Shinji, from Evangelion.
He’s 14. His mum is dead. His dad is a piece of shit and a manipulative bastard, who sees him as nothing but a pawn. “Emotionally traumatised” doesn’t even start to describe him. He’s pressured to pilot a mecha and if he fucks things up people will die, he knows that they will die, and that it’ll be his fault.
And yet people expect him to be assertive or to not have meltdowns? Come the fucking on.
Imagine if nerv had invested some of its money in the mental health of its employees. I like to think many issues could have been solved by hiring a few therapists.
I really thought the idea was, “You like mecha? You like kids piloting mecha? This is how it’d go down.” I loved it so much. Shinji’s a broken, abused shell child. He lives with a broken human who drowns her sorrows in drink. His father is just evil. He’d have to be to let his kid pilot the mecha.
The only real father figure we ever see for shinji is a spy. Who gets killed. He’s in love with a girl that hates him. Because he’s broken. But he has no one else. Except those friends at school who I think they take away. Don’t remember. And that angel who he has to kill or something. Damn, it’s been like 25 years. I have no idea what happened. But in my memory it’s terrible. Wonderful stuff.
I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.
With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.
I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.
I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.
Didn’t realize he was hated? He is a fucked up little weirdo but so is everyone in that show. Man, I might need to rewatch, been way too long.
Wesley Crusher. I always liked him
An ambitious smart young man who has clear life goals and the drive to serve the federation and push the limits of human expansion and discovery? His character is to show that all generations young and old are willing to further humanity’s/the federation’s goals of a peaceful coexistence and cooperation for greater prosperity for ALL.
Some of Wesley’s haters often come across as honestly jealous that THEY couldn’t be born into such a time and place.
Edit: furthermore, a character like Wesley is SUPPOSED to be the way he is. It’s not the actor it is the character. Young viewers were meant to look at him as a mirror to themselves, a way to imagine yourself in such a universe, someone to identify with and better put your mind into the headspace of the story.
While Riker is cool and funny, you are not Riker.
While Picard is cool and professional, you are not Picard.
He had a tendency to be immediately dismissive, impatient, and often outright insulting to other cultures and non-Federation types. The kid needed some humility, and often showed his age and closed-mindedness when he shut out ideas that didn’t come from his superiors.
Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.
Jar Jar Binks. He’s my favorite Sith
I know this a joke theory (mostly), but given how much Star Wars rips from classic scifi works, I think looking at the Foundation books makes a good case for this being viable as more than a joke.
It’s not even viable. In canon, Jar Jar was relegated to being a shunned street performer on Theed where adults hated him but the children would laugh at his clown antics. A Sith lord wouldn’t become that, ever.
I am viewing from intention as written, when written for the films. It seems plausible that “Darth Jar Jar” or something similar could have been an original, but abandoned intention.
Willie in Temple of Doom. So what if she wasn’t cut out for the big adventure! She liked her life in Shanghai- dresses, performing, champagne, and nightlife. She didn’t ask for any of what happened next!
Skyler White. I didn’t even know that she was hated quite a lot. I always thought she is actually the most sane person given the situation she’s in.
Same, and I suspect that not many people ever did hate Skylar… But the narrative makes for good content, so the few that did hate on Skylar got portrayed as the majority.
IIRC, though, Anna Gunn mentioned having a lot of negative interactions with the audience conflating her with her character… So who knows.
I like how these conversations always ignore the wrong things Skylar did, such as cheating with Ted. It’s always “well Walter was the devil, so anything she did was ok”. She still begins the show by showing very little care for his birthday and making it feel like a chore. She’s literally part of why he feels he’s in a hum drum boring life with no control. His character ark is largely about him going from a meek high school professor afraid to do anything into a completely fearless kingpin who finally has control over his life. Yes, the point is that he goes too far. But it’s also shown pretty clearly early on that he feels powerless and like his life is out of control(you know, like a sudden terminal cancer diagnosis might do).
Was Walter a bad person? Yes. Was Skylar also a bad person who didn’t truly see him as an equal and who, when given the chance, cheats on him remorselessly? Also yup.
Multiple people can be bad. Even Hank, arguably one of the most moral characters, suffers from major blindspots and is a dismissive dick to Marie.
People defending Skylar are the kind of people that say “I can do what I want because it’s a free country” and get shocked when they learn there are consequences to their actions, even if justified.
