Watched Eva again and realized this time I was actually appreciating Gendo as the martyr-hero of the series. Like, he doesn’t have time or interest for Shinji’s crybaby shit but that is a correct evaluation of the situation - it’s not very interesting, and even successfully resolving it wouldn’t accomplish much, especially compared to what could be accomplished by GETTING IN THE FUCKING ROBOT, SHINJI.

I think this might mean I’m ready to have kids.

Eva 3.33 notes:

Hey new character design. Uh, hey new everything design. Hey butch Ritsuko. Is that flagship the fucking Nadesico?

Aw, they worked puffy underwater Unit 02 in!

Hahahahaha holy shit its Nadesico AND Ragnarok and at least 8 more references off this and most of them probably refer back to something I missed and man fuck steampunk I forgot how amazing Japanese airship design was

Finally, after 2 movies of useless, absurdly massed Cold War ordinance, we get useful post-nuke bioform guns, that’s some pretty classic anime themes right there.

“So that’s the power to kill God” - haha yussss, this is all getting pretty Utena

Yuss, yussssss, this is what I miss growing up with ‘90s Japanese pop culture - fuck all that 2000s indulgent moe/visual kei glam bullshit - rococo and biomechanical and dieselpunk design and elegant piano and German romantic esotericism and beautiful clear wistful summer days in the middle of absurdly huge ruins, yuss, this is what life was supposed to be and what I was supposed to die about

Wait does that SDAT player’s cord on the ground read “foe” in cursive?

Kaworu and Shinji DPing the Eva with their plugs OBVIOUSLY

Uhh… what?

No seriously, what? I see we’re now firmly into the “incomprehensible apocalypse” part of an Eva story cycle.

Oh god the preview looks like someone’s FINALLY going to dance like they want to win BRILLIANT

Thoughts on Eva 2.22

Haha wow that English is way too clear and even. Is that what I sound like when I speak Japanese? Also wow Kaji’s (&later Mari’s) seiyuu are obviously doing this phoenetically.

(Also wtf with how Mari specifies Japanese interface and then all the stuff comes up in English?)

They’re really big on tilt-wing VTOLs this series of movies. I guess the Osprey might be a bigger thing for Japan, still kinda being part of the USMC branch of the American imperium.

Hands again. Oooooohhhh, stigmata, I get it.

Shit, did Kaji just make a Wild Zero reference?

I guess this movie has all the lighthearted, slice-of-life, Pen-Pen, fanservice bits the first one lacked (is Mari the… fun parts of Asuka?) and

Wait. Okay, the 9th angel is the first time you didn’t know what’s going to happen and in retrospect they were kind of being light for a while so they could set you up for this sucker-punch

And holy shit, the 10th angel fight as a mashup of Mari doing Asuka’s EoE Mass Production fight, Rei2’s sacrifice, and the 3rd Impact female-form that’s interest…

Wait whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

FUCK.

(shit though they aren’t going to dance like they want to win, are they)

Got around to seeing the first of the new Evangelion movies. Saw it subbed, which was something - that was one property I always preferred dubbed. Maybe I was missing something, because there seemed more texture to the voice acting - Shinji came off less wimpy and more panicked, with less snivel and more shriek in his lines; Misato’s flightiness comes through more, creating a greater contrast in her scenes with Ritsuko, and with her “Commander” decisiveness during operations. Even Gendo seemed a little less impenetrable, with some of his steeliness passed on to Fuyutsuki instead.

Actually I wonder if that was even true in the original series; so much of this movie seemed to be the original highly polished in a way that brought the psychological stuff to the fore early on. (I mean how many episodes deep did the seiyuu even know the plot when recording episode 1? Hell, how many deep did Anno?)

Hands seem to be a more noticeable recurring theme in this one, I like how Shinji seeing Rei’s blood on his hand when they meet played as a callback to his “I’m so fucked up” scene in EoE. (For that matter, hospital beds, or just beds, come to the fore with the other stuff trimmed down.)

The story condensation was pretty good in that looking back I can’t even recall what it left out. Maybe some slice-of-life scenes at the school or Misato’s place?

Finally seemed to depart from the source material towards the end. That seems to be the tradition with Eva properties - they all start the same way and then find different ways to turn batshit crazy.

So remember how I said I dreamed a whole episode of Family Guy once? Well last night I dreamed a few episodes of a new (yet another) Eva reboot, this one as a 26-episode series.

In this version, there had been a bunch of Children, but before the first episode they were all doing a synchronization test when they started to synch together racing past 100%. The test was emergency shutdown because they were threatening to start an Impact wrong, and the kids were left unconscious in LCL-filled stasis tubes in NERV HQ.

Shinji was revived in Episode 1, I think Rei was already awake. By the 6th episode the 5 Children from the recent movies were all up and running.

It was fairly light and fun, there were some cool battles. One running thing had been that whenever the Eva units operated outside there would be a few spectators who would gather to watch them and cheer, like picnickers at a Civil War battle. I was thinking “heh, Eva fandom”.

Then in the 7th episode things got darker. It was mentioned that some of these fans had become a cult worshipping the Evas, and then suddenly Nerv HQ was invaded. By who - the cult, SEELE, ??? - I don’t know. But Misato was shot through the chin point-blank in a perfect reversal of that scene from EoE, and the invaders smashed all the stasis tubes and executed the Children inside.

Ritsuko organizes a counterattack and kills the attackers, and then the last shot is this wide hall of NERV HQ littered with corpses, blood mingling with LCL.

Then there was a black card with white Japanese text on it, subtitled in English. It was a message from Anno, saying that now was the point when fans who got into Eva from this series (he called them “tan fans”) should consider looking into the other versions.

It’s funny that of all the fucked up shit that happened in this dream, “tan fans” was the one thing that seemed odd.

(Update: Oh you know what? Maybe he didn’t mean the color but the stereotypical childish mispronunciation of “-chan”, because this series would be the “baby” of the Eva metaverse.)