alright new show thread

finished ep1 at lunch, the 6-year gap between the making of 0079 and zeta really shows, the animation is no longer nearly as wonky and the rendering on basically everything is visibly more complex

mechanical designs are also clearly more intricate than anything in 0079, and you can tell they were going for more serious colors this time around

my only regret is not taking count of how many times kamille's name's is said in the exact same tone throughout the whole episode

#driftiniwatches #gundam #gundamzeta

finished the 3rd and final 0079 recap

I found this one not only easier to follow but overall better than the 2nd one, I was particularly glad to see a lot of the focus shift back onto characters rather than just the action

this still doesn't change that 0079 is definitely not one of those watches that'll stick with me for a long time, but it was fine nonetheless, and more importantly it opens the gates for me to check out some more cherrypicked entries of the franchise

more precisely, I'm looking forward to watching

• zeta (which seems to have an awesome reputation)
• witch from mercury (partly cause haha yama op)
• iron-blooded orphans (stumbled across a video about it like years ago and I remember finding it interesting)
• seed (literally just saw it on wikipedia and got weirdly hung up on how it's a 2002 production, then thinking way too hard about 2002 sounding like kind of an odd year that never comes up anywhere) (yeah this makes no sense) (another, more sane explanation would be I'm curious about early 2000s anime cause I don't think I've seen any besides initial d ages ago, and FLCL like a month ago)

#driftiniwatches #gundam

FINALLY got around to watching the 2nd recap

not much to say about the movie itself that I haven't said about the first one - I think it has all the cards to be a banger, but it's massively held back by being a product of its time

(rare) comedic animation details in the middle of serious sequences, hit-or-miss sound design, these are the kinda things I believe would've been handled a lot better if 0079 was made a few years later

the deeper themes don't come up in this recap as much as they did in the first one so that's also a bummer ig

one thing that didn't disappoint is yet another great ending theme

#driftiniwatches #gundam

so I get hit with a meme shot barely under 5mins in and it hits me like when I learned the sayaka poke gif comes from madoka magica

anyway wtf how is the animation so good in something so old??? is this what a studio with a good budget looks like???????

also the amount of crack in the studio's bloodstream is evident as I officially gave up on trying to understand anything around the point where naota grows ultrakill v2 out of his head and it reenacts a certain evangelion episode

I figured this was gonna be good when haruko straight up revs an electric guitar like a chainsaw, yeah I think I'll like this

#driftiniwatches #flcl

well that was a movie

idk what people mean when they say it's any more conventional of an ending than the show's cause it gets just as surreal, with the difference it actually feels like they had a reasonable budget to work with this time

I found it kinda funny how the first half of the movie mirrored the HECU's intervention in the resonance cascade disaster in hl1 lmao

the first half of the movie kinda feels like it's rushing a lot, ritsuko getting killed isn't given enough time to sink in; same goes for misato to a lesser extent

asuka dying(???) def carried the impact it should've though

I'm kinda surprised they did as little as they did with the final, non-tailor-built evas, they were quite interesting

also the final shots were really cool, I dig the style

as for the deeper meaning and whatnot.. I regret to say I haven't figured out much more than I did in the show's ending, this feels a lot like it needs to be rewatched a couple times to get some kinda grasp on it (much like the show's ending)

I won't lie and I'll admit I liked the first few and late-midpoint episodes of the show more than I did the two final ones and the movie, but I don't mean to imply the rest is remotely bad, I just think I haven't understood it enough; eva remains one of my best watches this year

I guess this is where I'll put a stop as far as evanglion goes, unless I decide on watching the rebuilds sometime in the future

#driftiniwatches #neongenesisevangelion

rei's VA being able to sound alive might just be the biggest plot twist of the whole show

also I had no idea gainax pioneered liminal space pics two decades ahead of time by shoving random photos into the episode

all things considered I can see why people disliked these last couple episodes back in the day, this is one hell of a weird way to end a show, but what they are is not really anything not seen before

some of the other second-half episodes also do this kinda deep insight into characters' psyches so it doesn't feel of place at all

a bunch of sentences said ep25 and 26 also kinda resonate strongly, it's interesting

I think the biggest mistake gainax made was releasing these episodes when everyone expected them to be the definitive end of the story, without knowing the end of evangelion movie was gonna come out eventually (I have no idea what that's like but I'm pretty sure it's less of a disappointing ending than this)

so tl;dr: I treated these like normal, non-ending episodes and I enjoyed them because of it. if they really were the final piece of evangelion's original storyline (so excluding rebuild and whatever other reboots etc), I would've probably been left quite disappointed - not pissed, cause after all 25&26 fit in pretty well with the rest of eva, but it would've def felt like something big was missing, way too many loose ends

I guess I'll watch end of eva tomorrow, idk what to expect but I hope it'll be a much more satisfying end of the story

oh yeah shinji actually living an illusion of a normal life at the end was quite cool lol

#driftiniwatches #neongenesisevangelion

rei being replaced by her third (and likely last) iteration and losing her recent memories was pretty sad, seeing how far rei 2 had gotten in terms of showing emotions and generally not being a mostly hollow yes-man

asuka seems to have completely gone off the deep end after the last episode's events

unit 01 seems to work surprisingly well all things considered, after it awakened yet again a few eps ago

the official confirmation that rei has been cloned to hell and back didn't hit me as hard as it was prob supposed to, the concept of the clones being a source of "spare parts" was interesting though

still a mystery what exactly happened with adam, but it's cool how its name and that of evas have been weaved together

#driftiniwatches #neongenesisevangelion

hallelujah playing while asuka was getting - in her own words - brainfucked was the wildest tonal dissonance in the history of entertainment I think

also oh hey they pulled the spear out of adam, I'm actually surprised things didn't take a cataclysmic turn within the next five minutes

doubt that'll remain the case for long though

speaking of "what could possibly go wrong", a whole NINE evas getting produced in mass, shortly after at least two instances of an angel clearly showing the ability to take them over

I get that gendoh is any% speedrunning armageddon but why is the rest of the world helping by making more evas ripe for exciting angel takeovers

that last question would normally just be a haha funny but evangelion is the kinda show where you could seriously ask that with a straight face

#driftiniwatches #neongenesisevangelion