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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 998589" data-attributes="member: 8461">I only saw the first episode, but it failed to impress me - Dual, in my mind, started out not being quite so much in the vein of Eva. RahXephon couldn't even be that. A much better look at the question of RahXephon versus Evangelion can be found here: <a href="http://www.animenation.net/news/askjohn.php?id=549" target="_blank">Is RahXephon an Evangelion Rip Off?</a>.Well, that explains why you felt so disappointed. I, in turn, never felt that the anime promised to be a serious angst-fest the way Evangelion was. While the first episode is certainly mysterious, with Kazuki seeing visions of battling mecha that no one else can see, various aspects of the show indicate that it clearly isn't meant to be taken seriously. These include his having to run away from the rest of the male population in his school when he's seen talking to Mitsuki, and pretty much the entire scene with Ken, an archetypal mad scientist.It should also be noted that after the fourth episode, he dispenses with the dressing in drag. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />You're basically correct here; the character archetypes are so familiar not because Dual was trying to play off of Evangelion (though I believe that that was in there too), but just because these gender roles for anime characters are stereotypical, finding themselves virtually everywhere (I did my senior composition on gender roles in anime <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />).Dual, while a sci-fi mecha show, has, IMHO, its primary basis as one of the "One Guy Many Girls" subgenre that began with Tenchi Muyo! All the classical types of characters are there: a shy male who somehow becomes the love object for several woman (Kazuki), one girl who obviously feels for him but can't express it, hiding it behind a wall of distaste (Mitsuki), another who feels for him, and tries to get close to him with her charms, doing cooking, laundry, etc (Yayoi), and, what was a more later development in the "One Guy Many Girls" subgenre, the girl who is emotionally undeveloped, and "warms up" thanks to the male (in this case, D).Evangelion took itself too seriously in its character interactions to fall into this category. While Rei did feel some emotional attachment to Shinji, she never fell in love with him in terms of romance (though she did care about him, probably moreso than she did for Gendo by the end). Likewise, Asuka's enmity for Shinji isn't some schoolgirl attempt to hide a crush, but her own way of trying to ignore her deep-rooted fear of failure and sense of worthlessness. Finally, Misato doesn't ever really consider falling for Shinji, since she's still in love with her old boyfriend, Kaji. In essence, Eva is a story with fully-developed characters; they interact with and affect each other, but none of them truly revolve around another to the point where we say "we only know character X in how she related to character Y - he defines her" We can say that in Dual, since we only see most of the cast as they relate to (and are affected by) Kazuki. Dual wants to be (and, I think, succeeding in being) a fun anime that doesn't try to be anything more than what you see. It still has deeper complexities (which Kazuki later outlines when he asks why he was able to see across parallel dimensions to begin with, why he has no alternate in the other dimension, and why he is able to pilot a robot that is only supposed to be pilotable by women), but none of these approach the universal questions about sense of self and others posed by Evangelion.In a sense, I would sum Dual up as being "Evangelion Lite".</blockquote>

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