Are the main characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion supposed to be self inserts for emotionally stunted retards...

yes

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You can relate/sympathize with them, but they are too fucked up in the head from past emotional trauma specific to their fictional situation to self-insert into.

Self-inserts also tend to actually succeed at whatever they do, Eva characters just fuck up and cause the apocalypse.

Anno based Shinji largely on himself, and made the show when going through severe depression. That's why he's an emotionally-stunted retard. The anime is about emotionally-stunted retards trying to interact with each other, Shinji and Asuka being just two of them. One of the major criticisms of Evangelion from idiots is that Shinji's timidness, inaction and emotional breakdowns make it hard to self-insert as him. They want a bland bad ass Shonen hero who kicks ass without any issues so they can win vicariously through him, and they want him to get the girl (opinions vary on who "the girl" should be).

Anno was so annoyed by people ignoring the message of the show by trying to self-insert that he basically made EoE a giant middle finger to them, making Shinji a worthless, perverted, vindictive little shit that ends the world because he gets rejected. Anno was basically saying, "You want to self-insert so bad? Well, THIS is you."

I unironically wish more shows were like that. Classic wishfulfillment never worked for me for some reason.

To be honest I understand Shinji very well when he ends the world because he gets rejected.

>ryangoslingscream.jpg

Wish fulfillment shows are just boring and predictable. Yugi always wins his duels, Goku always wins his fights, SAO guy always fills girls with two years worth of semen, yadda yadda, yawn. It's diminishing returns. There's a place for those types of shows but the fact that that kind of predictable structure has permeated throughout the industry is kind of disappointing

Picking a show at random, look at Date A Live. Before an arc even begins, you know the bland MC (can't even remember his name, not going to Google it) is going to end up winning over the girl, kissing her and adding her to his harem. Complete dogshit. The show's okay when they're playing the premise for laughs (because the premise IS laughable), but whenever they try and have a heartfelt emotional moment, it falls flat on its face.

I know comparing that show to Evangelion isn't comparing like with like, but it's just the most average, tick-the-boxes series I can think of off the top of my head. There are exceptions but they aren't very common.

Yeah, this. Aside from the aspect of lacking excitement there is also the problem that I just can't relate to anyone who just gets everything served on a silver tablet. By that I am also including series like SAO that might have a fight struggles and fights but will always end in a good way, add just another girl to the harem and you know it.
Let's say I am craving escapism for example, wish I could actually fall into a coma and wake up as hero in a game. In that case typical isekai don't work for me because I can't vent my frustration with a selfinsert who doesn't face my struggles and who already gets his happy end in the very first episode. Instead I would rather choose to watch a series about escapism itself. Be it NHK, Gridman or .hack//Sign. In that case I could relate with the characters that face the same problems and who will eventually find soem sort of solution. Not one that actually fulfills the wish directly like newer isekai, rather one that makes you learn to deal with the actual problem, like these series did at the end.
It's like losing the brother to cancer and watching a series about someone reviving his dead brother, it would only piss me off. Maybe other people want that, but it doesn't work well for me because my real brother would still be dead when the series ends. Maybe I am just a shithead.

>self inserts
Ok. That sounds fake. But ok.

Ya, a character getting into a fight you know they're going to win isn't a struggle. Most of the time, any difficulty they're going to have is only there to make it look even more bad ass when they inevitably win.
>woah, he doesn't stand a chance in this fight, but he's STILL standing up to the villain!
That's not to say you have to have a hero lose regularly to make it work. Even when Yugi or Goku or Luffy lose, you know it's just to set up the epic rematch where they prove their true greatness, or teach a meaningless lesson about humility.

Again, look at Eva. All of the angels are beaten but how many are straight wins for the pilots?
>3rd: shinji gets ko'd, has to be saved by his eva
>4th: he wins, but breaks down crying from stress immediately after and then runs away from home
>12th: he gets swallowed, has a mental breakdown, needs his eva to save him
>13th: he is basically mind-controlled into beating his best friend half to death and crippling him
>14th: he runs out of power, has to be saved by his eva, is absorbed for a month
>15th: asuka is so broken she doesn't pilot properly again until the movie
>16th: rei ii gets blown up and comes back different
>17th: shinji has to kill the only person who loves him

There's a big gap there between 4th and 12th, but even the victories they have aren't meaningless. We actually learn something about the characters, compared to what we learn about, say, Luffy in every fight (he's strong and doesn't give up on his friends)
>5th: learn about rei's personality and set up her relationship with shinji
>6th: introduce asuka
>7th: establish asuka's relationship with shinji
>10th: learn shinji pilots for his father's approval
>11th: learn how the magi work, and about ritsuko's mother

TL;DR The fights in Eva don't just exist to serve you bad ass moments but actually function as moments of genuine character analysis and development

>Are the main characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion supposed to be self inserts for emotionally stunted retards?
YES
That's exactly why most Evangelion fans are basket cases with a long lasting existential crisis, gay people who cry a lot and screaming autists (I know because I've met them, and they literally "scream" I shit you not).

>TL;DR The fights in Eva don't just exist to serve you bad ass moments but actually function as moments of genuine character analysis and development
Yeah I wish series would make a better use of fights, characters and episodes. You can even have a semi-episodical show for most of the series and still use every episode to develope the main plot in the background while developing or revealing other stuff in the foreground and use characters wisely. Instead, most series get drowned in an every increasing cast and are the repetitive hell save for an episode in the middle and the last few in which all of the plot gets dumped through speech, even though the show-not-tell rule should be one of the very first rules every writer should have internalized.

I think semi-episodic is my favorite way of structuring a show. Something like Avatar, where they have a planned overarching plot, but most episodes stand on their own and have a self-contained beginning, middle and end.

Purely episodic shows where the status quo is always maintained is flawed for obvious reasons, but the rise of Netflix and binge-watching has put things too far in the other direction. A lot of shows now just feel like ridiculously long movies chopped into awkward chunks, with pointless scenes added to each to pad them out to an episode's runtime, until they can get to the finale and wrap up the only plot thread they're interested in. Stranger Things season 2 is the obvious example, but I've noticed it in other things.

I'm not stupid, I know that's kind of intentional. Watching an episode of one of these shows is like watching 20 minutes of a movie. You watch 20 minutes, you're going to watch the whole thing. That's the aim. It's not supposed to leave you satisfied, because then you'd stop binging. There's very rarely an episode you'd re-watch on its own, and no one's going to be making lists ranking their favorite episodes years from now. They all just blend into one.

NGE has some really nice visuals huh

>Purely episodic shows where the status quo is always maintained is flawed for obvious reasons, but the rise of Netflix and binge-watching has put things too far in the other direction.
Yeah this. I am a plot fag but these series are too plot centered to make them rewatchable. They're meant to urge you to marathon them through cliffhangers at the end and everything but in the end once you know the story there is no reason to ever going back, because it's all about showing off cool twists and no feelings. Semi-episodical series can have a lot of calm episodes or moments that are beautiful to watch for the show, interactions and emotion or atmosphere while also contributing to the main plot, but not primarly. It's perfect.

Yes

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Exactly. I saw protagonists who always won and succeeded at pretty much everything from when I was a child, and by the time I was a teenager, I was already bored of those characters. Now, I simply can't be bothered with watching those shows except to mock them in good company with some drinks to hand.

Yep.
Actually I didn't really like Eva much the first time I saw the start of it, and I had a bad habit of dropping shows after one episode at that point. What kept me going was the visual presentation, the aesthetic of it, and it became my favourite anime of all time after that.

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if you look at the scenes before its not just rejection
the first scene shows shinji as a kid, playing in the sand because two other kids asked him too he becomes happier but they leave, no one tells him to stop so he keeps building since people were happier with him when he was doing what they told him to he keeps doing it- he wanted to feel needed and at the end he has the finished product for no one else to see and destroys it in a fit of rage
the next scene was misato being fucked by kanji, lamenting how people behave differently to one another i'e the misato kanji knows is different to the one shinji knows. In the next scene we see the conclusions of these beliefs when shinji statrs screaming about how he cant handle the ambiguity and justs wants to be loved. Since his father rejected him when he was a child he doesn't want to go through the pain of believing someone cared for him, only for them to leave him alone again.
The final scene before he destroys the world is him begging asuka to help him. He exposes his true self to her and she laments how hes using her for an escape - he just wants anyone to love him and make him feel needed. She rejects him because of this weakness. He realises how alone he is and how his existence doesn't matter to anyone - he wasn't needed- there- whether he did what others wanted to or not- he would end up alone because they could exist without him hence the dream sequence showing a world he never existed in

he destroyed the world because he wasn't needed - he needed others to validate his existence, but they didn't need him to validate theirs

Probably

I really miss series like these. Original BeeTrains had such great symolic visuals but it disappeared after that. The only recent show that had this was SSSS.Gridman.
No I am not counting the random sensory overload bullshit Shinbo does.

The characters are way to developed to be self-inserts, except for the author himself.

But those are all types of rejections.

Based retarded OP.

No character in Evangelion was even intended to be liked. It's not a self-insert per se, but rather a representation of what people shouldn't be. Unfortunate that the series' fanbase turned all the characters into waifus. I really pity Anno.

There were about a dozen authors for NGE. Anno's inspiration was to make a commercially successful original property and his idea for how to do that was recreating parts from his most successful projects to that date, the mythos of Nadia and the characters of Gunbuster. He told the character designer to make Noriko and Kochi again. Sadamoto thought that was tired or less relatable to a larger audience and recommended a male protagonist, and then Shinji became kind of a lightning rod for for the writers and episode directors remembering being a disaffected but well-meaning teen not knowing what to do.

I didn’t intend to call the characters of NGE Anno’s self-inserts.
My point was that the characters are so developed that if they are self-inserts then it can only be the author’s.

the only right answer

I back this opinion.

>Never experienced parental pressure
Get a load of this guy. Every MC is a self insert, if you don't identify with any part of an MC why would you watch their show?

I love Pulp Fiction but I don't identify with any of the characters

Yeah you do, or Butch's motivation to doublecross Marcellus, then going back to save Marcellus, and why Marcellus would be willing to call it even and lose face to his whole criminal enterprise would be frustrating mysteries. You just don't point at any of them and go "it me".