This week on the podcast my sister and I covered Kpop Demon Hunters. It’s a good movie and you can hear our opinions about it on the podcast. What I didn’t mention was that this movie gets one of the most important things right in animation, which is the food looks delicious.
If your food isn’t looking good in the movie, then there is something wrong.
I was at the gym today getting my swell on and I thought about Neon Genesis Evangelion for some reason. Maybe it was the fact that I was getting gains but it made me think about the way that Evangelion handles bodies both of its young protagonists and their mechas.
For those that don’t know, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show about Shinji Ikari and his two… I am legit unable to think what term would best fit for their relationships, friends doesn’t work, allies kind of works, coworkers fits a bit more. As they pilot giant mechs called Evangelions to do battle against the angels. Here’s a screenshot that sums up the show but isn’t actually from the show.
That purple thing in the foreground is called an Evangelion hence the title and that big white thing is an angel. That is one of the more straight forward angel designs because they can vary from geometric shapes, kind of bird looking dudes and literally just a young boy. They’re looking to bring about something called Third Impact that I will get into at a different time. Here it is from the front:
Let’s set our stage. The Evangelions stand about 200 meters tall. They are insanely powerful and powered by what’s called an umbilical cable that literally is just a giant power cord that even plugs into the back of the Evangelion. You can see one in the above picture that’s not featured in the show. They’re equipped with various weapons like spears, knives and guns. They also have heavy armor but their main protection is the AT(Absolute Terror) Field. It’s a field that the pilot projects from inside the Eva. We’ll get into that in a moment.
Now where is the pilot in all of this? They’re inside what’s called an entry plug, which is then inserted into the back of Eva’s neck. Like so:
The entry plug has the piloting chair and controls and is then filled with an orange breathable liquid called LCL. Like so:
Now that we have all of this out of the way, it’s time to get into spoiler territory for my discussion. If you don’t want to be spoiled, leave now.
Okay, so the thing is with Evangelions is that they aren’t just giant machines. That metallic thing around them isn’t their whole body, it’s just what’s protecting the body. You can somewhat see what they look like with it in this picture:
They are giant humans in armor and can occasionally just go nuts and attack things? Why would they do that? How could they do that? Well, it’s because inside of those giant humans is a soul. For Shinji who is the one in the LCL, his Evangelion is powered by his mother’s soul. She died in an accident and was absorbed by the giant robot that he pilots.
This is where we start getting the way that Evangelion fucks with the concept of mecha in general but more specifically the male power fantasy. In one of these animes, normally getting your mecha becomes this grand thing and showcases the young boy into becoming a man. He becomes that much more capable and beloved for it. Just look at the way that Amaro in the original Mobile Suit Gundam is respected. Many of them have some trouble with piloting but eventually start feeling jubilant towards it.
Shinji doesn’t get that and part of it is the difference between Evangelions and other mechas. Other mechas are shells that protect their pilot from all danger. Not so the Evangelion, who requires the pilot to sync with it to pilot. Hence, why Shinji pilots the Evangelion with his mother’s soul in it. But the thing is that because of this synchronization Shinji feels everything that happens to it. This becomes horrific in the movie End of Evangelion, where another pilot, Asuka gets stabbed in the eye by a spear. We cut to the inside of the plug and blood is pouring out of her eye socket. The enemies then eat her Evangelion and she feels every part of it.
From this example, we can see that the power fantasy doesn’t quite match up to the expectation. Shinji just can’t go nuts in his Evangelion without getting badly hurt. Furthermore comes what I mentioned before, the umbilical cable. It’s not just a limiter by making sure that if it gets cut he only has about five minutes before the Evangelion deactivates. From the name, it ties Shinji and the other pilots in a parental fashion to the base. Speaking of umbilical and pregnancy, it’s no coincidence that the LCL fluid looks like amniotic fluid in a womb.
So, you have this child in the womb being sent out into the world to fight against an unknown enemy. It reminds me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s first part of Slaughterhouse Five where he talks about writing his book to his friend and his wife. That she complained that he’s going to make war sound good when they were really just children, babies being sent out to fight. This has different meaning for me now that I’m an adult and could comfortably have a child Shinji’s age. It breaks my heart in a way that it didn’t when I was a kid.
This show has stuck with me since I was a kid. Part of the reason, I think is because unlike other shows I watched where there was just violence for violence’s sake, Evangelion used violence as a means to emphasize the amazing dialogue and characters. Half the time, the fights just became brutalization and animalistic screams. When I was a teenager, I related to Shinji. Now that I’m an adult, my heart bleeds for him. I’ll get more into him later this week.
Last weekend marked five years that my father passed away. It didn’t really hit me until I put it into the frame point that it’s been half a decade. We’re coming around to the point that next year, the anniversary will fall on the same day of the week as it was when he first passed. I will as I always have try and keep myself busy that day.
I spoke about him last night while recording a podcast with my friend, Donnie. About how he was a simple man, not a stupid one. How he didn’t need complicated reasons about race theory or LGTBQIA+ because in his mind, he boiled down everything to “There are good people and bad people and it doesn’t matter what if they’re gay, white or black”. He judged people as they came to him.
One of the stories that remains in my mind is that my dad did taxes from January to April. There was an older woman who was on a fixed income and three years of her tax return had been messed up. My father was so angry about the work the guy had done before him. He never took that out on me though, I remember coming downstairs to give him his coffee and he was cursing at the computer. I handed him the coffee, he immediately calmed, said thank you and as I walked away went back to angrily talking about this “Fucking idiot accountant”. My father charged about a hundred dollars an hour for his time but he put the work in. He put in enough effort that he could get people back thousands of dollars and do it in a legal way. I was eating dinner alone when the woman came to pick up her tax returns. I remember sitting at the table and thinking that all the work, about three hours for return, would be a nice paycheck for him. She was over the moon. He had gotten her back so much money. Then I heard him say:
“Let’s just call it fifty dollars and be done with it.”
The woman paid him his money and left. He was clearing up his papers when I went into the room. I asked him why he had only charged her fifty dollars. That should have been a nine hundred dollar paycheck. My father took off his glasses, something that always signaled that he was about to talk to me seriously, and told me:
“Money isn’t the most important thing. She’s a woman alone, Rollo. You have to help where you can.”
That’s been with me since that day and probably will until I can no longer draw a breath. Another favorite story of his is that my dad told me that he didn’t want me to steal because he would be embarrassed if he had to come to the police station because I got caught stealing a candy bar. He didn’t tell me not to steal because it’s wrong, just to do it in a smart way. He told me that if you can steal enough to retire and never work again and do it in a way that you didn’t have to harm anyone, go for it. Anything else was pointless. That was way more effective and I never thought about stealing little things because what would be the point? I can’t retire on what’s in a cash register. I can’t retire on a Butterfingers. My dad said be Danny Ocean or don’t bother.
In conclusion, I want to talk about one of the greatest gifts that my mother gave me. One year, she took a video on her phone of my dad wishing me a happy birthday and that he loved me. Whenever I’m down, I watch that video and get to hear my father’s voice. I get to hear him tell me he loves me.
This is a hard thing I have to tell people and I get asked about the death of my father alot. I’m older and people are seeing their parents get old and becoming infirm. They need someone with experience to get through it. So, they talk to me.
What I’m trying to tell you is if you’re a parent, you should leave behind something that your children can hear you tell them that you love them. That they can go forward without doubting that. And no matter where you are in your life if you have loved ones, tell them that you love them as a goodbye. You want to make sure that that’s the last thing they hear from you in case something happens.
Be well my friends. I love you.
The Tomorrow Series by John Marsden is perhaps one of my favorite anti-war book series that I’ve ever read. For those that don’t know, the series is about seven Australian teenagers that go camping in the bush and when they return home, they find that another country has invaded their home. They then become guerilla fighters and try to fight to win back their homeland.
The books are incredible and are each titled exquisitely: “Tomorrow When the War Began”, “The Dead of Night”, “The Third Day, a Frost”, “Darkness, Be My Friend”, “Burning For Revenge”, “The Night is For Hunting” and “The Other Side of Dawn”. They are harrowing to say the least.
But the thing is that it has I think one of the saddest moments when it comes to growing up. Ellie talks about picking up a Barbie and trying to summon the magic of play that she had when she was a child. She just can’t do it. That magic is gone. It’s cut off from her.
I’ve read a fair amount of anti-war and tales about growing up but nothing has resonated with me like that. It’s the same as someone pointing out that there was a point when your parents put you down one day and they never picked you back up. Leaving childhood behind means that you’ll never be able to do some things again.
I’m childfree but I figure that this is partly why people have kids. To give them the things back that they can’t get. I always think about when I went to see the first Inside Out movie and wonder why I saw so many crying adults in there. I wondered if it was because they knew that there was going to be a time when they couldn’t make their kids happy. That their children would have to suffer pain. The inevitability of all of that.
If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend them. Just be aware that they get very rough at parts. He doesn’t shy away from the realities of it.
(I wrote about my time working at McDonald’s in my Monday article, so I thought for this fiction Friday I would write a nonfiction account of my time there)
I’m not the audience for this place. This play place. I crawl through tight tunnels not meant for my five foot ten frame. I’m barely through the first tube, trying to figure out how to bend my body so that I can get through when I see a small child coming the other way. I wonder if he’s a holdover from when I put the sign up that I needed to work in here. Either way, I can’t have him here while I clean up.
“Hey buddy, I need you to get out of here,” I tell him.
“Why?” he responds.
“Because I need to work in here. There’s a mess that I need to clean up. You should head out of here because it’s yucky in here.”
The kid thankfully crawls away and out of the play place. I keep crawling through the multicolored tubes. I’m nearly at the mess that I, years later, would find out later you need a hazmat license to clean up.
It’s then that I hear someone shrieking at me. It sounds like a dental drill. I’m so close and now she’s banging on the tubes. Getting up here was bad enough, crawling back out is worse. I finally flop out and this woman gets up in my face.
I remember what this woman looks like but I’m not going to describe because it doesn’t matter what she looks like. Imagine a Karen and you’ll have a rough estimate. I’ll never forget her red face.
“Why isn’t my child allowed in the play place? He wants to play, why won’t you let him play?!” she screams at me.
“Because there’s a mess in there, ma’am,” I deadpan.
“Then why isn’t someone cleaning it up!?”
There was a time when my sister and I worked with her friend, who said that when the two of us get yelled at, we are clearly disassociating. Our minds are elsewhere. Not today though, I felt the rage burst its way up through me. But I need to keep this job because it would be far too depressing to get fired from McDonald’s.
“I’ll get right on that, ma’am,” I say.
I crawl my way back up into the play place. I clean up the poop and spray everything down. I crawl my way back out and throw away the towel I used. I would quit like three months later because I found out you could work at CVS at the age of sixteen. I got yelled at a lot more at CVS. I eventually got used to it though I never liked it.
Oh, by the way, especially in the post pandemic world, don’t let your kids in the ball pit. We never bothered to clean that and I doubt anyone else did either. Those places are disease and germ pits.
Here it is.
They’re putting their intent in the forefront. They want to cover the earth in life erasing, world killing paint. Choking the life out of the land and filling the oceans. Would it be a uniform color or would it be a rainbow of them? Behold our eighteen different types of beige as they cover Belgium.
Let’s look at if other companies were truthful like them.
It’s like Google or Meta making their company logos, “We’re building death robots and killer AIs.”
Every medical insurance company: “We want your money, we hate you and don’t care if you die”.
Every printer and printing supply company: “This is going to run out far faster than you expect, the printer’s going to break and everything costs way more than it deserves.”
I have to wear a CPAP mask because my throat is very crowded. Even if I lost weight and got my tonsils out I would still need to wear it. The problem is that there’s no way to make this thing look cool or sexy.
Of course, there’s something to be said about stigma that when you put it on, you have to admit that you need this thing. Plus it leaves a weird red mark around your mouth. However, it helps me breath and I love it for that.
So now I’m going to make it cool and sexy.
Cool: It looks like a vague attempt to make a dollar store version of those breathing masks that jet pilots wear. If I put sunglasses and a bicycle helmet on when I fall asleep, I’m basically fitted out to fly an F-14. God, that would be so funny if someone came in and saw me sleeping like that, I think I might do that just in case a burglar comes in.
Let’s make it sexy. This one is far easier. Just say this to the person sleeping next to you.
“Hey lover, get ready for me to not snore and keep you up. That’s right, here comes the mask. Prepare for peaceful slumber and when we wake up we’ll have enough energy to make more love or go to the farmer’s market like you want. Hell yeah.”
Also, I think that I should paint some flames on my mask to make it look even cooler and sexier. Plus I need to give my CPAP machine a new cooler name. Let’s see this is going to be difficult because the name lends itself closely to the idea of pap smear. Let’s go with Turbobreather. Oh, fuck yeah.
Welp, done. I’ve fixed CPAP machines for all. You’re welcome.
Another game genre that I’ve been enjoying are simulator games. Two in particular lately, fast food simulator and supermarket simulator. I can say that the first one is a highly accurate version of what it’s like working in a McDonald’s as I did for my first job. The only thing is that I’m not horrendously shy and scared of people.
The work in both games is just as monotonous. You perform the same actions day in and day out. You can throw on a podcast and just cruise. There’s no story to pay attention to.
So, why do I love these games?
Yahtzee the very swear-y video game reviewer has called these dad games and one of his points is that it lets you envision your life if you had taken a different path. As someone who has played these games it also allows you to pretend that these are viable career paths. I put together one bag of food for someone coming through my drive through and it had four items an somehow cost fifty-six dollars.
I’m not a dad and never will be but I’m dad age. Sometimes I imagine pulling a dude from American Beauty and going back to work at McDonald’s when things in my life were simple. But I don’t think that’s why I actually like these games. McDonald’s made my clothing stink no matter how many times my mom washed them. One of my prize Kurt Cobain t-shirts was forever cursed with the smell because I put my work shirt on it overnight.
The real reason that I think that I like it is that I have another hobby that some people might consider boring: knitting. For a lot of people, it might seem so boring to sit still and slowly knit stitch by stitch. But there’s something that I love about the click of the needles and the slow creation of a scarf or washcloth(I’m not that good. I need to work on getting better).
It’s the same thing with these games. Watching as my level goes up in either one and expanding on the things I can make in my fast food restaurant or watching my supermarket slowly expand. It’s the satisfaction of a job well done. Even though it’s just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.
When I knit, the world falls away, my mind clears and I can just focus on that. It’s the same thing with these simulator games. I don’t care if people think they’re a waste of time or boring, for me those moments of peace are what make it all worth it.
I’m including the Yahtzee video if you want to hear more about dad games:
I don’t drink. I’ve drank on a three occasions. The first was when I was working with my dad when I was like eight. My dad was drinking a Budweiser and I asked him if I could have some. I took a sip and it was disgusting. Put me off beer for the rest of my life.
Secondly, my grandfather put his gin and tonic next to my water during a barbecue. I drank from it, thought it tasted weird and he said what are you doing. I spit out what was probably some very expensive gin into the sink.
Thirdly, I was on a date with a beautiful woman and she poured me a glass of wine. I didn’t know how to back out of it, so I drank it in one gulp. She then said accurately, you don’t drink wine do you.
So, I don’t understand how alcohol works. Here are three ways that I don’t understand how alcohol works.
I read about champagne flutes before I ever knew what they were. It’s the same thing as the word quiche. I read the word but it translated in my head to “qwincha”. My parents and sister made nonstop fun of me, constantly asking where did the n come from?
So, when I read about champagne flutes, did I think long thin glasses? Nope!
I thought that people were having fun and drinking out of flutes that they were covering all the holes of. Do I need to look at the dictionary? Nope! Just continue with my stupid thought until my young adulthood.
2. You can just mix whatever.
When I was younger, I listened to a lot of the Good Life where Tim Kasher is singing constantly about getting blackout drunk. So, I thought that that was the point. So, you would want the highest alcohol content in all your drinks.
That means you would want to drink like a rum and scotch. Irregardless of things like taste or texture.
Hell, if I was coming up with my signature drink given the parameters of what I thought people wanted it would probably be everclear mixed with absinthe. We would call it the straight to the grave.
3. A Scotch and soda was just any soda
I loved Law and Order and M*A*S*H and watched them religiously when I was in sixth grade. During the summer, they had like four episodes of each on in the morning and evening. I watched them nonstop.
The thing is there’s a lot of drinking in M*A*S*H and after many cases, McCoy would go to the bar and order a scotch and soda. I now know that that was seltzer, which is just water ruined through carbonation. But to my young mind, I thought that it was Coca-Cola or Pepsi. They’re both brown, right?
In conclusion, don’t let me make your drinks. I’ll either kill you or disgust you.
The Phantom Menace sucks. We all know it. It was such a disappointment. But the thing is, I think that you could make the movie a lot better with one change and it’s not just get rid of Jar-Jar.
The actual answer is to simply age Anakin up. There’s no reason for him to be a small child and in fact, it makes him a lot more sympathetic to do so.
Okay, so the movie starts as it normally does, invasion of Naboo and everyone flees on the shiny ship. But as the ship is whipping through space and being saved by R2-D2, no one knows who the pilot is but they know he’s very good.
The door opens and a handsome, smiling young man enters the room. It’s Anakin. He’s carefree, he’s joyful and he loves what he does. You can still have the scene where Padme can’t sleep and she speaks with him. He can ask her if she’s an angel and he can talk about how much he loves being out here. How they’re returning to the place that he hates. She says that if she helps him retake her planet, she’ll find a way to free his mother. Suddenly, he has emotional investment.
When we get to Tattooine, Anakin reunites with his mother. He brings up that he has gotten closer to buying her freedom. Watto can still stiff them for the part and he says he’s willing to get back into the podracer to win the part. That’s how he won his freedom the last time but it nearly cost him his life. He survives and he has to leave again.
The rest of the movie plays out the same way with them realizing that he’s powerful with the force and they save Naboo. He has to leave Padme and his mother behind to do the job of becoming a Jedi.
The thing is that having him already grown with his own opinions that are hardwired into him, makes a lot more sense for his eventual fall. Especially if you do something like have him having never killed anyone before. Death comes pretty quickly in the Star Wars universe. Luke kills stormtroopers in the first movie and doesn’t bat an eye at it. It would be interesting to have Anakin be a kind hearted person that doesn’t like violence. He’s suddenly thrust into this world that he doesn’t understand why he has to harm people.
His journey to becoming Darth Vader can become that he wants to end suffering in the galaxy. That he wants to make sure no one can be harmed again. It’ll become a bigger part of him when he has the visions of Padme dying in childbirth. You could also use the idea that Jedi are violent by being the thing he’s trained the most in.
Having him be a child, it just doesn’t make any sense. You can have him be innocent but it turns him into something other than precocious. It makes him annoying. Plus, child actors, for the most part are not that good. It’s like in the Ender’s Game movie where you have to have Ender react to finding out that he killed a whole race. He couldn’t act it out that well because no one could act that out.
Also you have a ten year old hitting on a fourteen year old and it’s so weird. Age him up and they become equals.
You could also play more into the Han and Leia thing. Making him a dashing young pilot, then there could be a thing that oh like mother like daughter when it comes to the men they like.
Franklin Cota, an author and podcaster 