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Comment by _peeley | Hacker News Reader

Word of warning to anyone that might give Neon Genesis Evangelion a watch after seeing this - a lot of people include it in the "mecha" genre but if you're looking for a light-hearted, Saturday-morning, big-robots-punching-each-other kind of experience that's definitely not what Evangelion is.

It certainly includes big robots as a plot point, but that's really just a backdrop for the character drama and deeper (and pretty heavy at times) emotional themes of the story. Things get very avant-garde towards the end, and the studio producing the series basically ran out of money to animate the last few episodes so you'll have to jump between the movie adaptations if you want a complete experience. I'd still probably recommend at least giving it a try sometime, as it's personally one of my favorite anime series and a landmark work in the medium as a whole.

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Also, watch the original series.

The remake is sorely deficient in both cicadas and power line hum.

I'm pretty adamant that the unconventional TV ending was not due to a lack of budget, but rather from the messy production schedule. Anno did something similar with his earlier Gunbuster, where the final episode is monochrome and the action scenes are just pans and zooms of still frames.

To be very specific: if you’re not comfortable with implied teenage suicide and incest, give the show a pass.

Also, it’s very confusing at the end, for the reasons mentioned above.

Confusing isn't really the term I'd use, I think complex probably fits better. It is incredibly dense and there is a lot to take in. I can understand why its reputation is controversial. Among friends I know who I've recommended it to there's roughly a 50/50 split between people who love it and people who can't stand it so it is a fairly divisive work.

I saw the series when I was a teenager it first aired on Australian television (SBS) in late 90's it had a profound impact on me growing up. I'd never seen anything like it before then and it absolutely blew me away.

I personally think the whole series in an absolute masterwork. I do agree with the original commenter though it is kind of an outlier amongst mecha genre.

Looking at Anno's influences, it really draws upon a hodgepodge of non-mecha media like tokusatsu and sci-fi to the point where the inclusion of robots seems like a marketing pull. Interestingly, the Evas are are rarely, if ever, referred to as "robots." They're officially classified as 人造人間, "artificial humanoids," which is apparently what robot-like things were called before Čapek invented the word.

In an odd way, it's the same lightning-in-a-bottle formula that made the Golden Era of The Simpsons so endearing: a deconstruction of a worn-out formula coupled with shameless-yet-tasteful references to other media.

They really are artificial humanoids (less artificial and more humanoid than most characters and most viewers would like), with enough additional inanimate components to obtain enough of a giant mecha "look and feel" to cause a wrong first impression. But let's avoid excessive spoilers, since the nature of EVAs is a major plot issue.

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