The Patreon Letter - 13th July, 2019 (catchup)

Hi everyone, Em here again once more trying to get these letters out at a reasonable cadence. Maaaaybe by the end of the month I'll be caught up? We can hope! Anyway, today I'm going to be talking about two specific Evangelion podcasts, the ones that the Waypoint crew did, and the ones that Dan and Bianca Ryckert did on their podcast Panning the Stream. If you want to check those out, you can find the Waypoint ones here and the Panning the Stream episode I'll be referencing most here. If you want to listen to me and Jackson talk about Eva and for some reason haven't, you can listen to that here. I know that's like 30 hours of podcasting to listen to, but hey at least it'll keep you busy.

With that, let's get into it.  

There's been a whole slate of Eva criticism coming out in the wake of its Netflix release, which has been an interesting time for someone like me with a long and fraught relationship with this classic anime. I was so worried that the Evangelion love-in I was sure was coming would be so intolerable, we shunted all Eva talk into a specific discord channel so I could mute it for my mental health. I'm not unwilling to listen to people talk about Eva, but something about the way it has been so glowingly canonized really sets me on edge, especially since I find huge parts of it actively unpleasant.

I was very surprised, then, to find that as the dust is settling that my extremely unpopular opinion that Evangelion is an ambitious, often entertaining mess that can't get over its problems with women to tell a worthwhile story has become something of a moderate opinion. Yes, the people who adored Eva are always going to adore Eva, but a huge swath of people approaching it for the first time in an era of Unlimited Anime(tm) and a greater awareness and vocabulary for speaking about ideology and gender violence have come out of the experience with a lot to say. Much of it, in the podcasts I linked above, is angry and confused (not by the meaning, but by why it exists in the first place) by Eva, especially the dual endings of 25&26 and End of Evangelion. 

Bianca's reaction on Panning the Stream to the end of the show is absolutely the most intense of these, a rejection of everything Anno is circling the drain of, one of the most pure and angry reactions to a piece of media I've ever seen. I know some people were very critical about how hostile she was on this episode, just around the internet water cooler, but I cannot begin to tell anyone without a media podcast how hard it is to be that honest with your emotions in front of a public listenership, how brave it is to be so vulnerable with something that is so emotionally loaded. 

The one time we were so agitated about the thing we were covering all we did was get mad at it, it killed our podcast (see the end of Discovery season 2 on Second Officer Slog). For me, for a lot of people I know, detachment is seen as part of the job. But it's a part of the job that can trick you into giving things a fairer shake than your gut might feel is appropriate. Bianca Ryckert, a hero, has no such compunction. She just tears into the last two episodes of Evangelion, and it's as glorious as any Asuka rampage could be to my podcast weary heart. 

On the other hand, you have the waypoint podcasts, where everyone comes in mad and Austin Walker does a herculean job of bringing them around to doing more than just yelling at the show for three hours because ... well, because they are professionals, dammit, and no matter how much they don't like it they're there to give it a fair shakedown. Which they do, but not without a lot of effort to push the conversation in constructive ways past the emotional response and into, and I use this knowing how loaded it is here, criticism. 

And all of that is valid and good. Even the people who like Evangelion a lot are valid and good. Whatever, I'm not here to judge the value of anyone's specific critiques one way or the other. The thing that's interesting to me is watching people approach something as lionized as Eva and just balk at the thing. It's very rare that you get such a huge spike in appraisal for something that was so beloved among a relatively small audience. And suddenly everyone's showing up and they don't care about the history of mecha, or about Anno's depressed predilections for psychotherapy, or the ways Japan is totally okay with some fan service that would be unthinkable in Western media. They finished Stranger Things, it's time to watch the big anime everyone's talking about. No wonder the responses are so strong. It's amazing they weren't stronger, but also normal people probably just bounced when it got weird and most of the twitter conversation was absorbed in talking about the new localization. 

But if we do believe in Eva's greatness (or at least its importance, if you're like me) then it can and should withstand the blows of new eyes on it not approaching it with proper reverence. You can absolutely brain genius your way into approaching all things exactly how they should be approached in perfection (say, by watching Gundam in order for ten years), but that's also not actually a reasonable request. Nobody demands you understand the 20 movies Tarantino pulls from to make Kill Bill, you just watch it and have your opinion about doing so. That's what art is. And it's incredible to see happen in real time, the conversation shift dramatically from it being near the top of any best anime of all time list to people on twitter or in podcasts clowning on its very real problems. 

Eva, after nearly 25 years, has been made mortal.

I think this is a beautiful thing. To me, one of the best things you can do when approaching old works is to take them in as earnestly as possible. Going in knowing it's The Big One, with expectations and people telling you context and all the rest? That's not earnest. It might be well intentioned, but this is exactly like every high school English class that overexplains every joke in Shakespeare until you just want to leap from a window. You're either going to enjoy it, or not, and no amount of explaining can bring you to that place of truth in your heart in the moment you take a thing in.

So I find myself a little wistful about Eva, now that the talk has settled down. Seeing many of my concerns about the gendered violence has been very validating to me. Seeing people dismiss the formal structure and presentation of 25 & 26 out of hand as some surrealist nonsense has been frustrating, because I think even time-crunched and confusing animation choices are still choices worthy of consideration when they burn past our expectations of cinema. I feel like in some ways people maybe didn't give it a fair shake, in others I feel like someone finally said the emperor has no clothes. 

I wish more people would go on to watch the rebuilds because they're fascinating, but I get the desire to wait until they're all done. Hopefully that's soon!

But I do think it's okay to react to Important Works with disdain. Almost everybody I know in my friend group hates Chinatown (y'know, beyond the Polanski thing), a movie regularly regarded as one of the best films. It doesn't speak to us, it doesn't have to, our reactions are valid. Many of my friends, myself included, love the Resident Evil movies, films that have been almost totally ignored outside of a slowly building cult movement that has responded to this weird and sprawling action franchise. You see the same thing in music, in games, in books, whatever. It's important to be honest about what you love and what you hate in equal measure, because taste is more than just preference it is in many ways a reflection of beliefs and identity. And that's cool. I think we should strive for more of this.

I also, deeply and truly, wish twitter had been around when Star Wars came back in the 90s. Then you would have seen some serious shit.

Until next time,

Em