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I haven't delved too deep into the weirdness of anime, but probably the most confused I ever felt watching an anime was the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I originally watched the series when I was in high school and couldn't really follow what was happening in the final couple episodes. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that there is probably some deeper meaning here that I am just too dumb to understand...
...and I still think that. I am sure if I really wanted to read explainer articles or watch more of the many Eva-adjacent things it would make more sense, but I am happy to just not fully understand it. I am content with appreciating it as an influential piece of art within the genre and move on.
It's not that deep. They got the rug pulled from under them when the studio slashed the budget. Instead of doing an ending they wanted, lots of action, with bad animation, they instead rebelled with a rewrite ending that used intentional vagueness and ambivalent philosophical storytelling that let them use their resources to focus on art design and keep the cool factor up. Tons of stills, but really pretty. That's why a lot of the last sequences are just artsy backgrounds with only voice overs, there are several seconds of just white paper, etc. This however proved widely popular and the writing was vague but interesting enough to fuel hundreds of hours of video analysis and thousands of words essays.
The other factor was the mythological treatment of biblical imagery, which was rather new and unique at the time.
I never really looked too deeply into the production side of Eva, but that makes sense now why the show seems to change completely at a certain point.
The narrative pivot just happened to fit well with their overall rebellion against established shounen tropes and archetypes. It's what makes it so enthralling. Something they have thankfully kept in the remakes. It's a shounen only superficially, it has all the flashy action bits and colorful high tech things, the blank MC, and the harem cast. But then you get to the characterization and dialogue and it's pure existentialism horror.
Isn't this a myth? I thought they didn't have budget issues they actually designed the ending to be that weird.
I've read it both ways with sources. Read also a third that they never had the whole budget to begin with and overextended due to clerical error. Alledgelly the latest remake has the style of ending they originally envisioned with lots of fight sequences and more experimental animation. It's part of the endless debate.
Maybe we will never know, that's almost fun. But there should be people alive that worked on it that could confirm right?! Idk, that kind of mystery makes the show even more fun!
Eva starts throwing out wild amounts of lore and background information out of nowhere and never really stops to explain any of it. I don't think most anyone fully grasped the show on their first watch through. In fact, iirc a lot of what was figured out was with the help of a Playstation game that came out that had large text entries of lore.
It could be thought of as deep. I remember it being meanigful to me. A visual representation of the ego dissipating and watching the main character with numerous neurosis honestly reflect on his life and character while communicating with his subconscious that's taken the form of the people in his life. Seemed like it was what the whole show was working towards.
I have a simple explanation that's more Doylist than Wattsonian:
Anno is kind a dick.
Evangelion is a long series of borderline rug pulls, culminating in possibly the most infamous rug-pull that's not just "it was a dream." There was never supposed to be a textual climax and payoff. It was always scripted as a suck-zone for you to care about the characters so you could appreciate the introspective what-ifs in the last few episodes. Like if Tolkien stopping halfway through Return Of The King to say "fantasy is bad, actually." And then spent six chapters litigating the dynamics of Frodo and Sam's relationship, because that's what all this Middle Earth bullshit was really about.
And then the movies and the rebuild are various forms of Anno targeting critics of all perspectives and finding genuinely creative ways to say "fuuuuck yoooou." Like, thematically? The "curse of Eva" is ingenious. But the whole exercise is a giant middle finger to anyone foolish enough to care about the story he's telling.
It's satire that doesn't work. It's too functional as a sincere example of the genre it's aimed at. If the man had been dragged from the studio, kicking and screaming, somewhere after episode nineteen and LCL splashing against a van on the road - if the last half-dozen episodes had been rewritten to play the story out, to its extremely final conclusion - it would still be revered among giant-robot anime. Its influence would be nearly identical. But all the philosophical payload that needs two left-turn episodes to "explain" would be known only to one pouting young director and a few co-writers. Vanishingly little of it is in the work, three-quarters of the way through the work. God help us, if the wrong hired gun took over, "get in the robot" might've been Shinji's major character arc.
Contrast how The Last Jedi leaks "anyone can be a hero" from every seam, despite the finished product being roughly hammered back toward the status quo. Half the parts people like and most of the parts people hate are beautifully attuned to that lost moral. Meanwhile Eva can't get people to go 'ohhh, escapism is bad!' even with two episodes beating them over the head, and a film sequel that spits on everyone who saw it, and a remake that loathes its own existence.