Neon Genesis Evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion:  S

So, Evangelion was for me what Harry Potter was for a lot of kids who are slightly younger than me.  It was formative.  I saw it when I was 14, in 1998, and it was one of the first anime series I ever saw.  I was at a point in my life where I was searching for meaning, for motivation, for purpose, and I found it through the suffering and growth of another 14-year old, the boy named Shinji Ikari.

I could give a summary of Eva, or reasons to watch it, but everything I could say on those topics has already been said elsewhere on the internet.  It's too popular, too embedded in the anime-viewers' collective consciousness, even the ones who have never seen it, because of the effect it had on anime as a medium: Evangelion is almost certainly the single most influential series of all time.

For me, the thing I want to talk about is how difficult it seems to be for viewers to allow themselves to be affected by the emotional content of the story.  Eva is a series where practically all of the characters are varying degrees of unlikeable: Shinji is a passive, self-denying doormat, Rei is incapable of coherent self-expression, Asuka is an egocentric showboat, Misato is self-deceptive hypocrite, Ritsuko is a liar of outstanding proportions and Gendo is utterly lacking in compassion.  However, the power of the series comes from the viewer's ability to sympathize with these characters despite their flaws, indeed, to recognize these flaws as being human and reflected in themselves:  These people are like you, and who they are brings them pain, just like you.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard the series referred to or discussed in terms which ignore its emotional content, instead making jokes about the screen going red and Shinji screaming, dialogueless scenes, frame saving, incomprehensible philosophical pontification, or sexual subtext (or just plain text, in a few cases).  Joking about it allows the viewer to evade sympathy by treating the content as absurd or engaging in schadenfreude at the characters' expense, and that denies the emotional impact which is the core of the series' purpose.

Much like it's younger, more upbeat cousin Gurren Lagann, if Eva doesn't affect you emotionally, you're missing what the series is about.  Not everyone is interested in being affected in the violently cathartic way that Eva attempts to affect you, though, and this is probably the real reason that there are so many jokes at the series' expense: when you're watchin' anime with your friends, you don't want to have your emotional walls torn down and your mortality and purpose in life brought into question, you just want to watch the explosions and the boobs.

This is a reason why I have strongly recommended that the series be watched alone, because when viewed in a group, people are far more likely to try to appear knowledgeable, clever, or funny at the cost of sympathy and connection, without which, Eva becomes what it is most often described as: weirdly-used christian iconography peppered with sparse dialogue, technobabble and scenes of crying, screaming and giant robots fighting giant monsters (often at the same time).

But for me, and many others, that was not what Neon Genesis Evangelion was about, that was simply the context in which an empowering story about personal responsibility, identity, choice and love could occur.