pink propaganda

I have the dubious honor of being the voice and face on the Platinum Evangelion DVDs v5-7, doing my best to share my subjective feelings on a subjective medium timed to the video on the screen.  It is hard to establish bulletproof arguments in this format, as you might expect.  I hear that “Sean McCoy” has been added to the fan-Evangelion dictionary, defined as something quite unsavory.

But attendees to my panels at Fanimecon, NDK, AOD, etc (where I do hours on Evangelion, How to Talk to Girls, How to Animate, etc) all seem to agree with me beyond mere politeness.  So I will start answering questions on this blog, be it Shinji’s issues or yours, and posting clips from my panels so everyone will have a proper opportunity to disagree with me, or, maybe learn something!

So… ask questions, and I will answer!  You can send emails to blog@seanmccoy.com until I learn more about how wordpress works.

-Sean

Evangelion manipulates the well-worn stories of personal development found in many mythologies to create a strangely personal yet universal human drama. This is a common practice in western cinema, with every hero from Harry Potter to Rocky to Luke Skywalker following the same basic hero arc–namely one based on the foundation of western narrative, the New Testament. The hero must be alone, misunderstood, gradually gain acceptance, be betrayed, prostrated before evil, then provided the strength to overcome at the last moment. This is what C.S. Lewis called “the baptism of the imagination,” a way of basing character drama on religious structure.

Evangelion does this in a surprising way… the story tells Shinji that he is the unwilling messiah, the very foundation of western heroes. But he wants to be a japanese style hero, like Goku or Sailor Moon… meaning rather than suffer through the western arc, he wants the eastern arc, which includes leveling up and improving your skills through hard work and dedication to a greater goal (think Gundam… he wishes he was in that show).

Since we are so indoctrinated in the western arc, and we like anime–therefore interested in eastern style arc, we get a whole bunch of character out of the series… perhaps more than japanese fans.

The ending is confusing, but basically it is the resolution of the great contradiction in emotional development, best said in the kabbalah as “man shall know his mother as the definition of woman until he takes a wife, at which point he shall know his wife as the definition of woman and will know his mother no more.” Compare the juxtaposition of Shinji’s mother sinking into the LCL, followed by Asuka stroking Shinji’s face (despite the situation). It is honest emotion, something Asuka has never shown before! It took a lot emotional development on Shinji’s side to reach this point. We see it built into visual metaphor, because the manner in which he develops would make this a hentai title.

It is a dubious honor to be a commentator on a subjective medium. Evangelion is a work of art that speaks to me in ways only animation can… and I want others to appreciate it as I do.