I can't belive I am only finding out you are doing this retrospective now. PLEASE CREATE A SEPARATE TAB ON THE MAIN PAGE FOR JUST THESE ENTRIES.
Too late to make meaningful contributions to this episode convo, so I will probably post some iteration of this again, but my crazy conspiracy theory that I know is insane is that Gendo Ikari is Hayao Miyazaki. I'm only half joking.
Ack I'm sorry I meant to and then I forgot. Honestly if I ever have some extra money I think I need to hire somebody to figure out how to run this newsletter in a less slapdash way.
Actually your Miyazaki theory makes complete sense to me—I obviously love his art but he's always struck me as probably a very chilly person, particularly to his son. That Ghibli itself has never really been able to have a successor for him is partly not his fault (since at least one handpicked successor died) but also… isn't not his fault lol.
Yeah, I don't know if Miyazaki is a particularly bad father by comparison, or just par for the course for men in Japan of his generation, but I think its true that trying to win his approval would be painful and exhausting.
The thing that's always stood out to me about Shinji and Gendo's relationship is that Gendo is not just (or even primarily, in his own mind) Shinji's dad, he's Shinji's *boss*, and the boss of everyone around him. And he is both very demanding while at the same time, completely inscrutable and unwilling to disclose his larger objectives, we have to piece it together from a very brief handful of conversations between him and his right-hand man and even then its basically impossible to know you actually understand what he hopes to accomplish (to be clear, his motivations are actually pretty transparent, its the outcomes it leads to that are so galaxy-brained as to be completely nuts, a detail of the writing I appreciate).
Which brings me back to Miyazaki, in one of the documentary's I watched about him, several people who had worked with him commented that working with him is like having your soul slowly sucked out of your body, not because he's cruel or harsh, its just that he's incredibly demanding and perfectionistic. He's very clear that has his vision and while he respects his employees, he sees them as tools with which to accomplish that vision and treats them as such. And they do it, probably with the same mix of gratitude and exhaustion I would do it with myself if I could somehow be useful in helping my favorite genius fulfill his creative vision.
Returning to Hideaki Anno, we know that he was basically discovered by Hayao Miyazaki, and he got his start because Miyazaki recognized Anno's special affinity for animating giant bio-mechanical monstrosities in Nausica. But of course, those bio-mechanical monstrosities were not Anno's original idea, they were Miyazaki's.
So I see a lot of that dynamic in Evangelion, in the exhaustion of Shinji, who certainly understands why its important that he pilot the Eva, but who is denied basically any agency beyond "do this one thing you are very good at or everyone dies" and its all in service to this distant, demanding figure who you desperately want to impress, whose vision you are essential to, but who does not feel he owes you an explanation as to his plan.
this is so interesting—when the series resumes (this weekend I hope if the headache stays clear), would you mind if I linked to / quoted this? I think it's really insightful!
Also, if you want to get super-meta: here's a funny clip of Miyazaki directing Anno inside a VO studio. Miyazaki auditioned a lot of people for the role of Jiro in "The Wind Rises," and he hated all of them, then his right-hand man and long-time producer suggested Hideaki Anno (who, as far as I know, is not considered a prominent VO in Japan), and Miyazaki jumped on the chance because, as he told Anno to his face, everyone else tries to "emote" when they speak, but Anno doesn't do that.
So first, I had to start thinking of learning Japanese as both sort of supererogatory and good/pleasurable for its own sake. The green owl and others will try to get you to do it efficiently and scrupulously so that you make a lot of "progress". But you would not let some app try to gamify you into feeling bad about not watching the sunset every day. There's no "commitment" to make here.
Having accepted that I am only (and let's face it, will only ever be) an amateur, I found myself free to "study" however I liked. I've followed this guide for the past year: https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/ I'm slowly making progress, but I'm not forcing myself to do anything I don't want to do and I don't have a deadline.
Fun parts:
* accepting that I'll never need and have no desire to ever write Japanese by hand, and am lucky enough to live in a time where I don't need to learn to do it (it's easy to type!)
* there's an uncanny pleasure in learning stuff with a mnemonic and then noticing the mnemonic drop away over time. "i know that – but wait, how do I know that?" is an amazing feeling
* i am the sort of person who loves word games, but only the semantic ones (crosswords, connections) but not the orthographic ones (those that end in -le). Japanese is SUPER fun for this reason, from the kanji to the grammar, it's all lovely meaning and nuance in service of extremely elliptical statements.
* It feels as structured as Latin but with fewer exceptions
* Kanji is a lot of fun if you like the German making-long-words thing but wish it were a little more poetic
Will also say that it can be really fun to use online tools to "cheat". My most common experience in Japanese is clicking "translate tweet" under something and then using a bunch of online tools to try to work out why the translation doesn't make sense or seem right. You can try to break things down into parts in google translate, or easily look up words in a dictionary. If you see a kanji somewhere, there's even tools that let you try to hand-draw it in to look it up (https://kanji.sljfaq.org/), or pick radicals/components you recognize from a list until you identify it like a game of Guess Who? (https://www.kanshudo.com/searchq)
ok FUCK YES bc me and the wife started an nge dvd rewatch.... several months ago, after we saw end of eva in theaters, and then we got distracted by other stuff but now i'm READY. jesus i have a lot of thoughts. i love how anno gives us misato (bad mommy) and ritsuko (worse mommy) right off the bat. like he does not even play around with putting a good mommy in the picture so that we know bad mommy is bad. he just says Yes i will turn the snare up one more level bitch
Barbara! I’m the guy reading this who’s never watched Evangelion! Despite various friends pestering me for years that it’s extremely my shit. Got to the line break where you started talking about the episode specifically and fired up Netflix and watched it.
Also I’ve never seen any Gundam. So if you want the absolute anime moron’s perspective I’m your guy
honestly I haven't seen that much Gundam either, I just watched the first few episodes a while ago (and then rewatched the first one while writing this to make sure I remembered it right).
my two favorite pre-Eva robot things, other than Gunbuster, are Macross and Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still (not Giant Robo, the TV show, which is a different thing). To me Macross is the anime par excellence… completely ridiculous yet deeply moving.
Eva is like if you watched the “UFO” credits and were inspired to make a whole show that is as awesome and insane as those credits (something that Gerry and Sylvia Anderson neglected to do, bless them
I can't belive I am only finding out you are doing this retrospective now. PLEASE CREATE A SEPARATE TAB ON THE MAIN PAGE FOR JUST THESE ENTRIES.
Too late to make meaningful contributions to this episode convo, so I will probably post some iteration of this again, but my crazy conspiracy theory that I know is insane is that Gendo Ikari is Hayao Miyazaki. I'm only half joking.
OK here it is: https://notebook.substack.com/t/evangelion
Ack I'm sorry I meant to and then I forgot. Honestly if I ever have some extra money I think I need to hire somebody to figure out how to run this newsletter in a less slapdash way.
Actually your Miyazaki theory makes complete sense to me—I obviously love his art but he's always struck me as probably a very chilly person, particularly to his son. That Ghibli itself has never really been able to have a successor for him is partly not his fault (since at least one handpicked successor died) but also… isn't not his fault lol.
Yeah, I don't know if Miyazaki is a particularly bad father by comparison, or just par for the course for men in Japan of his generation, but I think its true that trying to win his approval would be painful and exhausting.
The thing that's always stood out to me about Shinji and Gendo's relationship is that Gendo is not just (or even primarily, in his own mind) Shinji's dad, he's Shinji's *boss*, and the boss of everyone around him. And he is both very demanding while at the same time, completely inscrutable and unwilling to disclose his larger objectives, we have to piece it together from a very brief handful of conversations between him and his right-hand man and even then its basically impossible to know you actually understand what he hopes to accomplish (to be clear, his motivations are actually pretty transparent, its the outcomes it leads to that are so galaxy-brained as to be completely nuts, a detail of the writing I appreciate).
Which brings me back to Miyazaki, in one of the documentary's I watched about him, several people who had worked with him commented that working with him is like having your soul slowly sucked out of your body, not because he's cruel or harsh, its just that he's incredibly demanding and perfectionistic. He's very clear that has his vision and while he respects his employees, he sees them as tools with which to accomplish that vision and treats them as such. And they do it, probably with the same mix of gratitude and exhaustion I would do it with myself if I could somehow be useful in helping my favorite genius fulfill his creative vision.
Returning to Hideaki Anno, we know that he was basically discovered by Hayao Miyazaki, and he got his start because Miyazaki recognized Anno's special affinity for animating giant bio-mechanical monstrosities in Nausica. But of course, those bio-mechanical monstrosities were not Anno's original idea, they were Miyazaki's.
So I see a lot of that dynamic in Evangelion, in the exhaustion of Shinji, who certainly understands why its important that he pilot the Eva, but who is denied basically any agency beyond "do this one thing you are very good at or everyone dies" and its all in service to this distant, demanding figure who you desperately want to impress, whose vision you are essential to, but who does not feel he owes you an explanation as to his plan.
this is so interesting—when the series resumes (this weekend I hope if the headache stays clear), would you mind if I linked to / quoted this? I think it's really insightful!
Sure thing.
Also, if you want to get super-meta: here's a funny clip of Miyazaki directing Anno inside a VO studio. Miyazaki auditioned a lot of people for the role of Jiro in "The Wind Rises," and he hated all of them, then his right-hand man and long-time producer suggested Hideaki Anno (who, as far as I know, is not considered a prominent VO in Japan), and Miyazaki jumped on the chance because, as he told Anno to his face, everyone else tries to "emote" when they speak, but Anno doesn't do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OrIJJILh4U
> Too much of a weeb to stop watching cartoons, too little of a weeb to commit to learning kanji
uh oh, don't get me started on how much fun learning kanji is
no go for it
So first, I had to start thinking of learning Japanese as both sort of supererogatory and good/pleasurable for its own sake. The green owl and others will try to get you to do it efficiently and scrupulously so that you make a lot of "progress". But you would not let some app try to gamify you into feeling bad about not watching the sunset every day. There's no "commitment" to make here.
Having accepted that I am only (and let's face it, will only ever be) an amateur, I found myself free to "study" however I liked. I've followed this guide for the past year: https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/ I'm slowly making progress, but I'm not forcing myself to do anything I don't want to do and I don't have a deadline.
Fun parts:
* accepting that I'll never need and have no desire to ever write Japanese by hand, and am lucky enough to live in a time where I don't need to learn to do it (it's easy to type!)
* there's an uncanny pleasure in learning stuff with a mnemonic and then noticing the mnemonic drop away over time. "i know that – but wait, how do I know that?" is an amazing feeling
* i am the sort of person who loves word games, but only the semantic ones (crosswords, connections) but not the orthographic ones (those that end in -le). Japanese is SUPER fun for this reason, from the kanji to the grammar, it's all lovely meaning and nuance in service of extremely elliptical statements.
* It feels as structured as Latin but with fewer exceptions
* Kanji is a lot of fun if you like the German making-long-words thing but wish it were a little more poetic
Anyway, try learning hiragana (https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/?utm_source=Tofugu&utm_medium=Article&utm_campaign=Learn%20Japanese), and if you like that, try learning some kanji (https://wanikani.com) and if you enjoy that, keep it up for a while. Or don't! It's fine!
Will also say that it can be really fun to use online tools to "cheat". My most common experience in Japanese is clicking "translate tweet" under something and then using a bunch of online tools to try to work out why the translation doesn't make sense or seem right. You can try to break things down into parts in google translate, or easily look up words in a dictionary. If you see a kanji somewhere, there's even tools that let you try to hand-draw it in to look it up (https://kanji.sljfaq.org/), or pick radicals/components you recognize from a list until you identify it like a game of Guess Who? (https://www.kanshudo.com/searchq)
having just watched the series for the first time this past year, i'm extremely excited for this article series
ok FUCK YES bc me and the wife started an nge dvd rewatch.... several months ago, after we saw end of eva in theaters, and then we got distracted by other stuff but now i'm READY. jesus i have a lot of thoughts. i love how anno gives us misato (bad mommy) and ritsuko (worse mommy) right off the bat. like he does not even play around with putting a good mommy in the picture so that we know bad mommy is bad. he just says Yes i will turn the snare up one more level bitch
i once described evangelion as "a show about hanging out with your mom" and i stand by this. however, well, the moms in question…
and boy i have made a lot of shitposts in my personal talking place that will be very tempting to obnoxiously crosspost into your comments
i'm so ready for this… i'm sad that i cannot put images in comments because i have so many stupid eva memes
my wife drew this image in 2010 (spoiler for anyone clicking it i guess)
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3y5nvvmCF1qbuuz3o1_500.png
LMAO
Barbara! I’m the guy reading this who’s never watched Evangelion! Despite various friends pestering me for years that it’s extremely my shit. Got to the line break where you started talking about the episode specifically and fired up Netflix and watched it.
Also I’ve never seen any Gundam. So if you want the absolute anime moron’s perspective I’m your guy
honestly I haven't seen that much Gundam either, I just watched the first few episodes a while ago (and then rewatched the first one while writing this to make sure I remembered it right).
my two favorite pre-Eva robot things, other than Gunbuster, are Macross and Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still (not Giant Robo, the TV show, which is a different thing). To me Macross is the anime par excellence… completely ridiculous yet deeply moving.
Eva is like if you watched the “UFO” credits and were inspired to make a whole show that is as awesome and insane as those credits (something that Gerry and Sylvia Anderson neglected to do, bless them
Shit is this gonna cause me to rewatch the whole thing? Hmmm…
i mean i'm not gonna stop you…