a friend of mine assisted me in discovering dazai’s a gemini (bc of course he is) so here’s this entrance exam blurb between him and my actual favorite blonde bungo man

kunikida: “so when’s your birthday?”

dazai *smuggly*: “june nineteenth.”

kunikida *trying his hardest to actually get to know dazai*: “of what year….?”

dazai *being mr. oh you want to get to know me lol good luck*: “every year”

kunikida *snapping his pencil in half* “alright mr smartass- get out!”

About the EvaGeeks wiki and why you shouldn't trust it, concerning mainly one user.

On the subject of EvaGeeks: Let’s talk about the manipulation of information on the wiki, and perpetuated “nastiness” on the forums that has persisted for several years now. THIS IS A MIRROR OF THIS GOOGLE DOCS FILE. (My twitter post.) You can share this post or the original document freely, use parts of it, etc. I want this document to simply serve as a warning to new Eva fans and those less familiar with EvaGeeks and their history - as well as an update for people who haven’t seen the current state of it.

NOTE: If you can’t read any of these images, these are Imgur albums containing all of the notable ones: https://imgur.com/a/z2mGvvX https://imgur.com/a/oAgufc3

The intent of this document is not to “take down” the wiki or forum, obviously. The intent is simply to inform people of the dangers of trusting this site with their Eva info. It might be the best we have but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. I would actually love to see a more community cultivated version of the site with less biased information, but I fear that will never happen. The anxieties of any one (or many) individual(s), which have prevented consistent change until now are well justified, and it is not within reason to blame the outsiders for never bothering to correct the myriad of issues with the wiki. Please extend kindness to other Eva fans and approach sites like EvaGeeks with the appropriate scrutiny, if you aren’t already. We’re divided enough as it is.

Before I begin, I must state: All of the information presented is publicly available, either through main pages, chat logs or history. And yes, the link to join the Discord server and verify the information given in this is publicly available too. I will not link it myself, as I want to avoid any possible harassment of the users I speak about here. Harassment is NEVER the answer in any kind of conflict. This behaviour I don’t believe can go unchecked, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of it should be any kind of conflict towards any user. I will be naming them here so you are aware, but I really do have to advise you, as a reminder, DO NOT HARASS OR ENGAGE WITH THEM. The rule of thumb is that these issues are more systematic than you might think, and blaming or taking it out on a singular person or even a whole group is never justified. Targeted harassment, even with reason, especially never helps to remedy an issue, because it forces the person to double down on their behaviour and beliefs. Causing unnecessary pain to a person is never okay, and the ‘offences’ committed here aren’t deserving of it in the first place. Please also consider the feelings of the people who use the server and EvaGeeks site; not everyone is your "enemy" or your "target" (and frankly, no-one should be) and despite the feelings echoed in this document, EG is not a monolith of a singular opinion or belief.

The purpose of this document is to inform people of the ways EvaGeeks fails objectivity and has existed to push narratives and exclude outsiders for far too long. With new people coming into the Eva fandom (and there of course being others who have been around for quite a while but just aren't aware) I feel like now is the best time I could write this.

As for what prompted this, an anonymous member of the Discord server contacted me regarding the behaviour of one particular user they were concerned about. Said user had expressed considerable bias in the past and was admitting to making large edits to pages on the wiki very recently, and the person who contacted me felt unequipped to bring the issue to light themselves.

A decent amount of this document will be dedicated to presenting said user's contributions - while I feel someone always had to address the EvaGeeks Problem at large, it doesn't help that this user has essentially incriminated himself here to expose the problem in its entirety. 

There is quite a bit of pretense I must discuss before I get into the subject of the wiki pages themselves. I suggest you read all of it; the start of the wiki section will be in heading text if you’d like to skip to it. I’m sure information on the biased editing of wiki pages is privy to anyone who has used the server or the site itself, but at the server’s current status of 60 entire members, I know not everyone has, or is aware of what the problem actually is. Please note that the person who contacted me has requested anonymity and I will be complying. I will not include screenshots of their conversation with me, and anything I quote from them will be paraphrased so nobody can go full Sherlock and analyse their typing patterns. It sounds silly and it’s probably just paranoia, but they shared my concern here. Any conflict we can prevent is for the best. EvaGeeks, of course, has a culture very much promoting the idea that it’s the “number 1 source for all things Eva”, and for English speaking fans it definitely is - you’d be surprised the amount of people who still, after all these years, think this site is consistently reputable. For the sake of context, I’m going to assume that you are not all that familiar with the site’s history or nature, so I’m going to provide a little bit of information about it for those without any first-hand experience. The forums in particular cultivate a very join-us-or-get-out type community, where those who dare to go against the grain get incentivised to leave the site; they’ll claim this isn’t the case if asked and obviously the site is NOT a hivemind but that doesn’t mean it’s not insular. I can vouch for myself and many others who refuse to go in more than a few threads for fear of discussion turning particularly nasty. Even the server member who came to me about this has stated they feel it “might not be a hivemind but it sure feels that way.” Silencing dissent, even when officially-backed, is part of their culture. You don’t have to personally harass everyone who has an opposing thought to you for it to not feel acceptable, you just need to have a history of mocking those who do. If you want some previous, notable cases of “discussion turning nasty”, here’s some off the top of my head: 1. The AWL Incident - In which ADV VA of Rei and director of EoE dub, Amanda Winn-Lee, joined the forums for discussion and was promptly harassed by a user. Most of these messages have been deleted but you can view what remains of her post history here.  2. Recently brought to my attention: upon beginning translation of the Episode 24 drafts, EG forum user LiLi was subjected to incentive to leave, mostly in the form of homophobic disgust in replies to her thread or others they were mentioned in. Any information that goes against the cultivated narrative, even when it is literally officially licensed content, is only ever considered with a degree of reluctance. The fact these drafts co-exist with other pages concerned with this episode is almost a miracle. You can find plenty of repeat instances of the above if you want to (more to do with homophobia and misogyny than outward hostility, but honestly it’s the same thing.) A look at basically any EvaGeeks thread concerning pairings or the female characters will unearth a variety of awful comments from many other users, not that that would be surprising to anyone who has spent more than two minutes in the fandom. Now, of course, that’s very relevant to the topic at hand even if it doesn’t seem to be. The EG wiki and forum have quite a bit of overlap and circular influence on each other as you’ll see later if you aren’t already aware of it. For a short summary before we jump into things and analyse our subject of the day, this essentially means that anyone with an opinion or information the majority doesn’t like will never get in a position good enough to edit the wiki and keep the edits there. This has resulted in many articles filled with conjecture and fan speculation that serve to shut down other viewpoints, whether it’s intentional or not.

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ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI

The issue surrounding homophobia and downplaying of references to LGB content in Eva, through proxy of fan-dictated content control and translation is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure you're all very well aware. It’s far from the only issue present in the fandom but it will be our subject of conversation today. Any ‘one instance’ of this persistent behaviour from Eva fans is never going to be enough to summarise how insurmountable it really is, though, so today I instead draw your attention to one user of the wiki who goes by the name of FelipeFritschF and his recent, frequent updates to pages concerning Nagisa Kaworu.

[TOPIC: FELIPEFRITSCHF]

I must reiterate here: although this document is mostly concerned with this user and will contain a number of receipts from various places, it is NOT supposed to function as a hit piece or inspire any kind of mob. Leave this guy the hell alone, just be aware that he’s the one making most of these changes and isn’t a particularly impartial party, to put things lightly.

Now, before we really get into things, it should be stated that the EvaGeeks wiki requires approval to get your edits there, as stated at the bottom of the homepage, here:

This means that anyone making consistent edits to the wiki has in fact been approved, and this isn’t the result of lack of maintenance.  

What you’ll find is that it is consistently Felipe making edits to the pages in question. Kaworu’s bio page, for example, is almost entirely edited by Felipe, which we can see from the “History” tab of the article.

This is barely half of his edits made in the last few days. Take a scroll through it yourself if you’re so inclined. This hilarious bit of waffle was added by Felipe a few days ago and since revised since by him, as shown here. 

(As an added bit of comedy, the man who decided to add in the Japanese in the first place apparently didn’t know the difference between 好意 (kindness, what Kaworu actually says) and 行為 (action). It’s been fixed since but I still think it’s quite funny.) Now, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese knows, 好き is not actually a very ambiguous word at all. I think it goes without saying, though, and I’m not here to have an argument about translations with you all (for the record, Kanemitsu’s now scarily infamous translation of this scene is perfectly fine with me in a vacuum, it’s just literally everything else surrounding it that’s the problem. Also, regretfully, I will have to speak about this nonsense later when it becomes relevant.) I’m using this as an example instead, to show how utterly ridiculous this guy’s additions to these pages are. He’s not even making a point here. It keeps going past this excerpt, and I suggest you read the whole thing (Kaworu’s page is linked above.) The point of bringing this up - and when I eventually discuss the Netflix translation when it’s necessary - is not to complain about semantics, although I’d argue that’s what’s happening in these articles, honestly. It’s just helpful when proving the actual point of the editor being incredibly unreliable and biased in how he phrases and omits things.

On the page dedicated solely to Shinji and Kaworu’s relationship (which is basically identical to their section on Kaworu’s page as far as I can tell), we can see that Felipe has also edited this several times, and even credits himself with expanding the version on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki now copy and pasted back to EvaGeeks.

The kind of “discussion” (very much not discussion when added to a wiki page supposedly presented as factual information, is it, frankly?) would be fine if it was happening in the EvaGeeks forum itself (and happen does it ever, but that doesn’t change the inappropriateness of this particular behaviour.) What I find disturbing is that in the past few days, this user has gone out of his way to make some already worrying articles even worse, presumably in an attempt to silence discourse, or add more fuel to the flames, surrounding the new Netflix translation. He has a whole page on that one, too, one which is very up-to-date in some regards and not at all in others, despite only being added a few days before me compiling this information. Frankly, going through this whole page on its own is a huge waste of my time considering how BLATANT it is in its biases, but I’ll do it anyway. It IS only a Theory and Analysis page (which is essentially an EvaGeeks free-for-all), but I think it’s quite bothering that the site even allows Theory and Analysis pages that consider only one viewpoint and are written by one person. The forum, presumably, is connected to the site for a reason. 

I’m just going to link it here, for the sake of brevity. https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_lines_in_Episode_24 I suggest you read this before continuing. For a slight departure, the original theatrical Funimation dub of 3.0 is partially available for viewing online, although the audio is in cam quality so you may want headphones if you have plans to watch what’s there. The home media dub’s major changes are to issues with lore and localisation of jargon. While not directly mentioned in this article, it is implied from the subject that this is what it’s about; it’s been speculated that the very literal translation of Episode 24 in particular has come about due to Khara’s embarrassment with how Funimation’s theatrical dub of 3.0 handled Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship rather loosely. Despite these claims, every instance of the two sharing (honestly pretty awkward and unnecessary) flirtatious back-and-forths are still present in the home media version, barring an instance in the stargazing scene where Kaworu’s dialogue was translated even worse than it is in the final dub. If you don’t believe me, do the comparisons yourself. It may not be conclusive, but I think it puts mostly to death the rumour that “a Khara employee was there and saw how people laughed at the Kaworu and Shinji scenes and demanded it needed to be changed for the final release and now that’s being reflected on the new translation”, which is what it tends to boil down to. 

It also goes without saying that NO ONE PERSON is “the most qualified” (holy shit, is this entry not even bothering to hide how biased it is) to translate an entire TV show, let alone something like Evangelion. Let us not forget that Kanemitsu’s claims that he respects “ambiguity” are not even true to begin with. EvaGeeks itself is a shining example of Eva fans, of which Kanemitsu is one and this is even discussed in the article, not being impartial enough to be tasked with discussing Evangelion! (There is obviously issue with citing the ADV translation as a source of all truth; if you read further into the thread on my tweet [the kitchen scene in EoE], I provide extra context for those interested, which I am aware has been spread around Discord and other places without that context included. Of course, I’m not an unbiased source either as you can probably tell from my tweets nor am I claiming to be, so please feel free to discuss these things in other places if you want. I’ve just got the tweets I have on hand here. Sorry about that.) Next, the repeat claim that this is “Khara’s licensed translation and thus the most accurate version” is pretty obviously nonsense; I’m sure I don’t need to point out to the audience that Japanese companies meddling in localisation has ended poorly in the past, or that Khara uses questionable translations from the dubs of the Rebuild films on licensed merch from time-to-time, or that the translation was fairly obviously not overseen or even QA’d by anyone following Kanemitsu’s translation work judging from the myriad of grammatical errors, missing subtitles and overly literal, poor sounding phrasing present in the final work. (Do I need to source this? Just watch the damn thing.) It’s not even like the ways it was translated have been consistent through different versions on Netflix; some were translated from Kanemitsu’s English to other languages judging from the obvious mistakes being present in multiple tracks, and some were barely even translated at all - the Italian version, the dub of which is mysteriously now missing, was so bad people were commenting that it sounded like Shakespeare or that it was translated word for word from Japanese. I dunno about you, the reader, but something about “Khara only bothered to check very rigorously the English version for their specific requests with the translation” doesn’t sound like what really happened to me. It’s more like they’ve just sent a translator they have worked with before to work on a project of theirs. Apologies for engaging in speculation, but that’s all this whole article is anyway. It’s just something I noticed from skimming through the page, but I find it quite interesting that Felipe makes a blanket statement about the excerpts from Schizo and Prano “being wrongly attributed to Anno” and then the source he provides for that is just someone on the EvaGeeks forums saying the same thing with little proper sourcing, when that was never really the intent of their post anyway. An interview summary exists where Anno has stated he wrote both books himself, and if you haven’t seen it, here it is. It’s obviously flimsy at best, but Tokyo Otaku Mode is an officially licensed Evangelion distributor. If Felipe is going to parade around his love for the Very Official Khara Subtitles Of NGE he can at least extend the same gratitude to other forms of official information; I mean, frankly, this article is about as reputable as anything in the Netflix subtitles are.  Lastly, another thing I found quite interesting is his strange love for the ADV VHS subtitles. I really, really think this is obvious, but subtitles changed in later versions of the ADV release were changed because they were deemed incorrect. I don’t have sources for this so take it with an absolute grain of salt but I believe there’s even a commentary track on the Platinum release where the translator talks in depth about why she translated episode 24 as she did. It’s not exactly a better word than Kanemitsu’s, but if we’re considering translator’s word as law for whatever reason like Felipe is here, we might as well consider hers, too, right? Oh, and actually, have a look at the sources used on that article. Most of the sweeping statements he makes have absolutely no backing beyond what he’s piecing together from old and irrelevant interviews (when discussing the Netflix translation) as well as...linking Kanemitsu’s job history...I mean, sure, the guy is qualified, but do I really need to go over this again?

INTERMISSION: Speaking of sources, you might have noticed from perusing these articles yourself that EvaGeeks has a very low standard for sourcing to begin with, which is likely partially to blame for how things like these articles can even exist in their current forms in the first place. A site that doesn’t have such a lenient policy on sourcing, though, is Wikipedia. Felipe, of course, cannot stay within the confines of the fandom and has decided to have a go at providing some information to Kaworu’s actual Wikipedia page as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kaworu_Nagisa&action=history Felipe is far less to blame for the state of Kaworu’s Wikipedia article, which is honestly pretty bad to begin with. There have been plenty of other people editing this one and the rather homophobic “Relationship with Shinji” part of the article has been present for a while before he started editing it. (The fact this article literally uses someone being explicitly homophobic as a source is not surprising for Eva fandom, but holy shit, am I disgusted every time I reopen this page. I'm not even going to bother figuring out who added that one.) I do wonder if his reasons for not desecrating this page the same way he has on EvaGeeks is because he knows it wouldn’t stay up for particularly long. Reminder that he is also the main editor of the same pages on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki, which is essentially a copy and paste of EvaGeeks. Of note is this little tidbit I found:

This is what Felipe then deleted, as this is apparently not relevant, despite literally being about Kaworu’s relationship with Shinji. I mean, I’m sure this could have been put in somewhere else and perhaps phrased a bit better, but why the hell would you outright delete that kind of information? It’s supposed to be a wiki, not your own personal opinion chamber. BTW, this is the thread post he links as a rebuttal to that person adding it, and it’s probably for the best it’s presented here with context: https://forum.evageeks.org/post/886380/NGE-Ep24-Script-First-and-Second-Drafts/#886380

He clearly thinks he has a point here, but I’m not sure what exactly he’s going for. Basically everything he’s saying is conjecture, and while I can kinda see where he’s coming from it sure does completely fail to address the intent as explained in this interview. “Read the whole interview” is very dismissive, especially when the interview in full doesn’t exactly contradict the initial point. It does say quite a bit, how he will disregard official information when his wiki articles themselves are full of nothing but rambling.

Here’s another relevant and quite funny Discord screenshot:

Felipe is making a pretty hypocritical statement here. I’m sure he does have a point - there’s probably been quite a bit of vandalism happening to these pages which isn’t exactly surprising (again, Eva fans are not often rational people, please be honest with ourselves). That being said, I think there’s a particular irony to the man who has written many very, very long paragraphs on the wiki pages he has control over trying to stop people from thinking there might be anything but “ambiguity” between a pair he doesn’t like.

In the case anyone reading has forgotten: the purpose of a wiki should be to provide unbiased information on the material it discusses. Obviously the repeating of “innocuous” statements about how “ambiguous” it all is, in the vain of EG’s now made fun of ‘we don’t know what he really meant by that’ and ‘why Kaworu is so intent for Shinji alone to have happiness remains a mystery’  are pretty obviously intended to downplay the very, very obvious “subtext” and leagues of official information provided.

It kinda goes without saying that WE CAN INFER THESE THINGS FROM THE ACTUAL INFORMATION ON THE WIKI, you don’t need to add a disclaimer to everything going “well we just don’t know what it means!” (even in instances when we do know what it means, but that’s almost besides the point). You don’t need to add in these statements, unless you’re trying to sway people into ignoring what's presented by the show. If you want people to draw their own conclusions, you are in fact capable of presenting information without commentary - in fact, that's kind of the whole point of a wiki. Yes, Eva is ambiguous at times, but talking down to people like they need this reminded to them constantly is an absolute waste of time and energy. It’s almost as if the editor has been trying to cultivate a narrative and has been getting away with it because you can’t really prove these statements are biased unless you do the research. (I mean, you can from context, but it certainly hasn’t done much to get them removed, has it?)

You can view the editing history of any given EvaGeeks article on their own pages if you want to see just how many times these things have been added in by Felipe. And obviously, no, it isn’t just his fault - there are other users, several, in fact, credited with the editing of these pages, many of the edits serving the same point as Felipe’s paragraphs on “ambiguity”. He’s just the most concrete example of a biased editor. Also, yes, I do recognise this has all happened within the few days post the release of Eva on Netflix and that it was likely prompted by that. But we know at least one of the mods is aware of it given how Felipe talks about it in the EvaGeeks Discord server. It’s also quite funny I’ve seen people linking these pages like they're some kind of "gotcha" in response to tweets discussing the new translation, as if they haven’t been invented out of thin air in the past few days.

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Now, frankly I’m sick of staring at EvaGeeks, and if you want any more information on these articles and others with instances of the same thing happening, you can have a look at it yourself.

Originally, this document contained far more screenshots from Felipe. My desire for this to not turn into a hit piece has lead me to remove a great deal of these messages. I do suggest, if you want to, you join the server and make your own conclusions. Even beyond what the member told me about I found myself agreeing with him fairly frequently when he was being reasonable - this doesn't change my concerns regarding the presentation of information on the wiki, though. The anonymous member was mostly concerned about this user having basically all the control over Kaworu's wiki articles, seeing as he has far too high of a stake in everything. Not all of these messages are inflammatory or even necessarily bad or wrong, but I find that to anyone privy to the “revelations” about the EvaGeeks Wiki here, they paint an interesting story, to say the least.

It’s starting to sound like he perhaps has just had some bad experiences. The following few messages are part of the same conversation.

I find it interesting how he flipflops from not understanding anything about the whole Eva Parallelism Theory Thing to suddenly being all for it when it concerns things not about the gay stuff.

Comments on how ‘manipulative’ Kaworu is

Because Kaworu is very pro instrumentality, and this definitely isn’t just a theory, I mean, it’s even talked about on the wiki, guys! (And I’m not even touching on the yes-men in this server.) Oh.

Oh no.

For the record, this page is clearly still under construction, and to point out any one thing about how bad it is would be essentially just poking a stick at a beehive. At least this one is so absolutely poorly phrased it’s doubtful anyone could mistake it for any kind of proper information. I also find it incredibly funny whenever pages on the wiki use the forum as a source. Relevant: Qmisato’s post on his defending of Shinji sexually assaulting Asuka: https://qmisato.tumblr.com/post/183082754484/yesterday-i-was-invited-to-evageeks-official

In response much later. I really can’t see it as being framed as “fun teenage romance”, also why is the word romance suddenly being used to talk about Asuka and Shinji after the whole debacle with Kaworu? He’s said before he doesn’t see Asuka and Shinji’s relationship as romantic, either (and GOOD! It’s not!)

(Also - it’s not sexual assault when Shinji tries to kiss Asuka in her sleep, but it IS when Kaworu does the exact same thing to Shinji? Make up your mind, dude.) Turning this sort of thing into Shipping Discourse is frankly not the right way to go about it, but it is perhaps notable that despite what Felipe says, he is in fact an Asushin shipper. (I don’t feel the need to post all these images in the document as its cluttered enough as it is.) At this point it’s rather adhom and I feel irrelevant but I do think it’s relevant that through all of Eva fandom, those who have the most issue “understanding” (more like accepting, I suppose) LGB subtext, are those who also are really attached to a fairly morally grey het pairing themselves. Again, seriously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this and assuming the worst of someone because of the pairings they like isn’t my intent here, it’s more that I find this pattern has always been prevalent and it’s bothering me I’m seeing it STILL in 2019. ESPECIALLY from a wiki editor who inserts so much of that into his work on the site. 

  You’re probably sick of reading all of this (and I’m getting sick of writing it), so I’ll wrap up the part on Felipe quickly: Yes, I just dedicated several pages to screenshots of mostly innocuous (when considered out of context) stuff one guy had to say. I feel more obsessive than I’d like to admit, and frankly I have no business with this person. We’ve spoken twice on EvaGeeks threads if you can even call it speaking. This task was given to me by a member of the community who was concerned about his behaviour but didn’t want to publicise it themself and I feel a little out of my depth here. I at least hope we can come to the conclusion I wanted to here, that I fear may have been lost in this whole great mess of language - no one person should have THIS much sway over the state of a wiki that’s supposed to be impartial, especially when they have not been quiet with their biases in the first place, and it is the failure of everyone involved in the maintaining of the wiki itself that this sort of behaviour has been allowed in the first place. 

The guy can have whatever opinions and theories he wants, obviously. I don't give a shit; he's not even that bad compared to the grand majority of Eva fans to begin with. Don't think this document exists to "cancel" him or thoughtpolice, I truly, genuinely, do not care what is said inside this server anymore. It doesn't concern me. I mean, it's a fucking cartoon, for god's sake. This only becomes an issue when opinions are expressed on a wiki, for reasons I have reiterated many times now. EvaGeeks lacks the objectivity required to function as a wiki and I'm trying to make that clear. 

[ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI AND COMMUNITY IN GENERAL] As for who can edit the wiki and what they’re allowed to say: As you can see from the nature of people’s posts in this thread, you’re given access to do very specific things, and although I haven’t bothered going through the process myself (as I find it would be quite redundant, trying to fix such an inherently broken system), I’m guessing it’s very easy to get your edits reversed if you post anything they don’t like. Take that as conjecture of my own.

I have it in decent faith that the approval process involves whoever of the mod team is there at the time coming to an agreement based on people’s applications. Obviously this is a decent idea for a system, and I’m sure there are legitimate reasons as to why EG has to be locked down as much as it is; judging from the state of other fanon wikis I’ve seen there’s likely to be a decent amount of vandalism, especially in a fandom as passionate as Eva’s is. However, I think it’s fair to say that the complete restriction of updating these pages to those approved by a mod team who, while I’m sure are very reasonable people overall, certain individuals of which have displayed concerning behaviour and biases of their own in the server during my brief look around. I won’t be naming anyone in particular from the mod team as I don’t feel like I need to add any more targets of shame to this already horrifically negative document, but I have gotten the general impression (in case it needed confirmation, following the remaining of these specific changes on the wiki) that some mods, not all, aren’t the most nonpartisan individuals themselves. I do happen to be decent acquaintances with at least one of them so, again, please don’t consider this a personal attack.

My concern here plainly is that I don’t think a group of mods who have routinely failed to prevent events like the ones mentioned earlier, nor seem to have much of an issue with the myriad of examples of people being openly homophobic and misogynistic on their own forum are really in the position to be choosing who of the Privelleged Few get to control the Eva meta-narrative here. As I was writing this, I was alerted to the state of the primary Japanese Evangelion wiki as a source of cross referencing for what these things can look like if done right. If you take a moment to browse it, even if you don’t speak any Japanese and have to use an automatic translator it should be very obvious how something like this differs greatly from EvaGeeks. Kaworu’s page, for a relevant example, doesn’t have present any of the nonsense statements about ambiguity or overwritten descriptions of everything. The wiki respects the reader’s intelligence enough to know that it is, in fact, a wiki, and thus tries its best to be factual. His page is fairly decent in size and states things we know are fact rather than theory. There’s no attempt made to influence or confuse.

Oh, and just in case you think the mods aren’t actually active or present enough to know what Felipe is doing, his particularly awful page on Kaworu in episode 24 got a shoutout from the official Twitter account two days ago.  

If you are going to join the Discord server to verify things yourself* or do further digging, again, please be cautious of other users inside and do your best not to start anything. I am an occasional contributor to the forums and I’d prefer not to get my account flagged or to experience harassment myself, if any EvaGeeks members are still reading this document and disagree with my conclusions. I may not have posted much since I joined earlier this year, but despite everything I find the forums to be valuable for connecting with other fans and have enjoyed the positive feedback to my SIRP translation! Those who have spoken to me there have been very kind (including Felipe himself), and I must reiterate that this is not targeted at the whole site, or even at just Felipe. I simply believe there is more than enough evidence to suggest there have been consistent, systematic failures to recognise and correct the utter lack of objectivity present. I seriously don’t have any personal issues or beef with this guy, either. I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t someone else who came to me about it.

*It should be noted that the person who spoke to me has pointed out certain members have been concerned about outsiders joining and screenshotting the chat. They may remove the public link to join if this document were to cause a huge issue. I will leave the server following the publication of this document and I have no plans to join again. I can’t speak for those who may join of their own accord but I do hope people have heeded the disclaimer I made initially.

Thankyou to all the people who have extended their own kindness and support during the creation of this document, to the anonymous person who tipped me off and the lovely Eva analysts I know for offering their own experiences with EvaGeeks and further supplementary information. If this whole document reads like the product of a bad mental health day, I guess it is. Also yes I know how hilarious it is that I’ve spent all this time creating what essentially amounts to an EVAGEEKS CALLOUT POST but I mean. Someone had to say it. Why not make an utter buffoon of myself in the process?

Okay I'm pretty sure I swore off discourse when I started planet-bryyo but hey, it's Christmas!

With regards to the Samus-out-of-her-suit discussion, it seems to be a pretty subjective matter. I keep trying to put my opinions into words, and I think I've narrowed down the issues I have. So this is JUST my personal take on the entire thing: what I like from Samus, what I think works well and doesn't work well. Feel free to disagree and even drop a comment in the replies, I'm open to a change of opinion!

(FYI I stole all my images off Wikitroid to break up the text)

Seeing Samus outside her suit is a neat reward. In the original Metroid, it lead to the very significant reveal that Samus was a girl. A lot of games tease the woman-behind-the-suit with stuff like reflections in her visor, or a view of her eyes and expression during a cutscene, so the game culminating with her completely out of her suit can be very rewarding and awesome if done well.

While I have a bit of a preference for stuff like badass suit shots or Fusion's lore endings (which I think were Japanese exclusive so I've only ever see them via the wiki) it can be really fun to see Samus just chilling in her spare time. Zero Mission does this pretty well; she dons regular outfits, goes back to civilisation, and does normal stuff like drink at bars. It's nice to see her get some down time, and hint at what her life is like beyond her missions.

On the other hand, blatant this-scene-only-exists-to-show-off-her-boobs scenes aren’t my thing. Y'know, I’m willing to say a bit of sexiness probably doesn't do much harm. I'd argue that some of the scenes we see in the likes of Zero Mission and Fusion endings (like the above) are acceptably, as youtuber ShayMay puts it, "sexy not sexualised" and detract far less, if anything, from Samus' portrayal. Samus is pretty without it being obnoxiously sexualized. And hey, we're all human, loads of us like a bit of boob. They aren't of much interest to me but plenty of people love 'em. In Metroid, though, it just feels a bit excessive and unnecessary at times, and I think it can impact how Samus and certain scenes come across.

The zero suit segment of Metroid: Zero Mission was a really interesting part of the game, with that stealth mission being challenging and fun to play. That's just about the only thing I ever liked regarding the zero suit, because almost every other instance of its appearance (including cutscenes in Zero Mission itself) is used to scream "HEY LOOK GUYS, SEXY BUTT." Personally, I just don't think those shots mesh well with what Samus is generally portrayed like. There's better ways to go about showing her suitless, like the variety of civilian outfits she's been presented in, or even simply taking off the helmet as in Prime. She can look very beautiful in these shots, without it looking blatantly sexualised and a bit ridiculous. Compare the above bar scene to this thing which always really bugged me because it's literally just butt and sideboob and the way it's posed looks really weird.

I find it a bit jarring when we go from the imposing figure of the power suit to the zero suit, which tends to be used to scream boob and not much else. For the most part, suited Samus carries this gravitas that makes her very impactful as a character. Unfortunately, that gravitas pretty much instantly evaporates when she's put in a blatantly sexy shot on screen, no matter what she's saying or doing. Note that there IS a difference between "blatantly sexy shot" and "shot where Samus is not in her suit" and the latter would be no issue. We see that in the likes of Other M's ending, where she's in civilian clothing and can look nice without the camera lingering on her rear end too long and killing the impact. I have my issues with how Other M did things, but at least IIRC it didn't derail that ending moment with Anthony by making it weirdly sexy, unlike a few other parts of the game which I'll come to in a bit.

I don't think sexiness is automatically bad- see Bayonetta for what I guess is an example of sexiness done in a good, not-disempowering or disrespectful way? I guess? I haven't played those games. But sexiness in Metroid is put in places where it feels out of place. Zero Mission and Other M are bad offenders; the latter two Primes only have like one scene of it, so it's odd but can be more easily passed over if you aren't into the uncanny valley robot tiddy look from Prime 2 that haunts me to this day.

Hunters did the out-of-suit thing quite nicely too. Hunters stands as evidence that even the zero suit doesn't have to be inherently bad (though let's be real, it was designed for tiddy and it will probably be used for tiddy until the end of its days). Hunters was actually my intro to the franchise and the first time I personally saw the face of Samus Aran. If you beat Hunters before developing carpal tunnel syndrome, and if you access the hidden ending by fulfilling the Alimbic prophecy, the monster Gorea is destroyed in its final form and the Alimbic spirits telepathically contact Samus to thank her for what she has done. There's a lack of obnoxious proportions or questionable camera angles, so the scene comes across as meaningful as it's supposed to.

Prime did well in combining the thrill of "IT'S HER, IT'S THE PROTAGONISTS FACE" with the badassery of suited Samus, giving the scene quite a good impact. People remember that scene with fondness. It's a shame that so few scenes with non-suited Samus have managed to capture the same thing- like, imagine Samus standing on a hill in a long coat or some other awesome piece of apparel, gazing over a futuristic city like a watchful guardian. That would be sweet.

I personally liked the more realistic look they went for in Prime, despite technical limitations on the face model; it suited the tone of the game and the personality of Samus better than the weird anime kinda thing in Prime 3. You can get away with that look in the 2D games where everything has that art style, but all the other humans in Prime 3 were more realistic so it just looked out of place (we don't talk about Echoes...) but that's verging on a different issue entirely.

Zero Mission is one of my favourite games, possibly my favourite 2D game on par with Samus Returns at the minute. It did really well in a lot of stuff, but it also has a degree of booty with bad timing. The moment after Samus crashes and is left with nothing should be a fairly serious one- the situation is bleak, the task up ahead is daunting. The only hope you have is Samus' confidence and skill- and your skill as a player, which, if you're anything like me, you're starting to question in a moment of utter oh shit. This is also one of the few moments where Samus actually has some dialogue, which is all pretty straightforward with a hint of her good humour and personality.

That entire scene is framed over a very blatant butt shot. Maybe it's just me and I ought to care less, but I find it a bit harder to take the scene seriously because of it. Sexiness isn't inherently bad, there's a time and place for it, but is this serious scene really the time and place? I'm not even gonna pull up big words like objectification and such, I don't really know enough to say about those things, I just think it looks really silly there. If it needs to be included, couldn't it stay as the under-five-hours reward as per usual?

I could just be really bitter about that one, though.

Buff Samus is another related issue. I've seen loads of people saying "Samus looks good as she is!" and there's nothing wrong with that. I just thought I'd try and justify my own reasons for being a bit let down with Samus' current out-of-suit design. It's not so much the design in itself, nor the fact that she's not what the fandom fantasizes her being like. It's more related to the design's history and trends of change.

Personally, I'm just a little bitter that they felt the need to change Samus from the design they gave her in Super, because of WHY they changed it. In Super Metroids manual- and visibly in-game- Samus is toned and tall. These days, the media is gracing us with more tall and buff lady characters (Zarya from Overwatch, Brienne of Tarth from GOT, etc.) but when I was a kid I don't think I could name a single muscular lady outside of joke cartoon characters. Maybe sportswomen, but even then I can't think of any popular ones whose names I haven't learned in just the last few years. Doesn't mean there weren't any, just that I never came across any widespread ones, and I'm inclined to believe there weren't many around in popular media. Which made a taller, buffer Samus a little bit more of a revolutionary concept, important for the sake of seeing varied body types and such. It's important for people with those body types as much as it is for everyone else SEEING people with those body types and lifestyles.

Basically, as far as I can tell, Nintendo decided that "sex sells" and their major lady protag wasn't good enough without the sex appeal that comes with being skinny and shapely. They decided buff wasn't attractive, so they had to do things like cut her height down, slim her waist, bring out her chest, and make her ass stick out half the width of Zebes. Everything she was allowed to be before was stripped away and swapped out for your standard sexy woman's frame so people could titillate over her.

This only increased over time. Going from Zero Mission to Other M and the Smash Bros franchise, you can see this increasing trend of Samus getting promoted in-game and in pre-release material as sexier, up to Smash Bros 4 where so many Zero Suit promotional screenshots had her bent around like the token sexygirl in a forgettable Hollywood movie poster, posed for good view of her assets, or even put in freaking bunny ears which have their own set of connotations. Then there's the whole heels debate, which I'm not even gonna get into.

Her boobs are orbs.

If I'll say one positive- Samus Returns didn't do badly. Actually, big kudos to Samus Returns. All of its ending poses were all nods to other stuff for fans to recognise and they took time to make three different out-of-suit Samus outfits. Samus genuinely looks pretty cool in each of them. I really dig it!

I think some people in the fandom have the misconception that me- and others who share my opinion- don't like the idea of sexy women, or feminine women, being badass heroines. And that's simply not the case. People bring up Bayonetta as an example of "you can have sexy/pretty heroines" and while I can't really say a lot about her, as far as I can tell, her game really works well with it and is designed around her having the appearance and personality she has. Metroid is designed around a different sort of protagonist, in a different sort of atmosphere, and the sexualisation is kind of jarringly different from the surrounding material.

If Samus had always been a shortish, big-breasted woman with a strong personality and whose ass and boobs were never/scarcely highlighted in a sexy way, indicating that they exist just because she is a shapely person rather than because people won't survive the game without a boner, that would be sweet. In fact, I could really get behind that because I'm short as hell myself. It's secretly every short person's dream to have a cyborg suit which makes you tall enough to reach the top shelves and fight off everyone you're otherwise too small and weak to handle.

(Had Samus always been a sexy Bayonetta-esque character, I think the franchise would be very different in general. If that was part of the design, it would’ve worked, I guess.)

It's not Samus' size, shape, and proportions in themselves that have the effect of changing the scenes and character portrayal; it's the blatant fanservice and the way they're framing of these features to obviously have a very sexual appeal, and to me that doesn't sit well alongside the rest. When serious scenes are played over what looks like a SFW alt version of a porn pic you glance over while scrolling down the Metroid tag, it’s hard to see any of the impact that Samus had one scene earlier in her power suit. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little for effect, but the point still stands.)

This peaks in games like Other M (disclaimer: I'm not a fan, apologies to fans of the game) where tragic and meaningful scenes are played over shots of Samus’ butt… like, it’s obvious what they were going for here. I’ve never been a straight male member of the obvious target audience for this so I can’t attest to whether the dual boner-and-tears method works at making a scene memorable, but for the most part it just looks silly from my point of view.

When Samus loses her suit in Other M- e.g. when Adam dies- and all the subsequent shots focus in on her rear end, it really doesn't feel like just about any suited shot in any Metroid game ever, and not in a good way. Like I think I said before, it strips Samus of a degree of gravitas that is integral to her character. Then it tries to play the moment off with a degree of seriousness and dignity that framing her ass like that just doesn't quite have.

(Then again, Other M Samus' lack of gravitas comes across even in the scenes where she's in her suit; this time it's nothing to do with sexualisation or anything, just that her postures and movements don't display any confidence in what she's doing, which is weirdly different from her normal presentation but persists throughout the entire game. Some people like it, I don't think it works, each to their own.)

I've sorta lost track of where I was going so I'm gonna round off here. I'll emphasise that this is all my opinion and interpretation, I don't expect everyone to agree and I completely respect that. I think it's absolutely fair to love Samus while being critical of how her designers portray her and the wider impacts of those choices- at the end of the day, she is fictional and doesn't make these choices for herself. As the audience, we are the ones who feel those choices, for better or worse depending on your own view.

I'm a bit salty about how Samus is portrayed outside of her suit and wish the Samus on the inside was allowed to carry the weight that Samus in the suit does. That doesn't mean she can't be beautiful, but the active increase in her sexy traits and highlighting of those traits over the years is a little bit infuriating, especially considering what they were willing to do with her design early on in the timeline.

Feel free to drop comments, I'm going to try and steer clear of my own salt for the rest of the holidays but I'm keen to know what other people think!

the bsd fandom gravelly overlooks the meme potential of kunikida liking to fish… i’m just sayin