There was a harem romance in NGE?
You mean you didn't notice the blatant romance subtext between most conversations Shinji has with Asuka, Rei, and even Misato?
And of course Shinji wants to hump every female he sees in the show. Everyone.
Including his mother. This is what I meant by Freudian complex, in that the whole motivation of his attraction to Rei is supposed to be a symbolism for him wanting to have sex with his deceased mother, since Rei is a clone of her. I get that it's phrased as some sort of "wanting to grow closer to what he never had" maternal attraction, but honestly Freud was full of shit and it annoys me to see stuff try to play his mentality straight as if it was fact.
And the last two episodes are pointless drivel. No, really? Watch End if you cared enough to finish the series.
I did watch End of Evangelion, and thought it was worse than the original. The entire thing felt like a consummate "fuck you" from the author towards the fans of the show that had voiced their displeasure with how it ended, via making the most aggressive satire of his own works that he could. "You didn't like how I ended the show? Fine, take THIS as your new canon ending instead."
I'm honestly not sure how much of the hate for NGE comes from the perspective of "this show doesn't have a likeable protagonist or a happy ending, it's shit" -- the same sort that complain about films where the only death occurs off-camera and is entirely bloodless, and the characters spend the next two hours interacting in increasingly paranoid peace -- as opposed to the legitimate complaints about pacing, the fucking final two episodes, the characters being a bit too monodimensional, &c. Instead it's always "it's trying too hard and ends up being pretentious", as if using real mythology as the basis for your world is somehow supposed to be a statement of innate superiority... 
I don't have an issue with things needing to wrap up nicely, or having to be violent, or even show everything. If I've sat through Darker Than Black, Ergo Proxy, Legend of The Galactic Heroes, Ghost in the Shell, Gankutsuou and Planetes, and enjoyed them to varying degrees, I think I can handle the more action shounen style of Evangelion. It's just an issue with how it's written. Maybe it's because I watched it not as a teenager but as a twenty-year-old young adult, but the type of character connection it was going for didn't click with me at all.
You can have an unlikable protagonist, but there needs to be a reason for it, and you have to make up for it in other ways.
Hell, the protagonist in No Longer Human from Aoi Bungaku Series was rather unpleasant, but he was intended to be. You are supposed to pity him, not love him. The difference is Evangelion puts Shinji center stage and highlights him as if he was supposed to be someone to cheer for, someone to sympathize with, regardless of the fact that I can scarcely remember any scenes where he wasn't whining, inflating his "emo" style of narcissistic love, or being a coward. He's an asshole who only sees the people around him as either mean monsters forcing him to do things or sexual objects that he is frustrated he is not allowed to mount immediately.
This is my core problem with the series regardless of all smaller quabbles, which is that it is incredibly difficult to enjoy watching something when the main cast not only is unpleasant, but actively ruins your enjoyment of other scenes due to their inclusion.
It has many other positive things going for it; A great doom and gloom pre-apocalypse atmosphere where humans really feel like they are barely clinging on, fantastic mecha and enemy designs, and a good soundtrack. But the way it handles its characters and plot are not, in my opinion, included among those.
As for what else has been said, I cannot say I recall any "tsundere harem romance." What fanservice exists is mostly too disturbing to actually be fanservice (to me, at least; plenty of people have no problem pairing Shinji with Rei).
Asuka's characterization can be summed up as "I have mommy issues", and "I want Shinji-senpai to notice me." Almost every dialogue she has with Shinji she is being tsundere, and most conversations she has with other people ultimately come down to her talking or thinking about Shinji. I honestly can't think of a moment off the top of my head where she was doing something unrelated in some way to him. Even her rivalry with Rei is "I feel that you are my romantic enemy for Shinji, so I will hate you."
The fanservice comes in the way of random shower scenes, ass shots, vague sexualizations of characters that I believe are middle schoolers? That angle got pushed enough that both Asuka and Rei are sex symbols in Japan among otaku, and not all of that came from fanworks. I heard once that the masturbation scene in End of Evangelion was an allusion to this, the director saying "This is you, the fanbase, masturbating over people who are not there."
It's maybe a bit of a stretch, but it's the only thing that explains why the fuck he decided to put that in there.
Should I just conclude this as "It's not for everybody, who cares"? It feels as if a Shit Tornado™ is forming, which is mostly my fault.
Maybe I'm making a blanket statement, but the problem I think a lot of people have with Elfen Lied is not the quality of the show, but the fact that it recieves undue amounts of glowing praise despite the show being decidedly average if you level it out. Especially since the writing is not stellar and the plot is mostly a vehicle to prop up reasons for gore to happen. An average or bad show that gets left by the roadside attracts no attention, but one held up as a sort of treasure is due to be attacked for what people see as an injustice. You can see this with Mahouka, a horribly done show that got super popular and is now hated.
I've liked shows that I probably shouldn't have. Heck, I liked Mnemosyne and that's about on par for being gratuitious in every sense of the word as Elfen Lied is. I just liked how it handled certain aspects and forgave it for what it did poorly, which is a fairly common reaction (and is okay to do as long as you accept that those are flaws and don't try to make excuses for the creator's sake. Or to try and shield yourself from the criticism of others.)
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3138700 times)