In complete honesty, I’d have to go back and rewatch the whole thing again to give you specifics, and I’ll give you a guess how thrilled I am at that prospect. But Doc’s liveblog has basically hit my biggest problems on the head: NGE is presented as having all these high concepts and deep meaning, but then has zero confidence that its audience could figure them out without fucking IKEA assembly instructions.
DON’T TREAT ME LIKE I’M STUPID NOTHING WILL INFURIATE ME FASTER
That on top of all that, it’s infused with garbage symbolism that literally means nothing just someone thought it looked cool, the insistence of every dude in a college anime club that it’s the greatest work of our time, AND it has the audacity to be boring as fuck.
Burn NGE in a goddamn fire and and salt the earth, GOD I hate it.
…the insistence of every dude in a college anime club that it’s the
greatest work of our time, AND it has the audacity to be boring as fuck.Â
The toxic dudes in my anime club were cut from this cloth, and while it’s not NGE’s fault exactly, it certainly never had a chance once I woke up and realized this was a social group I should have no part of. So NGE is… more or less a giant red flag for me.
The kind of thinking I like to see, the kind of thing I like to think about– and tell my students to think about.
Amazing how much a movie could be fixed by telling it from the woman’s POV.
“I was genuinely surprised by just how creepy Pratt’s character is when you take away his POV. We don’t know whether to trust him or not, believe him or not … We feel the cruelty as she feels it.”
I mean, I doubt many women would be nearly as surprised but yeah, a very interesting take on how stories are not the same when told starting from different points and perspectives
Excellent analysis.
Do you guys remember the scenes after the revelation where JLaw told Pratt to leave her alone and she’s jogging around the concourse…and Pratt keeps talking to her over the ship-wide comms system? Given the original edit with Pratt being set up as a Nice Guy™ , it was supposed to be romantic like a boombox scene, I guess…
…but it’s terrifying! She can’t get away from him. No matter where she goes he can still talk to her, force her to hear him. Like the creep who sits down next to a girl on the train and insists on talking to her despite her book, her headphones, her body language and her verbal refusal to engage, Pratt just keeps coming at her like an entitled predator.Â
It’s the last two people on earth fantasy that guarantees the man his choice of hot babe. :/ Because he’s a Nice Guy™ and deserves a second chance.
This is a really good example of two important storytelling principles that I’ve come back to over and over again.
1. Entering the story as late as possible is often the most interesting choice. See how much creepier–and more engaging–the movie gets when we chop off the first 30 minutes? In this case, withholding important information until as late as possible is much more effective than seeing the story in a purely linear fashion.
2. Who you pick as your protagonist is the most important political choice you make as a writer. You’re choosing whose eyes we see the world through, whose mission we’re hoping will succeed, and whose interior life we empathize with. This is an example of a premise that gets way more interesting when you don’t assume it’s going to be told from the Default White Guy’s point of view.
Oooh, I love the suggested alternate ending with Pratt dying. What a fantastically dark option.
honestly “i’ll do whatever you want” “then perish” is the single most powerful exchange possible in the english language and it’s from some bizarre “hewwo” obama rp
And there was that other post where someone dreamt that Obama said “violence for violence is the rule of beasts” like what is it about Obama that makes people come up with such raw fucking dialogue for him
my mother had a dream where he lived in the forest and she had a cigarette with him and he said “to become god is the loneliest achievement of them all” and put it out and walked into the mist and i’ve never fucking forgotten that
