My new car, what do you think?

 

I can't stop watching this

 

Old school clip of Leh from 2006, courtesy of IMV Films.

 

EDIT - Repost. God, I suck.

 

 

....the ****

 

It makes more sense if you've watched it a few times.

 

I assume that this is some kind of "weird Japanese cartoon that isn't cool unless you watch it with poorly-translated subtitles, where the whole plot fits into one sentence and somebody gets horribly raped by a tentacle monster" thing?

 

EoE is one of my favorites, but that menu is freaky.

I'm surprised how many EvaGeeks we have on this forum
Quite the opposite. Subtitles are great, dubbing is pretty good, too. No tentacle rape(ish). Well, the original did have some major flaws, but it's been redone a billion times since it become the world wide super phenomenon.

You've never watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, Joe? I know you've at least seen Cowboy Bebop.

This pretty much sums up Rebuild of Evangelion. The story is a total mind ****. But it's one of the most beautiful displays of animation I've ever seen. I have friends who want nothing to do with anime sit and gaze at the final fight scene of 1.11 because it's just unreal.

Here's the first 8 minutes of 1.11

 

Evageek checking in. Joe, I' really surprised that as a fan of science fiction you haven't watched it. It's quite the mindfucking.

 

It's really hard to explain just how deep people try to climb into this series. There are 100's if things to discuss about the series, most of which are hidden and subliminal. The character development is on another level.

ex.

 

Eva! One of my favorite series. Love the most recent remakes, 1.11, 2.22 and soon 3.33 (when I actually see it)

 

Sidebar: Cornbread Red.

Search for it on youtube.

Good stuff.

 

The author had a serious breakdown around episode 18. His girlfriend as she was dying in the hospital told him that he disgusted her. (sound familiar?) That's why it got so weird and was remade after he recovered a bit. The story is amazingly deep and can have many meanings.

Joe, just read a bit of the wiki page. I bet you'll be interested.

Also, best fight scene.

 

Whats funny is that there are a whole group of anime enthusiast who insist that Evangelion is just pretentious bullshit, with zero value and that everybody who likes it is just a pseudo-intellectual.

Those people are called haters.

I dont deny that some of the open ended allusions and imagery may have been included just because they are cool, without any particular meaning behind them. But, thats left up to interpretation just like a lot of art.

I once got in an epic argument with a group of these "haters" online (because I use my time wisely). They insisted Evangelion was total crap, while ~90% of them thought this was one of the best anime series of all time, and that I was a some sort of heartless sociopath for not liking it:

 

What is evangelion? Is that like, a nerd con or something?

 

A top-level Wiki search turned up over a dozen different entries. I gather that it's a franchise focusing principally on a cartoon about a group of angsty children who pilot giant, magical cyborgs to fight against a bunch of brightly colored angels with ambiguous motives who lack a clear back-story.






Don't misinterpret, I'm not just spewing random hate. To the contrary, this is one of those social phenomenon which I find to be quite fascinating to observe from a third-party perspective.

Full Disclosure: I'll admit to having been a huge fan of Æon Flux when it was in original syndication as a series of shorts on Liquid Television in the early 90s, though I completely lost interest when they turned it into a long-form serial with dialogue and continuity. (I am also a *huge* fan of "The Wall." You wanna talk about serious breakdowns? Animation director Gerald Scarfe damn near wound up in an institution towards the end of production on that one.) I was in college when the whole Anime trend was first starting to gain serious momentum in the mid-late 90s, and I honestly tried to get into it. But I found myself unable to sustain interest, finding the genre as a whole to be utterly lacking in either artistic merit (the quality of the animation being roughly on par with The Flintstones) or anything resembling serious character development. So I admit to approaching the topic in the preset-day with a certain prejudice.


In the present-day, however, I find it interesting to observe how different fandoms inter-relate with one another, and how, by and large, such interactions seem to be massively hostile while at the same time astoundingly hypocritical.


Posit the following highly over-simplified generalization:


On the one hand, you have Group A, who are fans of a cartoon about a bunch of brightly-colored fictional characters which exist in a magical fantasy world.

On the other hand, you have Group B, who are fans of a cartoon about a bunch of brightly-colored fictional characters which exist in a magical fantasy world.

Groups A and B both exhibit, to some degree or another, obsessive tendencies which trace their roots back to the original Trekkie culture of the late 60s / early 70s. This includes behaviors such as the collection of toys, the generation of fan-art and fan-fiction, engagement with topic-specific online forums, and occasional participation by a highly visible minority in communal activities such as ARGs, conventions which include activities such as cosplay, board/card gaming, etc.

As a broad generalization, some percentage of Group A tend to be highly vocal about their disdain for group B, using profane language and imagery to express their negative emotions. At the same time, some percentage of group B tends to project a public image which focuses principally on themes of "tolerance" and "love" in the context of genuine neo-sincerity (oppose: hipster / post-ironism), while freely expressing a certain emotional vulnerability which is to some degree consistent with the contemporary feminist ideal of the "enlightened man."

Groups A and B tend to be externally indistinguishable from a Nielsenized point of view. They are predominantly male, in their 20s or early 30s, largely college educated and employed in technical / professional fields.

The principal distinguishing factor between groups A and B is that, for group A, the brightly-colored fictional characters tend to be robots / cyborgs, whereas for group B, the brightly-colored fictional characters tend to be ponies / unicorns.

And yet the supply of hate / tribal cynicism which exists between these two seems to be essentially unbounded.


It's quite the social dynamic, isn't it?




(I think this is relevant. Not 100% certain- I'm judging mostly by keywords here.)




Also, I'm completely, 100% serious about Cornbread Red. They've done some seriously good ****. Short version: they're a band which does bluegrass covers of popular rock anthems. Here's their take on Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams:




Another good one is Iron Horse, which focuses more on the early Metal genre:

 

 

looks like my vette:

 

I don't get the anime fan culture. In college I watched some Dragonball Z* because some friends** were into it, and couldn't get past the fact that 60% of each episode was spent on close-up reaction shots of each character's face.



*I know that anime fans will object that Dragonball Z is not a good example of serious, artistic anime. I accept this criticism. I also watched Cowboy Bebop, which was better, but not so good that I have ever felt compelled to seek out more anime.

**These are the same friends with whom I created a Strike Force† clan whose tag was [CAG]. When asked by other players what this meant, we responded, "Clans are gay." Somehow, this is still funny to me. I suppose it was inevitable that I'd end up at mt.net.

†Strike Force was a mod for Unreal Tournament 99 that was conceptually similar to CounterStrike. We preferred it because the UT engine was better and the matches weren't filled with aimbots. Additionally, most of the online play was focused on team deathmatches rather than defusing a bomb and so on. The smaller, more dedicated community also meant there were far fewer angsty teenagers TKing everyone at the start of the round.