>>123895 (OP)
It's not terrible, as Chinese cartoons go. It's more interesting as character study and psychological drama than anything else. The last several episodes of the series feel really phoned in, for which both series creator Anno Hideaki and Studio Gainax had long been infamous before production even began. The ending so enraged the hardcore otaku in .jp that some sent Anno enraged demands for a redone ending, in some instances including death threats. Anno responded with a theatrical film release called "End of Evangelion," in which scans of the death threat mail are shown onscreen. Also all the characters in whom the audience became emotionally invested are killed onscreen in graphically hideous ways. "It's incomprehensible, so it must truly be art," say some fans, thirty years later. Others sighed and wrote a gorillion fanfictions in an attempt to create a more satisfactory ending. And there have been fixups and redos and "rebuilds" and decade after decade of merch, merch, merch, merch, merch.
I kind of liked the series. I disliked EoE, but not to such an extent that I felt called upon to send death threats. I kind of like the characters, who include among them a waifu for every taste.
For anyone who still hasn't seen it and may be considering it, my recommendations, which are worth whatever you paid for them, are:
Remember it's not a shonen super robot adventure anime, though it does kind of look like one for the first few episodes if you squint. It's somewhere between a deconstruction and a blackly humorous parody of shonen super robot adventure anime, and it spends a long time exploring just how insane the premise of every one of those old shows was. "Let's bring in this teenage boy, who is an obvious audience surrogate written to be a self-insert, and have him summoned to Tokyo to meet with his estranged father, only to be stuffed into the cockpit of a giant stompy warbot and sent out to save the city with no training whatsoever, but somehow miraculously win against all odds, just out of sheer determination and pure heart..." It's been a cliche and a trope in Japanese entertainment media since the 1970s at least. NGE lifts the premise into the air, turns it upside down, and shows you all the weird bugs skittering around on its underside. It's supposed to leave you a little uncomfortable. It's supposed to leave you questioning.
I wholeheartedly endorse the subtitled version over the dubbed version. The emotional tone is completely different in ways that change everything.
I do not endorse End of Evangelion, or any of the microwaved reheated leftovers and sequels and "rebuilds." EoE was made out of spite. Anno despises his own fans and he didn't hold back. The subsequent stuff is one soulless cash grab after another and I personally don't think it's worth your time. For that matter somewhere around episode 20 of the original series, Anno lost his way. He ran out of money, cocaine, and ideas, all simultaneously. That last fourth of the series is a mess and the last two episodes are a dumpster fire. You may very well fall in love with one or more of the characters and seeing them used this way at the end may be painful. Do not send hate mail to Anno, he already gets enough of it.
The "deep lore" isn't that deep. People are still boggled by it because Anno created a unique fictional technical vocabulary for the series that is still extremely distinctive and instantly recognizable. It's also gibberish. Instead of the usual science gibberish you usually see in popular sci-fi entertainment, Anno mashed up terms from Freudian psychology, medieval European hermetic magic, and Qabbalistic occultism. For a Japanese audience this was mind-blowingly exotic stuff. It's all still inconsistent gibberish that falls apart at the gentlest examination, so don't go into this thinking it's that deep, because it's not.
And finally, it's just a TV show. It's not a religion, it's not a philosophy for living. Every character you see is profoundly flawed and not one of them is an example of how anyone should live. Enjoy it for what it is. Maybe, once you get to know the characters, seek out some fanfiction, if you like that kind of thing.
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