It’s well-understood by now that Neon Genesis Evangelion represented (at least in part) Hideaki Anno’s attempt to attack his fanbase…to call out the otaku for being immature, fetishistic, delusional, whatever…and that all the widespread full-hearted love and enthusiasm for the series, especially within the hardcore otaku community, represented a sort of artistic backfire.
But this should not be understood as an outgrowth of the fans being “too dense to get it,” or some such thing. The fans knew what they were seeing. Their joy was an inevitable, necessary outcome of that kind of story being told very well. Anno may not have understood what he was actually doing, for all I know, but he did it, it’s right there in the text.
Which is to say –
The alleged point of the story is: “Look what would happen if a sad-sack fuck-up like you were actually put in the role of the world-saving hero! You’d be wretched, you’d be horrible, you’d spill your mental problems all over everything, you’d be pining after screwed-up love interests whom you couldn’t possibly understand, it wouldn’t look the slightest bit like a heroic power fantasy.” And this is in fact one layer of the narrative, one possible way to process the data.
But the actual point of the story is: “Look, we know exactly how much of a sad-sack fuck-up you are. We know that you’re wretched, that you’re horrible, that you spill your mental problems all over everything, that you pine after screwed-up love interests whom you can’t possibly understand, that you don’t know how to exist without it feeling like a horrorshow. And despite all that, we can tell a story about you – yes, you, with all your disgusting secret troubles, not any of the more-appealing smoothed-out avatars that you sometimes try to pretend to be – in which you pilot a giant robot, and you save the world, and all the petty details of your internal fuck-up-ed-ness actually matter in the broader scheme of things.”
How could you think the otaku were not going to lap that up with a spoon?
There is an important general-purpose lesson to be learned here. Articulating that lesson will have to wait for another day.
Hey, that’s the Hastur-thing, right? The reason why you’d worship him? To be the star of a tragedy whose ending is fundamentally rooted in why your flaws matter?
Partly that.
Partly the much-simpler “hey, this show is providing me with a fantasy where I pilot the giant robot and kick ass and hang around with several variously-archetypical hotties who are clearly obsessed with me, all without having to look or behave like someone other than myself.”