I believe this is from the Playstation version of "Shinji & good friends" It was a Gainax mahjong game. Only the Playstation version had the story mode though.
Well, they say opposites attract...and between the female incarnation of Absolute Badassery and the male incarnation of Absolute Wuss, you don't get much more opposite than this.
If you actually watched the TV series you will know that he had some pretty badass moments for a 14-year old guy who got dragged right out of his uneventful life and was always surrounded by unfriendly characters who abused him for their own goals while he never had an own. He's pretty much the traditional male lead in the real-robot genre, stepping in the footprints of nerdy and aimless dragged-out-of-his-uneventful-life Amuro Ray. Shinji's whole issues with never wanting to pilot Evangelion anymore but still coming back each time and him seeing that people around him only want him for his piloting talents are copied straight from the original Gundam.
Shinji actually is at times way more badass than Amuro. It's just that he at other times is slightly more whiny as well, so you could basically say that he is just a little more imbalanced than Amuro. You can see that as an advancement of the real-robot genre itself, one year after even the Gundam franchise betrayed its roots in order to advance the super-robot genre instead (with G Gundam). In order to surpass the psychological realism of the original Gundam and make real-robot fashionable again in the wake of G Gundam, Evangelion borrowed many of the original Gundam's themes and made them even more intense. We can actually see that back in Gundam, Amuro had a quite similiar quest of finding his "true self" and cheesy stuff like that (battle of A Baoa Qu), all coming with similiar psychological themes and over-the-top psychedelic effects. Amuro cried after having unintentionally killed Lalah just like Shinji cried after he had unintentionally killed Touji. The Gundam project also destroyed his relationship to his parents much like Shinji lost his parents to the Eva project. There are many more parallels and what I really wanted to say is that Amuro was very much a "wussy" male lead as well, yet he is never called that.
There was a reason that real-robot was invented. And that was partially because people in their teens got sick of all those brave allies of justice who always fought on no matter what and never needed more reason than the upright desire to banish the cruel enemy and save the planet. Shinji and Amuro are meant to be more realistic depictions of actual teenagers who get involved in a war not only as a mere front-line soldier, but as the single most important pilot of their forces on whom all the pressure of everyone's expectations and hopes and fears weigh. Shinji still keeps fighting to the very end and even seems to find some place for him to rest for a short moment after all the fighting (again like Amuro), what do you expect more of him? He was the Anti-Domon of the nineties much like Amuro was the Anti-Kouji of the seventies. These series were so succesfull just because they had less than perfect protagonists and more themes of inner than outer struggle!
Comparing him to people like Noriko or Shimon is just stupid. You have to ask, were these two forcibly recruited or did they take the initiative to begin their adventure? What are their relationships to their parents? What are their relationships to the other pilots? Do they have rolemodels and teachers and coaches, or do they only have superiors expecting results from them? You will soon find that Gunbuster and Tengen Toppa are actually more similiar to each other than each of them is to either Gundam or Evangelion.
Please refrain from comparing Super-Robot characters to Real-Robot characters, demonstrating to everyone your thoughtlessness.
ringo, there's a big difference between Amuro and Shinji. Amuro manned up half-way throughout the show, while Shinji stayed being emo. That's the main reason with all the flak against Shinji.
Even Amuro had support. Shinji had a girl who was just as mentally disturbed as him, a women who still clings to her past, Teh Rei, and a father who doesn't even identify him as a son who is also his boss, and the only person who did understand him died by his hands. Even in fantasy, I don't get how unrealistic people want Shinji for even the super robot pilots he's compared to.
ghghghg said: ringo, there's a big difference between Amuro and Shinji. Amuro manned up half-way throughout the show, while Shinji stayed being emo. That's the main reason with all the flak against Shinji.
Shinji's one of the most "believable" characters. He doesn't always get to magically pull the badass card out of his ass.
So basically all of Shinji's problems had nothing to do with the fact that he rode around in a giant mecha maybe once every other week? That all of the people around him are assholes and he's a doormat?
I mean, it's not like he had to fight for his life day after day, week after week, fighting hundreds of enemies in a gruelling war setting. He probably sortied once every two weeks on average, maybe even going as long as a month without any battles. Meanwhile he lives in a comfortable apartment and goes to school without any other responsiblities than what is normal of someone his age.
Sure, his oppenents were big scary monsters, but he was in a big scary monster himself. You telling me he didn't get any satisfaction out of riding around in that thing and killing big things?
Most likely he didn't want to pilot it because his dad told him to. That's all there was too it.
He's emo not because he has a hard life or he's in a difficult situation or because he doesn't like what he's doing. He's emo because he's spoiled rotten and has a relatively easy life. Maybe if things had actually been difficult for him, he'd have grown up a bit, but as things were all he could really do was make things unnecessarily worse for himself and others by being a whiner.
His standard of living, the amount of fights he's had, and having his own giant robot have nothing to do with the fact that he shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. So a few fights go well? He's still sporadic and emotionally unstable.
People expect him to confront confront conflicts when he can barely maintain a normal relationship with his surrogate, friends, family. "Hedgehog's Dilemma" comes to mind.
I mean if you want to take some random kid, shove him into some crazy shit, and expect him to turn out fine/rise to the occasion then TTGL is right there for you. I mean it has everthing a guy could want. Generic Shounen Lead #4, an overrated plot device, boobs, giant fighting robots, and a happy end.
Exactly. The mecha part of the show is completely frivilious. It's just there to draw viewers. It has nothing to do with how screwed up and spoiled Shinji is. If the series were completely normal without the mechs, he'd still be the exact same way he is.
Would have just been another slice of life series with screwed up people doing screwed up things with screwed up things happening to them. Rei would have been hit by a car or killed by a mugger. Auska would have been raped for real by a man/a group of men. The rest of the cast probably wouldn't matter.
Really, take out all the weird singularity bullshit and mecha and what have you got left? Nothing.
I really want to bring up the fanfic 'Shinji and Warhammer 40K' as my replacement for Eva canon. But excuse me, I'll probably just go crawl back to the hole from whence I came.
I didn't say take out everything either. Just the mecha/apocalypse parts. We seem to agree that what made Shinji Shinji was himself and the people around him. Whether one thinks he deserves to be held in contempt or sympathised with is something else altogether.
However, let me say this; being screwed up doesn't make one more special or more dimensional than normal people. It just means one is screwed up. You might find it interesting, seeing a different dynamic, but it most certainly doesn't make it better or more complex, let alone realistic. It's just another way people can be.
Falgabird said: I really want to bring up the fanfic 'Shinji and Warhammer 40K' as my replacement for Eva canon. But excuse me, I'll probably just go crawl back to the hole from whence I came.
Eva-sized bolters and hammers and anti-Eva Leman Russes... and Shinji playing his father's authority like a hula hoop. Delicious.
I don't know why this thread devolved into how much Shinji sucks/justifiable depressed, but I just want to say that Noriko would definitely be a his friends, and that belief makes me like this picture way more than I really should.