Bartimaeus

One approach you're looking at them as an actual person - a person, with all of their friend and family bonds, a lifetime of experiences, accomplishments, dreams, memories, all that they've ever been and that they ever wanted to be from birth to death - and thinking to yourself, "Yeah, I'm glad that person is dead." That was a person - regardless of how flawed or even simply undeniably terrible they may have been, they've now suffered the ultimate terror that we'll all have to go through at some point. A little empathy for others, especially when it's difficult, makes all of us better - even the APPEARANCE of empathy is better than the kind of bloodthirst that happens today whenever someone famous dies. The other approach is looking at them purely through the lens of the harm they've done and were doing via their platform or position and being "phew, glad that ain't happening anymore". I don't know this Valentine guy, so he falls into the latter category for me. But I would not go nearly so far as Guard Dog would - I would not begrudge anyone who did celebrate the death of someone who had a lifetime of hating and hurting others through their words and life works. I would still always advise courtesy and empathy, but I'd totally get it. And after the last four years, if Trump dropped dead of a heart attack tonight, it'd be pretty difficult for me to not be genuinely glad he was gone - the hurt, division, and actual death that he, as our President, has had a major hand in causing (and could still cause in the future!) in not just my own family but throughout our entire country as well feels very personal indeed, so Guard Dog will have to forgive me (...or not) for being temporarily unable to suppress those feelings. I'm pretty sure I've said all of this on this subject before, though. Should save this post just in case this comes up again, I guess.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've all had this particular discussion with Guard Dog before... At least Valentine didn't go to his grave still spouting the same garbage like so many other have. Heck, Hermain Cain was still tweeting Covid-19 skepticism after he died from it an entire month later... No, really.

I kinda just ignored that, to be honest. I'm not gonna let any more of the idiotic plot crap get in the way of my characters. Yes. But I think we may get something out of Evangelion that most other people don't (or maybe the other way around - they get something out of it that we don't which leads us to focus on different things), especially given the ratings I've been seeing others give this. I had to do that right around where you did as well, my brain was melting, especially after the previous hour of being slow character stuff and then to suddenly jump into seizure CGI action. Plus, it's a really gosh-danged long movie.

Yeah, uh...my average rating was lower for the two Madoka movies than the average for the four Rebuild movies. Here's a major difference that should tell you enough: while I may have mostly hated everything that Rebuild did...I also hated everyone in Madoka, and that's kind of a big deal for a person that experiences things through characters, to say the least. The only character I hate in Rebuild is Mari, and she's only in like...I don't know, maybe 15% of it? Sure feels longer, but I'm pretty sure it's not that much over the entire run-time of all four movies. ...Though I suppose that might be a little unequal, because Rebuild had the unfair advantage of having already had me pre-attached to this universe and its characters. But I'm not trying to account for literally every factor in how I perceive and consequently rate these things - my 75/25 subjective/objective rating rule exists for a reason after all. I really thought you already had Usagi in mind when you mentioned that about Shinji, .

Nadia's pretty good...er, maybe wait until I finish it and know for sure, though, . If it worked for Crystal Usagi, why shouldn't it work for Rebuild Shinji? ¿Que? Actually, all of what you wrote sounds pretty much like RoE to me right now, so I can't blame you for making the parallels, . I'm the lord of making massive additions and revisions to my posts (both before AND after I've posted them), so it's not like I can say anything about it. The setup is your meta-knowledge of the series and knowing that Shinji and Asuka are supposed to be...something to each other? Isn't that enough and totally satisfying on a character level? (No, no it's not.) I was having a real Dr. Phil seizure reading the second half of your post once you actually got into the 3.33 stuff because I was actually trying to make what you were saying make sense for 4.0 instead and, well, it just wasn't working. Then I started to remember some of what happened in 3.33 and was like "oh yeah, that was a movie too! I just watched that, actually". I thought I was being hyperbolic when I said I wouldn't remember anything from Rebuild in a week or two, but I may not actually have been, because a lot of this is already starting to blur for me. That's how you know I really loved it, . Hopefully you get at least a little enjoyment out of the first half of 4.0. I did - not a ton, but...enough. It was a little weird, but it felt like a long-deserved respite after the first three movies. You might not because it's still probably not really that great, but...

I can't believe you forgot poor Fuyutsuki's name, . And also, I actually thought he was like the only one to get noticeably aged up - lord knows Misato didn't (I guess looking ridiculous in her current get-up is what we got instead?), but at least the English voice actress did a good job at sounding old and raspy. ...Because she wanted to sound old and raspy. Yes, because she wanted to, @majestic, and for no other reason - quit hating on my incredibly lovable English dub VAs*! *If you don't, I'll start watching Sakura in English just to spite you. ...And, well, obviously myself too, because that crap sucks. Oh, *that's* why I was more okay with the first one. Now it all makes sense! Yeah, that's fair. No, that's part of her charm! Asuka being Asuka is like the best part of this entire thing, even when it makes no sense! ¿Que?

Please do, I want to experience the disgust and annoyance all over again.

Yeah, it's actually pretty well setup, but still feels weird after having spent so much time with the alternative persona. It's been so long that my mind had jumped all the way around to it actually being Sakura's dead mom. Whoops. How's 3.33 going?

Cardcaptor Sakura:

No, I still plan on trying it. I want to feel the wrongness myself - especially because if I've learned anything from RoE, it's that it will make the original look even better in hindsight. It's just that there's about a 0% chance I'll watch more than a few of the first episodes and the couple that you said that were actually good. In the sense of them loving it, no, it didn't - said it was very well-made but just didn't hold any inherent appeal to them. Regardless, my aim of finally getting an answer on Sakura was fulfilled, which also means I can finally finish the second arc, . Yeah, I didn't really have...too much of a problem with that particular scene. It was a bit too indulgent for me, but at least it felt like there was some kind of purpose. Unlike everything with...Who-Know-Who. ...I should've listened to her in Japanese, maybe she would've been slightly less repulsive - even just her voice in the Amazon English dub is simply nails on a chalkboard for me. A better character and maybe I would've gotten used to it, but all of it together made for easy yet utter intolerance. It is kind of amazing how watching Evangelion's action scenes is completely unappealing AND makes my brain bleed, and then seeing something like that is like...well, it's obviously a bit more crude in terms of technique and style than something modern, but who cares when it works and doesn't give you an aneurysm? Looks like a dark and dingy proto-Utena almost, .

That's such an utterly ludicrous and ad hoc manner of "mattering", though, and feels like a Star Wars-level of absurd detail no-one in their right mind should ever care about. That could've been anyone, and the fact that it didn't matter at all in the original story (even though it should be literally the same there) makes it feel borderline revisionist to me. I vastly prefer an ambiguous or even no explanation over a bad explanation. In broad strokes, I guess the story's...fine, for the purpose of fulfilling the intended goal, but on a real level, it feels like one bit of arbitrary nonsense after the other made by someone that didn't know how to get their plot, characters, themes, and world to all tie into each other in a satisfying manner. And never mind the animation. ...So yeah, I found The End of Evangelion to be way more satisfying on pretty much every level, even if it was difficult to parse the details and more ambiguous. It also didn't literally make me feel physically sick like Rebuild did, so there is that too, . And that's all you needed to know. I think I can do without any more "BIG BROTHER!!"-ing or "Pegasus!"-ing it up in anime for the time being. Glad you enjoyed it more than RoE, though, . More Nadia: this is for @KP the meanie zucchini : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/uydiwp9cg2vwkbv/7dY7dua4yY.mp4 (note: slight choppiness in the frame rate is my video recorder's fault, not the show's)

Luckily, I have Alex Jones here to help explain Evangelion for me: Phew, at least I understand everything now. He had to call SEELE "Google", but that was just so he didn't trigger the psychic vampires sucking out his brains. Anyways, the gist of everything is that it's actually Gendo, not SEELE, that is turning the freaking frogs gay, so there you go.

This movie is unreasonably long, I'm only halfway through where I paused. Here I go again... The music in Rebuild is pretty weird. It started out almost entirely with music from the original show in the first film, but then I think transitioned to weird modern stuff during the second movie, and then entirely during the third. Presumably meant to signal a divergence...but it still feels weird. Almost none of the new stuff works all that well, but I guess it mostly doesn't detract either. Mostly - generic "epic" music isn't really my thing, and that's usually the weakest stuff in this. And now...some of the original show's music is creeping in towards the end again. "OH CRAP, SHE DID EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED!" Boy, I'm getting deja vu here, feel like this has happened once...or twice...or a dozen times before. Sometimes get the feeling that everyone doing literally nothing would've averted all of this nonsense. My reaction to seeing Eva Imaginary: Let's not do CGI ever again, mmkay? Man, well, that was an absolute load of... What the heck was I supposed to get out of that? It was just one bit of nonsense after the other. Does any of that mean anything to anybody, besides the basic character stuff anyways (which is barely even a thing in Rebuild)? I'm sure it must, but man. The first half of this sort of reminded me of what I liked in the original Evangelion series and was pleasant enough (if a bit weird feeling), the second half of this was a CGI seizure-inducing action nightmare (although not as bad as the third, which was truly loathsome) while being punched in the mouth non-stop with endless nonsense that just...kind of happened. If nothing else, I think I got over my hatred of Shinji - rewatching the original show should be freaking awesome now. Any time Shinji might start to annoy me and I'll just be like "hey, at least he's not Mari". Please watch the following video and pretend it's about Mari (existing) instead of Joe Biden (becoming president): (P.S. Turns out...yeah, Mari didn't matter at all and could've easily not been here. Big surprise that someone you did absolutely nothing narrative or character-wise with didn't end up mattering character or narrative-wise. Wow! @majestic is gonna love this.) I give Rebuild a...4.5/10 as a whole. That's almost good*. 6/10 for the first movie, 5 for the second, 3.5 for the third, and...a 4.5 for the fourth, I guess. My headcanon is that none of this ever happened and that the series finished with The End of Evangelion. Thanks for coming to my metaphorical crucifixation at the hands of Hideakki Anno's Evangelion, I hope you (or rather we) all burn in hell...or at least get gooped and sucked up into Human Instrumentality. (e): Restructure of my post because I accidentally more or less repeated an entire few sentences.

No excuses! ...Okay, I guess excuses are alright, grumble grumble. Oh, also, one other thing: Kaworu more or less directly spoiled it at the end of 1.11. Said something about not letting bad things happen to Shinji again or "this time" or something like that. Felt way too meta, suspected from then on, especially as events diverged more and more in 2.22. Right to all of that. She feels even more pointless past 2.22, where you could literally remove her from every single scene and sequence and...make the slightest of modifications to the scenes and she wouldn't be missed even one iota. Where is the middle finger emoji at?

Man, do you know how many times I re-wrote and edited out her name in this little side-discussion about her because I kept remembering "wait, Majestic doesn't even know if she survived yet"? Good lord, give a guy a reaction emoji at the very least, my gosh! I didn't even notice that, to be honest - I guess I was already semi-consciously interpreting it that way because there's no way this could be considered to be simply a remake or "improvement" of the original. Had to be some kind of "alternative" telling. Mainly, it was the beginning and the end in that image that made me groan and laugh, . But seriously, she is the worst. You know what? She's worse than The End of the World. Yeah, there, I said it. What an ill-fitting, odious abomination from an entirely different universe to insert squarely straight into Evangelion. To have literally anyone else from the entire rest of the cast serve her "role" would have been grand. At the very least, The End of the World fit into their own little messed-up universe and was loathsome on a character level - Mari is revolting on even a meta-level. Gosh dang, I think I would've preferred even literally The End of the World to take her place. And every time I think Rebuild has shook her, there she appears again... It's slightly PTSD-inducing. No, I did get through the entire first episode.

Did @majestic say anything about Mari? I was looking for it...I thought it was only me who despised her with every fiber of my being. Interpretation on Mari that I found, : Non-edit: majestic just posted as I was about to post this and mentioned how much he despised Mari. (Also, SPOILER ALERT: She doesn't appear to matter even one microscopic bit...but I do still have the second half of this last movie to go. I'll read the rest of your post soon.) I didn't even notice that about her, but probably because I was closing my eyes and plugging my ears about every time she appeared on screen, the annoying and seemingly pointless fabrication that she is. If Hideaki Anno can re-make Evangelion, so can I, and Mari ain't gonna be in it, let me tell you! ...At least in my mind, . 4.0 stuff: Sometimes I wonder how much it cost to make The End of Evangelion vs. one of these movies. With how ungoshly long credits in big CGI movies are, you'd almost think it'd be more expensive at some point to make the CGI...

Ah, screw it, guess I'm gonna watch the rest of this. Was kinda hoping majestic was going to power through both 3 and 4 today to beat me (if you ain't first, you're last...and therefore the inverse if you ain't last, you're first, and lord knows I don't want to be first with this), but I just wanna get this over with. My other party that I watch shows with has never watched Evangelion, and they have tentatively opined that they want to watch NGE after we finish Nadia, so I should have an opportunity to re-watch Evangelion (and at a much more sane and digestible pace) in the coming months. ...That or Princess Tutu. I'm not sure which I'd prefer - two utterly dastardly shows sure to break the mind of any mortal, .

Don't think Asuka needs her butt to help her express contempt, but... Sometimes...actually, most of the time, less is more, methinks. I'll remember this particular shot for quite possibly the rest of my life - I most likely won't remember anything from Rebuild in a week or two, . The artistry is simply not there for me with Rebuild. (P.S. I was trying to avoid mentioning the character for majestic's sake, but KP mentioned her directly in the above post - it's not my fault!)

Ironically, that particular scene in End of Evangelion was framed way more tastefully and actually had some kind of purpose, as messed up as it was (and actually, it literally showed how screwed up both Shinji and the entire idea of violating an unwilling or unaware person in that manner were). Again, I repeat: framing matters. It's not always about what you show but rather how you show it - if you show a scene in such a way that it is incredibly jarring and takes me right out of the scene...like cutting down to just Kyoko's crotch in the middle of her having an emotional moment or cutting down to just Mami's chest in the middle of her explaining something important (Madoka), it's going to feel incredibly jarring and like it was put in there purely for the sake of fan service - not to mention, it completely deflates whatever is currently being said or whatever is occurring. Maybe I'm just not normalized to this crap...but at this point, I'm probably not ever going to be, especially since I always have such a viscerally negative reaction whenever I see it, . https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6yjtzx6c5bd05f0/WA8qVy5AFy.mp4 So what do we have here? In short succession, we have a cut-down to her "fists" (but actually dead-centered and with a focus on her crotch), then another crotch shot because she inexplicably got up on the glass wall and the camera went to her lower half, then a butt shot as the shot reverses, then a ridiculous reverse power pose where she's towering Shinji, and then her crotch again from a creepy underside shot. I don't know...just, uh, all of that just doesn't really feel like it's justified by the scene in question and the conversation going on in between our two characters. Feels slightly out of place to me, to say the least. There are better ways to do this, especially for "serious", "prestige" anime and animation like this is supposed to be. (e): I'll be finishing this up today, I guess...

Here, I'm going to spoil you about something I put in my spoiler for 3.33, because I'm a dirty rotten person, but not really. Suffice to say, it doesn't get better. Framing of scenes matters, guys - most of the time, I gave the original a show a pass because at least there were usually plausible framing explanations (particularly because characters didn't then go and immediately explain the entire scene verbally immediately after in an a shockingly embarrassing display like you pointed out)...but zero forgiveness exists now in my heart after seeing [character] done dirty in the middle of her having a moment like that. See, even Mr. Rodgers is mad now. That's probably a good explanation as to why they were seemingly trying to melt my brain while I was trying to figure out why all of this felt so weird and wrong. This crap stinks, yo. The biggest enjoyment I've been getting out of this has been hearing Rei's and Asuka's VAs in their roles again.

It was a lot less sanity-draining than what usually goes on in this thread.

Uh. Er. Hm. Ah. Well. Ergh. That is... I guess, really, as I've said a number of times now, everything usually comes down to characters for me, and so long as the characters and how they're acting sit well with me, I'm usually A-OK. Everything else is usually just bonus. Assuming...assuming that they matter at all and don't feel like a complete cliff-note to everything else that's going on, that is. With Evangelion, I may not understand a danged bit of what's going on plot, theme, or action-wise all of the time, but at least the characters (in the ORIGINAL series that, is) made sense and sat well with me, and that's the lens through which I try to interpret events, and yeah, though it was frustrating, it at least mostly worked. There's a reason I gave NGE as a whole a 7.0 while Utena got a 5.5, so there's your answer. Now this Rebuild crap is an entirely different matter... (e): I was going to watch the final one, but it's 2 hours and a half. ...Yeeeaaah, I'm going to wait until tomorrow.

My gosh, Mari is so freaking incredibly grating, makes Shinji look downright pleasant in comparison. Could they have designed a more despicable character to add to Evangelion? ...Yes, they could've, easily (her name isn't End of the World, after all), but even so. 3.33 stuff:

Miyu: There's no room for any of the scenes to breathe or develop, of course, since everything's at a breakneck pace...but for what's there, I thought Asuka actually seemed *nicer* than she did in the original show...then again, I am watching the weird Amazon English dub, . I remember there being an internal discussion while making the English dub for the original show about "Child" vs. "Children", and apparently one of the translators was absolutely insisting that it *had* to be Children instead...but they were overruled because no, that's just dumb and doesn't work in English, . Yeah at the weird and inexplicable scenes. Of course, seeing how 2.22 ends, I then kinda understood a bit why everything feels so absurdly rushed... (e): Guess I'm going to watch Evangelion 3 now...

At best, it would've just been switched: the people who currently love and praise him now would utterly abhor and revile him if he were an equally loud-and-proud Muslim instead. I'm not sure if there would've been enough of an up-swell of support from the other side to have supported his notoriety this long, but I guess I don't know for sure. By all accounts, he's a fine enough human being...but gosh, I could do without ever hearing him tiredly mentioned again, particularly from friends and family. What I said was specifically in the context of his NFL career, which, well yeah, has kind of sucked. Some exciting 4th quarter finishes, sure, but that's about it. I thought I remembered hearing talk years back of teams wanting to try him out as a receiver on account of his athleticism, but he only wanted to be the guy at the time. A little late to be making a conversion at age 34 after many years out of football. At least the Jaguars got an absolute boatload of jersey sales out of it?