Oh you did, yeah the 'as a standalone it wasn't good' part was the meh part. Kind of hard to blame for not being super good if it's mostly setup, I mean this was like truly a new frontier, no where near anything Eva's traversed so far. I hear it was only originally supposed to be a trilogy but got extended, I wonder if that means there was originally another 'safer' ending or story. One of the complaints I heard people making was that at the end of 2, people were accepting of Shinji's decision (mostly Misato) but antagonized him in 3 which made no sense, a complete 180. Reintroducing angst again, which leads to Shinji jumping at the first hope at 'redeeming' his actions, which turned out to cause the thing Wille was formed to prevent in the first place, good going.
Anyway, since I'm posting I guess I might as well mention that I started Nekota no koto ga kininatte shouganai. Which, unusually for me, is a shoujo romance manga, like shoujo shoujo. And, I note with amusement, another cat related manga. It follows pretty much your general shoujo manga, but with 6th graders, in some love thing except that the main heroine sees the main character's head as a giant cat's head. It makes the whole thing surreal and more enjoyable than one would initially expect. If it weren't for that it would so so fall short, it doesn't deviate from any preconceived conventions, the main heroine is a mary sue, random drama inducing girl also included (though thankfully, within my tolerance levels, not to mention she shipped off on another boat quite early). Also it's about children, so the whole thing is written with a flair of childlike ignorance and, I guess, giddiness that makes all the bad drama nature of shoujo romance stuff softer and less sharp. Also she's totally oblivious but it actually works because she's a kid and not a blockheaded shoujo heroine. Or even worse, those lovesick-with-love heroine types. Like a gaussian blur or something. Not something I'd recommend, but w/e, might as well contribute to the thread.
