Initially, the premise of this article was going to be all about why I didn’t really want to go back and watch Eva. It would have been a bunch of half-hearted complaints about a show half-remembered. I came to the wise conclusion that apathy probably wasn’t a good bases for an article.
The real problem I’m tackling here isn’t that I have any real issue with Neon Genesis Evangelion, like I said, my feelings towards the series are apathetic at best. It never did anything for me. The issue at the core is that;
Thanks to Netflix putting it back onto their streaming service again, thus putting it back into the zeitgeist, I feel compelled to write something about it. The question is how to go about doing it.
Hence the humid, sticky stew I find myself in. I mean, I want to write something about it, because it’s a current hot topic and I just gotta keep myself part of that current culture. *dramatic eye roll*. But just spending a thousands words complaining about a show I don’t really remember outside of the big story beats seems real lazy. Not to mention disingenuous.
So then my thinking started to waver in the direction of going and actually watching the new re-dubbing of the show. Because then I’d have no excuse in any wild or inflammatory accusation I’d make regarding it. Because the last thing I’d want us to be seen as a click bait writer…
Maybe you can start to see the problem I’m facing. What started as me making excuses in written form as to let everyone know why I had no intention of going back to watch this show, I’ve done so many mental gymnastics that I’ve gone and convinced myself to go and do the opposite of what I set out to do in the first place.
It was at this point that I had to stand up, splash some water on my face and write something about Dragon Ball instead. Coming back to write this later on.
That’s the weird inherent thing I’ve found out about myself when it comes to blogging. It’s that I’ve become something of a media consuming masochist. It’s part and parcel of the territory, and not a new occurrence for me by any stretch. However, it is something I’ve become more aware of in the past year or so.
You find yourself looking forward to terrible movies coming out, relishing the inevitable train wreck that comes with a live action Sonic the Hedgehog movie for example. It’s an experience any other sane person would despise, but there’s something broken with a blogger’s brain that doesn’t always consume media simply for enjoyment’s sake.
Instead, we do it because there is potential for a good blog to come out of it. One that, in my case a lot of the time, doesn’t end up paying off in the way that warrants the personal pain I went through to “research”.
Sure, I could go and watch 26 episodes of Evangelion, get increasingly frustrated with it as it slumps into its final… episode? Then I could write a piece that confirms that I didn’t enjoy it a whole bunch and throw it into the gargantuan pile of other tweets, Youtube videos and blog articles giving their own two cents on the very same subject.
My quaint following on here will give me a courtesy like and would I have really benefitted from spending 14 and a half hours of my life watching a show just to immediately get buried in the pile. Not really. So no thanks.
…I suppose this did turn into a pretty negative article in the end. If anyone even made it this far, I appreciate you letting me get this off my chest. Sometimes blogging can be a very frustrating experience for me, despite my love of doing it. But it’s all self inflicted.
The main take away here, from any fellow blogger reading this is: stop doing this to yourself. The potential for a good rant is tempting, but is it really ever worth the pain of watching or playing something that you’re going to hate for 95% of the experience.
Just be kind to yourself guys. Try to not be like me. I also apologise to anyone who clicked this actually thinking I was going to talk about Evangelion at all.
A Richard Wood Text Adventure 