majestic

And now imagine any other anime, TV show, movie or what have you trying to pull off an ending like that. We'd all be here ripping that a new one, instead of grinning like idiots. "I want to be friends, not like masters and stuff!" Indeed Sakura, not like stuff. Heh. Yukito's name gets some malign treatment in all of the subtitles apparently. Kero every now and then calls him Yuki-Usagi which means snowbunny. Sometimes the subtitles then read "Is the snowhare around?" or "Did you see the snow bunny?" - good job translators. I have no idea where toad could come from. edit: Oh, right, and Yue and Jadeite!Kero conly come out when they're needed. No need to worry about that. Well, I do like Yue though. At least he doesn't change voice actors in the transformation. How can you have Kero go from sounding like Ami to talking like Jadeite, holy hell, did you guys not watch Sailor Moon before picking the voice cast? Evangelion manga talk:

Sometimes complaining helps. Princess Tutu went and suddenly turned away from a victim of the week setup to finding another heart shard for Mytho, the episode was much better than the ones before, and there's some bit of meta fun at the end when: Ahiru also had a really racist and ableist moment. The drama club is preparing for a play, and a snake wants to go and do some shopping in town, and she's like: "If you want I can go, I'll be much faster." and the snake is like: "Yeah, that would be awesome, thanks!" What's that supposed to be Ahiru, do you think you're better than the snake just because you've got legs? I still have no idea why some characters are animals, or what Neko-sensei's deal is. I'm beginning to fear that'll never really be revealed.

There's no way in hell I'm going to even try that. I thought that was clear with the spoiler, or let's put this another way, I'll certainly try Toradora! before Edens Zero, and even that's really unlikely. Watched some more of X, do you guys remember when I said Emo McEdgelord was at least not a whiny brat about it? Oh, he just had a Shinji moment. Unlike Shinji he didn't say much during it, because he was just lying around being catatonic before one of the other characters had a telepathic heart to heart showing him (in an admittedly nice sequence where Emo McEdgelord reverted back to a small boy in the telepathic dreamspace to escape from his life) that he's not the only one suffering from tragedy and pain, and that he can't do anything about it without facing it. Wait, actually, no, the episode depicting that wasn't bad, it just had the problem of being the result of some setup that didn't work for me. Well, it's the first real misstep after half the series' run, so that's okay, assuming it recovers. Spoilers: By the way, @KP the meanie zucchini the spoiler contains part of the reason why the writer of the manga said it was inspired by DEBIRUMAN. I'm also being a bit unfair here. I already knew it was coming from the film, and probably expected it to be handled better in the series, and it was - slightly. Just not nearly as much as I hoped. The film skipping the Shinji moment actually worked out much better, huh. Well, at least it's only the middle two parter. It's just going to be more tragedy and death from now on, but at least it'll be properly set up tragedy and death. I think.

I was confused for a moment when looking that up, then I realized I mixed the titles up with Toradora! which is a repeat Netflix suggestion to me that I've avoided getting into based purely on it having been published by Dengeki Daioh. Netflix can tell me that it's 95% likely to be interesting to me all they want, and tag it as slice of life comedy until they're blue in the face, but Dengeki Daioh has covers like this: Yeah, I think I'll pass. Who knows, maybe I'm missing out on something lighthearted and silly that's only borderline offensive and occasionally fun like Love Live!, but there's a difference between taking a leap or making a shot in the dark, as it were, and walking into a minefield with eyes open and "Danger: Mines!" signs all over the place. Speaking of Netflix suggestions, this greeted me today after logging in: Because I'm feeling super adventurous right now, I'll let you guys vote on whether or not I should hit that play button. Small spoiler about the vote:

I don't blame you for that, I mean just look the main character. Not going to lie, Kamui doesn't just look the part, but at least he's not a whiny brat about it. He just has no interest in this prophecy business and wants to be left alone so far. He does care about Kotori, in his own way, otherwise he wouldn't have gone to the basketball game I mentioned after her asking for it. I'm having a hard time describing the series. The character's looks are much milder compared to the movie (especially Kanoe), except for the prostitute, she looks the same. And yeah, she really is a prostitute, and a devout catholic, quite a contradictory character. In the short time she was on screen so far, at least. I'm kind of expecting a focus episode with her and a background in an abusive family, because that's a) it would fit thematically into the anime and b) would fit perfectly for a character like that. The best way to describe it, I guess, is like... yeah, no idea. It really features some common shonen anime elements (Ashari summons a freaking katana from her hands to fight) except its populated with shojo characters and their interactions. For the first two or three episodes, I was wondering how that manga was printed in a shojo magazine, but then it gradually became clearer. Aaaaaaaaaaand I know that says preciously little, but I really cannot place it. Hell, I couldn't even begin to guess if you'd like it or just drop it like hot coals, or something in between. If you do end up trying, the only thing I can say is wait until the first two or three episode are over (unless you instantly dislike it). I'm guessing the manga changed after that because it becomes a bit different afterwards (much less action, more character interactions) and the adaptational team just took everything as it was. But that's just a guess. Miyu is much more understated and focused on only a handful of characters. X on the other hand, is much larger in scope, both in terms of storyline (it is about armageddon, after all) and in terms and amount of characters. Where Miyu herself exudes a certain sadness and melancholy, in X, the melancholy spans across the overarching setup. You don't have episodes with individual victims running across a stray demon that most often end in tragedy, the tragic elements are still there, but in the form of characters knowing what is to come, and what will be asked of them. Where Miyu is juxtaposed with her friends who have a normal social life and she's sort of tagging along for it, without ever truly being a part of it, some of the characters in X have regular lives (there's an editor, Kanoe is a secretary, the prostitute is, well, yeah, and one of the Dragons of the Earth works at a civil registry office), it's much more about them facing their destiny than it is about them living unaware of what's going on. If you want, it's probably the difference between an Obsidian and a Bioware game, if both had characters written for teenage girls. However, that's with only being halfway through X. I haven't looked up anything by CLAMP other than Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, but that doesn't sound too promising.

You're being too generous when you say the movie has a structure, I think. It really is a horrible mess. It starts with a weird sequence that makes no sense until you get some context later, then proceeds to a massive exposition dump that ends with Kotori and Fuma being abducted by Kanoe (I keep wanting to write canoe) through some unexplained teleportation shenanigans that keep showing up in the film whenever its convenient for the plot to have characters teleported around and then smoothly continues with even more exposition, just from the other party's point of view, and it then follows up to proceed directly to the endgame without introducing the characters beyond "hey, here we are, here are our names, good luck, try not forgetting them all while we start battling in 3 2 1 NOW." Did you find something watchable without a red tinge? I'm halfway through the series by now, and it has - obviously - a lot more time to breathe. Both sides are still gathering their members. Some exposition is of course still there, but it flows more naturally from actual dialogue between the characters, or often through showing flashbacks to the character's past. Kamui still has certain things explained to him, of course, but that's partially his role as fish out of the water character. Hinoto telling him about her dream isn't that different from Obi-Wan explaining the Jedi or the force to Luke. I'm not sure what else is going to happen, if they're really giving every character a focus episode that'll end up being 80% of the entire show's runtime, so I think that's out, but it already got bonus points for actually spending time giving the Dragons of the Earth actual backstories and showing them (at least for Satsuki so far). The series was made after Cardcaptor Sakura, but the manga wasn't, and it looks like CLAMP learned something in making it, it's one of their earlier works. There are definitely too many characters, and they're looking a good deal too similar, even in the adaptation. So far they're all fairly distinct in characterization, so that part is at least pretty well done. Pacing, while much better than the film, continues to be a bit uneven, the early episodes having too much action, perhaps. The last two felt like the show's not moving towards anything, even though they were really solid, which would be fine for the beginning, but not really for being at the halfway point of an anime that's apparently much more story driven than say Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura. Don't get me wrong, I really like watching Yuzuriha (that is so hard to type for some reason - that's the 14 year old girl with the dog spirit) buying ice cream, making acquaintences and talking to people, and I'd take that over any silly action scene any time of the day, but there are only 24 episodes, and there are 17 characters involved in this, plus some more minor ones. Some parts are going to feel rushed sooner or later. Now, with all what I've written so far, and having essentially binged half the show and the film in what amounts to roughly half a day so far, it's... sadly not the Cardcaptor Sakura for a more mature audience I initially hoped it would be. It also so far didn't exactly live up to the promise of the sixth episode, which was pretty much a very nice mix of character interactions and just a tiny bit of action in the right dose to spice it up a little. There's a certain air of tragedy hanging over it all, but I'm not sure if that's really present in the series or just something that carried over from the film. I'd say drop the film, unless you've watched it by now and give the series a chance instead with the time dropping the film frees up, you don't have any problems with stopping something you don't enjoy anyway, what's the worst that could happen, you waste an hour or two. To paraphrase Star Wars, this isn't the shojo I've (we've, I guess) been looking for, but I still like it well enough, luckily, so I don't consider it time wasted. Between Clear Card, Tusbasa: Reservoir Chronicle and X, it really looks like Cardcaptor Sakura was a once in a lifetime creation by CLAMP. As for the wild goose chase, well, guess I'm going to go and look for other birds in the meantime. By that I mean ducks, because there's also Princess Tutu to finish, where the second season, which I'm also halfway through by now, continues to be a little less interesting than the first season. I think trying new things is on definite hiatus until I've worked off my backlog. Funny, the vacation's almost over, and I wanted to spend the time getting my backlog done, and look what happened. Well, no, I finished Miyu and I'm almost done with Tutu. There the issue is primarily that it started having trouble with the episodic setup for the season. In the first season it was finding Mytho's heart shards, which explored emotional concepts that worked because Ahiru is a duck and Mytho a prince without a heart, at the moment the show is kind of having common drama and fairy tale plots as the focus point for each episode while structuring the story elements around a one-off character per episode that gets to be the victim of the week. It's still very well done for what it is, but it lacks... hell, no idea how to articulate that properly, the special something that made the first season enjoyable for me.

Yes.

This will be a quick post before I get back to watching, but I'm going to call it: X, Episode 6: Return of the Shojo (the actual episode title is Kōya) Well, and spoilers from here on out, I'll put them in tags, venture in at your own peril. I should probably do a better introductory post than the one I started making for the film, and clean that one up too. Oh boy are there typos, repeated words and jumbled sentences there, but that's what you get for posting this late and after watching a jumbled movie that sort of breaks your brain trying to make sense of it. Whelp. Maybe later, for now I want to continue watching. I posted that the movie didn't feel like shojo anime, and that there is not as much melancholy present as in the Miyu anime series. Woof. For the X the series, at least, that's not entirely true. Hm. So while Cardcaptor Sakura was aimed at the lower end of the shojo target demographic, this one's pretty much for the upper bounds. So far, so good. It needs to be said though that while it's based on a CLAMP manga, Ms. Ohkawa wasn't involved in writing the series. She did like it, according to an interview.

Don't worry, that can't be because you predicted that Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie 2 is going to be your most favorite thing ever. Once you get to watch it (not a spoiler, just fun). Sorry, couldn't resist.

Pursuing Untamed Ornithoids: Detours Well, in case anyone saw that particular Star Trek: TNG episode, that was Data's way of saying he's on a wild goose chase, and I made a detour on mine a couple of hours ago, because after having watched a couple of episodes of Attack No. 1, Robin Hood and the Evangelion films Amazon's algorithm thinks it has figured out what I cold possibly like in anime and started making suggestions. This came up: Now, far be it for me to see a picture like that and go: "Hey, I need to check that out, like immediately!" because just look at it, could anything scream "I'm the emo lead in this year's usless shonen manga adaptation" any more than a bishonen character with black hair and black and purple clothing? However, that design looked familiar, the clockwork mechanisms, the feathers and the character face. So what is this, then? Well, something called: X, or X/1999, or in the original: Ekkusu (just pronounced "X", because silent "u"s ) The name also did not really make me want to check it out, but hey, after Natsu E No Tobira being really weird, Princess Tutu not really what I wanted it to be and pretty much out of ideas at the moment, I went to good old Wikipedia to look at the classification, and hey, look at that: Can Amazon perhaps get me interested in a contemporary dark fantasy shojo anime, one based on a manga by CLAMP, no less? Well, ponder this: If someone's lying in the desert, dying of starvation and a magical genie comes around offering water, will they drink? There's a film, an OVA and a TV show, released in this exactly this order. The film... well, the bad news is if you watch the film on Amazon Prime Video, you'll really quickly find out that it looks like a NTSC VHS scan. It's so bad it is unwatchable, and the only alternative I have found is an upscaled DVD version with a host of filters applied to make it somewhat watchable, but that left it with too much red*. Everything that's supposed to be white has a, well, pinkish-red tinge, which is super annoying, but beats not being able to discern anything - and I mean that, the Prime Video source is so bad you literally can't make out details. The upscaling and all the filtering left it looking like a game running in DOSBOX with the resolution scaled up by the supereagle scaler. Hello, I'm your favorite DOS game mangled by supereagle (except with red instead of yellow tinging) because screw CRT screens! The sad part about this is, well, if there would be a quality source, then... ...then this would look damned good, wouldn't it? Eh, and just because something's release in a shojo magazine apparently doesn't make it immune to fanservice, even if the framing for this is still somewhat all right. Just in case you're wondering, that woman is played as the evil sister of a princess with white hair and white clothing. In case it's not obvious. Why can't you have a good quality source, film? Why? I mean really, why? It's also pretty gory when there's violence. They sure went a little overboard with the dark in dark fantasy. Spoiler tagged because spoiler. There's something else, virtually every character in this looks like Fujitaka or Toya (warning, this is hyperbole - but it's closer to the reality of the film and the series than I would like). And that includes the girls. No, I'm not kidding. Okay, that's wrong, by the way, because the manga is older than Cardcaptor Sakura, but for demonstration purposes, just look at the pictures above and the one from the introduction. That's not the same character, but they both look like Toya. The girl looks like Toya too, just with longer hair. The movie is apparently a 90 minute version of the later 24 episodes anime series, and if you think the Rebuild movies have breakneck pacing or the 80ies Miyu OVA is a jumbled mess, you haven't seen this movie yet. It's so fast paced it kills one of the main characters off before he's even introduced. There's supposedly less violence, or toned down violence in the TV anime series. One of the main characters is dressed like a prostitute, and there's no real reason given for it. Or anything at all. I can only guess that she's actually prostitute. I've already watched the first give episodes of the series, but not the OVA yet, but I will, because it's a prequel, as I later found out. The TV show has much better pacing, but is still a good deal more action-y than I expected. So far there was no filler stuff like in Miyu, but it also feels decidedly different from Miyu. Much less melancholy. I'm kind of hoping for more character stuff after all the introductions are done. There are a lot of characters to deal with. The story is about two groups of sorcerers (or any sort of magic users) called the Dragons of the Heavens and the Earth respectively. They're both working towards their own goals, but the stakes aren't low key like they are in Cardcaptor Sakura. It'll be the end of the Earth as we know it, or will it? Well, I guess you'll have to watch to find out. Plus I don't really know yet, because apparently the movie isn't the most faithful of adaptations. Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced of the series yet, the movie I don't want to rate because it feels messy, even though it very much was an entertaining watch, even with the quality issues. Some things really don't make much sense. It also managed to surprise me with the motivation of the dark evil dreamwalker lady with the fanservicey clothing, and that's a job well done, girl. Erm, film. Not sure if I would call the film a shojo anime though. It's fast paced, has a good deal of action, fighting scenes with magic and swords and is pretty gory at times. it's really more of a universal appeal sort of thing based on a shojo manga. Or something. Really... except for some characerization here and there, and the... About the manga series, however, well, what I read a little further on - hopefully that'll be in the anime as well: Sounds like a promising thing to look forward to, I hope. Sure, it can still turn out bad, but it's not bad so far. It's just with a lot more action than I thought it would be (the TV show now). The manga is unfinished so far, by the way. I wonder what that means for the ending of the TV show. Hopefully nothing bad. Also, slight spoilers: Oh, and this quote is for @KP the meanie zucchini, you know, just... you know, as payback for putting Mari in your spoiler tag about Revolutionary Girl Utena: Oh, yeah, before I forget, pretty emo boy is a pretty emo bishonen character. You can't really make him look like that and not play the part straight, right? He isn't really into being the chosen one at all, albeit not as whingy as Shinji is. He's more like "leave me alone!" and "meh" and then randomly whacks people away with his telekinetic force thing. *Maybe there's a real regular DVD source around somewhere. If any of you check it out and find it, let me know.

Assuming for a moment that Amazon's English subtitles weren't the best (it's such a hassle to switch subtitles around in their stupid interface, so I let them sit at English for rebuild) and he specifically references the Unit-03 fight like Sarex said and mentioned that he didn't want to take responsibility that starts to make much more sense. Not the part about him not being able to decide, but not wanting to take responsibility until it was taken away from him, that works. Specifically because it's also something Asuka would really have a problem with, rather than him not wanting to kill her. Maybe, I might be getting the interviews and production pipelines mixed up. Might have been Infinity Train then that scanned inked outlines and key animation and sent everything to a Korean studio to do in between animation.

Maybe in 25 years, after a stroke or two. But certainly not right now, and not for a 2 hour 40 minutes film - which I said, by the way, was my "favorite" (least bad, at least) one of the Rebuild series. I cordially disagree, but please go ahead and watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, then we can talk some more about balls in particular, blue or otherwise. And eggs. And a cow tranformation...

The subs I had on Amazon said nothing about Unit-03, otherwise I wouldn't even have asked what they're talking about. Hmmm. Odd. But yeah, that clears it up pretty well. The subs were pretty weird at time. Lots of typos, missing spaces and sometimes missing sentences. Quality work there.

I'll answer both: Yes, of course, realistically it is a non-choice. Attack the Angel and maybe be able to save your friend in the process, or watch everyone die. I have an issue with Asuka accepting Shinji's answer, because that answer makes no sense in the context of the fight. He wasn't waffling around what to do, he flat out refused to attack his friend (in the context of the films, "friend" is a meta assumption ). There's still some 2D animation around, the biggest problem actually, in my opinion, at least, is digital coloring. The digital effects and sometimes CGI'ed camera pans aside, Violet Evergarden was animated on paper, and then scanned and colored digitally. As far as I know, Steven Universe was made in the same way*, as was Infinity Train. It's not using cels and real color that causes the character models to look the way they do. In terms of Violet Evergarden that's kind of doubly worse because the scanned backgrounds that were actually drawn look pretty good, when they're not massacred by digital effects or how noticably different the character models are. Of course, the fully CGI sequences in Evangelion looked terrible to boot, and not only that, they had noticably bad physics too, you'd think that should improve when rendering everything digitally, but nope. Anti-Universe or not, Gendo and Shinji kicking each other into houses that blow around as is they weren't there, yeah, guys really, ReBoot did that better, and that was in 1994. *For key animation, at least, I'm not sure if the in-betweens weren't made digitally too. I would be inclined to agree had Gendo not specifically said that the Ayanami and Shikinami type (by the way, why has a Asuka a different middle name in rebuild?) pilots were designed for this very moment when Asuka and Rei acted as trigger for Another Impact. Besides, Asuka removes what looks like a control rod from her damaged eye before transcending her humanity. Still would like to know where Mari got her part Adam from, I don't think she should be able to initiate beast mode without it. Probably best not to overthink it. I don't know, to be honest. If the ending of the series was all we ever got, then I would agree, but I can't think of much that End of Evangelion left me wondering about. A lot is left vague, and that's not always bad, it explained what the difference betwene SEELE's and Gendo's plan was, it explained the Human Instrumentality Project well enough and the ending makes sense. Sure, the implication that Asuka and Shinji can move on - together - isn't overly great because those two are clearly not healthy for each other, but otherwise there could be worse things, really. Like one of the characters could come crawling out of a casket, then fall down, with the other main character unable to save her. Then both leave the setting of the show. Because why not. Nitpicky correction: That was Unit-03, master. Unit-04 terminated in an explosion costing many meatbag lives when the internal power supply test failed (or the original S² engine test in the original). I still don't think that she's supposed to be Anno's wife if she never was a character he wanted to create in the first place, and when asked/forced to for marketing reasons let others come up with them. But who knows. Sure thing, but I suppose Mari might have been edited into the script, not just the film, after at least a couple of drafts were done already, or the concept was there. Either way, all her scenes scream "I'm not supposed to be in this!" and by all information we have here that's exactly what happened. Score one for the fandumb, I guess. Hey, good thing I had this post saved, because forum just ate the first attempt at posting it. Holy hell...

When has listening to the fans ever made anything better? It made Pillars of Eternity worse with each patch (and the gameplay wasn't very good to begin with), it certainly made these movies even worse, I'm semi-positive that the final showdown between the Cleganes in Game of Thrones was inserted because it was a super popular fan theory (one of the dumber ones at that), it pretty much ruined WoW with Cataclysm, really... you can implement some ease of use changes the fans would like in your game when you interact with them, but otherwise, yeah, listening to the fandumb = bad idea. Granted, we could argue that Disney didn't listen to the fans and ruined Star Wars that way, but giving the fans what they wanted would probably be just as awful. *That's still somewhat normal for Japanese working culture anyway, I recently saw a video of a Japanese guy who said he once got chewed out by his boss for over an hour because he replied to a yes and no question with the Japanese equivalent of "of course" (mochiron, in case someone's interested), which isn't the keigo way to talk to your boss, and that happens to natives, so how are we silly gaijin supposed to get that right? kek

Poor Dr. Phil is having a good deal of seizures today. I, uhm, I don't think I ever hit the mark with idle speculation as much as I did with Mari. It almost looks like I looked the info up before posting, but I really didn't. Well, that does confirm that she was edited into 2.22 after the fact, that she was made as an extremely different character to be easily distinguishable from the others, and that she was indeed... well, harem manga fanservice waifu bait that was supposed to steal Shinji from Asuka before someone on Anno's writing staff had an issue with that idea - which admittedly wasn't the best but at least more interesting than what we've got out of the whole thing as it is now - and all of that only because a producer wanted a new female lead and Anno immediately envisioned her to be someone who destroys his connection to the series. Great, and she ends up with Shinji anyway. This is by the way the quote from Enokido: What we can deduce from these interviews though: There were many drafts, not just one. This makes everything worse, actually. If that is the revised outcome, then simply filming the first draft might have been the better idea. I wondered about how Mari appears to have been edited into 2.0 (is there a difference between 2.0 and 2.22, or are these just the different dubs?) after the fact. Turns out that's at the very least semi-true, wit her originally not supposed to have been in the second film at all, and said Mari feels like a fanfiction character, turns out she's the only character not developed by Hideaki Anno. She's still from the official staff, but it's as close to fanfiction as you can come under such circumstances. I don't know anything about the characters Enokido mentions, or where the differences are, but if the goal was to create a character sitting between Rei's Betty* and Asuka's Veronica*, then that went to hell in a handbasket. Oh, and it kind of throws a spanner in the works of the idea that she's a stand-in for his wife. Anyway, I'm super tired and I think that'll be all for today. Maybe tomorrow there will be more interesting replies from me. *Now before you strangle me for getting that "obviously" wrong, it isn't from a Japanese cultural point of view, where Asuka clearly is the exotic gaijin. I mean, even Enokido says so, and he was a writer on the original NGE.

That's fine, I'm not sure if you have read the thread back when we all watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but we had similar disagreements about the anime, except that I liked it. We had some interesting talks about it, so feel free to disagree as much as you want and post about it. This isn't the politics thread where the only winning move is not to play with the regulars. It might not look like it, but Rebuild being different is not what bothered me, it's being different in ways that are inexcplicable and, at least in a direct comparison to the original, worse. Much as I made fun of the idea that the script for Thrice Upon A Time was a first draft that was simply filmed as is - or animated, in this case - the problems that it actually has seem to come from too much retooling as much as not properly cutting it down to a managable size. It has all the extended runtime the other three didn't have but needed, and when @KP the meanie zucchini says that he thinks Mari may have been intended as something completely different from what she ended up being, then I can see how that could be true. Let's look at one particular point in the talks between Shinji and Asuka, and that's when Shinji says Asuka wanted to beat him up over not being able to decide whether to rescue her or kill her. When did that happen? The last time the two had any contact with each other before Asuka almost broke through a wall of apparently really solid glas to beat him was when she was piloting Unit-03, which was corrupted and turned into an angel. Shinji refused to attack her and wanted to save her, and they turned on the dummy plug system. There was no indecision in Shinji there, he refused to hurt Asuka. if Asuka wanted to beat him up for not doing his job in spite of her being in Unit-03, then that would be fair. As it stands, it just looks like something that should have been caught in a script revision. Perhaps it refers to something else, although I wouldn't know what (outside of directly referencing an alternate reality or timeline). Asuka doesn't work in this retelling at all, or in order to make her work, you need to use your meta knowledge of having seen the original show to fill in the gaps. I can only answer that one from my point of view, but Mari is a mostly unneeded addition of a character that in design and behaviour does not fit into Neon Genesis Evangelion's overall world building. Hence all the jokes about her being an alien in disguise. That she then has some of the most cringeworthy dialogue and is framed in what little time she has in the first three movies as nothing but fanservice didn't help her. It might be wrong calling her an alien in disguise, she's a fanfiction insertion character that serves as a narrative band aid to make the second movie work in spite of Asuka having to control Unit-03, much like the Vatican Treaty is needed to explain why Unit-02 is being dectivated. It's all really just there so Mari can end up in Unit-02 and Asuka gets hurt by the Dummy Plug system. In the original, there were other characters to chose from, and Toji was the poor victim, right around the time when he was tentatively starting his romance with Hikari. When you start thinking about her place in the narrative, it becomes even more problematic, because in addition to feeling like a fanfiction addition to the NGE universe, her role in the narrative is also simply superimposed over an existing plot, curiously part of it and separate from it at the same time. Mari always shows up whenever she is needed to do something, does that, and is then gone from the film again, unless it's time for her to talk about her big boobs or wiggle her ass in the camera. She initially tells Shinji to not tell anyone she's there, then she is suddenly inside NERV HQ without anyone mentioning it, and eventually she's part of WILLE even it seems as if nobody outside of Shinji and Asuka ever talks to her. In fact, with the chaotic way the second movie went, you could have cut her out and nothing would change, it's almost as if she was inserted into the film after it was already almost finished. In the new X-Files seasons that were made recently, there's an episode where the showrunners decided to retroactively insert a third agent into the narrative. It was one of the funniest, strangest and best episodes of the show, even in spite of the declining quality of the alter seasons and the abject failure of the new season's story arc. But it was played as a joke, while Mari feels like the same, but played for serious. In reality she was probably, like @KP the meanie zucchini speculated, meant to do something else, but in the end turned into a stand-in for Anno's wife, because he is to Shinji what Yui was to Gendo, someone to help him overcome his depression. Assuming for a moment that is what happened to Mr. Anno in real life. I know he often suffers from depression, I don't know if meeting his wife helped him overcome it. If that was her function though, she pretty much failed, because she only does that at the end, after Shinji self-actualized on his own. Zarathustra would have been proud of him, rejecting expectations and simply choosing for himself, like the Übermensch is supposed to. Hence the comparison to Neo when he changes from simply being the Chosen One to choosing to be the Chosen One at the end of The Matrix: Revolutions. These things might look like a joke on my part, but they're fairly deliberate. It migt not have looked like that, but that didn't bother me that much. It's a throwaway thing that may or may not have come about by the time Mr. Anno decided that every pilot except Mari was to be a construct of a sort, in some manner (whether or not that is true for Shinji is something else). Whether by design or simply as a side effect, the pilots not growing old isn't that bad. It has to be a side effect of piloting the EVAs, by the way, otherwise Mari wouldn't stay the same over the course of the almost 30 years since the Second Impact. Like @Bartimaeus said, maybe it's the contact with the LCL goop. It's part of Mari's problems though, as a character that was alive prior to EVAs being built, she was clearly not designed to be a pilot, or changed accordingly, but yet she's clearly also capable of abandoning her humanity and becoming an "angel" - or rather, specifically, one based on Adam, because the way the movies are set up Adam's offsprings are primal vitality with only instinctual intelligence, while Lilith's offsprings (life on Earth as a whole, that is) are intelligent. That Rei's ascended form is different lies in her origin as a partial Yui/Lilith hybrid. So when, how or why did Mari get enough "Adam" in her to be able to transform into an unthinking beast mode "angel" when it's needed? Shouldn't she be different altogether, like Shinji? Shinji just transcends his humanity to become something else, apparently. By the way, that's one of the things that made sense about needing Rei and Asuka to pilot Unit-13 for the Another Impact. The impacts (except the first one, that was Lilith's landing on Earth) were always the result of contact between Adam and Lilith, a combiation of both Seeds of Life that was never meant to happen. Rei was derived from Lilith, so Asuka's form being an Adam beast mode is fine (if you don't find the idea that Asuka was designed in some way to be terrible, like I do), both are in the same EVA, and as such the impact begins. At least until it is stopped - by humanity having transcended the need for Gods, in the form of Yui, Shinji and Ritsuko's newly created Spear of Destiny. The basic premise isn't that bad, which is more or less why I said that the anti-universe stuff was fine. It's the NGE equivalent of Sheridan telling the Vorlons and the Shadows to get out of their way. Not quite, but similar enough. The execution would have required some more setup. They had two movies in 2.22 and 3.33 to set up construction of a new Spear, and didn't. They had those two movies to make Mari an actual character, and didn't, and then she's suddenly both pivotal and useless for the plot of the final one. Asuka has good reasons for acting like she does though, as do Shinji and Misato. They're all living in the same appartment because they're all variations of the same problem - or maybe, better put, demonstrate different coping mechanisms as a result of the same underlying psychological problem. I'm not sure I agree that Misato is the capable and fearless leader type. She mostly winges it, often takes a course of action against all rhyme and reason and drowns her sorrows. Asuka is attracted to Shinji, but Shinji is the way he is, and Asuka is the way she is, so she's aggressive towards him to keep him at arm's length while still pining to be close to him, both emotionally and physically. That's an apparent contradiction that I can tell you from personal experience does exist like that in real life too. She misundertands Shinji's apparent attachment to Misato so she's trying to emulate her, and she later misinterprets Shinji's emotional attachment to Rei, and she fails as a pilot when she sees her fears confirmed by Shinji rescuing Rei, but not her. That... among other things, was the emotional core of the original series, and almost all of it is gone in the new films. Rei was, for a moment in 2.22, exhibiting real character growth with her plans for a dinner with Shinji and Gendo. It was one of the few moments I really liked, and that's part of the reason why hearing Asuka say that the pilots were designed like that made me almost angry enough to turn the film off and never go back, and that does take some doing. In the original NGE, Rei was a clone of Yui and part Lilith. It was both an attempt at recreating Yui and a way to create a vessel for the Third Impact and/or Gendo's attempt to rejoin his wife. That she needed constant medical supervision plays into Rei simply gooping it up in Thrice Upon A Time. She becomes the focal point of the Third Impact when she absorbs Adam, creating - well, here we are, again - a Lilith/Adam hybrid. Lilith's spear was lost on impact with Earth, either destroyed or otherwise unfindable, and therefore Adam deactivated himself with the Spear of Longinus. That, at least, was the official backstory of the original series. It's not exactly out of the question for NERV to have found the Spear of Cassius somewhere. I don't have a problem with them coming up with a new Spear made by humanity, not the precursor race that created the Seeds of Life, just not as a last minute solution. Setup, then payoff. I mean, with the way the movie ended it was, I think, pretty clear that this was the intention, aside from Mr. Anno finally telling everyone that he doesn't want to do any more NGE, what with having Shinji simply erasing NGE from existence and then eloping with Mari into the real world. That part of his life is now well and truly behind him, by the looks of it. I'm going to disagree here, the ending of the series was unsatisfying because it wasn't an ending, even if it made sense in the context of it (again, parallels to Lost's ending). It was not a resolution to the series at all, an unending if you will. The End of Evangelion I thought was sufficient in explaining what was going on and the ending was satisfying enough. Actually I don't see the different between Thrice Upon A Time's ending and that of End of Evangelion's. In both the impact is averted, humanity continues on - in EoE should they choose to, taking a silly detour into solipsism, in Thrice Upon A Time simply because the impact didn't get far enough to get to that point. In both the characters manage to transcend their problems and continue, in EoE it was Shinji and Asuka on the beach, where Asuka indeed really "grows up" faster than Shinji, and in TUAT it was Shinji with Mari and Asuka with Kensuke (presumably, at least). However, and that's the disclaimer I have to make here, I also found the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie to be a satisfactory ending to the show that complementend and explained a few things that were left open, and it did so by having the main character being dragged into a carwash and exit as a car, complete with a highway chase scene to follow. That's something you could attempt to watch if you want a really inexplicable show mired in allegory and metaphor to the point of being almost impenetrable because it also contains stylistic and artistic elements that you're meant to disregard, in addition to an entire character with plotlines that are simply there for insanity's sake.

I initially didn't like Asuka. Before she showed up, I didn't hate Shinji, which is I think the best that can happen for him. I really liked Misato, not only for her voice performance but because she's exactly the sort of broken person that I usually end up being friends with should I run into them. Misato stayed my favorite throughout, but not only for that reason. Rei I talked enough about, I think. Rei #6 in The Matrix 3.0 + 1.01 just reinforced that some more with her doing her Violet spiel. Asuka eventually stopped telling Shinji to man up, and I started to like her, and the juxtaposition with Rei. Asuka is canonically half Japanese, but she certainly is 100% gaijin, while Rei is the ultimate, perfect and traditional Japanese woman. It was a little painful to see Asuka trying to fight against that, even though there never was any real reason to. See, that's discussions you can have about the characters from the show, because love and care went into crafting them, even if they are, at times, extremely unsympathetic. Eh, it's gotten pretty late, and I'll sleep on it a bit.

I'm a little disappointed by the lack of comments about Sailor Moon. There were some, but not that many. I really doubt any of them have watched it. The video itself was fun, but I'm not the world's biggest Lynch afficionado. More like the opposite. Jay might like Revolutionary Girl Utena, it's weird and occassionally disgusting. Not sure what he thinks of animation, let alone Japanese one. Yeah, pretty much. I had major Stargate Altantis flashbacks. In Stargate, Atlantis was a city of the precursor race, and it didn't sink, at least not on Earth. They left Earth, with the entire city, to go to the Pegasus galaxy, where it was put under water to hide it. The entire city being a ship, and the show having been cancelled they invented a way to transport the city back to Earth called the "wormhole drive" - never came up before. Good job. This is similar, if there had been some NERV research on the spears shown, maybe Ritsuko trying to copy one, maybe that would have worked. As it stands, no, nope. Just do something without any setup, that's why I mentioned Stephen King. Many of his books end like that. Or at least the ones I've read. Not only that, you could have entire plot points taken out without them missing. But of course you're right, not every bit needs explanation, something that the original series understood well enough. But that was a collaborative writing effort, not a one man show. I was mostly okay with the anti-universe stuff that happened once Neo and Agent Smith went into the Matrix. It looked terrible, but it was a combination of the End of Evangelion and the ending of the series, and as such wasn't that bad. If Mari had not shown up. Everything from the end of the character moments to that point though: I have no idea what they were going for with that scene. Mirror Kaworu's interactions with Shinji? Whatever Asuka and Mari had there wasn't much of a relationship either, if that's what it was supposed to be, with Mari going for Shinji the moment she could, and Asuka being more interested in Kensuke anyway. But maybe, yeah, I guess someone else hugging her would lead to a broken nose. But who knows with these two. I tried to ask myself the question: "How would I react to this if I had not seen NGE before" but can only come up short. First, most of the film relies on prior knowledge that wasn't even in the other rebuild movies. Then there are the plot holes, the terrible CGI, the nonsensical plot points all over the place, the character development that ends up being mostly pointless if it wouldn't turn Shinji into Neo by the end, and any of that, and I can't... no. I don't get it. I often say I don't get the popularity of X while on a mostly objective level I can still somewhat understand, at least. While I don't find American Pie funny, I understand how someone could. Same goes for any number of rom-coms, or sit-coms. With this, and the pre-requisite of being a fan of the original show, I have no idea... but maybe @KP the meanie zucchini and @Sarex can answer that one, they seem to not have hated it nearly as much as I... well, we... did.

I'll reply eventually, right now I need to watch that RLM video.

It ties in directly with the film's resolution. There's no escaping it for me. Maybe, but I aso don't see any reason for these films to exist. They supposedly answer questions that I've never found asking myself after the End of Evangelion, and ruin characters that I found myself liking more in hindsight than I did when watching the series. Especially when it comes to Asuka. Ah, well, it's over now. At least, I hope the ending was meant to be serious and there won't be any more NGE content coming. With the success of the last film, who knows...

Some two decades back a new trend emerged in film business, one that would hit the world in a stride never seen before, and one that is apparently here to stay. It's the Art Of The First Draft, most commonly associated with established script writers and directors who had at least one runaway success, especially when they're both for one of their projects: The idea that a script needs no revision, and can simply be filmed as is after it was completed. Paving the way was this man, with his 1999 box office hit The Phantom Menace: Wait, no, that's not right. No, actually, it was George Lucas, whose script for The Phantom Menace apparently never underwent any revision, and nobody involved in the project dared to tell him that he's naked. No child on set to ask why the emperor doesn't wear clothes, and the result was... sadly, a box office smash hit that proved you could release any turd under the name Star Wars and fans would gobble it up without complaining. At least until Disney broke the Camel's back and suddenly found themselves with a Star Wars film that seemingly didn't make as much profit as it should, but that's not part of this post. Following this trend were not only the sequels to The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, two films that managed to somehow be even worse than The Phantom Menace. However, Revenge of the Sith is often seen as the best of the three, because it's dark and edgy. I guess. Because I have no idea how you could get that idea. The Phantom Menace was boring, had terrible actors and bad acting, stupid dialogue and nothing made sense, but so did the other two, and they were also ramping up the stupidity to offensive levels. No, this started spiralling out of control, and engulfed the Wachowskis, and even video game maker Bioware, who released an ending to a story much anticipated that was so bad it caused fans to buy ten thousand cupcakes with differently coloured icing but the same vanilla taste and send it to Bioware to make a statement. I am, of course, talking about The Matrix: Reloaded, The Matrix: Revolutions and Mass Effect 3. All of which will become relevant soon, I promise. The problem with the Art Of The First Draft is that nobody dares to confront their majesties, both out of awe and fearing that they might offend them, they then do not realize that they're standing naked and ridiculous in front of their subjects. That way you end up with these insane messes that feel like it could have been something interesting, if Antoine de Saint Exupéry went in and took everything out that was unnecessary for it to work, and someone who knows what they're doing would have pointed the stupid bits out. The success of the Wachowskis allowed them to make two more supremely messy movies in the Matrix universe full of religious allegory and philosophical nonsense. Bioware's success with Mass Effect 2 allowed their team to create an ending to the series that has managed a feat that hopefully will never be repeated: A cut to black at the end, leaving every plotline unresolved would have been better. Dark Matter, a sadly cancelled TV show that was great fun, ended on a cliffhanger. And it was a better ending than Mass Effect 3 had. And now, after all these years and buried memories of the past, Hideaki Anno has decided to join the Illustrious Circle of Naked Emperors with Neon Genesis Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.01 Thrice Upon A Time, a film that for some reason has an almost 5 star rating on Amazon. And he even does that by building on the blocks of his predecessors. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Neo, Crash Override and Angels! The film begins with a CGI madness and seizure inducing scene where Misato and the Lexx land in Paris to establish a containment field that will revert the effects of the N3I, the Near Third Impact. It's strange technology we humans don't understand. Wait a moment, I head you say, how can humans have built technology to revert the N3I if we have no idea how it works? Well, I also do not know. All we know is that it's slower than 8 bit computers, and that Zero Cool, alias Crash Override and Acid Burn need to fix up the computer stuff before the incoming attack by NERV drives them away from Paris. They're planning to salvage material from NERV's European branch. Mari, whose name is later revealed to be Mary Iscariot. No wonder she's such an alien fan-service insert into the Neon Genesis Evangelion universe. She's a traitor, a whore and the mother of God in the same person. Not sure who paid her to sell out Gendoh Jesuskari. I'm not even sure that works. Is Shinji Jesus then, and Mari actually just Magdalene? Wait, I just noticed I don't care enough. Yes, somehow, my dear, I find myself havin the same look of incredulity on my face. Mari fights off the insane amount of attackers coming at her, then deflects GIANT LASER BEAMS and finally rams the Eiffel Tower into the giant laser beam wielding Pseudo-Evangelion. I'm not entirely certain why NERV spends so many resources building these totally ineffective little attack drones instead of just building a group of four or five EVAs capable of trouncing Mami Mari's EVA. It's baffling and will never be answered, but probably has something to do with Gendo still needing Asuka, who is of course on board the Wunder. Zero Cool and Acid Burn fix the computer stuff in the nick of time and the salvage operation starts. Already we can see how a little overhaul could have saved this. Less attackers, make them more dangerous - WILLE is supposed to be a resistance group, not more powerful than NERV - and drop the silly containment field. Just make it a raid on the European branch for parts to repair or reconstruct Asuka's EVA. You can still have the containment field for Village 3. Just make it something WILLE came up with in response to N3I, and you're good. But never mind that. The film proceeds to spend a lot of time on character building. We meet Toji and Kensuke again, see how their lives went in the past 14 years. Rei #6 learns human interactions and feelings from them. I'm not going to say that he got the idea after watching (or reading) Violet Evergarden because he first started working on this travesty of a film way back in 2014, but it does bear a striking resemblence. Just with less typewriters. Shinji meanwhile sulks around watching a colony of penguins and Asuka is the same as always, except she's shown to actually care a bit for Shinji, which she hides from Kensuke by saying she's not going to let him die while he still has his head up his arse. The movie hits a little snag here. The pacing has slowed, it has interesting character interactions and is actually entertaining, and we can't have that, so Asuka explains off-handedly to Rei #6 that they were all constructed to fulfill a purpse as EVA pilots, and that she only cares for Shinji because it was embedded in her. How much that actually is true for Shinji remains unexplained, but he is once called the boy provisionally called Shinji Ikari, suggesting that he too is just a construct, but Shinji was really Gendo's son - and Asuka once had a mother and a father too. Maybe the versions in this film are just (re)constructions. Shinji did merge with his EVA once, maybe Asuka did too. Must be a reason why she has a choker. Anyway, with the entire character development of our main characters (Misato isn't nearly enough in this to count as main character) thrown out of the window Rei #6 does the only sensible thing in light of the revelation and simply leaves the film by turning to goo. Fuyutsuki helpfully explains to the audience that Gendo is a bit of an ass. Misato and the Wunder show up to pick up Asuka, but Shinji decides to go with them. He has sulked enough after Kensuke explained to him that he's not the only one who suffers, and without Rei being around nothing anchors him to the village anyway. He is immediately put into quarantine in a little box with explosives that SHIELD originally came up with to contain inhumans or otherwise superpowered humans or aliens. Mari and Asuka are shown to have one of these two, except they've apparently gotten really close in the past 14 years. There are more shots of Mari's assets while she's hugging a clearly disinterested Asuka. Gendo meanwhile begins his endgame, moving the Black Moon thing to the site of the Second Impact. Misato moves to intercept. Asuka and Mari pay a visit to Shinji where Mari gets to sniff Shinji once more and tells him that he matures a little. Asuka asks Shinji why she wanted to smack him silly, and he tells her it was because he was indecisive. I have no real idea which scene this is referring to, because it can't really be the end of the last film, the scene at the beach of End of Evangelion or any of their other interactions. A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away maybe she could be talking about him not being allowed to help her with the mind rape encounter at the end of the original series, but that can't really be it either. Never mind, whatever. She probably means the end of the third film. She also tells him flat out she had a crush on him, but grew out of it. Uhm, girl, sure. Lie to yourself there all you want. You grew out of that crush in this film because you had 14 years to play with Mari because you were forbidden to interact with anyone else apparently, so that's pretty much all there is to it. End of Evangelion Asuka broke through her problems by touching Shinji's cheek while he was trying to kill her. For her, that statement might have been true, but for you it isn't. This entire scene is pointless. Mari is as obnoxious as ever and Asuka talks about things that never happened in the movie series. At best she competed with Rei for Shinji's affections becaus she wanted validation. The real Asuka really had feelings for Shinji, this mockery of a character doesn't, never had. But that's fine. Then we get another seizure inducing CGI action scene that reveals NERV actually has three functional Lexx type vessels and could have probably shot down WILLE at any time they wanted, but never bothered to because... hey actually, no idea. Because nobody thought about what happens in this film, and having four ships is cool, so four of them are duking it out while Asuka turns herself into an Angel by awakening fully, in order to stop Unit-13, which fails because haha once again all you did was do what you were supposed to. Because Asuka was designed for this very moment. Shinji then gets into Unit-01 that Cylops!Gendo, who this time around fused with the remains of Adam with no problem because there's no Rei #3 around to stop him, tore out of the Wunder. The ship, funnily enough, stays afloat or whatever it is they do without its main engine. It's fine, really. Please, don't look over your script, just film the first draft. This is where the films finally flies completely off the handle. Agent Smith and Neo enter the Matrix, where they battle each other to a standstill and start talking to each other. Gendo asks Neo why he persists, and Neo tells him: BECAUSE I CHOOSE TO, FATHER! Now let me be your shrink and tell me of your woes. Gendo does, while he walks up to the middle option to start the Synthesis ending to fuse all synthetical and biological life. Because we're out of ideas, we're also doing giant Rei again, except this time it's only her head, not a complete giant naked Rei. We get an army of headless naked CGI Reis instead. Agent Smith reveals that he's just the same as Neo and wants to return home to a feeling of being needed and loved. Misato and Ritsuko meanwhile conjure up a new Spear of Destiny out of thin air to end this nonesense in best Stephen King tradition. When out of ideas, just end it somehow. I guess it technically beats simply erasing the Crimson King, but only by a hair. They successfully reverse the polarity and send Mari with the new spear into the Matrix too. Shinji has a moment where he talks to the other pilot characters, similar to how the series "ended", and they leave. He talks some more to Kaworu who is stuck repeating the same nonsense in a time loop forever and ever because Hideaki Anno apparently wanted to demonstrate how he cannot escape a series he made 25 years ago. That's fair and I can understand some of his frustration, but it's still really bad form to take it out on us like that. Kaworu also talks to Ryoji for some reason that I don't even want to think about. Shinji meanwhile is now fully enlightend, having rejected or embraced his destiny, because since we don't know what the point of his existence was (Asuka and Rei were made to initiate "Another" Impact, who came up with the names here?). He becomes Homura, who takes away Madoka's goodhood and rewrites the universe (for @Bartimaeus that happens in the final film you never watched), removing all the EVAs and Evangelion as a whole from existence. I'm getting the feeling here that Mr. Anno really wants to be rid of that stuff. Fine, you know what, Mr. Anno? So do I. I never want to see this again. Embracing his fate, his mother shows up and pushes him away, killing herself and Agent Smith in the process (I think, at least), stopping Another Impact for good. Mari shows up. Right, wait, Mari went to talk to Fuyutsuki who calls her by her real name and gives her something prior to all of this. She picks up Shinji and they live happily ever after? I guess Asuka is implied to go back to Kensuke, which is fine. It sure beats her being implied to have ended up with Shinji, but that's the only positive thing I can say about it. Phew. What the everblazing hell. Please studios, before you throw money at a director and screenwriter, make sure he signs a contract to have his worked checked and revised by someone else. Preferably someone who understands that most of the time "less" is actually "more" and that you maybe should think about your ending before you write yourself into a corner and have to fix it with inventing a new Spear of Gaius to stop the Another Impact that's going on. However, that's not going to go away. This is incredibly highly rated by fans and was one of the most successful movies in Japan ever. Still, and as much as I hate this, it's probably the best out of the four, if only for the nice character moments, before taking a giant dump on them. In the end, this series took the worst of its precedessors of unrevised scripts. It feels like a first, rough draft, is overloaded with super useless philosophical wanking at the end (unlike End of Evangelion or the ending of the series, which borrowed heavily from philosophical concepts I find useless, but at least it worked and wasn't only intellectual masturbation of the David Lynch kind) and sure could have benefitted from Asuka showing up in real life and slapping Anno silly for even considering to film this. By the way, this is the Giga Shadow in Lexx: Yes, it's coming out of a moon that looks kind of blackish. Does that remind you of something? I'm not sure. Not sure at all. So, what are we going to do now? I think I'll go and read the Sailor Moon manga. That is equally ridiculously paced, and the next arc has BRACK RADY in it, but at least it will have Sailor Pluto in it, the only good thing in Sailor Moon Crystal. It sure beats Anno trolling me for watching his films. Sigh.

Oh look, Mari is here again, and we have another shot where she's sticking her ass out holding Asuka, followed by focus on her boobs while still holding Asuka, talking about if she's interested in cute boys at all. Oh my, Mari dear, don't tell me you're interested in some hot threesome action here. What a sizzling scene, I'm sure someone masturbated to that fantasy. Please just go away Mari, really. Not even Love Live! was that bad, and that included Nozomi rubbing everyone's boobs at least once. Except for Ericchi's, I think. Here, have some Love Live! music: There we go with the Shinji sniffing again. Rooftop, glasses, big boobs. Yeah. Sure Mari. Uhm, guys, don't be like Star Trek Discovery, the LaGrange points are a little further away from Earth than you think they are. And by "a little" I mean in the ballpark of a couple hundred thousand kilometers you dweebs. Yes, I've reached the point where I'm complaining about nothing at all. Very well done there, film. Well done indeed. NERV has a Lexx copy called "Erlösung" with "Opfer" type systems. What? Oh, and another one called Erbsünde. This keeps getting better and better. Halfway through, time for a break. I remember a time when NGE was a mech anime that deconstructed common mecha anime tropes and was mostly about the characters. Do you remember that too? Because his film certainly doesn't, and now that Mari's fighting with a laser whip and Asuka has the sawblade cleaver thing from Bloodborne, everything is... getting worse all the time. If this keeps up it'll be the first time my brain breaks enough to make me stop and never go back.

When Asuka says that they were designed with inhibitors in place to limit their potential and Rei's feelings were designed to include some feelings of care for her son (sort of), does that mean what I think it does? That literally every single piece of character development in this film, and the films before, what little there actually is, was completely worthless anyway? Great way to make me like this part, movie series. Really. Just when, for the first time ever, you're not abject moronic or outright terrible, you pull that out of your hat? Asuka keeps checking up on Shinji without him noticing and it's probably nothing but residual programming from Gendoh. Sure, fine. It's a pity I can't delete something from the Prime Video library. Go to hell. Die in a fire. I hope every disc containing this travesty of a film dies at the same time without anything left to reconstruct it.

So far Mari had more screen time in the opening of Thrice Upon A Time than in the other three combined. That's the strangest part about inserting an alien from P7S-441, if you do that, why not give her enough screen time to do anything interesting to warrant that inclusion, like, at all. This is how the Mari looks when she's not zapping the audience or the other characters with her telepathic* defense mechanism: So much for fanservice, right? Well, this is the one that cosplayed as Lt. Tyler, his name is Kaiael, and with a name like that he really fits right into Evangelion. Coming up with other sci-fi universe tie-ins is more fun than watching these films. The Madoka bit was a joke, but Rebuild being a retelling of NGE makes it all the worse for me. That's why I kept saying that I'm probably unfair in my "rating" of Clear Card. If I had never seen NGE but only these films, I'd probably still not like them, but at least I wouldn't sit here making fun of them at every turn, or actually having to turn them off to go do or watch something else in between because I can't take it any more. Having the name and the characters attached makes it so much worse, much like Star Trek: Discovery. Discovery might have been an OK sci-fi show (in its first season, not in the others, the other two aren't just bad Star Trek, but also super bad in everything), it's just such an utter failure as Star Trek that it ended up one of the worst watching experiences I've ever had. The same goes for Star Trek 2009, which arguably at least was fun, stupid sci-fi action schlock with decent actors and high production values. I guess... your time with Clear Card won't be as miserable as mine then. Heh. We'll see. No, actually, I really didn't. Mari isn't entirely wrong about it, though, because unlike the bit in Sailor Moon Crystal which reinforces terrible stereotypes of hysterical women made all the worse by her needing to be convinced by Mamoru that he desires her and not a nine year old girl after throwing a tantrum that was so immature that you can't possibly think she's capable of giving consent in any meaning of the term , Shinji would most likely really benefit from having a friend who isn't messed up, someone to show him that there's more to life. Not necessarily getting laid in the process, that's just hyperbole added because I really don't like Mari, and her suggestion is so incredibly stupid in the face of the reality of these films that I don't even know where to begin. Or is it really hyperbole? Mari's suggestion really is the NGE-esque equivalent of a rom-com scene where either the friends of the male lead or the friends of the female lead suggest to him/her to vent their frustrations by getting laid for a change. Gah. Mari if you want to help Shinji then do something about it. Or get the hell out of these films. Seriously. If yelling at him would work Asuka would have set him straight already. I mean, show-Asuka, not this travesty of an underdevloped girl stuck in a plug suit that's "too revealing" indeed. What a meta scene that turned out to be, because it really was revealing. The quality of this entire movie series. *Maybe I should mention that in Stargate, it's explained as a chemical influencing people's brains, but that doesn't make sense unless they specifically evolved to avoid humans, so telepathy it is for Mari, really. On the other hand, maybe that's why she sniffed Shinji, to come up with a better chemical mixture that makes everyone believe she's part of the team for no reason. Hmmm.