Shinseiki Evangelion, Break Blade Recommendations
If not for the Break Blade movie series breaking up the content into six parts, I would've made this recommendation far sooner.
What links these series is the main characters and the unglorified manner in which they deal with the 'mecha' (technically, neither are mecha shows, with rock/quartz manipulation instead of mechanical control in Break; Rygart aside) genre. Neither lead wants to be a pilot in a 'robot'. In other shows you'd have a young boy that dreamed of piloting a giant war machine, with maybe some harsh lessons learned along the way, but you'd still describe them as heroic. In stark contrast, both Shinji in
Eva and Rygart in Break Blade instantly want to escape what is depicted as being a realistically horrible situation. And they both try to leave before finding themselves trying to endure: resulting in mental breakdowns further down the line.
Shinji was a student; Rygart was a farmer. Both have personalities that avoid fighting. And they find themselves thrust into kill-or-be-killed situations--expected to act like trained soldiers. In Eva the battles are against alien entities that attack individually, where as in Break Blade it's simply a war between nations, but both take their leads in PTSD directions where everything eventually weighs too much on their shoulders. Rygart is older and doesn't cry or act quite so pathetically (though realistic) as Shinji, but how they deal with their situations is still very similar.
In a nutshell, the sheer reluctance to do what other characters in mecha series WANT to do, when paired with the psychological distress, makes these two almost anti-mecha series. Like, the same message WWII anime films such as 'Grave of the Fireflies' and 'Barefoot Gen' carry, but with a different angle: aimed at an anime genre.
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