- Joined
- Oct 13, 2020
Hideaki Anno created Evangelion, the one anime that teeters between true epic and navel-gazing bullshit. Depending on who you ask, it is the pinnacle of anime storytelling or a clusterfuck with no rhyme or reason. But one thing one must give to Anno is that he made his work, well, work, and often at great prices.The fuck does "the last impossible hope of redeeming a generation of Japanese genre fiction" even mean? Are those power rangers type of shows problematic now or something?
As it turns out, Anno wasn't even intending to create something genre-defying. He simply wanted cool shit in his mecha animu (Crucifix-shaped explosions! Sephiroth tree patterns! Hebrew names galore!) with the occasional different things, like a reluctant kid as a hero in counter-balance to the usually hot-blooded mecha protagonists, and exploiting the extent of the physical and emotional damage caused by letting teenagers carry the brunt of battling world-threatening creatures, and that had the collateral of most blue-curtain analysts like the humanoid wombat here creaming themselves over it, and hailing/decrying him as a result.
In these particular screenshots, we can see Anno being his true self, a bit of a sperg who still loves his tokusatsu and is not ashamed of showing it, even mingling with its true target demographic over it. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Anno could pull it out because of his earned fame. Bob wishes he could talk about media aimed at children with other kids, and not be seen as a creep about it, and also wishes he could have enough clout to be seen as a genre-defying creator and overnight mediatic sensation, which is one of the reasons he's breaking into praise for the man. Kind of like what he usually does for James Gunn and Kevin Feige.
Mind you, back in the day Evangelion almost broke Anno both mentally and financially. The riches came gradually as the work gained more and more notoriety, and the man himself had quite a rough time picking himself up from the clinical depression he fell down into. I don't think the lardball would like it to receive death threats over how he handled his own works, or see the vision he had for them go up in smoke because it ended gobbling down all the intended budget and then some. It took decades for Anno to finally write down Evangelion the way he intended it through the Rebuilds, thanks to a mix of Evangelion becoming quite the household name all over the world, and thanks to him finally working out his mental issues.
TL;DR: Bob wishes he could be Hideaki Anno, but he has neither the passion, the vision or the mental fortitude to be like him. Also, he most likely never watched a single episode and only knows the memes. Get in the robot, etc.
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