Ask Lemmy

OG series and the story retold both let me in a state of wtf. Its damn good - even though I do Like the first telling/ Timeline in the OG more.

Theres a Lot open in the end that is unclear and makes you think. Its hard to follow fully through and its definetely nothing to rush in a bingewatch.

All I remember is the intro song.

I saw it much later on. Originally dropped out after Eva 01 straightup graphically eats the one Angel; that was too much even for me. Later on I picked it up and finished it.

In retrospect, it's not my favorite. I was introduced to Gundam before Evangelion, and that ticked all the right boxes for what I enjoy in a Mecha show (less symbolism and weirdness, more grittiness and politics). But I still admire Evangelion for the qualities it has: Its characterization, its message(s), and for doing its unique thing - to say nothing of the raw value of the animation.

Rebuild was decent. It went from a mild retread of Evangelion, to once again completely bonkers off the rails, to somehow wrapping around again to picking up similar positive themes Evangelion had.

High school. Had a crush on Asuka, but I've always been partial to German girls.

The plot however was confusing as fuck.

Also I found myself steepling my fingers all the time while resting my elbows on my desk.

Seen it. It's garbage

Aesthetics? 10/10

The actual show? The most boring watch of my life.

I was always vaguely aware of it growing up, but I was never much of an anime watcher. Loved the theme song though, even out of the show's context.

I didn't sit down and watch it until 2021, when I was in my mid-20s. Loved every minute of it. The only other anime I'd watched before that was Initial D, a few episodes of Speed Racer, and an old Gundam OVA, but I forget which one. Kaguya-Sama was coming out around then too, but I think I got around to that a bit later.

Didn't get around to End of Evangelion for another couple of years, when my local movie theater held a special screening. Now that was a fantastic experience... aside from watching the scene in the hospital room, projected on a 50-foot screen.

LCL vs FCL? I'm OOTL

It felt like they were trying to pack so much symbolism in that it all got too convoluted, and I rarely understood what exactly was going on. I could tell that they were trying to say something profound, but it felt like an artist trying to make a realistic painting with fingerpaint - the medium just didn't suit the message. But maybe it was just over my head.

I've been watching it with friends, and have seen about the first half of it now!

I'm pretty surprised by how little messed up stuff has happened so far compared to what I've heard about it, but I'm bracing for that second half! In general, I'm liking it a lot and I see why it's been so influential in anime since it came out

Which one? The first one I watched it when first aired and I watched the rebuild. The stuff in between I know I watched something, I'm not sure what.

Saw it in it's original run. Blew my mind and I basically became the Evangelion guy for a cuple of years. I don't think any other media influenced me more that than.

Nowadays I can't stand it. Have some nostalgia for it, but it's like please stop.

I saw the series but never any of the movies, saw it in high school and it was pretty good for an intro to giant robots fighting monsters. Not my first anime I think that was 8 man after or Dragonball z.

I bought it on VHS when it was first sold in France. I still love it, except for the ending.

Loved it. Didnt like the last episode.

Of course I've seen it. I was a teenager and it was the deepest thing I had ever seen. I don't like the new ones.

I watched it for the first time in the last year as someone who is largely anime naive. The mystery/mystical aspect of the narrative was the most intriguing part of the experience for me. I tend to enjoy genre-bending so the idea of using a battle mech anime as the vehicle to tell a character driven story appealed to me. However, I found many of the characters pretty difficult to accept.

Overall it was enjoyable but it's not as special to me as I feel it is to others. I'm sure it's because I am approaching it 30 years later and without an appreciation for the genre, but I don't regret it. I'll make the perhaps inappropriate comparison to Doki Doki Literature Club for someone who's not familiar with the dating sim games.

I thought it was an interesting concept with interesting characters. It took too long to delve into the mysteries of what was happening though, and the angels became a monster of the week. I understand some of this was to give time to develop the characters as they worked together, but they didn't focus enough on this either. And then I can only assume the writers were rug lulled and shoved 5 seasons worth of lore into the final few episodes, while simultaneously not explaining much of anything. I can gather a lot from implication, but it fell flat on its face, and End of Evangelion movie did very little to clear it up. I think it was aiming for something like Ghost In The Shell where it just "is", but I can tell it is desperately trying to say SOMETHING. Hell if I know what that is though. And the ending is so frantic, I think it's supposed to be a grand conclusion. Very scatterbrained in the execution. Some things like the nature of the angels and mechs are barely addressed or badly explained. And if I'm confused, I know Shinji's dumb ass was, yet the crux of the show is him making far reaching decisions. But what is the message if he doesn't even know what he's talking about in many ways?

Vibes are great though.

I watched it around the time that it was current, and had seen quite a bit of it's contemporary anime by that point. Lots of iconic scenes and moments, until the ending goes completely bananas. The end was / is beyond my comprehension, with way too much symbolism (I assume) for me to follow.

I saw it in the very early 2000s in my 20s and it was also the first mecha anime I watched. Most of the references to other anime went over my head, and it was half boring and half exciting, and halfway through the last or maybe second to last episode we started smoking weed because it was so weird anyway we thought it would help. Definitely had a good laugh when we found out the minimalism was due to running out of money.

Definitely enjoyed it, and after watching additional anime it was even better on a rewatch. Rebirth and Death or whatever the extra things in were great as well. Asuka facing off against the white drones or whatever is one of my favorite action scenes of all time.

Haven't watched the newer ones.

I got my hands on a physical copy a few months ago and I'm part way through a first watch. From my notes I made it to about an hour and half into the 2nd disc (of a 5 disc release where the last disc was the movie) back in February before putting it down. Haven't gotten back to it yet -- though I will eventually.

I was somewhat familiar with some of the characters from memes already (e.g. Shinji, Rei, Asuka) but the penguin was a surprise.

I saw it after watching and loving FLCL, in the early-mid 2000s.

I love it, and it's now among my favorite media "franchise". I didn't love the final rebuild movie, but it's hard to imagine anything ever topping End of Evangelion.

I've watched a bunch of other anime before and after.

I saw it tbe first time when I was a kid and spent the weekend at a friend's house after he moved to the Bay Area. They had access to an anime channel over there. We stayed up all night just watching whatever they played. Saw some Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, Neon Genesis, Dragonball, Kero Frog and a couple others.

I can't remember exactly when I first watched it. Within a year or two of the pandemic though. I was solidly an adult.

It was not my first anime, but I still would not call myself an experienced anime watcher or anything. I watched it because I really liked Kill La Kill, looked up the history of studios Trigger and Gainax, and saw that this was one of their core franchises. And I saw Evangelion's cultural impact on Japan being compared to Star Wars in America, so I figured I shohkd watch it.

I think its great. It starts off with relatively high-budget episodes, showing off smooth animation, cool and unique-looking mechs and great sound design (I watched the Netflix English dub, which had a bigger budget than the original). The kaiju they fight are pretty unqiue looking too. I'm also a sucker for other cultures appropriating western culture, so I love all random christian imagery they toss in unattached to any of its original meaning, just to appear "foreign" to their Japanese audience. It hits a lot of the mech anime tropes, complete with an animal mascot side character for comic relief. The 14 year old girls are a bit too sexualized for me, but I kind of get they were trying to sell this to 14 year old boys so... Eh. And even though its 14 year olds, they don't spend a whole lot of time lingering on school life which is nice.

After the first few episodes it slowly shifts to the point where calling it a mech anime is an inside joke. The pacing is incredible and refreshing, and I think has aged even better when compared against most modern media that is edited extremely quickly to hold people's attention. Beyond that... Well I could make a wall of spoiler text but I just recommend watching it yourself. I will say that this is a rare case where the sexualization of young girls is an actual artistic choice with meaning to it beyond just creepy horniness. Although I still think that's mixed with an element of marketing that is a bit gross... Its complicated.

I also feel like I need to say I don't take it too seriously. The psychological aspects are largely based on Freudian theories that were debunked decades or centuries before. I also often see Shinji used to represent introverted people, and I disagree. There's a common trope of characters like him, who I would categorize as either extroverts who are bad at being extroverts or introverts written by extroverts trying to imagine what introversion is like. For reasons, I think Shinji is the latter.

Since then I've watched it a handful of times again. I showed it to my wife and it became her favorite anime, and she even got a tattoo based on it. We have watched the rebuilds a couple times, and they're... Okay. I don't think they stand up on their own, but they are more accessible for people who don't have the attention span to watch the original.

I watched it for the first time when I was about 20 years old, back in 2019, I think. I loved it, because it was new and exotic. It used a lot more ambience and atmosphere for storytelling than I has seen any other anime do. Not to talk about the classic drawing style, which in itself is gold. What sucked was when it tried to be edgy and preachy. I'm sure the manga doesn't suffer the same shortcomings since it's not limited by runtime restrictions. Which is to say, there is nothing wrong with the story either. 😃

It was neither my first nor the only anime I watched.

It was the first anime series I had seen, IIRC. Maybe not the first anime anything. I saw it on VHS tapes back when it was new-ish in the US. A friend in college rented it in parts over several weekends spanning a couple months. We binged it until around 4:00am each night he could get tapes and I slept or almost slept through a few boring bits and pieces of it that are contextually important. I was all about the Eva lore and battles and liked that the Evas weren't just robots.

I might be remembering this wrong, but the store only had the original episode English dubs, so we had to find some random on craigslist with Death and Rebirth (or was it End of Evangelion?) episodes copied on a VHS tape he just had and then borrow that, or maybe we bought the bootleg copy for like $10. Then somewhere read a text file on some geocities page about the differences to get caught up and make sure we had the right episiodes. This was before torrenting more than MP3 via Npaster was a thing, and I think I had first seen a movie on DVD a few months before this, so this was sort of our only shot.

The first ending made me so mad I told my friend I wasn't going to chip in for the rental that time because the cellos and drawing episode was such BS as an ending. I understand why the director kept trying to redo the ending after that, it was such a confusing let-down.

Recently watched it again on Netflix, and forgot how much weird art-but-also-borderline-loli scenes there are. I was actually surprised how much I recalled and didn't sleep through. Amazing stuff, and I certainly identified more with the 3 adults playing the Id/Ego/Superego this time around than I did the kids.

I watched it in the early 00's. A friend at school torrented it and burned the episodes to cd for me. It wasn't my first anime, but it was among the first I saw that wasn't on Toonami. It was very different from the typical shounen stuff I was used to seeing and showed me that the medium could be dark.

I first saw the Rammstein - Engel music video. Watched that a whole bunch of times before someone found the anime and was able to watch the series. I remember it being really good, but got really really weird and didn't understand the ending at all.

Never seen it, so all the memes of it in animemes make no sense to me, but it's still funny to look at.

Watched it as it aired, def not my first anime, loved it, still do.