#mrmattstuart

No problem!

So, Shinji is a complex character just like anyone else in eva. Being that he's the main protagonist, it's easy to observe his character development from episode 1 to eoe. I think at any point throughout the series (as well s before and after) he would certainly benefit from good therapy (the key word there being "good") and a change in environment.

By eoe I think it's extremely fair to call him genuinely mentally unstable. Some of the actions he chooses in eoe are truly horrific. Eoe also shows us how his worst actions are choices he made with a degrees of intentionality. I don't think he was genuinely not in control of himself at any point.

As for my personal take on Shinji, I like him. He's not my favorite but honestly I think most of the criticism he gets, especially about the surface level of his personality, is rather hackneyed. No character in eva has a palatable personality, not on the surface nor deep inside. "Annoying," I guess, but to be frank that description fits Asuka and to a slightly lesser degree Misato and Kaji equally as well, just in different ways. Being annoying is not a moral failing, and it's a very subjective descriptor anyway. "Cowardly," sure, but Shinji is far from the only character who fits this description in eva. Almost every character in eva has moments of cowardice, except maybe Rei due to *gestures towards everything going on with her situation* and the classmate trio because they have much less screentime.

Shinji gets the brunt of this particular brand of shallow criticism because he's the main character, so we see things through his eyes more frequently than we do other characters, and also because some people have weird ideas about masculinity and project them onto Shinji. Honestly I find Misato and Ritsuko more grating on a personal level as a viewer because they have twice as much life experience as the pilots and they still make these selfish, hurtful choices.

Why are the stable / sane characters often tossed aside?

sure thing, I've been meaning to anyway (I like her a lot too actually lmao)

@ asukalangleyrp The engine shuddered, sputtering…

“Hey, Weirdo!” Asuka entered the scene from a distance, shouting out to the man. “Colonel sent me to come get you, we’re leaving earlier than expected. Say bye to your shitty car and lets go” Asuka motioned her head towards the WUNDER. “You know how pissy she gets when we miss a time hack, I wouldn’t suggest pissing her off this early in the morning”

// Oddly enough I find characters with a lot of tragedy attached to them very interesting. 

I had to look these up, oh my god.

Zuko’s poetry is just an awful poetic form of purple prose. I’m sure there’s a word for it when it comes to poetry, but I don’t know it. 

The Crusader mainly fought with its missiles, not its guns. The 20mm cannons had problems with jamming under high speed maneuvers, such as in a dogfight. The Phantom had problems, to be sure, but when the gunpod was introduced and especially when TOPGUN was established, it became a respectable fighter and fighter-bomber. The F-8 was put into service in 1957 and retired in 1976, but by comparison the more multirole F-4 was introduced in 1960 and retired in 1996 for US service when the last Wild Weasel F-4Gs were finally put to pasture.

The Phantom got fairly lucky in the design department, since the USAF requirement for it (fighter-bomber) was already similar to a previous F-4 design for the Navy, before the Navy wanted an interceptor instead. The powerful engines for a high-speed interceptor end up working for lifting heavy payloads as well, so the bird worked out better than other McNamara-esque aircraft such as the F-111 and the F-35. All in all, it was a decent aircraft, if not particularly excelling in one point.