Neon Genesis Evangelion

 Today I finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. At first I watched it because I was bored and just wanted to watch something interesting and hopefully be inspired by it some way or another. So I chose Evangelion because it’s very popular and seemed cool. I thought it was gonna be a typical mecha anime (you know, big robots fighting each other) with some drama around it, but oh boy was I wrong. I was very wrong.

At the beginning, it does seem like a typical mecha anime. The protagonist Shinji is told to pilot the Evangelion Unit 01 (which is one of the massive biomechanical creatures) to fight the Angels, massive enemies of varying appearance and power. At first he doesn’t want to, but does so anyway. Then he fails in battle, but the Evangelion (or shortened to Eva) awakens and does the job by itself. So far pretty normal for a plot.

Also the plot is super complex so I’m not gonna write all of it (even though the plot is crucial to the story). I’ll tell the basic plot though. So billions of years ago there was an ancient race that wanted to spread life to other planets, so they sent Seeds of Lifes to planets in the Solar System. There are two types of Seeds, one with a Fruit of Life and one with a Fruit of Knowledge. Only one Seed of Life is supposed to go on one planet, but Earth got two. Two different types. The Fruit of Life, Adam, makes Angels which are creatures with unlimited power but not much consciousness. The Fruit of Knowledge, Lilith, makes humans, which have a lot of knowledge but aren’t as strong as Angels. The reason no planet can have two Seeds are because if an entity gets both Fruits, they essentially become a god. Lilith crashing on Earth is known as the First Impact.

In the year 2000, an expedition team decided to find Adam in Antarctica and reawaken him using human DNA (remember, humans are a child of Lilith and it would be dangerous for a child of Lilith to collide with Adam and vice versa). This resulted in the Second Impact, a massive explosion which wiped out half of humanity.

In the year 2015, Angels started attacking humans, they were children of Adam trying to cause the Third Impact, that would eradicate humanity. So Nerv (an organization whose goal is to stop the Angels) sent out the Evas, which are equal in power to Angels, to destroy the Angels. The first half of the series focuses on killing Angels, almost a new one each episode.

By the second half of the series however, it gets deep. Why do you live? Why do you do the thing you do? What do you desire from doing so? Why are you even doing so? There are so many moments where I just went, “WHAT” loudly. So many confusing moments, all of them so deep in meaning and symbolism.

(this next part will make more sense if you’ve watched Evangelion but I’m gonna write about it anyway) The characters in this anime have incredible depth. Each of them has suffered before, and are trying to cover it up by doing various things. The protagonist Shinji for example, lost his mother at a young age which made his father desert him, leaving Shinji to live with his teacher. The other main character, Rei, who is actually not really human but is also sorta human (idk anymore lol), struggles to socialize with other people and acts like a doll, a puppet to Commander Ikari (who is Shinji’s father btw). She has questioned her own identity several times in the series too, and doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. The other other main character Asuka, had her mother driven insane by work, making her forget her own daughter and later killing herself after finding out she was being cheated on. So Asuka does anything to gain attention of others, to prove that she exists, similar to Shinji who does things for the approval of others.

In short, I really love Neon Genesis Evangelion. I spent hours today finishing it (along with 2 movies that are important to understanding it) along with reading the Wiki and watching videos explaining it. It’s so rich in lore and at the same time, emotionally speaks to you. It doesn’t have the happiest ending, but I’m pretty satisfied with it. All the characters have really good arcs and have grown a lot throughout the series. To sum it up, Evangelion is a kinda depressing anime about what it means to be human disguised as a mecha anime.

I can also say that it is not for kids despite ‘haha cool big robot’

Totto Chan Review

 Ok so I read Totto-chan thinking it was an eye-opening, spiritual awakening, educational fiction book or something. Then I found out the events of the book actually happened in real life and that it was an autobiography. So it’s an eye-opening, spiritual awakening, educational non-fiction book. Which is very cool.

Anyway, what do I think of it? First I wanna say the English version is very good and not awkward to read at all, considering the original is in Japanese. Even with some confusing dialogue that would be difficult to translate (I could tell it would), it wasn’t weird or bad. So it’s a good translation.

Now on to what I think of it. I am very surprised that a school like Tomoe Gakuen existed, and existed in the same era as World War II. To think that such an open minded school was there at that time is amazing. I really think that Tomoe’s methods of teaching should be implemented into schools nowadays (maybe not all methods but most of them). The teaching methods that Tomoe used made the school not boring, made the students not want to go home after school, as opposed to your typical school where students rejoiced when it was time to go home. If the students aren’t bored, that would also make less “doing stuff because I have to” and more “doing stuff because I like it”. It’s like, for example, students cheating in an exam. They cheat because they only want to finish the exam and don’t care how, as long as they can finish it. But if they want to finish the exam for the sake of learning and getting better at subjects, it becomes a different experience. Same thing as doing a job because you want the money, and doing a job because you enjoy it.

I also like that the students at Tomoe all really genuinely enjoy going to school. No one would rather stay at home or go do something else. They all like school. But that’s not the case with typical schools nowadays. I think a big part in why that happens is how conventional and outdated the current education system is. I don’t need to say anything, you know how bad the education system is, and so do the people at school. I think teachers and staff at school (not all of them obviously) realize that the education system kinda sucks, and as a result get lazier at their job. Which makes the students even lazier.

Kind of like how I said that when parents are grumpy/in a bad mood, the children get affected too. If you’re feeling gloomy mentally, you also might feel gloomy physically. Stuff is connected. So the solution to that is, don’t be a bad influence, right? Yes, I think so too. Or, the simple answer is that, at least.

Remaking an entire education system would be a lot of work. It would take years to perfect a new education system. Heck, maybe one education system won’t be enough considering how different and special each child is.

Aaaand that’s the problem I guess. Every student at school is expected to do well in all subjects (and not all subjects are important in life). There’s also the stereotype where if you were an excellent student, you become a successful adult. And if you suck at math, you’re dumb, but if you suck at music, that’s probably not your thing.

Well I’m glad I am now homeschooled lol

also I didn’t talk about the things Totto-chan did because writing about that would take way more effort and time that I feel like, if I did write about it, I wouldn’t have appreciated it enough in writing than I do in my mind because I really liked reading those stories. They were very nice and heartwarming, and in the war era as well jeez wow

memory

 I say “we need to have fun before we die” a lot, because, well, we will die. But I’ve been feeling kind of, scared now. Scared of growing up and getting old.

There’s this album called “Everywhere at the End of Time” and it’s 6 hours long. It’s an artistic approach to Dementia, which is known to cause memory loss and confusion in the brain. I used to think of dementia as like, oh it’s just another tragic disease. But seeing what it can do is terrifying. To think that your mind could die before your body does. When you can’t remember anything, and forget forgetting. It’s terrifying. If someone I knew slowly began to lose their memory, I’d be very sad and even sadder because I can’t do anything to help it. If I started to lose my memory, at first I’d be very stressed and confused. But when it does come, I won’t know what happened because I won’t remember anything. That… is the scary part. Having lived your life to its full extent, doing so many things, experiencing so many stories, and just forgetting it. And what makes it sad is that this can happen while you’re alive. While you have a body. So you could still walk around and breathe, but your mind could be lost. Death is different, because (in my opinion) you’d be at peace after dying. Well I can’t say for sure because no one exactly knows what death is like.

I’m also scared of the fact that EVERYTHING will be forgotten one day. My favorite things like Minecraft will be forgotten eventually. And that’s not a nice fact… Minecraft has been getting updates consistently for years, and to think that it will have one last update, one final update. Well, this is speaking from my perspective because I love Minecraft. But apply this to literally anything. For example, I don’t remember my great-grandparents much. I don’t even remember their faces. I could look at a photo of them and be like, “oh that’s my great-grandpa” but I’d have no emotional connection to the photo.

That’s another reason why we’re so attached to things we knew in our life, for example, our relatives, a favorite actor, a favorite singer, etc. Things that we didn’t know in our life however, let’s say for me, World Wars for example. People older than me might have a connection to those times because they experienced it/their parents experienced it. There’s also things that have ended before we even were born, but we have a connection to them. I was a big Michael Jackson fan as a kid (and still am, haha) yet he died a day before I turned 3, and I didn’t even know who he was at that time.

That brings me to another point, which is we should be grateful for all the technology that can surpass human memory in terms of keeping records. Videos, photos, audio recordings. All of that is easily accessible today. I used to hate photos when I was younger, but as I grew up I understood why some people love taking photos. To keep memories that we might forget.

If I’m already old and hardly remember anything and you told me to look at old family photos, I might not know anything about them at all. Or even feel emotion. Those old photos would simply serve as a documentation for future generations. Humans do like documenting stuff, huh?

Basically the whole point of writing this was the first sentence of the first paragraph. Idk anymore