All I remember is the intro song.

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.

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.

I saw it (and the ending movie) when I was a teenager in the 90’s. I found the movie to be one of the most depressing things I’d ever seen at the time, because…

Other than that, I really liked it. Since then, I’ve seen much better anime, but Evangelion is still great and a classic.

Loved it. Didnt like the last episode.

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.

Aesthetics? 10/10

The actual show? The most boring watch of my life.

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.

It felt like they were trying to pack so much symbolism in that it all got too convoluted, and I rarely understood what exactly was going on. I could tell that they were trying to say something profound, but it felt like an artist trying to make a realistic painting with fingerpaint - the medium just didn’t suit the message. But maybe it was just over my head.

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.

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.

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.

LCL vs FCL? I’m OOTL

You ran out of ink too, didn’t you, ya bastards?

Personally I like to compare it to my favorite anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, as they both have some surrealist themes and weird symbolism and homoerotic undertones with some normal episodes but overall being a mindfuck. I kinda see Evangelion as the shounen version and Utena as the shojo version, and I’m more into the latter but a lot of that is just which aesthetics you prefer.

Utena vs Evangelion, see, practically identical 😆

I can’t remember exactly when I first watched it. Within a year or two of the pandemic though. I was solidly an adult.

It was not my first anime, but I still would not call myself an experienced anime watcher or anything. I watched it because I really liked Kill La Kill, looked up the history of studios Trigger and Gainax, and saw that this was one of their core franchises. And I saw Evangelion’s cultural impact on Japan being compared to Star Wars in America, so I figured I shohkd watch it.

I think its great. It starts off with relatively high-budget episodes, showing off smooth animation, cool and unique-looking mechs and great sound design (I watched the Netflix English dub, which had a bigger budget than the original). The kaiju they fight are pretty unqiue looking too. I’m also a sucker for other cultures appropriating western culture, so I love all random christian imagery they toss in unattached to any of its original meaning, just to appear “foreign” to their Japanese audience. It hits a lot of the mech anime tropes, complete with an animal mascot side character for comic relief. The 14 year old girls are a bit too sexualized for me, but I kind of get they were trying to sell this to 14 year old boys so… Eh. And even though its 14 year olds, they don’t spend a whole lot of time lingering on school life which is nice.

After the first few episodes it slowly shifts to the point where calling it a mech anime is an inside joke. The pacing is incredible and refreshing, and I think has aged even better when compared against most modern media that is edited extremely quickly to hold people’s attention. Beyond that… Well I could make a wall of spoiler text but I just recommend watching it yourself. I will say that this is a rare case where the sexualization of young girls is an actual artistic choice with meaning to it beyond just creepy horniness. Although I still think that’s mixed with an element of marketing that is a bit gross… Its complicated.

I also feel like I need to say I don’t take it too seriously. The psychological aspects are largely based on Freudian theories that were debunked decades or centuries before. I also often see Shinji used to represent introverted people, and I disagree. There’s a common trope of characters like him, who I would categorize as either extroverts who are bad at being extroverts or introverts written by extroverts trying to imagine what introversion is like. For reasons, I think Shinji is the latter.

Since then I’ve watched it a handful of times again. I showed it to my wife and it became her favorite anime, and she even got a tattoo based on it. We have watched the rebuilds a couple times, and they’re… Okay. I don’t think they stand up on their own, but they are more accessible for people who don’t have the attention span to watch the original.