The Shrine

Recently I decided to catch up on Evangelion since I know there's like all these new movies or whatever, and it's painful to even read the synopsis. It's like they might as well 'any semblance to characters in the original NGE is completely coincidental' like how many manga/anime put as a disclaimer to avoid lawsuits when they reference events in real life. It's a lot like the manga where it's a story about a guy who happens to named Shinji that looks like some guy named Shinji in NGE but that's about it. I'm not someone who thinks original NGE was that amazing even way back, but even if none of the symbolism in NGE ever made sense, the struggle is real and maybe it's not clear why 2 kids with serious mental issues got into this mess, that doesn't make their struggle any less impactful. Usually people will say things like 'you got to get the meaning to enjoy it' but that's not the point with NGE. There really isn't anything really deep and you don't have to get anything because it's probably not even there, but it doesn't interfere with the fact that it tells a decent narrative even if you don't believe in any of the big themes it was going for.

Now I think NGE was pretty excessive with characters flaws and I think I wouldn't mind if Asuka and Shinji aren't someone who should be recovering in a mental facility as opposed to Eva pilots, so I wouldn't have minded if they tone down their personality to somewhat less extreme. But you can't just end up with someone that looks like a bad fanfiction while making some meta commentary to the series itself. It seems to me a lot of people think if you make something that insults the guys who watch it or maybe the story itself that makes you ultra meta and it's automatically good. If all I want is some wish fulfillment I think random guys on Youtube making like fan version of stuff do just fine without the insult. Maybe it makes even less sense if everyone lives happily ever after in a dysfunctional world like Evangelion but you can do that without insulting the fans. It's almost like the director is saying "I'm making this suck on purpose to make a point about (whatever)", and it's like no if something sucks it's got no point about anything because people don't have to watch it.

I've been watching a channel on Youtube by a guy that goes by Critical Drinker and although some if it is cynical 'back my days...' deal, he does make a good point that we watch movie or anime for something that's fun and positive, not to be reminded that life sucks or that the director is trying to make a point about global warming. That's not to say you can't talk societal problems in a multimedia work but if you got nothing really great to say then don't expect people to actually enjoy it. Miyazaki has a lot of films that are of the form 'trees good, people bad' and just because he makes good Anime doesn't make these points somehow deeper than any other similar thing. Now at least in his case the Anime stands on its own and doesn't rely on you agree with his brand of environmentalism to be enjoyable, but a lot of work feels like they're airing some personal grievance which only gets in the way of making the product good and if you don't like it you must be against whatever point they're going for. It's as if the work is designed to entertain the guy who wrote it, as opposed to the audience. It's almost like a self-insertion fanfic where you go and beat up all the superheroes because you're just that awesome. And sure, it's technically within the director's right to do that but don't act so shocked when people hate your work.

I guess this is kind of like how people are always making a big deal about how sports stars like LeBron James has to say about social equality or politics or whatever. The thing is there's really nothing LeBron James has in terms of credential that'd make his view point any more useful than the generic expert you can find on the Internet. What he should do is used his brand name to make you aware that there are certain issues that are serious and people should rally around doing it, but I think very few people are interested in hearing how life is still tough for LeBron James just because some guys spray painted his home.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched the remake, but.

1. I felt the pacing was way better and the sense of time passing was more obvious.
2. Scenes were significantly better, more thought provoking. Often beautiful, even background details are thought provoking.
3. The effects of the second impact were FAR more obvious in this world. They spent a lot more time exploring the world. Like the red and dead oceans.
4. The original felt very repetitive at times, the remake does away with most of that. The story feels much better structured and no longer episodic, yet achieving the very thing the original series did, and more.
5. Stylization of various scenes makes the films much more interesting to look at.
6. The technology used was better in the show, much more interesting.
7. While 1.11 is mostly familiar to the original, 2.22 adds a lot of new stuff that is completely new.
8. Lastly, the battle goals felt more consistent in the Rebuild series, while the original felt a little random at times.
Note. I forget which version is which, but there are two versions of part 3, and I liked one much more than the other.

I’ve heard of The Critical Drinker, years ago. Though, I can’t say I’m familiar. I tend to avoid social media fandoms and fanbases.

The current day Internet fandoms seem less like fandoms and more fan-cults. Cynical, pessimistic, and dogmatic—always hunting for heresy. They leave no room for adaptations and sequels to explore themes further or along different paths than the previous films, games, or source material. These fan cults have even taken to inventing conspiracy theories that studios are deliberately targeting the fans—insane, and yet manage to gather legions to their cause. They make assumptions that because someone’s take on a brand differs from the view of the youtube channel, that it’s an illegitimate interpretation and that action must be taken—sustained keyboard holy wars targeting studio executives, writers, producers, directors, artists, show-runners, cinematographers, as well as critics and more prolific fans who are positive of the show/film/game that they assume are dishonest and in on the conspiracy. No one in these fan cults can just dislike something anymore and move on with their lives, it’s a social media crusade!

I guess cynicism is what sells on the Internet. It’s nothing new, Kevin Smith made a joke about it in his film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back over 20 years ago:

Neon Genesis Evangelion was always a 'The Emperor has no clothes' thing so it is fair to say the original stuff is flawed and you can definitely point to stuff where it is better in the remake. However, what made NGE great was that whether it's a freak accident or some unexplainable genius, the original series was still pretty cool and had a compelling narrative despite nothing ever made sense. I'm thinking it's more just luck and it can't be duplicated, but they can't just give up on a cash cow so they tried and it just doesn't work. It's really not hard to have something that's better than the original NGE overall because the original NGE had some really obvious flaws, but NGE has a huge ceiling on where it did well and if you're going to just have something that is like a 7 out of 10 overall with no particularly awesome moments you don't need to do it, at least not using the NGE name. It can be a spinoff, like Prisma Ilya is generally pretty well received by the fans despite the fact she literally is just someone who share Fate's Ilya's face and body, because there is no possible way to have a workable story that makes sense in the original source material's context.

In Xenogears, Krelian said his sins are so great that only by becoming God he can forgive himself. That's kind of like how Eva in general and same with Fate's Ilya. There's no in-universe explanation of why there could ever be a happy ending because the setting demands justice for the crimes the characters committed. If you're going to just say these crimes never happened then it's literally just a different story with characters that share the same face. And that's okay if you're willing to say that, but the remakes obviously still wanted to pretend it's the original one and it just isn't right. Nobody in NGE deserves a happy ending. The vast majority of characters are terribly flawed human beings, and for the few shining profiles of courage the other point of Eva is that life is definitely very unfair and Earth was pretty much doomed from the start dictated by its setting since NGE basically says the fate of the Earth depends on a guy who should be seeing a psychiatrist instead of fighting aliens and it's utterly unsurprising when this guy breaks down and gets everyone killed because he's never the guy you should've counted on to save humanity.

Of course there are indeed several 'characters that share NGE character's body' spinoffs and none of them made anything meaningful so I guess they can't take the financial risk, but it's really sad when you basically have to live off your old legacy assets. The new Star Wars movies gets criticized and rightfully so. Maybe these movies in a vacuum are kind of okay, but obviously they want to get the maximum mileage of the old cast because they're afraid if you rely on just a few newbies it wouldn't make a lot of money, and it's just distasteful that the director is trying to sell his new stuff but still shamelessly relying on the old stuff to keep the cash flowing in.

The original NGE is something I can get really worked up over how it is occasionally brilliant and yet falls so far from what it's trying to accomplish, due to lack of budget (most of the technical stuff you mention is because they went way cheap during development) and throwing out random obscure words that sound profound (Eva probably started the whole thing where you need a glossary to tell you what any of the stuff people talking about means). The newer NGE, beyond being shocked at how it was so shamelessly trying to milk more money from the original, is not something I'd think about very much because it's at best a pretty good Anime and there's probably 100 pretty good Animes that I've never seen out there. If you want a world where everyone lives happily ever after you can do like NGE the manga, or NGE Steel Girlfriend, or any number of random spinoffs that don't hide the fact that they're just totally different character with NGE character's body.

Finally, I really don't get this whole meta commentary on plot that somehow makes it good. For example people say the fact Shinji is a loser reflects on the fact that the director himself thinks of himself as a loser. It's like okay that's great but that still doesn't change the fact that Shinji is a loser that should not be counted on to make dinner let alone fate of the world. It said they choked the actress doing Asuka's voice in the End of Evangelion when recording her lines while she was getting choked, and all that says to me is that they should've arrested the entire staff for being insane. They also say the voice actress for Asuka went into some mental depression from doing voice for such a depressing character and again why do I even care about things like that? To me it just seems like a poor excuse because your work cannot stand on its own, both in the original and the remix, that you resort to arguing it's got some hidden message. I mean things don't even have to make sense to be cool. I was watching the fight against Zeruel and Rei, who basically is walking fan service at this point just ran up and rammed a nuclear bomb into the core to try to take it down with her. Does that make sense? Where is the character development that led her to do such a thing? But it's a really noble thing she did nonetheless and I give her props for that, because without that she's just walking fan service disguised as having religious implications.

That’s not what I found. Though, I don’t expect or think we should get the same thing out of it. Art is going to create unique experiences with different people. Films are art, so a variety of interpretations are possible. I think it’s fine to have different opinions of quality and different interpretations of what the story is about, and find such discussions interesting. The one thing I don’t like is the sort of group think fandom that’s done to satisfy the expectations of a fan group—I find it boring at best, sad at worst (when a bias based in pessimistic/cynicism blocks actual taste).

I've watched Evangelion three times. The first time, I was around the same age as the main characters, and I related to their emotional struggles as teenagers—that was basically what it was about for me. The latter two times (being the Netflix remaster and the Rebuild series) I found I understood the other characters a lot more than I did when I was a teenager and. While I did still think it was about emotional struggle, I found that the whole cast (not just the core teens) were interesting parts of the story. Also, the concept of traumatic experiences, and trying to overcome them or cope with them. I’m always willing to hear other interpretations, or knowledge, as it might enrich my experience.

So, on with the post. Let’s say that the whole reason for Evangelion was shameless greed to make money, that there are 100 animes that are better, and that the creator was a loser. Should that impact the enjoyment of the content? For me at least, none of these things were obvious to me in the content. I also haven’t thought about the story as a morality and judgment metaphor—although, if I watch it again, I’ll consider it more. I’ve played Xenogears a lot, and saw Krelian’s speech more a clarification of the underlying reason of his motivation.

Just to get some terms out of the way, at least the way I see them. Story is not the same as plot, but they are related.
The story is about the character experience and change, and the plot is the path. The characters follow the path and the story unfolds along it. Story and plot don’t just coincide, as usually the struggle with a character flaw is central to the story and can act as an obstacle (or create obstacles) in the plot. Story can also crease answers to other obstacles existing on the plot path, character strengths, or a unique coping mechanism that they use to deal with a flaw. Usually, characters are uniquely suitable for moving down the plot.

For me, the story of Evangelion is the struggle to accept and move past the traumas of their lives—these traumas come from their crazy experience in living through the post second impact world. Though, their trauma and struggles are relatable to most fans. Each character has their own version of this story that carries through some or all of the overall plot of Evangelion. I also don’t see the story as limited to the main teens, but the whole of the cast.

The plot in a nutshell is Nerve must stop the angels from acquiring Adam. If they fail, the third impact will occur. The Rebuild series shows the consequence way better than the original because it shows the dead empty world in contrast to the way it used to be after the second impact. The angels are agents of Lilith. Their goal is to wipe out the biological legacy of Eve and start a new regime.

The relationship between story and plot is that the characters' flaws create friction and conflict between the human characters. This creates more obstacles in defending Adam from the angels. It’s true! Shinji, Asuka, and Rei need mental help, but they're the only ones who can pilot the Evas.

The setting and the scenes that take place in it do a lot to convey the shifts in emotion and detail the what’s happening. And the world itself, the city, and the technology are all interesting (to me, at least). You could say I enjoy the world, and enjoy seeing the characters interact with it. But I find the Rebuild series does it best of the 3.5 (or so) versions I’ve seen.

On the Star Wars point. Most of the negative criticism of the recent Star Wars films comes from the Star Wars version of the culty “true fan” groups I wrote about in my first post. It’s just unhinged people engaging in snobbery. Snobbery has little to nothing to do with taste, it’s about trying to sound important. The poverty of the Star Wars “true fan” cynicism is easy to show. In the 80s and 90s, the hip thing in that segment of the Star Wars fan base was to love the expanded universe and hate the films, especially Return of the Jedi (Ewoks and such). When the prequel films came out, suddenly the old films became the brilliant, and the new films “raped” their childhood. Then when the sequels came out, the prequels were suddenly good, and the sequels were the new hated films.

But criticism of the Star Wars sequels has been extremely positive except The Rise of Skywalker, that was 50/50:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - 93%
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - 84%
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) - 91%
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) - 69%
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) 52%

From my experience, I found Rogue One and The Last Jedi to be a lot better than even the classic Star Wars films. I also liked Solo as well (though I forget most of it). In fact, Rogue One made me like Star Wars 77, which I earlier found not very watchable--although, I liked the aesthetic.

I'm not a fan of the cult of the original thing, but I do have problem when something can't seem to step out of the shadow of the original source and yet still expects to be recognized for being innovative. It's having your cake and eat it too. For example it's pretty clear if Han Solo around nobody really cares about any of the new guys so I understand why he had to go, but you're basically saying that your new guys are so uninteresting that any of the original big 3 completely overshadows their existence, and yet the Star Wars sequels clearly expects you to care about these guys. The rebuild of Evangelion is obviously telling a different story but it obviously draws on its legacy probably because it'd be very hard for it to stand on its own if it's just a generic mecha anime fighting aliens.

An even better example would be the Chinese drama Nirvana on Fire. Now, I thought that was a pretty dumb show, but it's definitely something noteworthy and was a huge hit to most. In Nirvana on Fire 2, it basically goes like '100 years after the events of Nirvana on Fire the great grandchildren of the original cast now are involved in things that awfully look exactly like what their ancestors went through'. Now in this case it was because the original cast wanted a zillion dollars to reprise their roles so instead they just grab some random guys that work for cheap instead while basically hashing out the same basic story as the original. I'm pretty sure it flopped hard since people are here to watch the cast, not some random dude who claims to be the cast's grand children that has exactly the same thing happen to him. As far as I know Nirvana on Fire 2 probably isn't even that bad, since I don't think the original was even that great, but why would you watch something that lives on the hype of the original source that contains literally nothing that made the original great?

I think for a while there was a thing about making sequels of everything and people discovered sequels are actually pretty hard to do because people expect it to be like the original but better, so instead remakes or reimagined seems to be the new way to go. But just because you call it something else doesn't really lower the bar any. People expect the remake to be better than what it was before too unless it's something that was strictly a 'we updated the CG/animation to modern standards', which is perfectly acceptable but that probably won't make you a lot of money either so I don't see it done very often. A while ago I bought a game that was called Songs of Conquest that was like a reimagined HOMM3, which might be almost as good as HOMM3, but I already have HOMM3 and that was 20 years ago. If it's not better or improved in a meaningful way why do I care about a reimagined game that's at best as good as something I had 20 years ago? Yes, it's a lot to ask for, but it's not like it's hard to figure that out that this is going to be quite demanding and it's never an excuse.

So I thought about this some more and I guess some people think of remakes with a relatively low bar, while I tend to think of remake as something that's equal to a sequel. It should improve on the original in some way because otherwise I already have the original, and also whatever issues that got a free pass of the original shouldn't get a free pass now because they have time to think about it. This of course doesn't count the ones that are just modernized graphics/animation/whatever but those are relatively rare and they're not expected to be controversial anyway.

My bar is mostly if I enjoy it or not. I don’t need it to be as good as the original, or to be the same as the original. To give a 25 year old example: Tenchi Muyo OVA vs Universe vs Tenchi in Tokyo. Three different creators adapting the same story with three wildly different outcomes. I like them all to differing extents, but I don’t think the existence of a better one (the OVA, IMO) means the other two aren’t worth watching as well.

When it comes to literal new versions, for me, there is JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Tolkien basically wrote this story four times, with Christopher Tolkien completing the fourth (but really it’s more like a fifth, since there are differences because of editing choices). The original version (the Book of Lost Tales) has Sauron as the King of Cats and is named Tevildo. The second version was largely poetic and recast Tevildo as Gorthu, King of Werewolves. The third version had him as Thu, King of Werewolves, Phantoms, and Vampires: Thu would return as Sur during the second age of Middle Earth as the new Dark Lord. Then Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in his last years of work early retirement, and Sur became Sauron, Thu/Gorthu became Gorthaur. Originally Gorthaur was an earlier name of Sauron, but Christopher Tolkien settled on Gorthaur being the Sindarin (Middle Earth Elvish) and Sauron being the Quenya (Aman/Valinor Elvish)—almost certainly something his father was considering.

And I agree that if a remake or adaptation isn’t to my liking, I still have the original. I find that it’s rarely the case—either that, or remakes/adaptations I don’t like tend to disappear from my memory. Usually, when I don’t enjoy a remake, it’s because it spoils my favourite parts of the original: the Chrono Trigger Remaster for DS added an ending explaining what happened to Schala which not only spoiled the mystery, but did it in a way that kind of spoiled the idea of Lavos being a planetary macro-virus driven by its biology. Also, it looks (to me) like they decimated the animations in the DS version, and the SNES animations were something special about the experience. The other was the Final Fantasy 1 remake, which fixed a lot of issues with the original, but also gutted the uniqueness of the game and replaced it with a standard magic system with spells and an MP pool, which removed one of my favourite parts of the experience. On the other hand, most people prefer the newer versions to the old ones—many found FF1 unplayable because of the lack of later QOL updates; like actually adding in how equipment effected stats—in the old FF1 game, you had to cross reference with a guide on the back of the map that came with the game. But, in the end, Square released FF1 on the Wii Virtual Console and NES Mini, and finding the equipment info on the Internet is not a big chore. At the same time, I think this is more a situation of very close versions of the same thing where I have a preference for one set of differences over the other.

Tenchi Muyo I think is a good example where it's pretty obvious they're just trying to milk some more money and it's at least not offensive. Tenchi in Tokyo isn't pretending it's going to finally reveal the secrets of the Light Hawk Wings or bring closure that the original OAV didn't resolve. In fact it's basically got nothing to do with the original other than having a bunch of characters that look roughly like their Tenchi OAV counterparts and that's okay. Also the Tenchi Muyo characters are pretty consistent. Sasami and the rest of the girls might be just side characters in Tenchi in Tokyo but it's they still act pretty similar to how they'd do when they're the main characters. The story may no longer revolve around them but they're also not just some random characters that happen to look like their TM counterparts.

Obviously attempt to flesh out/explain/improve existing stuff can backfire and that's unfortunate. Schala is a good example and I also didn't enjoy whatever they think they're doing with her in Chrono Cross but Schala isn't a selling point of Chrono Cross so at least it's not as offensive. It's a lot more offensive when it's done for $ and it fails to deliver.