Get in the goddamn robot Shinji

It’s weird how End of Eva is able to work equally well as either a complement to or a replacement for the original ending depending how you felt about it. Personally I loved the TV ending. I’ve never seen anything else bold enough to dive completely off the rails at the finish line, and yet it somehow felt appropriate.

[deleted]

Person in a philosophy subreddit "yeah here's a definitive statement on how art can't say anything past what the creator intended. Why? That's for me to know and you to find out."

Shakespeare would still be Shakespeare even if it was written by a trillion monkeys smashing keys on typewriters.

You reminded me of a shirt I saw once. It said:

"There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't."

It isn't about Christianity.

To be honest the movies barely make any sense at all if you have not watched the original series.

Thank you for changing your mind and agreeing with me that death of the author is a terrible idea.

Yeah, but there is meaning in stylization. Anno picked the religious iconography because it matched the vibe he was trying to create. He understood how including that imagery would affect the audience emotionally. Religion is the tool that some people use to answer the philosophical questions posed by the show, so including that imagery puts the audience in the right mindset.

Anno admitted he never read Kierkegaard despite naming an episode after Sickness Unto Death

A literal Nazi collaboration too? Nice

It's not about religion

There aren't any facts in it to engage with, though. It was all vapid assertions. A claim was asserted about why the Chinese invented global warming (a framing trick, meant to pass off an unsupported assumption as true a priori), but no evidence is given to support the conclusion about American manufacturing. That is also a framing trick, because there are a lot other plausible explanations for our industrial decline.

I don't need a new concept for "fact" to notice these things.

I think it’s because Evangelion really resonates with the depressed, or at least people who have been depressed at one point. I’m not an anime guy but I happened to stumble across it at a low point in my younger years and it is etched onto my soul in a way no other media ever will be.

Interesting, but I'm not going along with it.

The assumption that nobody considers epistemological factors and issues of framing when weighing facts is patently absurd. The author demonstrates this by forcefully arguing for their consideration himself.

This feels like an exercise in equivocation. The worry about facts causing religious zeal is ass backwards, because anybody who thinks of facts with epistemological factors and framing considerations in mind is de facto able to consider various points of view.

I would be a lot less hostile to this sophistry if it held the promise of a better approach to rigor, but it does not. All it does is is grant license to believe whatever the hell you want.

I am sorry, but I actually do feel a moral obligation not to believe things that are untrue, to the best of my ability. This entails using all my powers of deduction, induction and abduction to plumb out trust and framing surrounding those data by which I determine what is true. I need no new word for "fact" to keep these considerations in mind.

I think this is such a good point: re character's journey vs actual plot.

How often would you find the 'bad guy' 's motivation is alllow human unified so there will be no more loneliness?

Some comments here dismiss the complex desires and human conditions the characters portrait, because the use of mecha and christian symbols. Anno already made it clear those are just smokes and mirrors to get the story flowing.

I'm sorry, 2 + 2 = 4 is an objective fact.

>which mathematics are you referring to? Algebra? Calculus? Base10?

tell me you know nothing about mathematics without telling me you know nothing about mathematics

Yeah I sort of agree with you, anything more I can think of is really in the realms of how we look at comparing art to each other, and trying to quantify excellent, good or the like by how well they show the human experience or whatever other metrics there are. I'd agree there is nothing wrong with seeing the mouse on the moon and others interpreting something the pile of rocks didn't mean to be, otherwise there really wouldn't be beauty or the like. I just think a lot of the debate gets a little lost when people try to discuss their subjective opinions on good based on their subjective view of the rocks rather than a more objective view that is more accessible for others to understand and interact with. And then that's like getting into pyschology and how people react to shit on the internet or whatever lol, but I think mice are cute.

I've heard the animation and art for Evangelion is more of driving force on how Evangelion has been such a classic, and not so much on the philosophy, though admittedly I haven't watched Eva, and have only read critical reviews and the like. But especially for the anime scene and the time, the way they animated stuff was very well done and artsy for lack of better word, apparently borrowing a lot from traditional movie techniques and effects when its all animated, and not shot from a camera lens. And then all the imagery and stuff looks cool af too, even if it may or may not have some deeper meaning or not.

All my views on Eva are basically a summary of this really cool essay I read that dealt more in the art stuff from a good writer/reviewer. It's the first essay I found that wasn't a fan/casual review, and it helped clear up a lot of stuff about Evangelion that gets debated for me. https://alexsheremet.com/neon-genesis-evangelion-place-animation/

Plus it’s not woven in so much as they just make speeches scour their philosophies.

Thanks for this write up. There’s a handful of media that left me confused but with undefinable emotions and interest when I finished, and Eva was obviously one of them. So I always love reading different peoples’ interpretations. Even if there’s not some canon or definitive explanation for the show, the way people reacted to it is interesting and part of what made the ending so hard for me to pin down originally.

I think the fascinating thing about Eva is that it borrowed deeply meaningful symbology from a different culture, and did so in such a successful way that even those from a cultural background where those symbols have deeper meaning saw it their use still overwhelmingly resonated with them. That likely included in ways that the author could not have predicted or completely understood bc... Not his culture.

The reason this worked undoubtedly has to do with the author successfully reflecting an authentic human experience. That is the essence of good art, and that perhaps gets more into "what is art" rather than "what is philosophy".

Regardless, someone who watched the series and understood it in a way that imbued a different or deeper meaning from the symbols than the author meant did not experience the series "wrong" - no more than someone seeing a mouse in the face of the moon is wrong when someone else sees a face there.

https://youtu.be/IxEof-XHg68 How to pronounce Evangelion

Did you watch End of Evangelion after the initial series run? It works as an accompaniment to the final two episodes.