>>3962891 (OP)
Congratulations! *clap clap clap clap*
>>3962893
I love Evangelion and it's been a total pain in my ass.
Watched it because it was critically acclaimed and it aligns with a lot of my tastes in sci-fi and aesthetics.
Was severely closeted when I watched it and KawoShin definitely helped me get over that.
As an artist there was a point where I got fed up with Evangelion and how it was effecting me emotionally and psychically. Very sad show. KawoShin is tragic and melodramatic in a way that would feed into my own depression. Also noticed that there's a sort of trick to the way it's written: the kind of sleight-of-mind thing that will get schizos speculating endlessly as to what it means or talking about how deep it is, when it really kinda just boils down to being Anno's blogposts, informed by his own tastes, views, personal opinions, struggles, etc.
Evangelion forced me to re-evaluate other media. I now look at Star Wars as being about George Lucas' naivete leading up to, and subsequent depression/cope following, his divorce with his first wife. Kojima's body of work has quite a lot to do with his hangups about fatherhood, due to his losing his dad at 13.
There are quite a few great/classic works of sci-fi I can't look at now without seeing them as abstracted expressions of the personal hangups and psychology of their creators: and for better or worse that's thanks to Evangelion.
Might have even forced me to lose interest in sci-fi altogether, at least in the sense I used to enjoy it.
Re: Shinji - Evangelion depicts a universe where mankind isn't descended from adam and eve, as in christian mythology, but from lilith (presumably adam and lilith, although Eva makes some distinction between its version of adam and humankind - to the point where I'm not sure if the lilim are supposed to be descended from adam/lilith in eva) this makes Shinji a descendant of an ancient sumerian succubus.
This + cute design + tributes = cuteness egregore
