[EVA] Gender analysis in the series, vis a vis Asuka and Misato

[V V]

.............when the Lord of the Rings live-action movies were being made, there were "experts" like Tom Shippey and Karen Wynn Fonstad who had been writing "guide to LOTR" books for years, about Tolkien's works.

.......if/when Weta gets to make a live-action Eva project, and they ask, "hey, fans usually make their own freelance guides to the series long in advance, do you guys have any?".....are you seriously going to start telling them about ReDo?

What if they were to ask more basic questions, i.e. "what is Rei, what is Instrumentality" etc. etc.  And what's you've been doing all this time, is making fanfiction which is so divergent from the source material that it in no way is a reflection upon it?

"I'm having fun" is what the hippie-fans said for LOTR.

For the record....I dont' "have fun" sitting through self-serving poorly written fanfiction and waiting, on a scale of years, for *someone* to finally get some answers about this show.  I don't have "fun" waiting for Eva Commentaries or Eva Guides or Eva fanscripts that NEVER get finished.

I realize that people who write fanfic "have fun" doing it, but they seem to have lost the ability to guage that "do people even like the fanfic I'm writing?"  

If I wanted to read Eva fanfiction I would have gone to fanfiction.net.

Instead, I came looking for, specifically, "answers about the series" and instead, people shoved fanfiction at me.  

And I'm not the only one that thinks this way.

--- On Sun, 12/13/09, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [EVA] Gender analysis in the series, vis a vis Asuka and Misato
To: "The english-language evangelion mailing list." <evangelion at eva.onegeek.org>
Date: Sunday, December 13, 2009, 12:33 AM

On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 4:02 PM, V V <frumious99 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The funny this is, you guys dump on "Angelic Days" for being the same mawkish, self-serving, self-medication style narrative that "ReDo" is, you just prefer that one because it was fan made and thus in some warped capacity, "one of us".
>
> Let me get this straight, the defense was "We made a version with all the hardcore sex scenes cut out!"...riiiiight.  Imagine if we said the same thing about a show airing on TV or something;

To quote (myself) from Wikipedia
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Anime_and_manga/Evangelion&diff=prev&oldid=328316024
:

     "You exaggerate the sex scenes - quickly looking through, I count
~20 pages containing any sex, out of 660 pages. 3% is 'numerous sex
scenes'? If so, I guess there are numerous R-rated movies that need to
be bumped up into NC-17..."

> look, regardless of the porn scenes, I would oppose it, because it's just....telling fans what they want to hear, with a self-serving "happy" story.

An ending which comes after horrible struggle and growth on Shinji's part.

     "The plot is fine to me. It's much more comprehensible than TV or
EoE, and works much better on the inspiration level, and actually
takes the other-worlds plot device from TV seriously. You complain
about the happy ending? Well, 'no one dies' in EoE too, if by no one
dies you mean Shinji & Asuka don't bite the bullet. The Shinji at the
end of RT is a Shinji that deserves to live, not merely a Shinji that
doesn't deserve to die; a difficult and impressive transmutation,
IMO."

> Why do you oppose Angelic Days, yet support that?

Bad art. Dull plot. Unsatisfying ending. All characters OOC for the
entire work, as opposed to only occasionally for Re-Take or at least
confined to only a few characters like Gendo & Rei. In every respect,
Re-Take was better.

> Logical counterpoint:  Anno grew so disgusted with the endless merchandising of Eva, the thousands of naked Asuka and Rei statuettes, that he put in the opening scene of End of Eva (not the whole thing just the first scene) as sort of a "this is what you fanboys are really like, you ignored our character study and just made a ton of porn" thing.

Ah, yes, the merchandising authorized by Anno, and sometimes created
by him. (The Addition audiodrama?) Yes, Gainax has long taken a
principled stand against any mixture of shilling & pandering & art.

As for your EoE point, you've heard as well as me that EoE was in
planning even as the TV was ending, before the merchandizing and
fan-wanking you postulate as warping Anno into a Revenge scenario.
Want to prove that the masturbation was not there until well after the
TV ending? Or do you no longer deal in facts and truck only in crazy
theories? 'Vean VcVoy' doesn't alliterate too badly...

-- 
gwern
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