What is the Neon Genesis Evangelion of literature?

unironically Infinite Jest

>>9681030
Murakami (the shit gook)

Ender's Game reminded me of NGE in a few ways. Both are sort of deconstructions of their genre as well, but I wouldn't consider either of them to be high literature or art of course

>>9681030
stop making this thread. you've been told clarke - childhood's end before. now away with you.

>>9681030
The main series is useless depressive shit for edgy teens that want to feel important because they watched cheap psychological drama
So everything written by a philosopher, Nietzsche in particular

>>9681030
Ok, I'm actually going to use this thread to discuss Evangelion and why I find it unsatisfying.

First, I'll divide up what it does into three categories (writing/character, plot/drama and psychological/symbolic), because this makes it easier to talk about the aspects I want to.

- Writing and character:
This is the first thing I'm bringing up because I feel it is actually the weakest aspect of the series, despite so much insistence otherwise. It's not bad compared to most anime in these regards, but most anime is woeful in these aspects and it's honestly just not that much better than average. Now, many will protest at me saying this, but I feel that's because they're confusing this aspect with one of the other, stronger aspects of the show (i.e. the psychological/symbolic, which I feel is actually misunderstood by large portions of the fan-base and actually not given the separate acknowledgement it deserves). For the most part, we actually receive fairly little insight into the running thought processes of the characters and how they might have come to the worldviews that they apparently have. Much of this is either underdeveloped or ambiguous, either (possibly) deliberately for effect, or because these details weren't actually thought out in great detail in the first place and later explanations were produced on the fly. The times when we do actually get to enter a character's head and see their thoughts directly are fairly blunt, repetitive and simplistically written, with the character generally just stating their issues to the camera without providing much insight that couldn't have been gained through other means. Otherwise, the ambiguity and convolutions of the plot as a whole greatly impinge on the viewers ability to empathize with the characters as individuals (rather than being background that provides a stage for characterization), as it's difficult to tell what many of them are actually thinking or planning, or why, in any given instance, and this despite the fact that direct access to their stream of thought processes is actually granted a fair number of times. If Eva can be considered a 'psychological' anime, it's not because of its writing or character development, but because of how its creator uses various effects to portray neurotic states of mind to the viewer, as opposed to simply how it is written.

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>>9681109
take it to /a/ please. they need more devoted people like you.

>>9681030
Kierkegaard

>>9681109
...

- Plot and drama

Now, as I mentioned before, many people correctly recognize how open to interpretation and full of ambiguity the overall plot of Eva is (though many fans actually, wrongly, think otherwise and claim that it really is possible to understand most things as long as you pay attention). This enormously impacts every other aspect of it. One of the major effects this has is that it causes most dramatic events to be reactionary, i.e. the characters who's actions we do have somewhat of an understating of have extremely little power and agency, while those which actually drive events (Seele, the angels/shito) are largely much more inscrutable, with actual explanation of their behavior being minor. This isn't strictly a bad thing in itself, as it's a deliberate choice of style, but it does mean that the kind of drama Evangelion portrays is extremely different from that of say, a classical tragedy, in which the bulk of attention is payed to characters with high levels of agency and their internal and interpersonal conflicts, so that we see how their choices drive the plot as their own understanding it built up ad made understood though poetic imagery. Eva mostly denies up this, and instead places the characters under stress mostly by having disasters pop up episode by episode and showing how they deal with them, while implying that there are deeply complicated background reasons for everything that happens, but never actually providing enough context to allow you to hone in on exactly what these are.

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>>9681109
What do you believe to be the true interpretations of the symbolism in the show?

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unironically the Bible. Evangelize.