How Can You [Not] Like Evangelion

My feelings towards Evangelion are conflicted. If you know anything about anime, then chances are you know most of the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion, whether you’ve seen an episode or not. That is both a good and bad thing.

The back story behind the show is both at times inspiring and sad; a team working through uncertainty, on the cusp of having the entire project canned, and still managing to get a show off despite the exhaustion of its budget. Even more incredible is how it started out as a relative ratings flop but increased in popularity almost entirely by word of mouth.

It makes sense from a broad perspective. Even many of its ambitious internal themes in the aggregate work well. The engagement of the story in so far as character development is not bad, and the characters are fairly memorable beyond their anime, which is usually a great sign for a show when your characters survive beyond its end. Furthermore, it’s had a few remakes, all of which were received relatively well.

But that’s about where things fall apart for me. I can’t bring myself to like the show. It’s partly due to its presentation, partly due to its story. The fact that the show remains so popular despite what I perceive as critical flaws is personally annoying, even though in general I can’t bring myself to care.

All fiction stories have certain pieces that don’t work. They’re bits and pieces that ask the reader/viewer to assume facts not stated, to make mental leaps that shouldn’t be all that obvious, and generally are just plot holes. I have understood this of most, if not all, stories, and accept that. I will even defend it most of the time, because that’s what a story is. You will not find a perfect story. They don’t exist.

But Evangelion to me seems too imperfect. The story has places where there is deep, intricate focus on the way things are done, as they strive to address complex themes such as macro human understanding, alternate states of consciousness, and similar lofty theories and ideas. I can accept the gaps and pitfalls that exist there, because that goes with the territory. You can’t start a talk about string theory and hope it will come off perfectly, because no one has all the answers. I accept the fallacy and inconsistency that Evangelion has in these theories, because these are natural occurrences for the theory in question.

My gripe is that they seem to embrace the pursuit of their larger story goals at the expense of the basic logic that should not, and cannot be so easily dismissed. This goes beyond the basic big one that all giant robot shows suffer, which is that they tend to toss some kid who knows little to nothing about said giant robot, and asks that they become the world’s hero. No warning, no training, just get in and do something. I usually give some deference to any show that attempts some kind of pseudo-logic to explain this away. Even for Evangelion I accepted this at first brush because of the whole “world’s in danger” premise. Even the perennial giant robot series, Gundam, uses this basic premise most of the time, with some light retouches.

But for me Evangelion handles it badly, and what’s more makes it a central focus of the story.

Here’s the problem that this particular part of the premise holds; teenagers being thrown into giant robots to fight for the sake of the world is a stupid and really bad idea. To the extent by which you design a giant robot to fight, allowing a kid to utilize what is always in these stories a weapon of immense destructive capability, is a terrible idea I hardly expect anyone to fully expect would be replicated in real life. But we accept it because the story usually tends to amend or justify this. The world’s in danger, you need a pilot, this kid’s the only one around, so let’s give it a shot since we’re dead either way – not the best situation, but that’s part of the drama of the story. Usually the kid stumbles about, makes mistakes, manages to hold on or win, and later gets some real training.

What is a miss for Evangelion is that it is presented as Shinji, our hapless kid, is the only one that can really manage this. He wasn’t the only one around, just the only one, literally, who can pilot the machine. What’s more, this is apparently known for some time. Yet they wait to tell him that when they’re under attack and have no means of defending themselves.

So, you would think that, hey, we need this guy to pilot our robot, it’s an emergency, let’s work really hard to get him. No, they act as if they asked him in for an interview, found out he wasn’t all that interested, and got ready for the next best option who, oh yeah, is a girl who can barely sit up on the gurney she’s lying in. There was no urgency in calling him in, no urgency in taking him down to the hangar with the giant robot, and little thought of explaining this all to him in detail, including the part about him being their only real hope for survival.

Even if you manage to overlook this, and try to ignore this, you can’t because they keep making a deal out of the fact that this kid is reluctant as hell to pilot this robot. Yet every time they keep with this stupid act of reverse psychology of saying to him, “you can leave whenever you want, don’t worry that we’re all mostly doomed if you don’t pilot our robot for us”.

On top of that, the idea that their robot has a neurological link to the pilot is hardly explained in any real depth. The problem is that it sticks out very sorely as an incredibly complex, and stupid, idea for your giant robot. Now yes, I do understand that it’s to be part of the bigger story and conspiracy. But the fact that no one seems to question, “why allow our robot that is almost always getting gravely damaged, transmit that neurological response to the pilot”. If there was some logical reason for this, or even an attempt at explaining why it is necessary that would help. But one can imagine that even if you want to connect the pilot to the robot itself for better control, adding a system to directly transmit sensations of pain to the body would be a time consuming, and wholly unnecessary feature.

To top it all off, they treat his hesitation and fear of piloting the robot as his being a wishy-washy wuss. He woke up in a hospital bed after his robot was literally being roasted and he was experiencing the sensation of that blast shooting right at his chest, and the first thing he’s told is he’s gotta jump back in the robot and try to fire at the thing that nearly killed you, and by the way if you miss you’ll be likely killed. The only person there when he wakes is the girl who has the hardest time in the show of expressing emotion or relating to others, Rei, again guilt tripping him. And after that, he is met by his commander, and de facto guardian, Misato, who starts by guilt tripping him, then piles on the reminder that, we keep telling you to leave whenever you feel like it, but really the whole of humanity is counting on you.

That gets to my problem with the series as a whole, and why in general I dislike these preachy, tragic, stories. As the main character, Shinji is routinely given all the blame, grief, and trouble, and rarely awarded even basic remorse or kindness in return. He is roundly ridiculed, disliked, and treated as an invalid for doing some of the same things most of the other characters do, or otherwise doing so for very understandable reasons. He is suddenly tossed into a situation that should rightly render him a drooling pile on the floor, his brain scrambled, and he is treated as though he is just some useless idiot who can’t get his act together. It’s frustrating because I want to give the story a break because of the weight of the situation. I can understand the rationale that in a situation where you’re literally fighting for your life you don’t exactly have time to coddle people. But at the very least you would think they could muster a little more sympathy for the guy who you’re depending on to save all of humanity from destruction. I find it hard to believe they couldn’t spare the time to find him ONE psychiatrist to talk to him. And if you say that’s not great for a TV show, you may be right, but then you have to question why bother making it such a commanding factor of the show that he needs one.

Story wise, it’s not bad at all. Execution wise, details wise, it leaves a lot to be desired. I think that a lot of people tend to let these things pass because of how “big” the story is and the effort it took for it to get off the ground and keep going. And that is commendable. But it makes for a great backstory to a project, not a great project itself. I don’t place this as anywhere near the bottom of the list of great anime, but I do think its success is overbought. Good enough to watch perhaps, but count me as one who doesn’t quite get the infatuation many seem to have with the franchise.