The REAL Andy

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Black Menswear modelled by Black Men

yes, she grooms shinji. yes, it's messed up. eva wants you to feel disturbed by that. but flattening her entire character into "pedophile" misses what's actually going on with her writing.

misato is written as hypersexual, but not in a way that's empowering. it's survival. it's her crutch. she uses sex and flirtation as coping mechanisms, the only way she knows how to build intimacy after a life defined by abandonment, second impact trauma, and the death of her father. her relationships (with kaji, with shinji, even her casual joking) show how she's stuck in this loop where she equates intimacy with sex, because genuine vulnerability feels impossible.

her "hypersexuality" isn't meant to be titillating, it's meant to be tragic. it's messy, it's inappropriate, it's self-destructive. eva keeps showing us how she drinks too much, pushes boundaries too far, hides behind seduction instead of honesty. and when she offers herself to shinji, it's not some secret truth of "oh she’s a pedophile," it's a breakdown of everything she's been holding in. her fear of dying, her terror of being alone, her inability to connect in any way that isn't sexual.

that's why her character is important. she embodies adulthood in eva's world. not wise or put-together, but broken people dragging their baggage into every relationship. misato hurts shinji, but not because she's only predatory, it's because she's caught in the same cycles of trauma he is.