Neon Genesis Evangelion

Today I’m starting a new feature which will deal with the worst of the worst of troll groups in anime fandom. The terms fanboy and troll are often used to describe devotees of a certain series, so I have decided for the sake of clarity to merge the two terms into new single one; fantroll. The definition of fantroll is a extremely devoted fanatic of a certain series or franchise to the point of delusion and who directs hatred towards fans of other series or franchises because they do not share the mindless devotion of the fantroll to the given series or franchise. For the inaugural entry I thought it would be most appropriate to start with the single greatest example of the fantroll; the Eva fantroll.

I had been aware of Neon Genesis Evangelion for some time, hearing all kinds of things about it, and when one of my friends lent me her copy of the show in 2005 and  I sat down and watched it. My thoughts on the show at the time was that it was a average mech show. This was before I slowly become aware of the phenomena that is the holy status that some percentage of the Eva fandom hold the show in.  As I heard more of ravings of the Eva fantrolls about how it was “the greatest anime of all time” (You can thank ADV for starting that nonsense), my enjoyment and opinion of the show went down considerably. Before I go into the things the hardcore fans of this show rant and rave about, I just want to be clear I do like this show.

Now I’m going to pick apart the show, and discuss some of the outlandish and outrageous claims that the fantrolls make about Eva. One of the most often cited aspects of this show is the use of Christian imagery and icons. While its a interesting element of the series, fans often read more into it then there is actually there. They forget that its a show made for a Japanese audience, and the presence of Christian symbols its just a weird novelty to the creators and not some  deep, intertwined, and complex plot element.  Moving on to the most annoying part of Eva; Shinji Ikari. Boy do the fantrolls even like to hype up Shinji , I once had someone claim to me that he was the greatest character in all of anime, wow that’s arrogance lol. Someone also wrote into Gundamn’s mailbag with badly butchered grammar and made a similar claim, but went a step further by saying that Shinji was the reason people watch mecha anime.   Honestly, are you that caught up in your worship of this mediocre series that your so delusional and pretentious to try to say this guy is the single most influential character in the history of anime? I could probably think of a 100 characters that have had more of an influence on anime.Char Aznable and Lynn Minmay are just two off the top of my head, who have had much more of an impact on Japanse culture and anime than him.  Shinji did nothing at all during the series to warrant being called iconic, in fact he’s just like almost every other mech lead character in recent memory. Another annoying aspect present in Eva is the disposable enemies that appear almost every episode for the first half of the show, this is also known as the monster of the week cliche.  This gets old fast and really saps my enjoyment of the show during the first half. The constant remakes of Eva are also extremely annoying which serve just to devalue the series and are just a cheap way for Gainax to make money off the mindless cult that worships the series as the second coming.

What all this adds up to is a symptom of a larger ailment in the Western fandom that has to do with what shows are considered the greatest by Western fans. A lot of fans in the West only see a very limited amount of anime series from Japan and there is a tendency to automatically declare these series the best there is. When they find out about other shows they tend discount these shows and go on believing that what they hold dear is the greatest without evaluating the merits of the other shows, its cognitive dissidence at its finest.

Well that’s all for this post, I’m considering what group to profile next. It was suggested to me to talk about the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom so I might do them next.

Until next time,

Devil_Survivor