BOY (OFF):“Since she was raised over there
but born here,
do you think she matured early?”
UrsusArctos: This picture is downright criminal and the associated conversation about "maturing early" makes it even more revolting. It feels like a barbaric throwback to sexist shounen tropes in a series that goes out of its way to avoid or deconstruct them.
Pluto: In Japanese schools, students are assigned to a classroom and the teachers rotate. Students in an all-girls school will usually change in the classroom before gym class but in co-ed schools, they have a designated changing room for gym class.
Zusuchan: The "matured early" comment comes off somewhat ironic, considering Asuka's need to be seen as adult, but incapability to truly be one.
thewayneiac: Since they're going out of their way to be cliched here, I'm surprised this sequence didn't end with a broken camera and Toji and Kensuke covered with bruises.
Additional Commentary
Zusuchan: I hadn't intended to say it this early on, but considering Ursus's comment, I might as well-I honestly think the idea of Eva being such a deconstructionist work is flawed at best. Many of the things usually talked about in such a context (things ending badly, a depressed MC pilot who really doesn't want to be there) were mostly already done before by other (often quite high-profile) works and many of the usual tropes really just don't appear at all, so they can't really be deconstructed in the first place. Even this batch of more fun and optimistic episodes don't come off to me as deconstructing the usual mecha/anime tropes, but rather as just using them to tell its story. The fact that things go to shit later on and episodes 7-13 end up with darker leanings on rewatches isn't really deconstruction, at least not in the way I understand it*-it's just using tropes to trick the audience and then later on letting go of them.
Me misunderstanding the meaning is very good possibility considering deconstruction's dictionary meaning is entirely different to its seeming primary usage as something akin to "exploring a popular trope's consequences in a realistic environment; showing its meaning within the work itself etc".
Dr. Nick: It's probably not a particularly hot take to say that Evangelion's super weird, super deconstructive reputation is largely the reputation of its final two episodes, but when evaluating its impact, it's also instructive to keep in mind what the mecha anime landscape looked like in the mid-1990s. The genre was bifurcated: on the OVA side, the older fans were spoiled with really high production value serious business titles like Giant Robo the Animation, Macross Plus and UC Gundam OVAs, whereas on the television side mecha was dominated by the child-friendly Yuusha and Eldran franchises. The Gundam and Macross juggernauts were experimenting on television, but in their case that meant going unabashedly cheesy (G Gundam, Macross 7) or a wizard-did-it levels of fantastical (Gundam Wing). So the time was definitely ripe for some dark, psychologically fucky genre disruption.
