When did you first see it, and what did you think?

Was it your first/only anime if you did see it?

inspired by LCL vs FCL.

  • Doom@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Fantastic artstyle. Weird as fuck movie. Still hands down the best themesong of any anime.

    I watched a lot of anime in the 90s but I had to get all of it by VHS hunting through weird hole in the wall fan stores and doing loans/trades with friends. I use to browse the website anipike (the anime turnpike) to learn about animes because it had nearly all the anime in existence listed as well as summeries and pictures. It was a roll of the dice rather the tape would be Japanese, fan dubbed, subtitled, fan subtitled, or just a random copy someone made. Wild times. I don’t even think I saw all of NGE because getting incomplete sets also common.

  • [deleted]@piefed.world
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    17 days ago

    I saw it in the very early 2000s in my 20s and it was also the first mecha anime I watched. Most of the references to other anime went over my head, and it was half boring and half exciting, and halfway through the last or maybe second to last episode we started smoking weed because it was so weird anyway we thought it would help. Definitely had a good laugh when we found out the minimalism was due to running out of money.

    Definitely enjoyed it, and after watching additional anime it was even better on a rewatch. Rebirth and Death or whatever the extra things in were great as well. Asuka facing off against the white drones or whatever is one of my favorite action scenes of all time.

    Haven’t watched the newer ones.

  • wirelesswire@lemmy.zip
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    17 days ago

    I watched it in the early 00’s. A friend at school torrented it and burned the episodes to cd for me. It wasn’t my first anime, but it was among the first I saw that wasn’t on Toonami. It was very different from the typical shounen stuff I was used to seeing and showed me that the medium could be dark.

  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Of course I’ve seen it. I was a teenager and it was the deepest thing I had ever seen. I don’t like the new ones.

  • shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    I watched it around the time that it was current, and had seen quite a bit of it’s contemporary anime by that point. Lots of iconic scenes and moments, until the ending goes completely bananas. The end was / is beyond my comprehension, with way too much symbolism (I assume) for me to follow.

    • AskewLord@piefed.socialOP
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      17 days ago

      it’s not really symbolic so much as it is just a interpretation of mysticism traditions of various religious.

      it’s kind of a pastiche of christian Gnosticism, kabbalah, and buddist mystic stuff.

      but yeah you’d have to know about that stuff for it to make any sense, esp if you’re a teen. I watched it in college so I was a bit more fluent in these things.

    • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      While full of symbolism, there’s also a lot of weird Canon science/rules that make it all make sense in the story. Oddly though the actual Canon reasoning is more obscure than the metaphorical meaning/symbolism.

  • hansolo@lemmy.today
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    17 days ago

    It was the first anime series I had seen, IIRC. Maybe not the first anime anything. I saw it on VHS tapes back when it was new-ish in the US. A friend in college rented it in parts over several weekends spanning a couple months. We binged it until around 4:00am each night he could get tapes and I slept or almost slept through a few boring bits and pieces of it that are contextually important. I was all about the Eva lore and battles and liked that the Evas weren’t just robots.

    I might be remembering this wrong, but the store only had the original episode English dubs, so we had to find some random on craigslist with Death and Rebirth (or was it End of Evangelion?) episodes copied on a VHS tape he just had and then borrow that, or maybe we bought the bootleg copy for like $10. Then somewhere read a text file on some geocities page about the differences to get caught up and make sure we had the right episiodes. This was before torrenting more than MP3 via Npaster was a thing, and I think I had first seen a movie on DVD a few months before this, so this was sort of our only shot.

    The first ending made me so mad I told my friend I wasn’t going to chip in for the rental that time because the cellos and drawing episode was such BS as an ending. I understand why the director kept trying to redo the ending after that, it was such a confusing let-down.

    Recently watched it again on Netflix, and forgot how much weird art-but-also-borderline-loli scenes there are. I was actually surprised how much I recalled and didn’t sleep through. Amazing stuff, and I certainly identified more with the 3 adults playing the Id/Ego/Superego this time around than I did the kids.

    • AskewLord@piefed.socialOP
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      17 days ago

      yeah i saw it on VHS from Hollywood Video when I was like 17 in 1998

      But I never saw the whole thing until I got the DVDs in 2004.

  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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    17 days ago

    Saw it in it’s original run. Blew my mind and I basically became the Evangelion guy for a cuple of years. I don’t think any other media influenced me more that than.

    Nowadays I can’t stand it. Have some nostalgia for it, but it’s like please stop.

  • Albbi@piefed.ca
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    17 days ago

    I first saw the Rammstein - Engel music video. Watched that a whole bunch of times before someone found the anime and was able to watch the series. I remember it being really good, but got really really weird and didn’t understand the ending at all.

  • CumbrianCucumber@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I’ve been watching it with friends, and have seen about the first half of it now!

    I’m pretty surprised by how little messed up stuff has happened so far compared to what I’ve heard about it, but I’m bracing for that second half! In general, I’m liking it a lot and I see why it’s been so influential in anime since it came out

  • DGen@piefed.zip
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    17 days ago

    OG series and the story retold both let me in a state of wtf. Its damn good - even though I do Like the first telling/ Timeline in the OG more.

    Theres a Lot open in the end that is unclear and makes you think. Its hard to follow fully through and its definetely nothing to rush in a bingewatch.

  • STUNT_GRANNY@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I was always vaguely aware of it growing up, but I was never much of an anime watcher. Loved the theme song though, even out of the show’s context.

    I didn’t sit down and watch it until 2021, when I was in my mid-20s. Loved every minute of it. The only other anime I’d watched before that was Initial D, a few episodes of Speed Racer, and an old Gundam OVA, but I forget which one. Kaguya-Sama was coming out around then too, but I think I got around to that a bit later.

    Didn’t get around to End of Evangelion for another couple of years, when my local movie theater held a special screening. Now that was a fantastic experience… aside from watching the scene in the hospital room, projected on a 50-foot screen.