The most three dimensional character ever written in anime

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Shinji. The characterization is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of existentialism most of his beta behavior will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Anno's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterization - his personal philosophy draws heavily from the myth of Sisyphus, for instance.

>There's also Anno's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterization - his personal philosophy draws heavily from the myth of Sisyphus, for instance.

Anno developed shinji through both himself & his inspirations from his favorite anime.

Fuck off chunnbyo.

>Dood... hes heckin just like me!
Oversized forehead bitch

If his dad wasn't a piece of shit coward, Shinji wouldn't have grown up to be one as well
That's kind of the entire point

It’s fine if you think Shinji is a bitch. He was kind of getting on my nerves in EoE. As long as you also say that Gendo transcends what we typically think as a piece of shit. Something about him irks me beyond belief.

People are expecting him to behave like an usual anime mecha character, not like severely imperfect human. That dissonance sticks out, makes people uncomfortable because their expectations are ruined.

The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these characters, to realize that they're not just flawed - they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Shinji truly ARE idiots - of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the wit in Shinji's existential catchphrase "I mustn't run away," which itself is a cryptic reference to Dune's Litany against Fear.

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Gendo is the villain who also wants to end the world just like the enemies he is fighting against in his own way, so it makes sense he would irk you.

Amuro's dad was a piece of shit cowardly father too but he still wasn't as bad as his dad & out grew himself out of being a little bitch eventually unlike shinji. Despite all the coupling amounts of PTSD well up on till adult age.

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Ehh, to be honest, I think the tide is changing. I get the feeling these days that only the most surface-level of anime fans call Shinji a bitch. Dude's had 25+ years for his character to be understood by collective consciousness, I'm pretty sure people who think he's ONLY a bitch are either doing so as a meme or are few and far in between.

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Retard. Don't talk like ppl actually watch mecha anime outside eva.

You do know i was agreeing with you on that to an extent right?

I don’t think Shinji is a bitch but the “Get in the robot, Shinji” meme always makes me chuckle.

it's mid

i thought amuro's dad just disappeared since 1st ep and then when they met again, his father already had a brain damage, was it shown that the dad was an unlikable person? i'd say amuro's dad was a better person compared to his mom who preferred to stay still on earth due to her cowardice from leaving the earth.

Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure he gets in the robot every damn time. Hell, the Rebuilds explicitly give him shit for getting in the damn robot lmao.

Amuro's father didn't give a fuck about his wife or son outside wanting him to piloting a giant robot. It was an apathic ass hole would be more accurate. Still amuro wanted his father's validation & he failed to give him that. His mother wasn't much better.

Shinji is the only consistently useful pilot in the entire series. He’s always saving everyone’s asses.

>get the job done

Shinji ultimately gets in the robot and gets the job done like, every time. Pretty sure he's killed nearly every angel he's come across too. You're right to call him a bitch, but that's just one aspect of the character, not the entire story.

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Shinji spends all eoe not doing jack shit in eva unit 1 tho

Amuro spends 7 years also not doing jack shit & not wanting to pilot the gundam.

Both refuse to get in the robot unless forced to at times.

>He’s always saving everyone’s asses.
That's rei.

Okay, how about you watch your second anime?

Evafags coping will never stop being funny.

You know, when I watched this the first time when I was younger I do distinctly remember thinking Shinji was just a bitch, but on a recent rewatch I feel like he's really not. Compared to the other characters he isn't self motivated to pilot Eva, he literally only does it because he thinks its the right thing to do. Almost everytime he gets into the robot something terrible happens to him. Of course he doesn't want to get back in. Notice that in the episodes following nothing terrible happening from him piloting the robot he is doing just fine. That's why he's so fucked up for the entirety of 3.33, because the last time he got in the robot he basically wiped out all life on Earth, and then, surprise, when he gets back into Eva again something terrible happens.

>he literally only does it because he thinks its the right thing to do.
and because he's starved for approval from his father

You can be a complex character all you want. If you are written to be a bitch then you are a bitch and Shinji’s a bitch.

he does want to protect rei, asuka, toji and kensuke from physical harm.
question is, does he do it unconsciously for approval, self-sacrifice because of his low self-esteem or actual care for them?

ThisShinji is oscar-bait type of "3-dimesnional" character instead of an actually impressively written 3-dimensional character

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This is more or less actually true. But i doubt you'll ever elaborate on that.

You can be three dimensional and still be a pussy, retard

>question is, does he do it unconsciously for approval, self-sacrifice because of his low self-esteem or actual care for them?
actual care for human life.
Shinji at first hated Tojis guts, as he punched Shinji for something Shinji didn't even wanted to do. And yet when he saw them in the forest while fighting an angel, he rather would let himself get harmed than to put them into harm.
Or when he didn't know who the pilot of Eva 04 was. He would rather die than harm a stranger.
Even though he claimed at one point that he does it for approval of his father, that was never really the case, it was just a nice bonus. Every time he does it, is because he didn't want someone else to suffer.
But even by the end of the series and movies he never realized that, nor anyone else in the series, otherwise they could have avoided 90% of all the issues his cowardice brought upon. That's one of many things that show that Anno was making shit up as the show went on.

Garfield has more personality than Shinji. Not even exaggerating.

I've read this five times and I don't get what the hell you're getting at. If Shinji was in a cast of well adjusted people he'd be able to grow as a character a lot more easily. Everyone conveniently forgets that Shinji does try, but he keeps getting slapped down for his efforts.

Pretty sure he does realize it by the end of the new movies. I mean, it's pretty much the reason he chooses to get in towards the end.

Also, pretty sure he realizes when Zeruel attacks Nerv HQ directly and Kaji gives him the pep talk that he can actively make the choice to protect.

>the most three dimensional character ever written in anime
>25 years later people still get confused and miss the entire point, and just cope from their low iq by calling her a bitch

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>Shinji ultimately gets in the robot and gets the job done like, every time
Half of those were all Yui and when it mattered the most, in EoE, he didn't do anything

Shinji's main thought is literally "love me or die" like a true bitch and that's the focus of the story. No one else is like this except for Gendo.
He said it in NGE when he was angry at Gendo and was about to destroy Nerv and he said it again in EoE when he decided everyone should die

Shinji is only three dimensional if you self insert as him

Well things can be detailed without being interesting.

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>it's pretty much the reason he chooses to get in towards the end.
the reason is because he isn't afraid anymore of getting hurt by being near others, not that he wants to protect their lives.

>three dimensional character
>two dimensional drawing
What did user mean by this?

He still made the active choice to get in the eva and fight each time. Even in EoE, but he was too late to do anything since he was at his literal breaking point.

When I try to think if Shinji wasn't the main character, if so much wasn't informing his thoughts or feelings and it was another perspective only seeing him from outside, he's probably a character for a horror story. It could only be scary to be dependent on this boy, who only capriciously decided to save everybody, isn't happy to be there and could just as capriciously quit again, who might have brain damage.

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> Love me or die

What? That's not remotely what the focus was. He's not a school shooter. He was looking for meaning over the course of the show and only said those things when he gor pushed to the edge by all the fucked up things happening to him.

>he isn't afraid anymore of getting hurt by being near others
This was never a problem in Rebuild, Rebuild Shinji's main problem is selfishness. He's not afraid of others in Rebuild (He "didn't want to do anything" because by being selfish/desperate he kept fucking things up and in the end he only caused death and destruction), he fails at understanding that he's not the center of the world.
The last movie ends on him trying to understand where everyone is coming from. Gendo too, even if he doesn't forgive him at the end (little Shinji doesn't hug Gendo but he hugs Misato)
He does what NGE Shinji couldn't do and thinks about what Misato, Rei, Asuka and Kaworu go and went through and talks to them to have a proper relationship with them. Mari says he "smells like an adult" at the end, because that's what adults are supposed to do. He doesn't smell like LCL, as the Eva, anymore. The Eva being everyone's main problem that prevented them from progressing mentally/emotionally.

He literally gets in to save the world?

Yes it is. He's not a school shooter, of course, but the story on purpose shows you that when Shinji gets some control, he goes insane and it has nothing to do with the fucked up things happening around him.
And you know what, now that I think about it you have another 2 "love me or die" scenes. The instrumentality kitchen scene when he chokes Asuka and when he rejects Rei III because she's not his Rei

Watch/read more media

>He was looking for meaning over the course of the show and only said those things when he gor pushed to the edge by all the fucked up things happening to him.
Other characters get pushed to the edge by all the fucked up things happening to them, and while some do fucked up shit, they don't try to kill anyone nor want everyone to die and join instrumentality as the world is ending

Yea Forums, here is my idea for an original anime series. The title is ‘Bad Japanese Translation Word Salad’. The main character is Sushi Gayboy, a ten year old orphan. His parents died tragically when they jumped off a bridge because they couldn’t stand Sushi’s whining. Sushi is adopted by the Japanese military and put in a top secret program whose mission is to save the entire world. They don’t give him any training, not even a safety brief, before sticking him in a giant mecha made with super duper alien technology.

At no time does anyone ask why the Japanese military is using a child to pilot an extremely complicated and dangerous piece of military technology. The mecha program is part of the military, but doesn’t follow military organization or the chain of command. They don’t even have ranks or wear uniforms. The program is run by five hot young women, all with crippling personality disorders. There’s an alcoholic with daddy issues. A junkie with daddy issues. A nymphomaniac with daddy issues. A cutter with daddy issues. The fifth is an emotionless clone, with daddy issues.

Every episode, Sushi Gayboy and the five mentally ill thots save the world from the evil, enigmatic, unstoppable forces of the (insert mystery box here). All according to the ancient prophecy of (name drop religion and mythology here). Yea Forums, what do you think of ‘Bad Japanese Translation Word Salad’?

Selfishness? I don't think that's the right word for it. It's not like he was antagonistic towards anyone, and it's not like he acted as if it was only ever him who matters at the cost of others.

I think it's more like self-pity, and what he ends up doing is seeing the bigger picture and reaching out to his friends and family.

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Why would you type all this dumb shit knowing it wasn't even that funny and nobody would read it?

>25 years later people still get confused and miss the entire point, and just cope from their low iq by calling him a bitch
Funny how they all decided to come here and prove exactly that...

>Why would you type all this dumb shit

Why did Anno?

realistic =! interesting

Rebuild Shinji's character is still rooted in selfishness. Rei tells him she can only live in the core once she's fused with Zeruel and he still tells her to come to him.
Kaworu tells him to stop and he doesn't listen, he says there's something wrong and Shinji doesn't care to ask why.
Asuka tells him the spears will cause another impact and he doesn't listen he does the equivalent of covering his ears and going lalala when he tells her "but those are the spears of hope! you know nothing!"
It really is the one trait from NGE Shinji they decided to focus on the most and the one they fix at the end

It's two different generations. Generation X was the strong silent type shown in Amuro and (whatever is in between Boomers and Millenials) was more open to expressing emotions shown in Shinji

Fun fact: In the Super Robot Wars Alpha series for PSX/PS2, due to continuousy fighting alongside units such as Gunbuster, Mazinger Z, and various Bamco OC-donut-steels, Shinji grows into a well adjusted, slightly hot-blooded character by the end of the game.This culminates in the last game of the series, where Shinji proceeds to Bright slap the shit out Gundam Seed protagonist Kira and tells him to man up.

Quoting loltaku here
>"my favorite SRW thing is that if you put shinji in a non-abusive environment with responsible adults he turns out fine instead of a mess"

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>whatever is in between Boomers and Millenials
That's literally Gen X

>people still get confused

Nobody is confused. We just don't care. A bitch having excuses for being a bitch is still an insufferable bitch. OP, let me give you some life advice. You are not special. Everybody on this fucking planet has their own problems they have to deal with. We don't want to hear about your childhood traumas. Stop with the misery porn. Get over it and yourself. That's the lesson Anno never learned and why he's still a depressed sad sack to this day. Don't be like him.