like people really underestimate how darksided nge’s fandom is
on one hand you have the pretentious evageeks-type neckbeards who have systematically asphyxiated even the slightest insinuation of gay text/subtext by deliberately mistranslating the show’s subtitles and supplementary material, withholding key interviews, and recontextualizing the narrative to make it more agreeable to their tastes while parading around as ‘experts’ (evageeks/4chan) or whatever; all of this being exacerbated by their misogyny, by their ableism, by their homophobia and gross sexualization and objectification of the eva girls
but on the other hand you have the people exclusively fixating all their interest/discussion on the boys and paying the shallowest of lip service to the girls, where fandom love for kaworu+shinji generates tons of meta/cool passionate discussion but asuka+rei+misato get squat except for some cute n easy fanart/gifs with empty tags like “queen!/princess!!/badass lady!!!” attached, where rei only gets worthy mention as a footnote in kaworu-origin discussions, where an assbackwards misogynist sentiment like “asuka abused shinji because she forced him to snap/sexualize her/assault her/etc” is actually something that’s popularly expressed around here. because shinji ikari defense squad, right!? right
and it’s funny, because either way the girls/women of evangelion still lose out. one way or another nge fandom stays idolizing boy’s emotions+narratives at the expense of girl’s narratives/pain/complexity, which is really ironic given that the source material, you know, deals with girls/women navigating male-dominated spaces and being punished for their girlhood/womanhood, and a boy mc navigating male-dominated spaces and being punished for his perceived effeminacy while also taking his frustrations out on girls because of scarydeep internalized misogyny. life imitates art i guess
Thank you. I feel every single word you put here. Now that nge is getting more attention than usual due to the anniversary, a part of the fandom that honestly shouldn’t have showed up is active again and literally all I’m able to see is waifu/best girl competitions that coverge in actual wars. On a fb page they were insulting each other over the “best ass” and a person got shit tons of likes because he pretty much said that Asuka was fuckable the most when was self-hating and depressed. Not to mention the homophobia that explodes on your face when you dare to mention (canon) kawoshin. In short, it’s all reduced to shipping and self-insertion. And I am there like, what did you understand of this show, plot and pseudo-scientific aspects aside? Anno clearly tried to communicate something related also to you… About communication, respect, duty, love, and humanity in general. Where were you? What did you watch? If you got it, why are you dehumanizing the women of the show? The primary reason why I’m here appreciating your blog, @qmisato, is because you talk about chatacterization, relationships in depth and, above all, you talk about the ADULTS of the show. People tend to dismiss them all because with them people don’t do self-inserting (even if we know they’re not much different from the children) and don’t care about their characters at all. When they care, they care only about exterior (you know what I mean) and superficial aspects of their characters. There’s plenty of people out there who genuinely believes that Misato is a pedophile, Kaji is a womanizer and Gendo hates Shinji. Just to say.
