[Roger Rambo]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

I think what you pointed out is interesting, but it also kind of shows to me a sense of conformity in Anno's directing. The ideas of community and collectivism are very strong in Japan, and the original Evangelion was very interesting to me precisely because it went against those sorts of ideals. I mean why did Shinji reject instrumentality in the end? There was a respect for the individual, an understanding that we are different and that we can't fully understand one another...

Well to be fair, you're not exactly being particularly conformist by getting a group of people to come together to fight beings that are trying to exterminate you. One thing that got pointed out in Evangelion that set humans apart from Angels, was the ability for Humans to cooperate with each other in large numbers. So having visuals to remind people of that isn't unwarranted.

Though I don't think it's really fair to say that Shinji rejected instrumentality because he wanted to live as an insular individual. To me it seemed that the message was that being an individual that learns to live with other individuals, even if you can't completely understand them, is better than living as an isolated being, or trying to artificially destroy the boundaries between individuals and turn us all into the ultimate collectivist entity.

Individuality is an extremely admirable trait. But in the context of Evangelion, you got to distinguish between being able to learn to love yourself and make your own choices, and crippling isolation locking you into a shell and keeping you from interacting with people.

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Rebuild seems to run contrary to this in many ways. It seems entirely too Japanese and anti-NGE. Very typical, very cliche. Is Anno going to turn this all on its head in the end? I don't know.

To be fair, allot of what made the original NGE, *NGE* was the fact that Anno wasn't exactly a model of good emotional or mental health at the time. He'd come out of a rather extreme depression and allot of the most fucked up elements in Eva are bassically his therapy notes. When so much of Anno's depression is what formulated EVa, I can't exactly lambast Rebuild for not having that kind of stuff. It almost feels like I'm jumping in Anno's face and telling him to get depressed again so that his stuff feels more deep.

Maybe my problem when I watched Evangelion, was that I didn't really view it so much as philosophy, and more as the personal catharsis of a man who'd just pulled himself out of an EXTREMELY bad emotional crisis. So in a way the differences between Rebuild and NGE fascinate me more than any unhappiness about Rebuild not having the disturbing NGE elements.

Originally Posted by Reckoner

What you point how shows how Shinji is carrying a lot of weight and ti begs the audience to care about the fate of humanity. In the original, Shinji had very little care about these things and this was further stressed by the somewhat vacant atmosphere of the original that you noted. It's very different.

This is one of the fundemental things I was trying to allude to, in regards to Rebuild VS NGE, and Anno today VS anno over a decade ago.

I can almost imagine Anno when he first sat down to do Evangelion, sitting down and looking at the premise. *The world is in danger of imminent total annihlation*. And I can sorta see Anno's gut response being "I don't give a fuck about the world". Thus when he does the series, he filters into the protagonist and you see that Shinji's emotional's problems are so overwhelming that the prospect of so many people dying seems unimportant to him. This isn't to say that Shinji (and by extension Anno) are bad people. It's merely a commentary that people with extreme emotional problems probably aren't necessarily going to have healthy world views.

In Rebuild, Shinji's acknowledging larger humanity is more a commentary about Anno. About how a decade after NGE, when he looked at the premise of NGE. *The world is in danger of imminent total annihilation.* And I can sorta see his new gut response as "Geee, that's kind of a bad thing, isn't it?"

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Anyways thanks for pointing this out Roger Rambo.

You're very welcome.