So OP your whole premise is that people who watch a show must agree that the "intended point" of the show is true. If someone saw the shows "point" as false there would be no reason to stop them from choosing a waifu from it.

honestly this thread stinks of self rightuous elitism.

Anno doesn't seem to care much about what others think of Eva, for all I've seen (unless, of course, they're mailing them death-threats and painting graffiti at the door of Gainax). Anyway, given the pic you've chosen, I think I may have an idea of where you're coming from (see my pic: does it sounds to you?); but still, you'd sure have to elaborate if you want to turn that part of the movie into not just a (self-)critique/frontal attack of Anno against the entire otaku lifestyle (and the very practice of cinema), but into a blunt contradiction with having a waifu... So I better ask you frontally:

- What was "the entire point of the show", according to you?
- What a waifu is, according to you? (just give the functional definition you used in this case)
- In what way does acknowledging that Eva message necesarily contradicts having a waifu?

Post edited on 6th Dec 2011, 12:55am

>What was "the entire point of the show",
according to you?
Its a commentary on what was happening in Japanese society at the time, people need to face their problems instead of running away.

>What a waifu is, according to you? (just give the functional definition you used in this case)
Its what the people on the waifu board talk about, unless its all an elaborate troll.

>In what way does acknowledging that Eva message necesarily contradicts having a waifu?
The problem is that having a waifu seems to involve giving up on real human relationships. However you can still admire a character and acknowledge the point of the show.

>>7561
That waifu definition was kind of a mechanistic one (like defining sc. method as what the scientist do on the lab, or temperature as what is measured by the thermometer), thus an uncompromised one and not very useful to adress the ethical problem you refered at the end...

Nevertheless, I do think you have a point: if the problem is human relationships, having a waifu as an act of rejecting them altogether to hide into an inner world of fiction, and based on a character from the very NGE series, apparently shows a poor understanding -or disagreement- with the ongoing discourse of the show. The thing is (and this what I personally think), the Eva discourse went even further than that, and so further conclusions (concerning the very functioning of human relationships, love and this waifu thing) can spring from it.

Even at the TV ending (and way more explicitely than in the movie), Anno wisely pointed out the general need for limits/boundaries to -indeed- define anything: there must be a restriction, a point of view, an unavoidable subjectiveness, to make anything even intelligible and useful for anyone's framed (and thus personal) purposes. In particular (and this is what the movie adresses the most), this makes us face the problem of what the real/objective world might be, wich can only be solved, sufficiently, by conceiving it as the very condition of possibility for subjectivess to even occur: the world/reality must be, at least, the common place for one and all the other minds/subjects to co-exist AS SEPARATE BEINGS, each one confined into their own (AT Fields, final individuality or) dreammy/delusional viewings of the otherness, and ultimately unable to truly reach (objectively) anything or anyone else...

And that, Anno tells us, is the very initial cause of eventual and unvoidable failure in all human relationships; for in the world, by construction, we simply can't ever reach someone, let alone unite/become one with that person; wich left me, at least, with the personal conclusion that the only honest way to experience love, or being with your actual beloved one, is when it's made absolutely explicit that it is nothing but a fabrication in one's head, wich trully exists, as one conceives it and loves it, only in one's head... v.gr. as it happens with a waifu: a character emerged exclusively from the falsehood of art and imagination, where such ideas as love and soulmates really belong to; a relatioship with nothing more than just a part of one's inner self: voilà the only way, in coherence with NGE, in wich we can truly unite with anyone (other than by the unwanted, for unintelligible and senseless, sea of LCL). So, you see, rather than runing way from the problem, I faced it and I'm living in accordance whith the closest I could grasp to a solution for it, even if the consequences are uncertain and likely painful; just like Shinji did, actually, at the very end, by choosing to let the world be what he had done of it: to be true to himself, by remaining (what he has made of) himself.

NGE, I think, was indeed stronger than just adressing posmodern japan or global/occidentalized society's specific/existenciary problems; it reached the point of adressing ontological/existencial problems: of existence in general, where all questions are hard and no answers can be called ultimate; while, at the same time, it also dared offering a crude but honest ethical aproach to those questions... namely:

What is the initial source of all conflict and failure throughout our lives?
Why do we even experience doubts and problems at all?
Why do we even fail, or conceive failure in us, at all?
Why are we even here?
Why am I even here?
Who am I?
...

>Anno would be ashamed.

Putting it that way would imply that Anno understood 'the entire point of the show'.
I wish people would finally start admitting that Anno has no idea what he's doing.

I think OP has understood whole waifu thing wrong.

>>7568

This. EVA was not deep, it was just full of pretensions.

It's not a bad show, but it's not exceptionally deep or anything. It's just very obvious observations done on some very elementary philosophical problems.

>>7567
Thats an interesting essay bro. I'm glad this thread didnt get deleted.

I think the fact that everyone in reality is doomed to see others through their own fucked up lens is what makes life so interesting! and it doesnt mean nothing good can come of real relationships.

>>7568
>>7570

If you could see already that any work of art it's just a semantic landmark/aperture, wich only gets "completed" in the personal interpretation (and thus re-creation) of each receptor (done by the means of his own previously incorporated references), maybe you'd realize all you're really asking for is that others wouldn't be a better public, who come with richer interpretations than you did.

>It's just very obvious observations done on some very elementary philosophical problems.
Show how they're obvious to what criteria and name which those problems are.

I don't think anybody cares what Anno thinks.

>>7574

>If you could see already that any work of art it's just a semantic landmark/aperture, wich only gets "completed" in the personal interpretation (and thus re-creation) of each receptor (done by the means of his own previously incorporated references), maybe you'd realize all you're really asking for is that others wouldn't be a better public, who come with richer interpretations than you did.

I don't think you get it. What we're saying is that Anno just did something and that's about it. To me Eva has no inherent meaning. It just so happened that a lot of people flocked to it, came up with interpretations (some of which I believe to be outright ridiculous but that's a different matter altogether) and claimed Anno is a genius, even though he himself would probably laugh at the interpretations.

Oh, and just for the record, I'd place Eva somewhere in my Top 20 anime, so I obviously do like the show, just not for the reasons most people seem to like it (for more info see >>7000).

In a way I agree with you, though. Providing people with thought provoking material is a tough task and as such Eva sort of succeeds. But if that's how you look at it Utena would probably be 10 times as good. On top of that,
Ikuhara said all the interpretations of the show are right. Whether he meant exactly that or just wanted wanted to say that you absolutely can't come up with a 'wrong' interpretation is debatable. Either way I respect him for saying that.

I'm getting completely off topic here but because of what I've written earlier I believe that the 'what did the author want to say' bullshit is the most retarded thing they teach in schools. Not only does it neglect perfectly valid interpretations, it also strips kids of the every last speck creative thinking within them and teaches them to do things 'the right way' (then again based on my experience that's exactly what schools are for so maybe they accomplish their goals).
Fun fact: a poem by a Nobel Prize winning poet was included in one of national exams over here. Your task was to interpret it (duh). You ask what's funny about it? The poet in question later stated that she disagrees with the interpretation. Hilarity ensued.

>>7556
Okay, so I've looked through the replies, and most of them seem to deal with the artistic interpretations of the show itself. That's cool, but if your goal is to contradict the OP, I'd say there are easier ways to do so - say by pointing out a certain fallacy in his statement which concerns neither art nor NGE. Allow me to attempt:
Abstraction. Abstraction is a useful tool to abstract certain points from a body of meaning. That's how people get by without knowing the truth of everything. A waifu is abstracted from any kind of 2D media. So tell me this, OP: if a person can abstract a waifu through an entire dimension, what makes you think the puny premises of the given media to be any more of an obstacle?

EXAMPLE TIEM!!
Show T is an anti-escapist anime, and character X advocates anti-escapist notions. "Hey", Mr. Otaku rudely intervened, "I think character X is awfully cute, I'll make her my waifu and call her a tsundere (the show is probably a satire anyway)!" Then they lived happily ever after.
LE END

>>7838
>Abstraction. Abstraction is a useful tool to abstract...
You seem to have mixed up definiendo (what you meant to define) and definiens (the terms to define it with). You'd have to find another way to present what abstraction shall mean in this case; wich seems to be, actually, something close to decontextualization/interpretation, but I'm not sure of anything myself anymore...

>>7839
I suppose decontextualize works, but I'll throw in my working definitions of to abstract (verb) and abstraction (noun):
Abstraction is a work process where you isolate technical, practical and theoretical aspects and properties of complex systems, so to be able to work effectively with a specific task/problem belonging to infinitely complex and compounded systems; all relative to the subject's role and goal in his or her interaction with the given system.

The most common uses of abstraction relates to a) the opposite of concrete/practical b) general ideas, and c) removal. The latter alternative is most related to this context. For more information on the use if this term, see the entry in wikipedia. The most interesting topic in this entry is 'Abstraction in computer science'.

I hope this clarifies the confusion. What definitions of the word were you familiar with?

>>7840
>What definitions of the word were you familiar with?

Mostly, due to my own background (mathematics, science), maybe to what you refered as:

>isolate technical, practical and theoretical aspects and properties of complex systems, so to be able to work effectively with a specific task/problem belonging to infinitely complex and compounded systems... b) general ideas

...that is: to render, from a given number of different cases of a given phenomena, a sort of unified concept to henceforward work with instead, inside a constructed model of said phenomena, oftently to postulate general laws of its functioning. As scientific as you want this to be, outside mathematics (wich deal with pure metaphysical entities) this is indeed a metaphorical/aesthetic process: to pretend making universal propositions about a world that provenly surpases our posibilities to signify it correctly, it's not protected as much by logic as by mere practical convenience.

>>7842
Your understanding of the term really do sound spot on. The power of this tool lies within the breadth of its applications. From pure science to a layman's understanding of things.

ever hear of cognitive dissonance?

>>7869
No... but just wikied and sounds worthy of consideration. I'd welcome any thoughts of you about it, here (thought I'm not OP) or elsewhere.

>>7873
Actually I am the OP.
This part is funny:
>A classical illustration of cognitive dissonance is expressed in the fable The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (ca. 620–564 BCE). In the story, a fox sees some high-hanging grapes and wishes to eat them. When the fox is unable to think of a way to reach them, he decides that the grapes are probably not worth eating, with the justification the grapes probably are not ripe or that they are sour (hence "sour grapes"). This example follows a pattern: one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces one's dissonance by criticizing it.

But my main idea was just about people holding contradictory points of view, and how common it is.

>>7874
>one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces one's dissonance by criticizing it.

Probably the story of my life (mundane and all).

A friend from Japan told me to just ignore Anno; as he just acts as a pseudo-intellectual to call attention.

>>7883
you don't need to be japanese to see that

You all treat this show like it's some deep shit. It isn't. Here's evangelion in it's simplest form.

3, hurt, fucked up kids are made to pilot gigantic cyborg-like angels to prevent the world from 2012ing. The faggot is too scared to do anything. The redhead tries but is eaten by mass produced mutant angels, and the blue haired one didn't give a shit and ended up fucking everyone up in the end, except for her two only semi-friends, Shinji and Asuka.

It's that simple. Nothing more. And i don't love Asuka because lol Evangelion. I love her because she's Asuka, and she's the strongest person I've ever known. 2D or 3D.

>>7890
You should probably put some of that in spoiler tags.

I've heard of people interpreting NGE in a DEEP way, but I thought the extent to which people went was just a joke. C'mon, guys. This is a cartoon made by a guy who was going through some things, not a discourse on existentialism by your favorite philosopher. Anno just threw together a hodgepodge of symbols and metaphors from systems of thought that he didn't fully understand (like why in the world is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life included). Although this thread is interesting.

>>7890

The Sistine Chapel's ceiling is just a shitload of partial or total warrior-muscular n00ds (both dudes and girls, because the author had some issues), doing some fairy tales stuff that superstitious people actually believe. It's just that simple, really, nothing more.

I sometimes wish people stop saying pseudo-intellectual crap about it... using big words like "cangianti" to name something as simple as the author's changing of color when he painted this Jonah dude's shirt (and why it wasn't the same than painting some weird variety of silk or whatever). These guys just love to overthink it; they're just pretentious big mouted assholes who want to pass by as knowledgeable; they don't really have a substantial point to convey, as neither have that blody ceiling. Things are way easier than what they keep telling.

>>7896
>why in the world is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life included

For a similar reason than Adam and Lilith, I guess: rather than from the christian Bible, as people keep saying, Evangelion main mythological characters and references come from The Zohar (Esther Cohen has some very good analytical/philological essays about this text, wich could help you to grasp the probable references for some NGE ethical points of view... if you were interested, of course).

Post edited on 23rd Dec 2011, 5:44pm

  I NEED this phone!

http://phandroid.com/2012/04/03/sharps-android-based-evangelion-phone-pictured-sh-06d-nerv-is-a-fanboys-dream-come-true/

>>9187
And, of course, it's a Japan exclusive. No phone for us dirty foreigners.

>>9189
It'd be nice to see it at work, at least. someday soon, I guess.

>>9189
They get all the cool cellphones...

I can only guess because western cellphone consumers hate variety, and are happy having the same phone as everyone else, like when everyone had a razor, now everyone has a iPhone.

>>9195
>They get all the cool cellphones
Yeah, but it's way too much: according with Vu du ciel, in Japan there comes a new cellphone model EVERY 4th DAY (as the needed coltan keeps being consumed and ruining the Congo).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFXRE5XRsfg

>>9199
What world will come to an end first? Eva-Rebuild's, Sadamoto's manga or ours?
Place your bets.

>>9212

>Sadamoto's manga

You don't honestly believe he'll finish it before keeling over, right?

>>9218
There were rumors about the Stage 90 possibly concluding (or being near to concluding) volume 3 and the series. But I already read Stage 91 (in Spanish; curiously enough, can't find it in english) and... well, I think he might need to reach a 100th Stage to finish it properly. He's just starting pre-instrumentality, right now.

Post edited on 5th Apr 2012, 10:33am