Posted 07/05/2026
Okay am I going crazy here or do people not like the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion for being what it is, or do they just like the show for what it "stands for?"
A group photograph of the worst people you could possibly meet
You go on any thread called "Why do people like Evangelion?" and you'll find the same answers. It saved the anime industry when the medium was in a slump. It's different than other anime. It's subversive. It's "more mature," whatever that means. If you really dig, you might find people that say that the characters are interesting or relatable.
But... do you see the same theme that I do in the above comments? Evangelion wasn't released just to save a medium, or just to be different from other anime, or just to be subversive. It was an anime written (allegedly) with a purpose and story in mind and almost none of the people sighing longingly about how good the show is ever comment on the show itself.
I bring this up because I'm very much an outsider looking in. While most people's experience seeing shows like Evangelion for the first time might have come through VHS tapes or Toonami, I've only heard the whisperings of the quality of Evangelion for a couple decades now. Unlike most of Evangelion's fans, I watched the original Mobile Suit Gundam series before I watched Evangelion. (Apparently the only other country to experience things this was might have been Italy, where MSG 1979 aired in 1980. Go figure.)
And uh... all of the stuff that people praise Evangelion for, shows like Mobile Suit Gundam did way before Evangelion. And much better, I'd add.
Once you get past all of the comments from Evangelion fans about how innovative Eva supposedly is, you hear the usual lines about what Evangelion did right compared to other shows. It has kids put in messed up situations and the way they react is so realistic compared to other mecha shows. It's got deep intrigue and a shady organization pulling the strings of things.
Those are all things that Mobile Suit Gundam 1979 did over a decade earlier!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now in the defense of people in the west commenting these things, there's like a 99% chance they haven't seen the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. If I've read correctly, the series ran in a limited fashion AFTER Evangelion came out in the USA. So, major first exposure bias to people liking Evangelion first. Any impressionable teens that have grown up to be Evangelion... evangelists, might have seen this dinky mecha show from 1979 airing AFTER Evangelion came out and been like "eh boring SKIP"
"Evangelion is so deep, the characters so real!" Yeah, I guess it's pretty darn possible that a whiny teenager could be thrust into a life or death situation and shirk all his responsibilities to help people in order to do jack squat and not change as a person. Oh, I see this and think, this story must be a tragedy then? Shinji ignores his call to action and eventually sees the consequences of his actions as everyone he knows is killed off by angels or something? Nope, Shinji does not grow as a person and yet everything is magically fixed by the end? No lessons learned, nothing changed.
Every great story has conflict. No matter the scope of the story - whether it's about what you're eating for lunch in Lucky Star or about saving the world in Fullmetal Alchemist - every great story has conflict. Something changes. Or a joke is made. Or SOMETHING INTERESTING happens to move people or events along. Not in Evangelion. Evangelion gets a pass because it's "deep" or "subversive." Lacking substance in a story is deep? Changing core parts of how stories themselves work to be subversive is cool? If I see any one of these Eva fans lashing out at something like Star Wars Episode VIII for ITS "subversiveness," I'm going to have a stroke. Subverting things can be interesting, but it has to have a purpose??? Ooohh your car has four tires, but I took one off and now you can't drive. Isn't that so subversive?
In all these threads about how great Evangelion is, I never see people praise the best parts of the show to me - the animation and the soundtrack. They're Evangelion's saving grace. And then once those dry up as its famous production hell let happen, Evangelion quickly loses its charm. People don't mention this when talking about its trouble production history, but I SWEAR the writing budget must have also dried up, because most of the major plot threads go unaddressed by the end of the show.
Oh but of course those plot threads get addressed in the movies that followed, or so I'm told. Yeah I've seen trailers for those movies and I have negative amounts of desire to watch those after having finished the original Eva series. "Eva isn't like other anime! It's mature and blah blah" okay then please explain why any clips I see from people talking about the movies are all clips of blatant fan service. Not like other anime huh. Yeah sure buddy
Oh * 3, can we also pay more attention to the fact that Evangelion's own creator felt so much shame towards his original series that he's felt the need to make remake and expansion movies to clean up the mess of the original show? Are we just gonna ignore that then by his own admission the creator was not satisfied with Evangelion??? You know, like all great directors do. That's why there are four versions of every great movie, editing and adding things on every re-release. Oh wait, great shows and movies don't need to do that.
I guess all of this is to say, if you want a story about child soldiers forced to pilot giant robots, with elements of conspiracy and intrigue, with some kind of weird otherwordly BS that affects the main characters, and people die and get blown up, with a great soundtrack, and you want a story that actually goes somewhere and with characters that develop like people instead of self-insert OCs (as everyone is quick to pick up on regarding Evangelion's deeply disturbed creator), please please please go watch Mobile Suit Gundam 1979 instead. All these people hyping up Evangelion as the best anime series of all time I am 100000% calling first exposure bias against, that it's one of the first "serious" anime they saw and it stuck with them. Though in my opinion there are plenty of better shows and movies out there that do mecha and flawed characters much better than Eva try to do.
And before anyone levels the same claim of first exposure bias against me... the first mecha show I ever watched was Gurren Lagann, but I still rank MSG 79, Zeta Gundam and Gundam 08th MS Team above Gurren Lagann. I'll probably add the first Macross OVAs above Gurren Lagann too. All of these, great shows still. And man, when you look at all these choices next to Evangelion, 999 times out of 1000 I'm picking anything but Evangelion. And the 1 time I did pick Eva and watch it all the way through... I count that day accursed...
There's probably more nuance that could be added to my critiques of Eva, but people elsewhere on the internet have already done a much better job on that than I could.
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