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Maur's Profile

Thank you, you do me a great honor.

first well done on rahxephon your preview was awesome o agree with u completely,i've also watched nge and eureka 7 and i was just wandering when will i be able to watch the 3 one of the great mecha, and will it be worthy or not, it was a masterpiece a huge success it was a little like nge but the main purpose is totally the opposite shinji was rejecting his world and wishing to be alone when ayato was rejecting his world and wishing to change it for an other.well i saw from ur list who u are and i recommend for u if u like deep series to see "my first nightmare" ( i call it like that coz it was really a nightmare for me) i'm speaking about lain "serial experiment lain" see it and tell what u think

Great RahXephon review. While I don't completely agree with you on everything, it was well written nonetheless ^^

I have GOT to find the download for something that horrible!

Very good review of Outlaw Star.

Over 5,000 now! >;-P

Eva...well, the first thing to say is that one major thing that impresses me about eva is the way it can be a whole load of different things to different people and not really compromise. For teenagers it's a giant mech vs. monster of the week show, or a school relationship drama. For older sci-fi people, it's a serious, credible and epic sci-fi, while also being a serious examination of relationships. For critical watchers it's chock-full of religious, mythological, psychological and literature references. All at once. I know nothing else that even tries to work on so many levels at once, let alone succeeds; irrespective of the story, the sheer artistry behind the conception and realisation of the story is worthy of great respect. I realise that the series we see now is not the grand culmination of a stupendously complex plan, but is in fact something that was partly made up as gainax went along. The fact it is as coherent as it is desite all the problems only serves to make it all the more impressive to me.

Second, the story itself is great, in a way that is rather different from any other 'secret organisation saves the world' story I've seen - rather than a simple "goodies vs baddies, FIGHT!" setup (like for example Giant Robo) it takes in the actual ramifications of what happens, and is possessed of a brutal honesty that is lamentably rare. I love, for example, the fact that pretty much everyone hates and resents NERV, and that Tokyo-3 gradually empties of people the harder they work to save it, and the area around gradually becomes more and more cratered and barren.

The characters are also massively significant factors in why I feel Eva is a masterpiece; this is where the nuances are best explored. The use of Freudian psychology to create a basis for each of the characters leads directly to them all relating to each other in a fascinating manner. Possibly because of this and possibly just because they are well written, the characters are easy to take as real. Everyone hates Shinji, inside and outside the story, because they see a part of themselves in him.

I do sympathise with your point about the series' nuances. The fact is, there's so much going on that it would only harm matters if they started spelling things out; there's still only 26x21:30 minutes. Doing it this way also means that the things are there if you look for them and not if you don't - you can keep looking at Eva as a Mecha vs. Monsters show if you want to. For myself, I don't think psychotic, abstract or surreal are applicable words here - psychological, oblique and experimental are how I would characterise the qualities I envisage you describing. The psychological side of things was there all the time, it just got more pronounced as it went along; perhaps (and your opinion of Perfect Blue seems to support this) truly psychological drama is simply not to your taste. Pretentious is one charge I can't exactly fault you on, it is pretentious in the literal sense that it pretends to a great deal, but in my opinion it fulfils its pretentions very well.

The ending...I love the way it was done, to be honest, but that's coming from the perspective of someone who knew all along that there was an alternative ending. I can only imagine how annoying it would have been watching it as it came out. I look at the final two series episodes as what's going on inside Shinji's head, and End of Evangelion as what's going on outside Shinji's head. At least there are no problems with the basic production that we are actually given. The alternative, trying to animate some kind of full-blown climax on a shoestring and in much too short a time, would have been much worse. I note you've not watched Claymore, but the internet-wide rage over the shitty end to a superb series that Claymore
fans like myself felt would have been nothing.


Eva is not by any measure perfect. What Eva is, however, is something where it is incredibly easy to see the complexity and potential of the concept (even if it is at the same time very hard to understand it), and how close the thing came to being perfect in its execution of that concept.

Death Note, however...aside from the fact that it was a complete waste of an anime budget on something that should never have been anime, now that was exactly what I call pretentious. I really hate characters who are massively intelligent and yet fabulously stupid, and this had not one, not even two, but three of the buggers. At least the two worst ones died.

Code Geass, well, I watched one and a half episodes of it and had to give it up - not only did it have Clamp character designs but it was full of terrible mecha on lollerskates and I was already beginning to find the main character unbelievable. Intolerable, overall, although I am admittedly curious to know what everyone makes such a fuss about the series for.

I'm interested to see you like Paprika and Millenium Actress, but not Perfect Blue; all of those have a purposefully confused sense of what is real and what is not, a device/style of story I really love. What is it that Perfect Blue gets wrong that the other don't?

Controllers are better for racing games and fighting games, don't get me wrong. However, precise movement, while nice to have, is of massively less importance than precise aim in FPS. Ideally, someone will make a controller with some sort of flat 3-finger analogue pad where WASD are...

Thankyou. I also like yours for similar reasons. I can't understand people who treat reviewing as something objective - a review is what you think of something and why.

However, if that Fingersnaps McDoom bloke isn't called Mr Wonderful, what is he called? I'm convinced that's what my fansub said (what can I say, it's not out in the UK to my knowledge).

Confused by my praise for Evangelion? Why? I have yet to find anything that compares. I think it's one of the best pieces of television I have ever seen, I seriously think its multilayered narrative is worthy of mention in the same context as Shakespeare or Miller, nothing I have ever seen stands up to so much analysis without falling over, and on top of that it has peerless mecha fights. Sure, it has faults, but I think a lot of the things people criticise it for are not really valid in practical terms.

I understand loving Eva, I also understand hating it, what I don't understand is thinking it's worth a 6. I mean, your profile says you like a dark, epic, serious storyline and deep involvement with well-formed, consistent yet complex, flawed and dynamic characters - Eva does all these things very well indeed. You seem a critically minded sort of person, so I hope you realise that I don't think your opinion is wrong or invalid and I'm not looking for a fight, and am simply curious, but if you have an opportunity, please explain why it's not your sort of thing.