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*This review may contain spoilers*

So this is more or less the story of two friends who play pingpong. There are a number of side characters from China -- a david bowie looking guy who's homesick, a snakelike dude (maybe he was japanese, he was their childhood friend or something), and some skinhead who's really good and appears to be in a relationship with his cousin.

Given the nature of the the game pingpong, the show addresses the inevitable agon with melodrama by embracing it and resigning itself to having relatively unstable degrees of sincerity, which is all well and good. This allows for some indulgent scenes ... with split screens, fantasy sequences, and extended psychological reflections; Of course, most of this is done in relationship to pingpong games.

The two protagonists seem to be rather stereotypical anime characters -- the reflective, unemotional and stoic Smile, and his overemotional friend Peco. Smile is more epicurean, ironically, in his pursuit of pingpong, and Peco is more honor and competetition driven. Over the course of the show they end up coming to amend some of the problems that arise from their radical personas, and learn to be more like the other.

The most notable thing about the show might have to be the art. It is mostly a bland color palette, a strange animation style that nearly verges on being 3d animation, and creative tangents in which color, animations tyle, and realism is vastly stretched into creative but smoothly implemented episodes. On the other hand, the people look very ugly and sometimes the animation isn't as satisfying as it could be, depicting the action less directly than it should. Nevertheless the animation is at least interesting.

Mostly a quiet little anime that you don't need to take all that seriously, with action that embraces its melodrama.

Alright, so this is a major anime that has been called "the star wars of Japan". I watched it as, a mostly anti-Asian person watching anime for the first time, I was told it was an inevitability for any anime watcher, no matter how casual. In that regard I viewed it under that light, and so paid close attention on my watch. If my review takes liberties not usually associated it with anime, you'll have to forgive me, seeing as I'm mostly a literature guy and most of my analyses will be generally based on that front.

The story is as follows: A young boy is ... recruited by his distant unloving father into piloting robots to fight aliens called "angels" ironically enough that are trying to destroy Japan. He teams up with a blue haired quiet girl named Rei, who is stoic and spartan, and later on a German girl named Asuka, who is manic and extraverted. The boy, Shinji, undergoes a dual bildungsroman as he both learns to fit in at school with the others as well as deal with his father issues while fighting aliens. The aliens turn out to be a complex species who have attacked in the past, and from which the first robots were built. There is a lot of "deep lore" as my friend put it, but it doesn't really seem to matter beyond aesthetic. In the end, the girl Rei is revealed to be a clone undergoing existential drama at the fact that she's not really a person; Asuka is dealing with the stress of her mother's suicide and thus her psychological repricutions; And Shinji is dealing with his personal sense of isolation with regards to being an unwanted soul thrust into a key role in the preservation of humanity. In the end, Rei is given no ending, Asuka is left comatose in the hopsital from stress, and Shinji completes his bildungsroman as he realizes he needs other people to become a person in a melodramatic epiphany that overcomes solipsistic thinking.

To ellaborate more on Shinji, he is the protagonist obviously, and also the center of the show's ideas. He begins as a shy and vaguely immature boy thrust into a world of not only other adults but also other schoolchildren. He makes friends with his classmates as well as his fellow pilots, learns to conduct himself in the world of the government, particularly the Nerv agency he works for, and to become a fighter, more or less. This is rather a standard bildungsroman. He is generally rather individualistic, as the show goes to painful lengths to demonstrate for even the casually obtuse Japanese viewer, but in his final epiphany overcomes this. He also has an oedipus complex with his father which spreads coincidentally (at least on a manifest level) to his mother, or at least her clones. His final development is forced by the appearance of a Kaworu, a fellow pilot who turns out to be an alien that is kind enough to allow himself to be killed.

A tangent on this: the drama of the show is incomplete as the story turns from a drama of humanity threatened by invasion into a introspective narrative of an individual threatened by solipsism. The mythology in the show, as standard and uninteresting as it was, created a drama that was never finished, as the show turned toward its other plot later on and dodged by means of convenient narrative events and unapologetic ignoring of dramas set up earlier. This incomplete drama is unsatisfying, if I have to be completely honest with you.

Back to my analysis. I've read the creator's interpretation of the characters, Rei allegorically symbolizing Shinji's unconscious -- that leads me to think of Asuka being his consciousness. The embracing of Rei as his mother and the defeat of Asuka in the end appears to be a self-overcoming, as he embraces himself and defeats his insecurity (which is blatantly admitted in the final soliloquy). If this is Japan's national pop story, then Shinji is the protagonist whose, like Luke Skywalker's, journey is mostly forgettable due to its melodramatic simplicity.

Rei is the most popular girl in Japan which tells me a lot about Japan. She's shy, stoic, and mostly unemotional. She's also a clone, I guess, which makes her character's death at any point in the show meaningless. Fine, cool I guess. She is probably the more aesthetically interesting of the two, living alone in a crappy, uncared-for apartment and loved by a man who was her husband, but is now a friendly stranger. She does not react to seemingly anything, even when intruded upon while naked by a stranger and in fact accidentally groped. She is unsexual, unemotional, and unattached, truly a symbol of the unconscious.

On the other hand we have the foil, Asuka. She is the typical hotheaded stubborn girl, and really the picture opposite of Rei. She is overemotional, overexpressive, and overconfident. Sexually she is completely open, calling everyone she doesn't like perverts and literally throwing herself at people she wants, kissing Shinji for amusement and flashing her tits at some older guy. Still we are obviously meant to take her as a symbol of what Dostoevsky called hyperconsciousness, overthinking and rationalizing her way through everything. This is stemmed from a boring "childhood trauma", seeing the suicide of her mother. Obsessed with victory and an ironic attachment to an overstoic philosophy Asuka is a ticking time bomb, and of course she goes into a comatose state at the end of the show, utterly defeated in the morality play. Nevertheless I think she's the most likeable character, very cute and funny. Her energy and shallow but enjoyable aesthetic lends itself to the thin art of anime.

Another duality are the two older ladies of the show -- Misato and Ritsuko (I can't remember these Japanese names, had to look them up). Misato is a rather appealing image of a woman -- professional when she needs to be, slovenly when she doens't. She's (also) got father issues and is in a world of denial, doing things at utility and living at the bare psychological minimum. Ritsuko is the more stoic, the Rei to Misato's Asuka, with her own mother issues and a less developed psychological utilitarianism. She was fucking Shinji's father I guess or something. I don't really know. These characters aren't really interesting and their psychological journeys both amount to nothing more than melodrama. Unlike Shinji their plots aren't developed, nor are they as clean allegories into Shinji's consciousness. The title card to the last episode more or less says "we don't have the time to deal with everything so we'll show you how Shinji got his shit in line". We see images of them both being dead, and frankly I think they're less iinteresting to look at on their own. Therefore I'm just gonna leave it at "they're both '''modern''' women who are dealing with elements of governmental and personal utilitarianism in their lives and have oedipal issues and then they died or something".

The Freudian element while a bit juvenile is probably the most interesting thing in the show. Each of the major characters have on some level parental issues, as you might have read above (or if you've seen the show would obviously see). As a bildungsroman the show obviously takes into account parental relationships. There are no normal parent-child relationships in this series I can remember, (even a random classmate says "i don't have a mother") and so the character relationships are all either between peers or between adults and children unrelated.

The fixation on parental relationships is incidentally driven home by the aliens invading, as they're called "angels" -- the conflict between the angels, typically associated with protecting and loving beings (like parents) and the embittered children is a strange but actually compelling image. The angels are mysterious and unknown, attacking for no reason, like a child fighting against his parents in whom he can see no rationality. Although the oedipal complexes are never resolved, the underwhelming and uncelebrated defeat of the angels is enough of a resolution to the oedipal complex -- i guess.

With its love of Freud, the show also obsesses with sex. In the first five minutes alone we see Shinji, who is being picked up in a car by Misato, have a picture of the latter which is rather sexual looking (she is bent over, you can see a bit of her tits), and when in the car with her she calls him cute. This sexual tension later spreads, and while Shinji seems uninterested in sex his classmates are. He accidentally falls on a naked Rei, is in bed with and later kisses a hypersexual Asuka, and oftentimes is greeted with visions, both imaginary and real, of naked versions of his friends. It is an interesting choice to make Shinji a most asexual person in a hypersexual world. Nevertheless the show does a good job with sexual tension -- in some of the episodes it is truly palpable the restraint with which it is handled. The episode especially where Asuka and Shinji are forced to learn a synchronized dance pattern (which, yes, found a place in a show about oedipal complex and robots fighting aliens) is absolutely dripping with tension. I think, if the show is trying to capture the narrative of a teenage experience, this is a very tasteful addition. But I'll stop talking excitedly about sex in anime because it really doesn't make me look good.

The show invokes a lot of Biblical imagery as well. There are numerous crosses, beings called Angels, and an alien in the mythology called Adam. It is supposed the conflict is some kind of revision to the Biblical mythology. This is the title translated from Japanese, as wikipedia would have it - "The Gospel of the New Century". If we are to take this as a new Gospel, perhaps they have failed, for the ethical teachings seem to amount to "you can't do it alone" which I could've gotten from the scrubs theme song and the metaphysical theology seems to amount to "reality is perception but not truth or something lmao", mostly poorly regurgitated philosophy that reeks of too much Camus and Sartre.

Adding to this, the philosophy in general of the show seems to be very much more derived from weed and self help books than from the actual philosophic tradition. This may however be a cultural difference, if the show draws on Asian philosophy. In that case I don't want to tread too much on that due to my lack of philosophic experience with the Asian tradition, but I wasn't personally impressed by the philosophic elements of the show.

Aesthetically the show is rather unremarkable. The animation is nice and all but appears fairly similar to other animation typical of anime. Still there were some nice shots and there was a lot of cute animation. There was a penguin that was waddling around in the background for a lot of it which was interesting enough I guess. I was going to comment on how much I liked the animation of Asuka and Rei but I shaved my neck and the urge all dropped, so I don't know what to tell you.

In summary I guess the show is typically appealing. It has some vaguely entertaining action, although I don't really like action so can't really comment on it, some cute characters, interesting mythology (although undeveloped), and a descent into psychological introspection, not so deep as it is pseudoepiphanic which is shallowly exciting without offering much for critical thought, and is generic enough to appeal to many people while distinctive enough to not bore. Taken seriously, it is a repetitive melodrama that invokes psychological and literary ideas without anything to contribute to them other than pastiche of freudian and biblical images, vaguely mishadled, but it also has cute anime girls, so I can't hate on it too much.

Between the four characters we are given, we see the book lover contrasted with the pseudointellectual, portrayed in such a light that although the pseudointellectualism is mocked, the light satire also extends to the vague hypocrisies and personal weaknesses of the "bibliophile", most tellingly when ever Pynchon's very easy Crying of Lot 49 was too difficult for her. There is the development of their friendship, in which the intellectual realm seems to be cast into a seperate and isolated sphere, which seems a juvenile attitude toward art. Additionally, despite the show's effort to convey literary information, the obsession with books turns into idolatry, a theme ... they seem to embrace as the characters lose their love of reading books into a simple love *of* books, whereupon the viewer is overwhelmed by the characters' professed love for books to the point where the form of the book becomes merely a word. Additionally, there is the romantic pining of the librarian for the male student, two minor characters who don't amount to anything. I don't think it actually made sense.