I'll assume that, since you're using the internet, you'll know what Evangelion is already, so there's no point in me writing about it and I should just get with the times and jump on the "Square are idiots/demigods (delete as applicable) for making Final Fantasy X2, which will be the best/worst (delete as applicable) RPG/piece of shit (delete as applicable) ever". And you're probably right, but it didn't stop me reviewing Bad Dudes or making Megaman jokes. Come back in eighteen months to see my opinions on the X-Box, in which I will possibly describe the controller as large.

Evangelion was created using the time-honoured tradition of "Making it up as you go along", with the end result that the first half the series is "Fight of the week" with occasional cuts to people saying mysterious things, while the second half is The X-Files with hackneyed religious symbols instead of hackneyed conspiracy theories (and no T-1000). Making it up had one distinct advantage: Regardless of how many plot holes, deus ex machinas and unresolved sub-plots, at least it wasn't predictable.

The plot drew a lot of people in, but what really made the series was its constant - and I mean constant - use of religios symbolism. This had the same effect on the show's fans that long pauses and complicated camera shots have on movie audiences: They thought it was way deep.

Never mind that it really wasn't; people wanted to believe, desperately, that there was a show about giant robots for smart people, since God forbid people should enjoy giant robots for their sheer coolness factor. The fact is, removing all the symbolism from the show wouldn't have impacted on the series proper, just a bunch of fanboys' conceptions of it. Does the alien creature really need to be called 'Adam'? No, since it's not actually Adam, it's just an alien that blew up and made the world tilt off its axis, then turned into an embryo and got crucified, but that really wasn't it, it was another... you get the point (or lack of). Nor do the giant biomechanical creatures need to be called 'Angels', and the Tree of Life is only really necessary in the final scenes of the series.

This was pretty much lost on the 'creative' minds behind the greater portion of Anime / Video Games released after about 1997, who decided to make relgious symbolism the ninjitsu of the new milennium and cram as much as possible into whatever project they were currently working on, quite possibly at the last minute ("See that final boss over there? Give him wings, call him 'Adam Kadmon' and make sure you always refer to him in -stupid quote dahes-").


I like this picture because, if you squint, it looks like Shinji's been killed and dumped in a river.

Besides starting a new stupid, stupid revolution in stupidity, I still like Evangelion. Then I concentrate a little and realise that I'm basing this on my nostalgic memories of Evangelion, and that at least half the series' screen time was actually used as primal scream therapy by writer / director Hideaki Anno. The main pilot, Shinji Ikari, or Ikari Shinji if you're one of those annoying Otakus who knows 4 Japanese words and goes to great lengths to put them in every single fucking sentence you say, essentially (alright, totally) functions as a conduit for Anno's embaressing angst NO DAD YUOLL NEVER UNDERSTAND!!!11 in the same way Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back functioned as a conduit for Kevin Smith's pissed-offness because some people didn't like his other movies, only Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was roughly a tenth the length of Evangelion and had a monkey in it.

To give you an example of how Anno's whining gets in the way of almost every interesting scene, I present this example. Just read it over and over again for 20+ hours and you may as well have seen the entire series:

Mysterious Man: I will now explain our plan to end the world using an embyro and a giant crucified blob. You see, first we...

<cut to Shinji in his EVA>

Shinji: I won't save the world! I mustn't run away! I mustn't run away! I mustn't run away! Asuka, help me! Misato, help! Ahhh! My father hates me! Ahhh! I don't want to be an EVA pilot! I HATE ROBOTS AND FIGHTING!

Misato:Is this... EVA's true power?

You might begin to see paralells between Shinji and Rick Hunter from Robotech. Rick started off as a whiny bitch who didn't want to be a Veretech pilot, but quickly realised that, when the fate of the human race rests on your shoulders, you should put your emotional baggage to the side and do something useful. Shinji doesn't. Just when he's had some huge argument about not wanting to be an EVA pilot IT'S TOO MUCH I HATE YOU DAD NOBODY LISTENS TO ME and you think that just maybe he might put other people first or accept responsibility, he curls up in the foetal position, whines, and goes back to exactly how he was at the start of the episode. On one level, this demonstrates Shinji's stubborness and vulnerability as a person (or some analogy about a hedgehog). On another level, it makes me want to throttle him and demand a new series based entirely on Kaworu.

On a less embittered (though that's not saying much) note, there are three characters I really liked. The first is Pen Pen. Pen Pen is a penguin who lives in Shinji's surrogate mother / love interest / drunken slut's fridge and says 'Wark' a few times. The whole idea of having a Penguin living in the fridge appeals to me. Yeah. There isn't much else to say about Pen Pen, since he's not a self-centered, annoying, whining loser like the rest of the cast. Obese fanboys who consider cosplaying as an EVA character should probably go as Pen Pen, since every other character is, well, not obese.


Anime Moments in History is about the only webcomic that doesn't suck beside Pokey the Penguin

That strapping young fatty above is dressed as Kaworu, decent character #2. Kaworu shows up for one episode, demonstrates his amazing supernatural control over the EVAs, can fly, and refers to the other characters as "Lilim" while the higher-ups ponder where the last angel could possibly be. For fuck's sake, this is the equivalent of when one of the characters from Rescue Rangers is replaced with a duplicate who's a totally different colour and has a different voice but nobody notices except the audience. That some members of the audience probably didn't notice speaks volumes about the harmful effects of Otaku radiation.

The final decent character is Gendo Ikari, or Ikari Gendo, or Abraham Lincoln. Gendo is cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet, and by totally sweet, I mean he hates Shinji. Being the commander of a top secret UN organisation formed to protect the world from the Angels, as well as an agent for the Illuminati SEELE, he's actually on top of things for a change and doesn't spend every second of his screen time complaining that his life is falling apart, even though he's probably gone through more than Shinji & The NO! Gang. No, instead he takes matters into his own hands by plotting to destroy the world, or perhaps save the world, or ressurect his dead wife, or have a heap of little clone Lolitas running around in test tubes (Making Shit Up strikes again). In between this, he sits in a big chair and says cryptic things like "Excellent, the instrumentality of man is reaching its fruition" or "Retrieve the lance from Terminal Dogma" and generally being a nasty version of Captain Gloval, sans pipe. He also has an alien embryo embedded into his hand. This probably has some deep religious significance, but why bother looking it up? He has an alien in his hand, and that's what matters.


"Shoes with zippers. Hmmm"


Evangelion wasn't exactly given a big budget - after all, "I want to make a show about giant robots, the nature of God, and how I hate my father" wouldn't have been the kind of hot proposition it is today. Hell, just saying "I want to rip off Evangelion" is pretty much a guarentee of success now, which just shows how times change. Anyway, the end result of this is that the show ran out of money toward the end, so there was no room for a giant fight scene and a bad acid trip. Nope, instead we got... Shinji in a chair! Yup, that's it. The last episode is Shinji, in a chair, doing some soul searching. I don't mind people soul searching, as long as I don't have to pay to see it. And, assuming I do pay, I'd hope that at least they'd find something which matters beyond their personal universe. Shinji discovers that he can be himself. Yup. He shouldn't let other people define who he is. You go girl! Fucking hell, he could have just watched Mr. T's "Be Somebody, or be Somebody's Fool!" in episode 1, learned this valuable life lesson, and got on with the global conspiracy to unite mankind into a giant floating naked 14 year old girl. If you're wondering how I know what happens in the end even though THIS IS NOT A TRUE ENDING, it's because they went back and made an Evangelion movie or two, which I haven't seen but am told about quite frequently.

The robots are pretty cool, though.


Every fanboy's wet dream. Oh, sorry, they don't have cat ears.

But Evangelion never really ended. No, it became a part of our collective subconcious, with the following results:

1. Innumerable Yaoi fanfics involving Shinji and Kawuro.

2. Other EVA Hentai, occasionally involving Pen Pen's beak in places it shouldn't be. However, without this, the page background wouldn't be turning you on right now.

3. People who think that by sticking a bunch of heavy-handed, trite religious symbols in their shitty RPGs, they somehow become deep and meaningful. They are wrong.

4. People who think that by sticking a bunch of heavy-handed, trite religious symbols in their shitty animes, they somehow become deep and meaningful. They are also wrong.

5. Xenogears.

6. Morbidly obese fanboys lusting after Rei, their perfect woman, as she is both Asian and totally subserviant (TOADPOLE NO BAKA! >_<;).

7. People who, for the larger part of 1999 - 2000, emailed me CONSTANTLY asking me to explain what was going on. I didn't know, so I just made shit up, and it was just as plausible, perhaps even moreso.

I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it. See you on the flip side, dudemeisters - not!

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