I went into the anime and movie completely blind for the first time. I have no clue of what this anime was trying to be. Quite frankly I didn't like alot of what the story I'd about.

Here are the things I liked :

• the animation is absolutely gorgeous and aged like fine wine.
• the premise was very interesting and it has very deep lore
• the jokes were really clever
• character dynamics were pretty cool
• the fight scenes are fire
• the first episode left a great impression

Here are the things I didn't like :

• the foreshadowing could be a little too obvious and some elements very predictable. I.e toji being the fourth pilot was dragged out for the whole episode despite being extremely obvious , kaji being a spy was something I figured out pretty early on , tojis "death"

• speaking of fake deaths , there are ALOT of them. I couldn't count how many times characters blow up , get crushed or get atomized yet still miraculously survive. Shinji and rei tend to "die" the most.

• misato completely overshadows the main character in screen time. She wasn't a bad character but I was getting bored of constantly seeing her instead of the supposed main character.

• most of the characters are dislikable if not insufferable ; pretty much everyone is a selfish degenerate with no sense of basic morality with a few expections. Look , character flaws are a great way of fleshing out characters but this is making characters just straight up unlikeable and annoying. Even villains can be more likeable than some of the main characters here. Perhaps this was intentional , although I don't think that it's a good thing.

• main character is ALWAYS complaining about his life , to the point where it loses any impact and becomes stale and redundant really quickly. You feel like you want to punch him in the face at any given point in the show. He crosses the line of being kinda relatable at the start to just being a complete bitch. He never takes any action in his life and I can't really feel bad for him after a certain point.

• nothing in the story makes any sense and nothing is explained. I've had questions about the story since the first episode that have yet to be answered. I'm pretty sure everyone already knows how confusing evangelion is.

• those still frames that take up a whole minute with nothing happening

• plot devices that could be resolved by simply talking it out i.e asuka underperforming because of her envy , instead of misato or shinji trying to comfort her or atleast helping her overcome her envy by acting or smth , they decide to just ignore her until she's stepped down. I just found this extremely frustrating.

• over-reliance on repetetive dream sequences and abstract brain-fuck scenes of the main character hallucinating on crack that drag out for so long and establish knowledge that was already shown prior. Completely redundant , gave me a headache and wasted my time. Especially the final two episodes of the anime and midway through the movie. I think there are much better ways of showing internal conflict than having random seizure inducing nonsense. Seriously it was at this point I questioned whether the author was suicidal or having an existential crisis when writing this.

• infact there's this theme of depression and existential crisis that's common in Evengalion. I've heard that's what alot of people like about it. Me personally, none of the events of the story resonated enough with me. I wasn't convinced of this "hopelessness", everything that was supposed to be "deep" felt completely superficial. Either kids acting childish , or adults acting immature. And I'm someone who likes bitter sweet stories and drama that is done right.

Conclusion :

I did not understand most of the events of the story. I don't even want to touch on the can of worms that is the ending. Although it was kinda cool. Feel free to enlighten me with your opinion. I just wanted to express my opinion , and try to understand what I'm missing.