Drop Dead Fred! As a kid, I had no clue how inappropriate this movie was for kids, or how heavy the story actually is. Bless whoever came up with this story about escaping abuse with Looney Tunes level comedy.

Followup on Evangelion

This post was supposed to happen quite a while ago, but stuff happened and I forgot to do stuff so here we are.  Like I did with my Re:ZERO followup, I just wanted to come back to look more broadly at the rest of the series here instead of getting into individual episodes.  I previously talked about eps. 1--8, so this encompasses everything 9--26.

Before we get to the actual review, though, I need to tell you something bout my background, and consequently one of my biggest pet peeves.  I’m an engineering psychologist by training, and so although I’m not remotely qualified for the clinical side of things that people always associate with psychologists, I do know a fair amount about normal thought processes.  And you know what I am absolutely certain of?  Freud was wrong.  I don’t understand why we give him so much attention in intro-level psych classes, and I suspect that people often come out of those classes knowing less about psychology than they would if they hadn’t taken the class at all because they’re required to learn about Freud.  Freud was influential, sure, but that’s mainly a bug, not a feature.  He tried to develop an all-encompassing model of normal development and cognition based entirely on psychiatric patients (maybe not the greatest approach?) and ended up with a body of work so ad hoc handwavy that philosopher Karl Popper used it as an example of something “unfalsifiable” -- that is, one could not even in theory run an experiment which would prove Freud wrong, because there are no specific observable results that Freud’s theories couldn’t produce an explanation/excuse for like some kind of game of research Calvinball.  He maybe deserves to be mentioned as one of many “founders” of psychology, but really, unless you’re in a class on the philosophy of science or the early precursors to actually scientific mental healthcare, I cannot understand why we think he’s worth discussing in any detail.  Do we start chemistry classes with a week on the ancient Greek elements of earth, water, air, fire, and ether, and test students on the final on the theory of how those elements interact?  No?  Then why do we start psychology classes with a week on Freud’s theories and test students on the final on defining the id, ego, and superego or the psychosexual stages of development?

Why is this relevant?  Because the second half of the series gets frequently and intensely Freudian.  Some people draw parallels between Asuka, Rei, and Shinji and the Id, Superego, and Ego, and yeah, okay, I guess so, but I’m willing to accept that as a character dynamic that works well.  Then, in the backstory episode about the establishment of NERV, we get exposition about the three-part Magi computer system being different aspects of its creator’s personality, which is pretty hard to not see as another id-superego-ego set.  My real issue is with the psychosexual angle.  Misato, for example, can’t stay way from her ex Ryoji, but also repeatedly compares him to her father, including immediately after an off-screen (but voice acted) sex scene.  There’s an entire out-of-body experience episode where Shinji, temporarily merged with his Eva, directly experiences his own subconscious desires for sex and praise that all boil down to “he misses his mother” (who is filled in for, in a way, by Misato here, as she is the person who brings him back out of the Eva into the world and the first person he encounters when “born”, if you will... and of course in true Freudian fashion, she appears as one of his possible sexual partners in the out-of-body experience).  And I just... hate that aspect of the show and need you to know it.

That is not at all to say I haven’t enjoyed and appreciated the rest of Evangelion, though.  The angels, varied and bizarre, are one of the best uses of the monster of the week format I’ve seen in any show.  Their capabilities are poorly-understood even to those shown to be experts in-universe, and they are a genuine threat to the characters.  Serious injuries to pilots and Evas alike are common, and the number of implied or explicit civilian deaths and the amount of damage to Tokyo-3 and NERV HQ escalate dramatically.  They are, ludicrous technobabble explanations aside, a truly and horrifyingly alien opponent, whose motive is not even revealed until about halfway through the series, and whose potential impact (ha!) remains hidden to the main characters.  Those revelations come up organically in dialogue that establishes how secretive and how deep into mad science NERV truly is.  Blah blah spoiler spoiler, suffice it to say that Misato is not well-filled-in on what exactly NERV is doing, and learns some things from Ritsuko and Ryoji that have pretty disturbing implications about the capabilities and direction of their technology.  All the while, the “Human Instrumentality Project” looms in the background, mentioned but not explained until the very end when it is put into action.

Our main trio of pilots experience some character development that, again, I find very believable for teenagers thrown into a level of both danger and responsibility that they can’t handle.  Asuka’s arrogance and competitiveness turn from quirks into tragic flaws as she recklessly tries to prove herself to be the best Eva pilot, and are also revealed to be part of a more complex and general need to prove herself to be serious and mature.  (Not to mention, she is infuriating precisely because, again, she’s realistically written... her mixture of resentment and longing for Shinji and her wildly age inappropriate crush on Ryoji both remind me of people I used to know.)  Rei, who has never known anything but NERV’s single-minded dedication to making her a pilot (and who, like Shinji, is a victim of Gendo’s abusive parenting), starts to have the first vaguely normal human relationships of her life.  And Shinji tries to run away again, but I promise, it’s different this time.

No, that last one’s not in there as a joke -- I think this is an important turning point.  In ep. 18, Gendo remotely takes control of Shinji’s Eva to force it to do something Shinji refuses to do.  Shinji is understandably horrified by this, not just because of the violation of his autonomy or something but because of the terrible thing he has now experienced doing (remember, pilots are neurologically connected to their Evas and share their sensations), and in the next episode, in a burst of sheer hatred for not just his father but all of NERV, he quits again.  Most of the other characters still treat him as running away due to weakness or indecision, like they did earlier in the series, but he has a reason now.  They are falling victim to a “boy who cried wolf”-like problem, reacting to what they have come to expect from Shinji rather than to his actual motive.  He is persuaded to return in order to protect his fellow pilots who have become his friends, and then the next episode is that infuriating out-of-body thing, but the fact remains that this shows Shinji has grown across the series, from acting out of fear of and/or familial obligation to Gendo to acting out of a desire for praise (see ep. 12) to feeling like he has an actual role and mission to play.

Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Gendo really is the sinister mastermind he appeared to be.  While his colleagues in the shadowy council -- called Seele -- attempt to rein him in, and he theoretically is responsible to a chairman of that organization, the real power is with Gendo and the sheer amount of mad science he can muster under secretive or outright false pretenses.  And... wow, there’s not much I can say about that, because there’s not much I can say about episode 19 and beyond without revealing backstory the show wants to keep secret until this late.

What I can say, though, is I think the show fumbles hard on its late episodes, even before the notorious original ending.  Up to this point, I thought the show had been improving in general in its ability to tell an interesting story, but it dives back here into the same problem I had early on where it’s difficult to tell how much time has passed within or between episodes, and that creates more of a problem this time around for the basic ability of the audience to empathize with the main characters.  Perhaps this explains why there were alternate Director’s Cut versions of these specific episodes?  (I don’t know because I haven’t seen them, and they’re apparently only available to English-speakers on the 2004 “Platinum Collection” DVD release, and I am not paying the $120+ that eBay sellers want for them.)  I suppose it’s possible that the unsatisfying endings of our main cast’s arcs are intentional, and reflect how pessimistic Anno himself, and his initial description of the show, were, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a downer ending per se, but episodes 21-24 don’t manage to land them for me.  Asuka fails at the only thing that makes her feel valuable, Rei has her tenuous human connections and her means of maintaining them if anything happens to her taken away, Misato realizes maybe NERV has been the bad guys all along, Shinji finally shows agency and makes an important decision for himself but immediately regrets it... all of these clearly should be tragic, but they just didn’t make me feel as sad for those characters as I know I should’ve.

Asuka’s brief and mostly-offscreen abandonment of NERV in the face of her plummeting confidence, the introduction of the Fifth Child, Kaworu, and Ryoji’s sneaking of secret information to Misato all are great plot points that could have had dramatic conclusions, but they all fell flat for me.  The episode focusing on Rei at least makes sense in tying together many things implied by previous episodes, and fills in or confirms some things we’ve already seen.  For example, it confirms the existence of literal souls in this narrative universe, so now we know to take certain aspects of Shinji’s out-of-body experience -- the loss of sense of self, and the feeling of having recontacted his mother’s soul -- as literal rather than just a storytelling device to display the Freudian subconscious, and the angels’ ability to make direct mental contact with people by this point certainly seems to be literal magic, not some sort of exotic biology.

But episodes 21-24 in particular feel like a rapid-fire dump of partial ideas with the dramatic pauses in all the wrong places -- exemplified by the minute-long still shot as Shinji decides whether to stop the final angel from [spoiler] that changes the scene from tense to absurd.  It is, in other words, paced poorly, and this isn’t just bad news for individual episodes, but for the ability of events to matter to the audience.  I also expected to have something to say about the gay content in ep. 24 that the professional internet commentators are obsessed with talking about (specifically, talking about how much Netflix screwed it up with a very small translation change), but that aspect of that episode in particular was overshadowed for me because the show just failed to show enough of a relationship building between Shinji and Kaworu for it to mean anything.  Even with the “love” to “like” change, I end up coming away with the impression that Shinji has a crush on Kaworu (whether Kaworu feels the same or just doesn’t get how normal people interact), but that doesn’t mean much when their entire series of interactions seems to be over less than a day(?).

And so we come to the two-part finale.  With no more angels to interfere, the Human Instrumentality Project begins.  We first see our pilots suffering separately in their own despairs and doubts, Shinji and Asuka both suffering from needing to be needed, Rei wanting to die permanently this time but afraid now that it’s finally an option.  The Project apparently forces direct contact between everyone’s souls, though, and we see how the exposure of feelings we do not wish to express or even think about can be even worse than isolation.  Misato and Asuka both totally break down upon directly encountering Shinji’s soul and involuntarily sharing their most upsetting and embarrassing memories with him.

Or, well, that seems to be what Shinji’s getting from them, anyway.  We don’t actually know what they’re experiencing, I guess, since we quickly learn this is only Shinji’s personal experience of Instrumentality.  He, and implicitly everyone else, is stuck in his own personal incorporeal world having an internal argument and trying to navigate an entirely new way of existing not constrained by the physical world.  The visuals themselves meanwhile regress to sparsely-detailed still images, then to storyboards, then sketches, before suddenly popping back to full animation as Shinji experiences another “possible world”, a frankly hilarious couple of scenes reimagining the show as a school life comedy.  Shinji begins to untangle what he thinks of himself from what others think of him, and is instructed by visions of his friends and colleagues that, among other things, conventional associations between concepts are just that -- conventional associations -- and they don’t need to mean to him what he thinks they’re supposed to mean.  Then this fascinating mindfuck of an ending, which up to this point I have been genuinely enjoying enough to forgive its Freudian jargon, crashes to a halt with the resolution that he just suddenly accepts himself, abruptly.  And then everyone clapped.  The end.

I feel let down, because it just sort of feels like Anno wanted very badly to resolve Shinji’s misery, but just whiffed on how to pull it off.  “Just stop hating yourself”, even given some sort of amazing supernatural opportunity to do so, is a bit too “have you tried not being a monster?” of a resolution for me.  I’m not asking for realistic therapy in my anime, but maybe there was some better way to show him changing his entire outlook?  And then I feel let down again because I finally remember that we cut to this abruptly and are totally ignoring what Instrumentality is doing or will do to everyone else, something that is such a wild shift that it is certainly the end of the world as we know it, to zoom in on just one person’s inner conflict in a very surreal way for two entire episodes.  So... yeah.  That was Evangelion.  Yup.  It was a solid sci-fi (or... sci-fantasy, I guess) premise that went in interesting directions, although not always executed well.  I appreciated it, and I would be interested to see how it has been repeatedly remade by its own creator.  Just, uh, not right now.

Come back soon for a third post about Evangelion, which will be a headcanon and/or questionable interpretation that probably nobody wants or needs but which I feel compelled to share.

I'm not ready to stop hating Akechi, but I like seeing people get over their hatred of Akechi.  I like seeing more positivity in the world.   And I would say that "it gives me hope that maybe I too will stop hating a character and maybe will like Akechi when I play P5R, or at least not be enraged by Akechi so that I will be ABLE to be play P5R"

[Hey, Tumblr. Why aren’t you showing my cut?  There’s supposed to be a cut here.  I don’t want to traumatize people who love Akechi!  Don’t show them my Akechi-hate under this cut!  Damn it!  Let his fans go unhindered by my madness!  BTW Akechi has 2 Figma and 1 Nendoroid, if you guys could go buy them, GoodSmileCompany might be encouraged to make more P5 figures, and I’d really like that. ^.~]

...But truthfully, when I remember WHY I hate Akechi, that he hits one of my biggest pet peeves, that he's a bully, that he's unnecessarily malicious, and I remember HOW MUCH that behavior out of any character instantaneously ENRAGES me, I can't wish to stop hating Akechi.  He acts like an asshole, so he is an asshole, and I don't want to get to like him.  ...But I also want to someday play P5R.  Maybe not on the Western release date.  Maybe not even after I buy it during the following Black Friday sales.  Maybe I'll wait 2 or even 3 years to buy P5R on a Black Friay sale.  That's how little my excitement for P5R became when I learned the story changed to mostly be about Akechi.  (And I just wasn't hyped for Kasumi and she was just taking over all the promo for P5R, and addmittedly, I was getting jealous of the spotlight being taken away from Joker.)  

But sometimes I think about what it would have been like if my introduction to Akechi was not him bullying Makoto for no reason, if it wasn’t his presence constantly threatening and endangering Joker’s friends with his suspicions.  I wonder what my experience of his character would have been like if he had only the introduction from the anime adaptation of P5. Would the me in that parallel universe only focus on how much I love Soichiro Hoshi, since he voiced my favorite character from my previous OTP before P5's AkiRyu?  Would I have gone so far as to ship Akechi with anyone????  I honestly can't extricate Akechi's personality from his introductory scenes.  And those scenes were all about him being a bully and a threat to my friends (I mean, after establishing that he's high school prodigy consulting for Sae).  To me, his personality was established as being a malicious little bully, and every word out of his mouth was just so fake and plastic (thank you, Robbie Daymond, for so perfectly conveying that with every line), that WHO Akechi is is nothing but terrible to me.  Why would I ever want to like a character and personality like that?????  

Maybe the best I can hope for is to just keep cheering on the Akechi fans to enjoy their character and enjoy their ships.  Naw, I also wish, on top of that, to be able to play P5R without feeling icky.  

And I know that some fan of his is going to come up to me and say that “No, once you get to see his sad sad backstory full of angst, you’ll totally be on his side!”  And I’m sorry, but I’m firmly in the camp of “Cool motive; still murder.”  (Which is ironic for me, since I’m ok with characters who murder. I’m just not ok with bullies and people who make the hell that is living, additionally unnecessarily horrifying for people.)  A cool, sympathetic backstory isn’t a reason to get on someone’s side for me.  That is a SUPERVILLAIN’S backstory.  Practically every Batman The Animated Series villain was someone clearly sympathetic and unjustly wronged.  It was a reason for Batman to show them kindness, and I fully believe in the idea of Compassion that Batman TAS embodied (in those first 2 seasons), but it doesn’t mean I’m now cheering on the villain and they’re my favorite character(s) now.  I love martial arts and samurai anime, and there’s this concept of still showing kindness to someone, even while you’re killing the on the battlefield. You can still show sympathetic understanding to a character and not want bad things to happen to them, while continuing to dislike them.  And I save my empathy for real people in real life.  But a fictional character, if I hate their personality and every moment on screen they do something to make the moments more unkind and more horrible, then I don’t care what kind of backstory they’ve got.  Tug at all my heartstrings that you want; if you’re still choosing to act like an asshole, then you’re an asshole.  There are plenty of characters who have equally tragic backstories, who choose to do good and be kind people in “retaliation”:  Batman, Natsume Takashi, Ryuji Sakamoto---hell, ALL THE PHANTOM THIEVES EXCEPT AKECHI.  

Here's an interesting case study.  I used to fucking hate Tsukishima Kei from Haikyuu.  He's a bully and that is my pet peeve.  I mean, I'm maybe 7 episodes into the 4th season of Haikyuu, and I still don't like Tsukishima, but he doesn't bother me so much that I can't watch Haikyuu.  Tsukishima isn't a series-dropper, like Bakugo was for me and Boku no Hero Acaemia.  I can tolerate Tsukishima.  And it really helps that the series put him in his place.  It not only made the underdog that Tsukishima was picking on, into the star of the team and the series, propping Hinata up on a pedestal of his own skills in his own right, but aside from the directing/framing of the series itself, Tsukishima himself learned his place.  Season 2 has him state several times himself that he recognizes that Hinata out-shines him and even intimidates him.  Maybe I'm not so bothered by Tsukishima anymore, because his fangs have been ripped out.  He's not a constant threat of bullying.  More often than not, he's just inconspicuously making snide, but objective comments in the sidelines.  I think that objectivity was key.   It's something I could agree with, even if it was coming out of Tsukishima.  And especially in season 3, when Tsukishima was MVP, I could cheer for him, because his tactics were objectively good and benefited the group.  I didn't grow affinity for him as a person, but as a tool to advance/help the characters I did care about.  But though my tolerance for Tsukishima was growing in terms of utilizing him as a valuable tool, vs liking him as a person, still, my tolerance for him was growing.  And though he was introduced as bullying, _enjoying_ his malice, and often speaking with a superior, condescending tone, after he learned his place, his tone more often became just subdued.  Every word out of his mouth was not jabbing at everyone's weaknesses.  And even when they were, it was now framed with so much comedy, that even in the season 4 ep I watched yesterday, Hinata immediately shut him down.  ---It was pretty funny!  Tsukishima jabbed at Kageyama's weak point, then Hinata immediately jabbed at Tsukishima's weak point.  And maybe that was part of why Tsukishima became tolerable.  He was no longer attacking characters that could be truly emotionally debilitated by his bullying.  Now he mostly pokes at Kageyama, and though Kageyama can angst, I feel like his insides are less fragile than Hinata.  Hinata is Feeling and Emotion at 100%...Kageyama meanwhile, is a little too stupid for that level (which is part of why we love him).  It makes Kageyama more resilient than Hinata.  So for most of the scenes after Tsukishima's character introduction, he bullies Kageyama instead of Hinata, who he bullied during his introduction.  Now, for most of the series, when Tsukishima bullies, he's got equal chance of being bitten back, because his target is Kageyama, not the more vulnerable, "don't you dare hurt my cinnamon roll sunshine child" Hinata.  And Kageyama is more resilient and equally dangerous to Tsukishima.  Nowadays, Tsukishima is just that tall brat off to the side, who is useful sometimes, and I don't resent so much anymore being forced to have bought his Nendoroid out of obligation just to get a full set of the Karasuno team.  

I wonder if I could ever feel that way about Akechi.  (Because I certainly don't want to ever see him as a person enough to ship him or make him an OTP.)  But I wonder if I could ever tolerate Akechi enough, to not be scared-off from playing P5R.  Could P5R even make Akechi tolerable for me?  o.o?????

Verdict on Joe Nicolosi for Season 15

He did a solid job with his first full season. I can identify two major PROBLEMS I had with his directing/writing: 1) The momentary editing. Namely during CGI sequences. It just doesn't mesh sometimes, the clearest example for me being Biff's death. So Temple runs over to a newly-impaled Biff, then Carolina pushes him out of the way and onto his rump and palms, and then the blood spatter hits him, and then in the next shot he's crouching down next to his friend. 2) The treatment of the characters. There were times when Nicolosi stumbled with what to with all of these characters. Our new protagonist sort of fell into the background, serving as more of a set piece or a framing device than a character. Dylan didn't really have an arc. When we first met her, she was super clever, using her words to get around. I would've likes to see more of her silver tongue. That's just one example. Tucker's writing seemed lacking, especially in S15E14. He was a little more of a dick than usual halfway through the season, but that's okay. Donut! Donut faded completely out of yhe background during their brief stint in the brig. I noted a lot of these already, but a lot of little things - ESPECIALLY Carolina not changing or reacting that much to Wash getting sniped through the throat OR doing anything when he walked out into the battlefield. And there's other little things. Like a lack of exitement in the teens, but that's par for the course. It was a matter of personal preference for me, but some scenes could have been edited down, like some of the Jax jokes or Lopez's Star Trek homage. The machinima wasn't as tight as before. ...But for all that? Listen, Nicolosi directed the Brick Gulch Chronicles, which wasn't my least favourite episode in Season 14 (I'm looking at you, Grey vs Gray!), but I wasn't impressed at the time and now? I think now, witha full season's experience under his belt, he can improve for next time because there's a LOT of stuff he did right. Now I'm gonna make a bold claim here: Joe Nicolosi tried to tie the original light-hearted Red vs Blue feeling of levity and comedy to the more serious dramatic parts. The season didn't culminate in an epic duel like in N+1 or Great Destroyers, but little moments like "Take off your suit" with Trocadero's Carolina in the morning playing sultrily in the background or Caboose gently placing a finger on the Alpha's lips as he says goodbye made me laugh in spite ofnthe heartache. It didn't work all the time, though, and I'm especially picking on BvR Pt. 2, with the underpants flag killing Temple's best friend and setting up supposedly tragic antagonist or the Shelly joke during the Desert Gulch duel, and then there was the big revelation being just "Are you bad guys?", which I, personally, wasn't impressed with, but coming off another traitorues manipulator, the subversion is appropriate. Oh! And speaking of characters! Credit where credit is due - Nicolosi kept at least A female character in close to every episode. I think Dylan disappeared briefly around the late teens... I only bring this up to justify my own pet peeve with this season: Nicolosi gave himself to much to juggle. A whole SLEW of new characters, and I bring this up because during Miles' first shot at directing, he scaled back on the cast, even taking away our only remaining pre-established female character until a post-credits red herring, and before him, even Burnie, when he was getting serious in Season 6, cut the cast drastically. An entire season without Tucker! And yeah, I don't like the way Nicolosi treated some of them, but he at least appeased my desire to keep the group together. The music was good. I was surprised that the Temple/Blue&Red theme didn't factor into their backstory, being that it is essentially the haunting echoes of blaring alarms. I was disappointed "Lucky" didn't play during the finale because it was so darn cool. That space bandit desperado feeling I got from Locus and Felix. Oh! And I think GRIF HAS A THEME NOW, TOO. It technically plays a few times for Dylan, but Grif talking privately with Dylan, Grif saying goodbye, and Grif and Simmons taking down Gene together. Which brings me to what we have all needed for a VERY long time: RED TEAM DEVELOPMENT!!! That's right - Nicolosi did it! I got all the feels I wanted just from seeing Simmons' silent visor as Grif walked away. The love between the Grif siblings. Colonel Sarge's pathological need for honour and vainglory taking a backseat to his role as a human being. I liked Dylan. Wish he'd done more. The Spencer Porkinsenson reveal was PERFECT for RvB. And JAX JONEZ... THIS MOTHERFUCKER... was not that bad. Like Donut but kind of a cute kid and with film references instead kf double entendres. Oh! And my homeboy VIC. An antagonist of sorts from the BGC... Nicolosi, you did good by him, although I wish you'd've solidified his ties with the IDA Journalist to Season 14. Season 14 should have SOME narrative value, even if it's just a joke, but that's another topic that doesn't detract from the skill exhibited. And the fight scenes? I don't think Nicolosi handled his all CGI fight scenes well. Nah. The machinima battles during the penultimate and antepenultimate episodes, though, were MASTERPIECES, right down to the camerawork. Even better than the Battle at Crashsite Bravo from Season 11. Season 15 wasn't bad. Seasons 9 and 14 - THOSE were bad. It wasn't just average. Season 7 was average. I would give Season 15 a solid GOOD. Like a B. Nicolosi... If you come back to direct another season, I think you'll satisfy even more of shitty armchair critics.