Neon Genesis Evangelion
I watched the original Evangelion very long time ago, the below recounts the first rewatch I think.
The first episode is so good.
I love how they reduce the epicness to few key people and outside emergencies treat them like normal humans with relationships. Like how Shinji and Misato live together as roommates but in battle have very different roles and hierarchy. Or how Gendou is the cold boss who has a soft spot for Rei and how that makes Shinji feel. All this then ties naturally back into the emergency situations. The cast is so small and diverse, everybody plays multiple “roles” as it should be. I realize that describes about every (scifi) series out there, but I feel like there’s something done clearly better here.
Gendou and Shinji make for probably the only father and son conflict I have ever liked. And it’s so central to everything in the series because of Shinji’s psyche matters so much.
Finished the Evangelion main series, still have the End of Evangelion (EoE) to watch and maybe I’ll rewatch the Rebuild films too later on. It’s a great series but now that I’m becoming familiar with it, the bad things in it are more apparent. For example the tech jargon is idiotic and it’s a bit hard to suspend disbelief when the scifi goes from hard to really soft and back. Things like throwing the spear into orbit or the NERV scientists reconstructing Shinji’s body from his “self concept” were some of the most ridiculous things. I don’t particularly like the controversial ending either, the idea is cool and anime who dare to do that kind of thing are exceedingly rare, but the execution was not very good (lots of repeating “dialogue” with a slide show).
Watched now the EoE. Better than I remembered. The surreal stuff was better too in moderation, compared to the original ending. I think it was my third time watching the entire thing, and I feel like it’s the first time I understood most everything, with a little of help from wikipedia (of course I think a lot of Eva is confusing and ambigious on purpose).
An e-mail death threat sent to Hideaki Anno in response to the TV series ending, which reads, “Anno, I’ll kill you!”. This image was included in The End of Evangelion.
A hobbyist writer on /a/ explains his thinking, happening to use Evangelion as example:
In my view a proper story has a question that it’s trying to answer, something that the writer is trying to tell you, the reader or viewer or whatever. It doesn’t have to be phrased as a question and answer, but it should, in my opinion, be something you want to say. Take Evangelion, for instance. The “point” and I already know people will argue with me on this is that we need relationships to healthily function, and despite the pain we sometimes experience due to them, they’re worthwhile in the end.
Once you have something to say, you can form a setting around it. This is a very human, messy thing, and I don’t think there’s a set formula for it. Keep your eyes open while reading/daydreaming/watching stuff until you think “oh, that would be a neat setting.” I was reading about the female volunteer regiment in Stalingrad during WWII and how it might be fun as as a setting - girls and guns, what’s not to love? I write down points I want to make and settings separately since I don’t usually come up with both at the same time, and then pick and choose ones that seem to fit together.
After that, make sure you build your characters around the point. Your protagonist starts off with some flaw related to the point that then gets developed and resolved in a manner than also answers your original question. Do something similar for at least a few other characters (see: Rei/Asuka). In my opinion, conflict in your story should come from another character/the antagonist having a differing answer to the original question (arguably SEELE/Gendo if we’re continuing the eva analogy).
