Tag Archives: Evangelion

Winter 2021 Season Preview

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Hello all, and oh my god, I can barely believe it. I nearly choked up just writing “Winter 2021” for this article title, as I was faced with the enormity of realizing 2020 might one day be over. It’s not even that far off, now! After a year that has simultaneously felt momentary and endless (as Isaac Brock says, “the years go fast but the days go so slow”), it’s at last time to look forward to next year. And though 2021 isn’t exactly promising a reprieve in terms of our global pandemic or political disenfranchisement, it is offering a bunch of cartoons to at least distract us from the end of the world.

Per usual, I won’t be breaking all of the season’s coming attractions here – you can check out a full list over at anichart, along with synopses and trailers and whatnot. Instead, I’ll just be covering the shows that actually grabbed my attention, be it via a strong staff list, impressive trailer, or noteworthy source material. I think that about covers the preamble, so let’s get into it, and see what’s in store in the winter season!

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Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episode 4

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A great part of it is the rain, or rather, the felt sensation of perpetual rain. It pours down at all times, holding us up in bus stations or entryways or lonely stairwells, forcing us to relive old failures again and again. It’s cold and damp, and it makes us feel cold and damp in turn, unclean, ashamed of our clammy skin. It steals color from our surroundings, painting everything in a somber gray, draining the vitality of the landscape just as it drains our passion for the things we love. Others seem not to notice the rain, but simply emulating their behavior doesn’t make it go away. Whether you ignore it or acknowledge it, the rain doesn’t care – in the malaise of depression, it will remain your only true companion.

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Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episode 2

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I’ve always loved Neon Genesis Evangelion’s inventive and gleefully melodramatic episode titles, and none more so than the iconic “Unfamiliar Ceiling/THE BEAST.” Like so many of Eva’s narrative devices, the concept of an unfamiliar ceiling has become an anime trope unto itself, but here in its original incarnation, that title card feels like the essence of Eva in miniature. The first half’s title embodies Evangelion’s careful capturing of specific and alienating lived moments; the second half is the roar of violence lurking just beneath those moments’ surface. Eva doesn’t do pre-OP cold opens – it introduces its new drama directly, and its punctuation for that drama comes in the form of thunderous title drops. So much of Evangelion’s dramatic strength is a result of its utter confidence in its own tone, and these striking white-on-black mini-poems contribute greatly to that sense of solemnity and impact.

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Character Design 101: Want and Need

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Management: Vague character-arc spoilers for a few shows here – FLCL, Eva, Tatami Galaxy, Cowboy Bebop, Hyouka. Hyouka’s the only one I get particularly specific on.

Gonna share something a little different today! Recently I’ve been thinking about characters, which is probably because I am always thinking about characters. While a lot of my personal views on character writing have obviously come from reading and watching a whole lot of stories, a fair amount of my understanding has also come from writing characters. As a fiction writer, knowing how to write a fleshed-out human being is rarely optional – but even just as someone who just wants to poke more deeply at the things they consume, I think analyzing characters from a character-creation standpoint can be very enlightening. Characters are kind of like trees – though the individual branches of their actions may look strange and circuitous, generally everything winds its way back to the central trunk of their base nature and desires. And looking at characters trunk-first can do a whole lot of work to make sense of their wildly winding limbs.

So let’s get down to that trunk, to the absolute base nature of a character. There are a few ways to approach this, but personally I think the easiest way to consider character writing is to start with two key variables. The two often-conflicting desires that tend to define their choices, their conflicts, and their ultimate resolution: what they want and what they need.

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Top 30 Anime Series of All Time

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Yep, I’ve finally put together a top shows list. As I hopefully made clear in part one and part two of my critical biases post, this is obviously my list – it represents the things I think are most valuable in stories in the way I think they’ve best been articulated. It’s also just a list of shows I enjoy – there’s no hard criteria here, so I wouldn’t stress the numbers too much. Also, it’s a bit front-loaded – I only started watching anime seasonally about two years ago, so the last couple years are disproportionately represented. Incidentally, I’m not including movies here either – I think direct comparisons between shows and films are a bit of a stretch, but if they were included, this list would certainly be somewhat different. And finally, I’m absolutely (and thankfully) certain this list will change over time – there are still piles of widely beloved shows I’ve never seen, so I’m sure the current rankings will be filled out in the years to come. So with that all said, let’s get to the list – Bobduh’s Top 30 Anime of All Time.

-edit- I have now created a Top Shows Addendum for shows that have either fallen off or just barely missed this list. Please enjoy these additional almost-top shows!

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Once More With Fury: Rebuilding Evangelion

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Management: This one’s all about Eva and Anno’s relationship with his fans, so it’s a bit thornier than most. As such, the usual caveats apply – this isn’t an attack or an indictment of anyone, it’s just a personal take on some very strange fiction. Hope you enjoy![Coalgirls]_Evangelion_3.33.0_You_Can_(Not)_Redo_(1920x816_Blu-ray_FLAC)_[FC2091F9].mkv_snapshot_00.33.52_[2014.01.31_23.00.21]

“I started this production with the wish that once the production complete, the world, and the heroes would change.” – Hideaki Anno

In attempting to justify the existence of the Rebuild of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno offers an interesting defense. In the words of my handy statement-of-purpose booklet, “I do think, why revive a title that is over 10 years old now? I also feel that Eva is already old. But in these 12 years, there has been no newer anime than Eva.”

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Do Characters’ Ages Really Matter?

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Management: Just a mini-question today, since I found myself searching the archives for this and realized I’d never posted it in the first place. Organization!

Question:

Are shows starring adults meaningfully different from those starring teenagers? Are shows set in college meaningfully different from those set in middle or high school? I ask because I see this distinction made all the time, but generally it doesn’t seem meaningfully different outside of a setting/character-appearance sense.

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C3-bu: Like Evangelion, but with More Moe Airsoft

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C3-bu is a strange little show, marking the second entry in a little genre I like to call “moe club shows that aren’t pointless and terrible.” The first entry in this hopefully burgeoning genre was Girls und Panzer, and going into this show, my most optimistic assumption was that it would be a less good but at least watchable version of that.

C3-bu is not that. Not in the slightest. Girls und Panzer succeeds by working as a legitimate sports show, and C3-bu doesn’t have the slightest pretension of being a sports show. Sports shows survive by infusing their central game with drama, by laying out specific rules to create believable tension, by pulling off fun pure-plot turns in the winding of combat or sport or cards or whatever their chosen game is. And C3-bu never grounds the airsoft enough to make for actual tension – all the battles are essentially “wacky stuff happening,” and sides win because the show’s actual goals demand it.

What are the show’s actual goals?

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Thematic Integration and Philosophical Discussion

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Question:

As a fan of philosophy, I tend to enjoy shows that take the time to discuss their philosophical or ethical questions, such as Psycho-Pass or Evangelion. However, it seems clear that writers can go overboard with this, and that sometimes these discussions can seem inappropriate or even pretentious. Do you think there’s a specific pattern to when discussions like this are appropriate, and when they start to become pretentious?

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Is Anime an Inferior Medium?

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Question:

Many people seem extremely dismissive of otaku culture and anime in particular, claiming anime is an inferior cultural medium to books, movies, etc. How would you go about refuting this argument?

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