Is it safe to say that Neon Genesis Evangelion is both one of the greatest anime ever made...

Is it safe to say that Neon Genesis Evangelion is both one of the greatest anime ever made, and one of the most overrated?

Yes. Of the trashpile that is anime it is clearly on top as the greatest.
Compared to other greats of any other entertainment medium however it is clearly still trash.

Overrated as a work of art.
Clearly the best piece of trash japan has pushed out so far but with anime the bar is low and stays low.

best work of art by the japs is Long Season

I don't think it's the greatest, so much as it has a long list of firsts for the medium, and deserves alot of respect for that, but it's still wildly overrated.

I think it's boring

It’s the best anime ever created given the budget and other limitations

It is one of the best. Certainly not the best but such a thing is impossible to nail down anyway.
It's influence on the medium is immeasurable though.

I bet you like game of thrones or think that ((((steven spielberg)))) makes art

>giant robots punching aliens
>it's boring

Correct. People overrate it by failing to understand its greatness. It's decent by today's standards but it made popular the "sad shonen" formula.

It's not the greatest, nor it was overrated, people really loved it at the time and it was what drove the medium forward so even if you dislike it you have to understand how important it was and how it made anime mainstream.

It's wholesome and great until Lively!Asuka appears, then it's unbearable shit and then it's great again when Asuka becomes Broken!Asuka.

It's important to note that it was the greatest *at the time* but that doesn't mean that other series have not since met it's level or even arguably surpassed it. The autistic nature of fanboys however wants to enshrine certain achievements forever and declare it the greatest thing ever for all time for eternity because it's the best. I would argue that just because something is the first to hit the ceiling of what a medium can produce doesn't mean it's the best forever, and it doesn't mean that other things can meet it there either.

I would like to add that it was not the only one responsible for revitalizing the declining anime industry, shows like Pokemon, Digimon and Dragon Ball Z all aired in the 90's during the decline.


You don't have to believe me, you can find more info on the 90's decline if you google about it.

It also popularized something more important. Original anime. Most anime before it was adaptations.

the medium hasnt gotten much better since then on average

there are higher highs but I don't think anything really comes close to being as poignant to as many people as eva

the direction tends to be formulaic in addition

It's safe to say you're a complete idiot.

Yes it's formulaic, but that's just nature of business, you find the pattern of what sells and make more of it. If people stop buying/watching it then they will stop making it/change the formula.

>typical episode before 19 or 20
>5 minutes of characters going to school or yelling at each other
>"oh wow, a giant alien monster" exposition
>better spend 10 minutes preparing the robot and creating drama between the characters
>gendo does his pose
>in 30 seconds the alien dies and characters make up
its a character drama, it is miles apart from other mech series. it also has pacing issues until EVA-03 shit starts

thats the thing. modern anime is MORE formulaic but you people still claim its better than eva

I am talking about being formulaic on the level that the finance determines the type of characters nd introduces them as early as possible for merchandising. e.g. mysterious girl is mysteriously linked to protag from episode one

arguing that this can even compare to a freely made script like eva is ridiculous. no one can even take that remotely seriously

One of the best? Hardly? Overrated? That's an understatement. Influential perhaps, but all it did is copy from better but less popular works.

You aren't wrong.

the pacing is really good though. you learn something about shinji in literally every single episode

virtually no single moment of screentime is used poorly (maybe penpen)

One of the greatest, but then the ending shits the bed. End kind of helped, but that still means you can't call a single installment a masterpiece.

I dig the ending.

>brainlet
it got finished just to piss people off more

you missed the point

I explained this already, you make what sells, keep it to the pattern that has the highest chance of being a sucess and making money, i understand that you dislike that reality, but you have to accept it.

I dislike it either so don't group me as "you people" please.

It was just Ultraman with cool mecha and monster designs. How did this mess become so popular? There's absolutely nothing special about it. Literally baby's first Ultraman/tokusatsu.

that means its not good

Is it fair to say that Eva was an unintentional success? I get the feeling that it started out as just a fun monster of the week show and that Ano had little-to-no intentions of it morphing into a hyperdramatic, nihilistic surrealistic nightmare that it did.

are you kidding?

from the very beginning there are hints about everything to come.

if anything he ramped it up further than he intended

so it was mad e to be greatly overrated?

I think its great but its kinda over rated in how people look to deep into this shit.

End of TV is the ultimate pleb filter

Evangelion is a masterpiece and I don't care what you faggots say. Every episode is sprinkled with moments of genius, with just the right amount of shitty moments also put in to unintentionally get meta on the message of "taking the bad with the good".

There's the deliberate symbolism as well, of course, but I've always liked that unintentional piece.

>There's the deliberate symbolism as well
no. the director even said he just put it in because it was cool. And he is right it was cool stop looking deeper into shit.

Why put the filter at the end though?

So that brainlets who say Eva is great besides the ending can be easily identified

I think the real achievement of the show is how incredibly intimate it gets with its characters, particularly Shinji. I've never actually cared about the plight of an anime character anywhere near as much as I cared about Shinji, at all. You can see how many imitiators it spawned who tried to focus on the cute, suffering protagonist thrust into terrible situations, but it never worked as well because the character wasn't as well written, or the direction never forced you to be as close, or the situation never had the same incestuous underbelly.

At the end of the day, I was just sad as fuck because I knew I couldn't stop his life from going to shit. Hell, it even made me cry, and anime pretty much never does that.

My little Sup Forums can't be THIS contrarian! It is not deep if it just re hashes a bunch of messeges we already knew and a bunch of shots.

I'm not any of those anons, but I think it kinda works insofar as it forces the viewer to be even closer with the characters and their trauma, even if End of Evangelion is the better work, for sure. I don't mind the style, but we needed something that actually showed us what was happening in the real world and not just what was going on inside heads.

>as it forces the viewer to be even closer with the characters and their trauma

But I already was up close and personal with their drama before. It felt normal and natural before but the last 2 episodes ruin that.

> but we needed something that actually showed us what was happening in the real world
Its been a while but I do not think it showed us anything of the real world. It was all in shinjis head until he was it turned SoL for a while. Then the budget problems showed up again, and it was a mess.

Nice reading comprehension

fpbp

You're just so far off. I wasn't even talking about the religious stuff, which is what he was referring to, and even then, what he means is that they used Judeo-Christian shit, which looks cool, instead of some generic symbol that would've got the same message across in a less cool way.

Look, I'll even spell it out for you. Remember this scene? If you know anything about the Wall of Jericho, you know that the most notable thing it ever did was fall. This, then, is a hint to Shinji that he can cross a few boundaries and it won't be an issue. He misses it because he's a 14 yo Jap who's never heard of Jericho, and was also staring at cleavage at the time. So we've got the symbolic "wall" that Asuka actually wants broken down, and the theme of miscommunications both coming in at once, in just a few seconds of screentime. That's damn good directing.

The fact that it's religious symbolism isn't important. It could just as easily be the Walls of Babylon or the Berlin Wall and the meaning would hold, but that's part of the aesthetic. And yes, it is cool.

Brainlets will say all symbolism is coincidental.

>>as it forces the viewer to be even closer with the characters and their trauma
>Explain how that is not true
>lol reading comprehension

I am sorry user but I re-read it again and I do not see where I mis spoke or mis read rather.

>I already was up close and personal with their drama before

That's good. It means you were engaging with the story. I think a large part of the last two episodes is to do with bashing idiots over the head with the psychological aspects of the show if they've managed to think so little that they haven't gotten it yet. Of course, this means some parts are redundant if you have been paying attention.

>I do not think it showed us anything of the real world

Inside of instrumentality WAS the real world. I get what you actually mean, but this is an important distinction - what we were seeing was indeed reality, not just the result of chemicals in Shinji's brain giving him a trippy dream.

To be fair user, when people talk about how deep EVA is, they usually refer to the spear and the other religious stuff like adam and eve etc.

I apologies for forgetting this one scene. What you brought up was interesting ill give you that but I don't know. I would not call very clever word play "symbolism". Is it clever directing for sure.

Asuka acting sanctimonious while whoring herself out does not a symbolic series make

>I think a large part of the last two episodes is to do with bashing idiots over the head with the psychological aspects of the show if they've managed to think so little that they haven't gotten it yet.

Maybe I am just a cynic but I think its just because they ran out of money and that is what ended up happening. I say let the idiots miss out on that aspect and even then re using the same shots and I think even diologe is fucking boring and meaningless and it makes for a bad last 2 eps quality/production wise and entertainment wise.

>inside of instrumentality WAS the real world.
unreleted to the 2eps being bad or good but I always thought instrumentality was more of a personalized world/heaven/nirvina, like the Musubi ending in Nocturne. Which is why Shinji and Asuka rejected it for their own reasons.

I accept that a lot of people get way too deep into the religious side of it, and that's really unfortunate because it gives the show a bad name of being "2deep4u" bullshit, but still maintain that symbolism is very important to Eva as a whole.

For something that's a more concrete example of a "symbol" in that sense, consider Gendo's glasses that crack when he saves Rei (as he literally cracks his façade of "cold bastard"). Rei treasures the glasses, and they represent the only time anyone ever put themselves in danger for her. When Shinji puts them on, she gets pissed and tries to force them of him, and the fact that she then doesn't get pissed when he gropes her proves that she thinks these glasses alone are more important than she is. Rei III, who recognizes how shitty Gendo is in reality, completely breaks the glasses early in EoE which foreshadows her betrayal of him to seize her independence later in the film. Thus, the glasses are used as a symbol in different ways at different points.

It does rehash a bunch of messages the viewer already knew, but the characters themselves didn't know them properly until then - and at that point they were confronted with those truths. Seeing that coming-to-terms is worth something, I think.

>Seeing that coming-to-terms is worth something, I think.
Maybe, but lets say it is worth something. The way they showed it was just awful so now it is't worth anything.

I like this thread and all but legacy captcha's no longer working is annoying.

I agree that the execution was a bit ham-handed. However, I appreciated that the original ending left me unable to classify it as a happy ending - there's a serious possibility that what Shinji experiences amounts to little more than hollow self-congratulation, insofar as he can still be called a unitary self, based on his memories of the other characters.

So we seem to end up with a character who attains some sort of happiness, but it feels like he in some sense cheated to get there, and might not fully deserve it. On one hand he seems to be facing up to his own flaws, but on the other hand it's more like Instrumentality steps in and salvages things for him.

I just finished my third watch of Eva. I think all the religious allusions are actually quite a reasonable interpretation of the type of crazy shit that a lot of those ancient Hebrew scriptures actually seem to describe. I don't think its out of place at all amongst all the existential guilt, consideration of humanity as a single organism, the idea of mankind reaching the endpoint of its natural evolution, etc..

Man, Evangelion's so rad. I love Evangelion.

>overated

ah yes the argument used by nu-male soyboy brainlets to underline their extremely pretentious taste.
bravo

>are actually quite a reasonable interpretation of the type of crazy shit that a lot of those ancient Hebrew scriptures actually seem to describe

Compared to other religions they are no were near as crazy user. NT is tame as heck.

"Overrated" is a buzzword.
Meaningless.
You think it doesn't deserve to be so popular. Maybe.
But that has nothing to do with quality.

I dunno, depends what you mean by "greatest".
I don't like it - shit puts me to sleep. Literally, I've used it to help when I had insomnia. It's definitely overrated as fuck.
But at the same time, it's one of those great "starter animes" like Project A-Ko, BGC, and Akira, and deserves a place in that pack, so.

>overrated
I think it is over merchandised not overrated on any popular anime site, Evangelion is nowhere near the top and gets average reviews. Still my favorite.

Look up oxymoron in the english dictionary.

It's 10/10 and anyone who states otherwise hates popular things.

This on any anime site, it gets average ratings and reviews. And it is never near the top. How is it overrated?

Which was the episode where it turned into a sitcom again?

xxx67