The Otakusphere: So many controversies and Eva

Good morning, afternoon or evening where you are in the world. It’s Sunday in my corner of the Hinterlands, which means it’s time for another trip around The Otakusphere. So I’m wrapping up my vacation today, which is a bit depressing. It’ll be back to the grind tomorrow, but overall, it was nice to get […]

What I talk about when I talk about RahXephon

I can still remember the first time I watched the final moments of RahXephon. I remember the dingy college apartment, the hand-me-down couch, the giant CRT television and my brand new combination VCR and DVD player. I had just started renting anime from the comic store in the next town. I remember just being blown […]

Will I ever learn to love you, Eva?

Evangelion is a challenging show. I realize that sentence should elicit a chorus of “No duh, Dick Tracy. Where’d you park your squad car? Up your nose.” The people who would say that are right. I’m not passing down some wisdom from on high. This was a show made by a man who suffered from […]

The Odds and Ends of Evangelion

I reached the end of watching Evangelion, and I still need to work through my final thoughts on the show, but there are still a bunch of things I don’t think rise to the level of needing a post, but I do want to bring up. First, though, I want to thank everyone who read […]

Shinji perfect or the only real angel: The riddle of Kaoru

Kaoru may be the most difficult character to talk about authoritatively in Evangelion. Part of the problem is he has so much baggage around him. Shinji, by all appearances, is attracted to him on an emotional level, and, maybe, on a physical level. Instead of making things more clear, this homoeroticism makes understanding Kaoru harder. […]

Rei Ayanami’s journey to being a real girl — a tale of glasses and hospital rooms

I’ve been writing about Evangelion for about a month now. I’ve likely crossed the 10,000-word mark, and I haven’t really needed to revisit an earlier post. Until today that is. A little more than a month ago, I wrote a post examining how Shinji and Gendo treated Rei differently because they saw her differently. I […]

This is the dark heart of Evangelion

Sometimes there is a single moment in a show where it writes its main theme large for all to see. That moment comes when Shinji is isolated in the darkness with only himself (and his mother) in Episode 16. I know a lot of Eva’s titles are meaningful, but the title on this one has […]

Shinji Ikari is a giant cockroach. Where Evangelion and Franz Kafka meet.

Way back when in the old days, I wrote a series of analyses where I tried to group mecha pilots into two categories based on how they interact with the government. On the one hand, you have Arthurian heroes who are gifted a magic piloting robot powers and have a choice about what kind of […]

What would it mean if Evangelion was a new Gospel?

I officially made it past the halfway point. I reached episode 14, and I’m ready to talk about angels. For the one or two possible people reading this that somehow isn’t familiar with the debates surrounding Neon Genesis Evangelion, a lot of people make a lot of hay about the religious symbolism in the series. […]

Is Rei Ayanami a doll or a real girl?

I’ve been spending almost a week trying to find a way to explore the triangle that is Gendo, Shinji and Rei in episodes 5 and 6. This 46 minutes are really Shinji’s and the audience’s introduction to his fellow pilot and where we get some more insight into her hero worship of Gendo. The reason […]