Tahmmeow said:WatchTillTandava said:
It's polarizing, but one of the most common and long-running statements I've always heard about this anime going back to the early 2000s is that it's something you either love or hate, but I haven't found that to be, strictly speaking, true. There must be some who fall into the "middling" camp. I only finished it recently and found there to be a lot to love and a lot to hate both.
Love the premise, the world-building, the Eva and Angels' designs, most of the music, and its legacy of influence on anime as a whole. Hate the way the story is told, most of the characters, its superficial deepness in many respects with the Judeo-Christian imagery amounting to nothing, and its failure to integrate its main plot with its examination of the characters' psyches taking center stage in the last portion, resulting in a beautiful mess.
I've always found it odd that people criticize the imagery, it's not nearly as pervasive as people make it out to be while other series that use imagery that ultimately means nothing are not similarly lambasted for doing literally the exact same thing. I'd also argue that, no, the imagery was used with purpose, if not the immediately obvious purpose: belief, faith, and hope are common themes throughout all of Evangelion and the main character's name can literally be heard as "believe" and it stands to reason that purpose of the imagery is to convey, if only slightly, that the show is about believing in yourself and others (if the rest of the show wasn't already clear about that). And before you say it, no the creators have never said anything about the imagery in that context. What they've said is "There is no actual Christian meaning to the show" which doesn't mean that the imagery itself has no purpose, but instead that it doesn't have any meaning in relation to Christianity.
Here's a funny image:
btw nobody who says Evangelion is deep is saying that because of the imagery, they say it because the characters: Shinji is afraid of pain and because of this he's afraid of human connections because they cause him pain, Rei feels she has no worth because she knows she's replaceable, Asuka is almost identical to Shinji but reacted to the same situation in a different way (while also doing it for the same reason), Misato is constantly looking to find why her father sacrificed himself to save her in spite of never seeming to care about her (which is why she falls in love with Kaji), and Gendo once again has a lot of the same problems as Shinji and thus rejects other people to avoid causing them pain (which is kind of the opposite of Shinji). That's just scratching the surface of what makes them who they are and the baseline of why they do what they do.