My media diet for the summer of 2024 (so far)

Fiction

Evangelion

For the last couple of months, I have been watching the main Evangelion canon - the original series, the revival movies, and finally the rebuild movies. Evangelion is one of those anime series I had heard talked about a lot, and which I had never gotten into. I had watched the original series in a hazy binge a couple of summers ago, but never given it the time of day it (might have) deserved. After watching all of it, I have to say I’m still unclear on what (of the canon) I would recommend others to watch. Come along as we take a quick tour of this Christianity- and Kabbalah-inspired depressive tale of the forceful conscription of a boy into using a giant flesh-robot to kill “Angels”.

Be aware, I am placing a BIG spoiler warning on the rest of this review/analysis of Eva. If you haven’t seen it, and there’s even a slight chance that you might, I would recommend skipping straight to the next section of this post. If this is your first encounter with Eva, you might be in total darkness about whether or not to watch it. To tl;dr my review section; I would recommend Evangelion if you like psychological dramas, depressing stories of trauma, and can tolerate 90s anime genre conventions. For what to watch, you will have to judge your own patience. If it’s low, just the four rebuild movies. If you have more, first the series, then rebirth movies, then rebuild movies. Interpolate from there.

So here’s your last chance. Big spoilers from the next paragraph on.

Evangelion has a slightly complicated history. Let me first explain what I mentioned in the beginning: the original series, the revival, and the rebuild. The original series, Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE), was a 26-episode long run of a 1995-96 anime series, directed by Hideaki Anno. It tells the story of Ikari Shinji, Ayanami Rei, Soryu Asuka Langley, Katsuragi Misato, and some other characters, as they try to hold off a kind of ‘invasion’ by supernatural beings we only know as “Angels”. The revival was a series of two-and-a-half movies retelling the story of NGE, created in 1997, and also directed by Hideaki Anno. The rebuild was a series of four movies again retelling the story of NGE. The first three of these movies were released quite tightly together - in 2007, 2009, and 2012 - while the fourth and final one was released in 2021. Once again, all of these were directed by Anno. Why would the same man try to tell the same - or a similar - story three distinct times? To get to the answer to this question, let us first talk about the premise and core plot of the series.

As mentioned, our main characters are trying to defend against some kind of attack from the supernatural “Angels”. To fight these Angels, the ~14 year olds Shinji, Rei, and Asuka pilot mechs known as “Evangelions”, or Evas, the only type of weapon known to be able to damage the Angels. Why these children specifically? Well, in order for an Eva to be piloted, the pilot needs a certain “synchronisation rating” with the Eva. What is this, you might ask? Well, the Evas are not actually pure robots, but a certain kind of armour plated on top of large humanoid “creatures”. It’s a pilot’s synchronisation to the “core” or “personality” of the creature that is the Eva that determines whether the Eva will “reject” or accept the pilot. What causes a pilot’s synchronisation - and specifically these three children’s synchronisation to be so high? - you will have to watch yourself, and piece together from the hints.

The core of the series is this: Shinji does NOT want to pilot the Eva. He is depressed, and fighting the Angels is giving him major PTSD. But no one else can do it, and he is in the thrall of the military agency that controls the Evas; NERV. Shinji’s attitudes towards being a pilot is the major beats and arcs of this story, and that is driven further by the fact that his father is the head of NERV. Shinji is desperately seeking the attention and validation of those around him, and that goes double for his father.

In addition to the above, the story features heavy religious, esoteric, and mysticist imagery. The names of the Angels are taken from certain parts of the Kabbalah, and likewise their characteristics hearken to those in the Kabbalah. I will quote here from Wikipedia, as I have not had the time to do the research myself:

References to mystical traditions in Judaism and Christianity, including Midrashic literature and Kabbalah, are threaded liberally through the series. Complicating viewers’ attempts to form an unambiguous interpretation, the series reworks Midrash stories, Zohar images and other Kabbalistic ideas developed from the Book of Genesis to create a new Evangelion-specific mythology. The plot also combines elements of esotericism and mysticism of the Jewish Kabbalah, including the Angels, which have common and individual features with the Angels of the religious tradition, such as Sachiel, Sandalphon and Ramiel. Assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki stated the religious visual references were intended to make the series more “interesting” and “exotic” for a Japanese audience, denying the existence of a religious meaning for the use of Christian visual symbols in the show. According to Anno, “as the symbols are mixed together, for the first time something like an interrelationship or a meaning emerges”.

Shinji’s father Gendoh, as the head of NERV, seems throughout the series also to be playing some kind of deeper “game” - not only fighting back the angels, but deploying and holding back resources for specific reasons, counting down towards something as each of the angels are defeated. In the end, he reveals the “Human Instrumentality Project”: a plan to “ascend” humanity which involves the eradication of every single individual human will and being, to create some kind of super-being.

The core emotional tension of the story revolves around Shinji’s relationship with his father. Once this is resolved, Shinji attains God-like powers and remakes the world to be without the conflict of the angels. But this is not clear in the original series, of which the final two episodes consist fully of abstract and seemingly disconnected cuts of characters speaking to Shinji andd Shinji speaking back. It is only slightly more clear in the rebirth films, though even there most of the important plot beats of the ending of the story simply are not portrayed, or, if they are, not explained or given proper (prior) exposition. Only in the rebirth films is the actual story communicated to the viewer. Next, let us start to dig deeper into Hideaki Anno’s personal connection to the story he was trying to tell.

Anno famously struggled with depression throughout his life. So does Shinji, and, as it turns out, probably Gendoh too. Gendoh’s actions are all in service of being reunited in some way with his deceased wife Yui, whom we only see hints of throughout the series and films. Yui and Gendoh’s (back)story is only revealed in the final rebirth movie, ,1 but even then, the entirety of the story is once again not told to the viewer. It is possible to piece this story together from hints and scraps - but for most people it makes more sense to simply read the series wiki after watching the movie. In the end, Shinji and Gendoh’s relationship can only be healed by dealing with Gendoh’s trauma of losing his wife. Again, I will quote from Wikipedia here:

Neon Genesis Evangelion has been interpreted as a deeply personal expression of Hideaki Anno’s own emotional struggles with depression. During the production of the series, he became interested in mental illness and psychology. According to him, Rei is a schizophrenic character and a representation of Shinji’s unconscious, while Shinji has an Oedipus complex and is characterized by a libido-destrudo conflict. Similarly, Ritsuko has an Electra complex, in which she loves Gendo, a sort of substitute for her father figure. Anno himself stated that he identifies with Shinji in both a conscious and unconscious manner, while Rei is Anno’s “deepest part” and Kaworu his Jungian shadow. Shinji’s entering into Unit-01 has been interpreted as a Freudian “return to the womb”, and his struggle to be free of the Eva as his “rite of passage” into manhood. The series also contains references to philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts, such as the oral stage, introjection, oral personality, ambivalence, and the death drive, including elements of the works of Sigmund Freud,Arthur Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard.

It required a certain amount of story-telling skill to get a narrative resolution that included the two things Anno wanted it to include: Shinji’s mental well-being and relationship with his father restored, and the “Human Instrumentality Project” revealed in all its abstract glory, and how it connects the Angels, the Evas, and Humanity. It might literally have been the case that Anno could not tell this story until his third (full) go at it - that he did not have neither the physical nor creative resources to create a story arc that reaches fulfilment of both of these criteria until he had more fully explored (and released) several unsuccessful tries.

Brandon Sanderson has stated that he knew that his series Stormlight Archives would be his magnum opus. This was a story idea he has been sitting on since (if I remember correctly) the late 90s/early 2000s. But he chose not to write that story at first, to instead develop his skill as a writer, and only write what would become book one of the Stormlight Archives (the Way of Kings) after he had already published multiple books. It seems like Anno was granted the immense opportunity to both write his favourite story first, and also refine and revise it to become a true magnum opus later.2

Going into Evangelion, I thought it would be a series of series dealing only with Anno’s growth as a person: how he would become increasingly capable of, throughout his life, dealing with his own depression and trauma, and that only by himself moving past it could he fulfil the story he wanted to tell. In watching it, I also realised the writing skill angle of it all; that the story he wanted to tell was complicated enough that he couldn’t tell it without those several years of experience under his belt. It seems to me now that only through honing both his story-telling skills and his dealing with his trauma, and using the one to polish the other, could Anno finish the story he wanted to tell.

That all said, I suppose the crucial question is: would I recommend watching Evangelion? As hinted to in the pre-spoiler section, this is a layered question. Overall, I think I would. But I’m not sure how strongly I would recommend doing as I did; watching all of the works from the beginning. Watching only the four rebirth movies, you wouldn’t get the meta-narrative insight into Anno’s life and craft, but several parts of the initial 26-episode run are quite hard to get through. If you’re patient, I’d say go for the 26 episodes and all the movies, but if you’re not, go straight to the four rebirth movies. If you’re somewhere inbetween, my recommendation might actually be to watch the 26 original episodes and then move straight to the rebuild movies, as the rebirth ones were made in close succession to the original series, and depart from them only in the latter half of the last movie.

Haikyuu

After finishing the Eva rebuild movies, I started re-reading Haikyuu, one of the best sports mangas, one of the best mangas, and one of the best bildungsromans I’ve ever read. This was brought on by a multitude of factors; I had recommended the Haikyuu anime to a friend; there was a Haikyuu movie released recently, and, due to its subject matter; with the Olympics happening, it was on my mind. In fact, as I write this, Argentina is set to face Japan in the Preliminary Round of the Men’s volleyball - a match which has some amount of significance in the story of Haikyuu. But before I start digging deeper, let’s start at the beginning. What is Haikyuu?

Haikyuu is a sports manga written by Haruichi Furudate. I will assume you know what a manga is. A sports manga is ostensibly a manga about sports. Haikyuu is about volleyball. Sports mangas are usually targeted towards a young male-skewing demographic; the same kinds of people who watch or read more traditional fantasy or sci-fi anime or manga. Individual sports mangas often borrow more, and sometimes less, genre conventions from those genres. As an example, the basketball-focused manga/anime “Kuroko no Basket” by Tadatoshi Fujimaki starts off relatively normal, but as the series goes on, the main characters’ basketball skills devolve more and more into the absurd, and by the end are more reminiscent of supernatural or superhero abilities than actual real-life (high school) basketball. To contrast, seminal basketball series “Slam Dunk” by Takehiko Inoue stays realistic throughout its 31-volume run, and grows the stakes through the main characters’ investments in the basketball games, relationships within the team, and the characters’ (social) struggles outside of basketball.

Of these, Haikyuu falls more into the second category. The skills of the players are exaggerated, but at no point does it seem to the viewer that the characters are performing acts of physical ability best explained by supernatural forces. But potentially the best thing about Haikyuu is the attention, care, and time devoted to almost every single character that appears on the show. So let’s talk about the characters next.

Haikyuu has two clear main characters. Hinata Shoyo - the protagonist - is a short, energetic, and enthusiastic boy who just wishes to play more volleyball. Kageyama Tobio - tall, skilled, emotionally blunt - takes the spot of an antagonist during the series’ first chapter, as they face off in their final middle school volleyball tournament. The series’ premise is granted to us at the end of the first chapter; Hinata and Kageyama enter the same high school, and will have to learn to play well together in order to earn their spots on the team. From here, Haikyuu maintains a high tempo of introducing more and more characters, from teammates to training partners to local teams to national-level teams, all of whom end up taking any role in the narrative from friend to rival to enemy and anything in-between. It is this ability to characterise so many teams and individual players that is Furudate-sensei and Haikyuu’s strength. To give a taste of what this looks like I will now do two things; highlight the characterization of one of Haikyuu’s intermediate-importance characters, and then take you through a whirlwind tour of characters and teams with about equal depth of characterization (or more).

The character I will describe is Yuji Terashima, the team captation of Johzenji High volleyball club. Our main characters face off against this team in the regional playoffs for the spring national tournament. Their team is good, but not the best in the region. Johzenji’s team banner reads “Simplicity and Fortitude”, but at the time of the events in the series, this does nothing but hearken back to a time of the team’s past. Under Terashima’s leadership, Johzenji has transitioned into a team that plays fun volleyball: the team is consistently trying out new strategies, tactics, plays, and more, and play in unconventional ways. For example, the players’ have skill in sports other than volleyball, and will receive with their feet, thighs, heads, etc. due to their familiarity with the ball, and athletic abilities. They will also set the ball in unconventional ways from unconventional positions, often catching their opponents off guard.

Terashima’s main conflict lies in this; he wants to have fun playing volleyball; and when he first takes to the court he thinks this means taking it easy, relaxing, and not investing too much of yourself into the game. But, as is tradition in mangas like these, a match or a fight is really a battle of ideologies. As Terashima and his team face off against our main characters, who are taking this match seriously, who are heavily invested in the outcome of the match, he comes to care about that too. One of the theses of Haikyuu, and of this match in particular, is this: To have absolute freedom, you must also have absolute skill. To be good is to be able to express yourself; and therefore you should try to get better. Johzenji loses this match in back to back sets, but exit the court with the feeling that they did all they could, and that next time things will be different.

Now, let’s do our whirlwind tours of further characters, and remember this; 80% or more of these will have more, better, and more in-depth characterization than Terashima and Johzenji.

Our two main characters enter Karasuno high school as first-year students. Of the other first-years, there is Tsukishima Kei and Yamaguchi Tadashi, the first haughty, snarky, and sometimes straight up mean, the second a hanger-on who grows into his own during the series’ run. Then, further Karasuno team members include (I will be using last-names only when listing, except for when there are multiple people with the same last name): Tanaka, Nishinoya, Enoshita, Kinoshita, Narita, Azumane, Sugawara, Daichi, Kiyoko, Ikkei Ukai, Keishin Ukai, and more. In order of introduction, some of the others teams and characters are: Aoba Johsai, with members Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Kindaichi, Kunimi, Kyotani, Date Tech, with members Aone, Koganegawa, and Futakuchi, Shiratorizawa, with members Ushiwaka, Tendo, and Goshiki, Nekoma, with members Kuroo, Kenma, Lev, Yaku, Taketora, Fukunaga, and Inuoka. There’s Inarizaki with members Atsumu Miya, Osamu Miya, Aran, Suna, and Kita. Other notable characters include Ikejiri, Towada, Hyuakuzawa, Hoshiumi, Sakusa, Kiryu, Komori, Bokuto, Akaashi, Takeru, Michimiya, and finally Kanoka.

Now, that’s a huge list of names. But trust me when I say that this series gives you at least some reason to be invested in either this character/team for their own sake, or because they’re an obstacle that our main characters have to overcome. Often, if not most of the time, someone will be both. Haikyuu is really good at making you care about both teams in a match; that our main characters have actual stakes in the match, and that to win the match is not only a team achievement, but a step on the characters’ journey of becoming better, more fulfilled people.

Many a sports manga’s focus will be on personal betterment, the value of teamwork, and similar things; the characters grow up, attain skills, strengthen their social bonds through their sporting activity. But I think Haikyuu captures hte essence of this in a way few other things I’ve read has. Not only does Haikyuu capture the depth of this theme, through prolonged exposotion of the main characters, but the breadth as well, by the angle and lens through which each of the players views volleyball.

The depths of despair into which Furudate-sensei takes the reader are deep, but the peaks of triumph are some of the highest I have ever experienced in any story, in any medium. Haikyuu makes you cry, and there are tears of loss, of frustration, and of pain, but overwhelmingly tears of joy and smiles of glory.

Properly re-reading Haikyuu has made me appreciate it even more than I previously had, and which sparked writing this piece. I wholeheartedly recommend both reading and watching it.

I’d like to finish the Haikyuu section here with two short things. First is a couple of anecdotes of the impact of Haikyuu. German volleyball player Tobias Krick, who has a decent social media presence. Recently, he was featured in a “10 Essentials” kind of video, where he showed what he keeps in his gym bag. Among the items was a plush of the Haikyuu character Tsukishima Kei. Additionally, at the Olympics, they will now sometimes play the opening theme songs of the Haikyuu anime before, during, or after games.

Next, I will also give a shortlist of sports manga recommendations, “across the board” of what a sports manga can be, as well as listing its sport. Some of them I’ve written about in previous monthly reading posts:

  • Haikyuu - volleyball - straightforwardly about volleyball, but heart-wrenching and peak.
  • March Comes in Like a Lion (“Sangatsu”) - less straightforwardly about its subject matter shogi, but on the whole closely eking out in front of Haikyuu as one of my favourite pieces of literature across any genre or medium.
  • Chihayafuru - somewhere in-between Haikyuu and Sangatsu in terms of focus on the subject matter sports and the main characters’ lives in general, this series is about a reflex-sport called competitive “Karuta” , which involves live poetry readings of a set of 100 Japanese poems. Also focuses on romance, general coming-of-age things.
  • Slam Dunk - straightforwardly about basketball, but “real” and the OG.
  • Cross Game - straightforwardly about baseball, but with a great romance component.

Ruination

Ruination is a book set in the League of Legends world, detailing the eponymous Ruination event in the game’s lore. While I knew the general outline of this story before entering it, I was not expecting to enjoy reading this book as much as I did. In some ways, it felt like high-quality fanfiction, with the way it gave time, exposition, and personality to some characters who had generally received less of that in the past.

In the past 10 years, League of Legends (and Riot Games) have grown increasingly skilled at characterisation, and I was positively impressed by the way some characters were fit into the narrative in Ruination. I will try keep this section short, but if you want to here more about Ruination, get in touch. In general, I would recommend it if you like League’s world or characters, especially Kalista, Ryze, Thresh or Senna/Lucian. If you don’t know anything about League yet, just like fanfiction,3 this book probably isn’t for you.

Almost Nowhere

Earlier this summer I also read Nostalgebraist’s Almost Nowhere. This is a mind-bending, time-warping story sci-fi story of first contact with aliens who are very different from us. While very confusing at first, highly confusing in the middle, and befuddling towards its later arcs, the story overall is highly enjoyable, and working one’s way through this confusion is a part of the reading process. If I had been reading this as it was releasing, it probably would have been too much for me, but reading it all in consecutive sittings made me able to follow both the plot and the mechanics of the world nostalgebraist had painted.

I don’t really know what more to write here. The book is not explicitly rational fiction, but it borrows some things from that genre, as well as a nostalgebraist-classic focus on language, computer science, and simulations, with some theoretical physics thrown in there for good measure.

If this all sounds enticing to you, I would highly recommend reading Almost Nowhere.

Permutation City

Permutation City is a 1994 hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan. The most striking thing to me about it is how prescient it is in some respects. Egan’s world is set in what is now the near-future (late 2020s/early 30s), and envisions a world full of custom neural network systems intermixed with powerful simulation technology and expert systems (Good Old-Fashioned AI).

Equally prescient, it concerns itself with some questions relevant for another book I read during the summer; Nick Boström’s Deep Utopia. Specifically, characters in Permutation City eventually end up in a virtual utopia, living for an immense amount of time, re-wiring their brains to get immense amounts of joy from activities such as carving table legs - for decades on end. In terms of its connection to Deep Utopia, we have to wonder; while this is good for this character - they experience subjective positive experiences - how good is this really? How - if we can go there - objectively good would it actually be to spend utopia doing nothing but re-wiring your brain every couple of decades to gain a new hyper-fixation from which you gain immense pleasure?

In terms of its science fiction ideas, the book follows form for Egan, as it presumes certain levels of technical understanding of its audience. In the case of Permutation City, this is cellular automata and computer systems, which I am slightly more familiar with than that of his previous books I have read; the Orthogonal Trilogy, which was heavy on physics.

I don’t really have that much to say about Permutation City: It was good and I would probably recommend it, but with the amount of discussion we have nowadays about simulated humans, meaning and purpose, it did not fundamentally broaden or change my world view. We encounter the Shakespeare problem once again; as probably many of the ideas now discussed owe in some (perhaps small) way to Permutation City.

Non-Fiction

Deep Utopia

I read Boström’s Deep Utopia most recently, in the last weeks of July. While I think Boström succeeds in his stated mission of ‘exploring’ what meaning might look like in utopia, what struck me most about this book was its format. The book takes the format of a series of lectures given by Boström, interrupted by “handouts”, questions by ‘students’, post-lecture dialogues between certain recurring ‘audience members’, and ‘assigned reading’ for the next day’s lectures. Altogether, it creates a certain Gödel, Escher, Bach-esque veneer over the whole thing, which I immensely enjoyed.

Among these, it was the assigned readings, specifically those detailing the activities of “Feodor the Fox”, which stood out to me. These tell the tale of Feodor, an industrious and altruistic fox who wishes to find out how he can make the world a better place. While this could be taken as a straightforward simile for how Boström sees some of his own work, it is complicated by the roles played by other characters in these fables, and the ideas expressed by Feodor.

The more playful format has also afforded Boström the ability to include in the book some of his … gripes with the academic establishment. The lecture series is repeatedly interrupted by a ‘Dean’ and other university administration, the lectuer halls are called, variously, the Exxon hall, the FTX hall, and so on, and at one point the fire alarm and sprinklers go off, the lights go out, and the ‘lecture’ continues in darkness.

Overall, the book is good but not fundamental or vitally important in the current moment. I think Boström is aware of this - he recognises that most people do not need to concern themselves with the ‘issues’ of utopia, but that he thinks some should, or could. That is the impression I am left with after the book; these are not issues I think are pressing in the current moment, but that laying the foundations for future work here might be worthwhile enough. Especially given the way the ‘university’ and its administration is depicted in the book, Boström used this book as a way to vent his frustrations with the roadblocks placed in the way of doing this work.

It is in this way not a “pure” book about Boström’s explorations of the philosophical views on deep utopia, but also a clearer reflection of Boström himself, and his views on the institutions of modern academia; a more personal book than e.g. Superintelligence.

The Book of Why

Before Deep Utopia, I was reading Judea Pearl’s Book of Why. I started this book while travelling for EAGxNordics in April, then took a break from it during my exams, and resumed (and finished) it while travelling for EAGxUtrecht in the start of July.

While Richard McElreath’s excellent textbook Statistical Rethinking gave me a taste of the power of causal reasoning and scientific thinking when doing statistical analyses, Pearl’s Book of Why did not realy addd much on top of McElreath’s work. The book goes over some of the history of causal reasoning and inference, detailing issues pure statistical analysis has with determining cause and effect (and therefore the value of doing interventions).

After reading Book of Why, I walk around with pretty much the same outlook on causal inference as I did before I read it; while it introduces some tools that can help with explicit causal inference, a lot of the positives done by the causal reasoning framework lies in the groundwork laid by thinking in DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) at all - that while statistics can be done without formulating a model of the phenomenon under inspection, science is done by reasoning - extra-statistically - about how the world works.

Overall, Book of Why felt like a very pop-science book, and I’m not sure I would actually recommend it.

Music

Midwest Princess

Queer pop sensation Chappell Roan released her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess almost one year ago, but has in the last 2-4 months seen a well deserved meteoric rise in stardom. Internet’s busiest music nerd Fantano did not review it when it came out, which is a shocking thing to say (the man really is busy), but released a video on it recently.

It’s hard to oversell this album. Roan’s vocals are incredible, and the narrative arc painted by the album would fit well into any well-produced musical theatre production. Likely my favourite album of the year, and high up in my informal albums of the decade rankings. If you haven’t listened, I implore you to go do so. Midwest Princess is fun, heart-wrenching, dancy, angry, and so much more.

brat

Another album I’ve been enjoying recently is Charli xcx’s brat. Charli has been pumping out avant-garde and ground-breaking pop for a decade now, and with brat, my music taste (and the masses’) lined up just right with this album to produce an incredible amount of enjoyment in me. Fantano’s review of brat is slightly more coherent than his Midwest Princess review, luckily.

I can’t right now think of much more to say.

Misc.

Some other things I’ve been thinking about recently:

  • Compilers: I kind of want to write a compiler (maybe in Haskell?), and there are good resources for this on the Internet - probably going to start this soon.

  1. Note, the name of the rebirth movies themselves are indicative of the abstract and esoteric nature of the series. They are: 1.0 You are (Not) Alone, 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, 3.0 You Can Not Redo, and 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time ↩

  2. Though I fear this actually diminishes the impact Neon Genesis Evangelion had on the Japanese people and people who watch anime, I will leave the sentence as is. ↩

  3. The reason the book feels like fanfiction is that it assumes an already-existing relationship between the reader and some characters (and even to the world itself), and then builds on, plays with, and expands that relationship throughout the book. I think if you haven’t interacted with anything League-related before, the book might still be enjoyable - like a 6/10 - but with some “past history”, that goes up to something like 8/10. ↩