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Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

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Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#21

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

rolltiide wrote: post #18
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGE asked a lot of interesting questions about the nature of reality and humanity’s relationship to itself, but I think it intentionally left the answers up to the audience’s interpretation. Not a bad way to go, but personally I felt was unsatisfying because I was a bit spoiled in having first seen Gurren Lagann, which I felt was far more concrete about the message it was trying to convey, and definitively answered o…

Gurren Lagann goes way off the rails in the last few episodes too. I enjoyed that as well. Never thought of it spoiling anyone from enjoying a trendsetting predecessor.

TTGL definitely gets whacky plotwise in the last few episodes but I don’t think it ever lost focus on its central themes at any point.

From all the buzz I’d heard from friends and on the internet about NGE, I was ready to be bawling by the end with a tsunami of emotion. Not that it’s without precedent: TTGL, Kill La Kill, and Darling in the FranXX, to give some examples, have had me (and my partner) in tears at several points. And yet at the end of NGE (both the series and EoE) I just sat there like “...ok, that was interesting. Lots to ponder over. Also...what?”

I read through the wiki and thought a lot about the plot and themes afterwards, but it didn’t really speak to me on an emotional level. Maybe it was just me.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#22

Post by anthony_doan »

EamonnMR wrote: post #19

I ('m apparently the last person in the world who) just watched this show for the first time recently. It had its cool moments and was an overall positive experience, but the reliance on outdated (even then) freudian ideas hurts it a bit. Not to mention the slideshows.

It was ahead of its time and was during the golden era of anime.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#23

Post by gwern »

Paul_S wrote: post #12

Or maybe, just like all the symbolism, it was chosen at random because it looked cool. More work went into this analyses than the original font selection process.

That's sort of how art works, though. You hone your sensibility as an artist, and then you 'know it when you see it'. Anno et al looked at the fonts, and they saw it was good. Explaining why it's good is quite another thing altogether. Artists are always being surprised by how things 'click' or how the viewer notices patterns the artists weren't even (consciously) aware of putting in. (And to a certain degree, if you could adequately explain and convey it in words, why would you bother with the art in the first place?)

I've been using NNs to generate poems and Irish music lately based on pairwise comparison of poems/music (based on https://openai.com/blog/fine-tuning-gpt-2/ ), and it's definitely striking how fast I can make the evaluation of which one is better, but then how long it would take to reread or relisten to them and verbalize what exactly made one better than the other.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#24

Post by throwaway66920 »

rolltiide wrote: post #4

Typography is such an art I watched End of Evangelion for the first time in 15 years Still entertaining, great animation that stands the test of time, but wow I wish I can go tell my teenage self that it actually doesnt make sense, the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it and everyone had a good time making it

The use of Christian symbolism as nothing more than an aesthetic is somewhat common is Japanese fiction. I wouldn’t say it made no sense though.

The bad guys say humanity is fundamentally incapable of opening up to each other. Shinji proves that it can be done and is worth pursuing, although it is fundamentally difficult. He discovers acceptance of himself through his connections with his peers. He acknowledges that everyone must go through life at a pace they don’t get to choose, and that the inevitably of death doesn’t erase the meaning of existence.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#25

Post by throwaway66920 »

One thing I love about anime is that when the authors really want to drive home a thematic concept they throw in these humble observations about the human condition and demonstrate it in the most absurd contexts.

Evangelion does this. I would highly recommend Mob Psycho 100 for this as well (by the one punch man guy, and similar but not sarcastic)

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#26

Post by stefco_ »

EamonnMR wrote: post #19

I ('m apparently the last person in the world who) just watched this show for the first time recently. It had its cool moments and was an overall positive experience, but the reliance on outdated (even then) freudian ideas hurts it a bit. Not to mention the slideshows.

I think that if you read it symbolically it doesn't really matter whether the psychological model is inaccurate. This is why literary critics still use Freud in discussions. It's not about whether the model is accurate; the point is that these symbols provide a set of archetypes that we can then relate other things to. Freudian stuff in art criticism (when used well) is more of a shared vocabulary for discussing things than a reductive framework.

Not sure if that's your gripe. I used to dislike Freudian language/themes for a similar reason but realize now that I was taking it more literally than I now do.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#27

Post by antisemiotic »

rolltiide wrote: post #4

Typography is such an art I watched End of Evangelion for the first time in 15 years Still entertaining, great animation that stands the test of time, but wow I wish I can go tell my teenage self that it actually doesnt make sense, the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it and everyone had a good time making it

>writers eventually admit

Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about or lord and saviour, Death of the Author?

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#28

Post by empath75 »

Paul_S wrote: post #12

Or maybe, just like all the symbolism, it was chosen at random because it looked cool. More work went into this analyses than the original font selection process.

It probably wasn’t chose at _random_ even if there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into it. It was still an artistic decision.

When I used to DJ a lot, I would go to the record store and listen to dozens of records over the course of an hour or two and buy a handful of them. If you asked me in the store why I bought them, I might just say, because I liked it. Sometimes I had only listened to 30 seconds of it and that was enough.

But ‘I liked it’ hides a lot of inputs. I might have liked it because it reminded me of another song I liked, or because it had a key change that felt emotional or it had a beat that fit in with another record I liked, and if you asked me to dig into my reasoning for any of them at length, I could have probably come up with a few aspects that fed into why I bought it. In most cases they’re just post hoc rationalizations because when you’re digging through all the new releases you don’t have time to think of that stuff, but that doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate explanations.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#30

Post by Itaxpica »

rolltiide wrote: post #4

Typography is such an art I watched End of Evangelion for the first time in 15 years Still entertaining, great animation that stands the test of time, but wow I wish I can go tell my teenage self that it actually doesnt make sense, the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it and everyone had a good time making it

Much of the Christian symbolism is just there for the sake of aesthetics, but this is less so true for the Jewish (and especially Kabbalistic) imagery - there's actually a lot of overlap between the plot of Evangelion and themes from Lurianic Kabbalah (especially the notion of the ein sof and the traditional interpretation of tikkun olam, which is reflected in the Human Instrumentality Project), so the visual/aesthetic nods to it are a nice touch.
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