature. Literature guides your faculties, it doesn't fool them and then expect them to expand things past the breaking point.

To wit, look at shakespeare. Generally, a couple rich people who get in trouble with someone else, and either laugh it off or die. The end. The complexity is internalized in the characters; the plot itself is simple. That is why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Evangelion is just another mecha anime.