"I would like to end the world because my father is a dick"

Get in the robot Shinji. This is literally the fate of all mankind, including yourself. Your options are to let everyone die and then you die 3 minutes later or get in the robot, be scared, and possibly live.

Unironically, get in the fucking robot.

You mean, "get in your fucking mother"

I think that's part of it? Like I haven't seen it but Shinji's choices are objectively wrong but also make sense because he's a flawed human. So you're supposed to disagree with him but also sympathize but also disagree with him.

I can relate to that loser in many ways,

the fucking shooter whaaaaaaat?

I think the biggest hurdle that prevented me from fully taking the show seriously

oh

That's a pretty normal sounding anime

[CW: child SA]

I think cocaine wrote more of "It" than Stephen King did.

The explanation I've always heard was that it was his response to otakus jerking off to anime characters. I.e. women who can't hurt you with rejection. This is who he sees them as.

From an article in which he is interviewed:

Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.

Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”

Tbf the whole point of that movie is that Shinji is a horrible person who ends up totally broken due to his inability to even try and confront any of his demons.

The difference is that Evangelion is actually good unlike anything King ever wrote

I don’t think the show ever sympathized with Shinji. Well, at least I don’t sympathize with him and I didn’t interpret the show that way.

One Piece good
FMA good
Mob Psycho 100 good
Other stuff probably also good, I haven't seen it
Hellsing cool. Pure vibes.
Castlevania was also good.

Anybody got some good non-shonen to recommend? When I say good I mean good and not "yeah it's good for an anime".

prove me wrong

Promised Neverland and Made in Abyss

I'm not sure why people are obsessed with Evangelion, what happened to make it some sort of "meme anime"? I never found it to be remotely popular while growing up, or even in the early 2010s when I did a lot of anime watching

Define "modern anime"

On top of all the ones mentioned, shoutout to Vinland Saga, that slaps

studio trigger has some bangers. kill la kill and promare stand out as amazing leftist anime that directly call for revolution.

one piece is also leftist and clearly calling for revolution but it's long and will take a couple more years to wrap up.