Neon Genesis Evangelion: Sub or Dub?

For Evangelion the question is not really sub or dub. It is which dub, because there are two, they are unusually different, and the one most people are told to watch is the one you cannot legally stream.

The short answer

Watch the sub. Evangelion is the series where that advice is least controversial, and the reason is not performance quality but access: the older English track is out of circulation, and the one that replaced it was built to a brief that works against the lines people came for.

The two dubs

The 1990s ADV dub is the one quoted in twenty years of forum posts and video essays. It is not on streaming, and it did not get there by being disliked. Rights moved, and the release that reached Netflix in 2019 carried a new English cast: Casey Mongillo as Shinji, Ryan Bartley as Rei, Stephanie McKeon as Asuka, Carrie Keranen as Misato.

The recasting was not the substantive change. The script was. Khara handled the translation in-house and Anno wanted something close to literal, which is a coherent position and produces a different show in English. Lines audiences had known for two decades were simply not there any more, because they had been the previous adaptation's choices rather than the Japanese text.

The line the argument is actually about

Kaworu, episode 24. ADV rendered it as love. The Netflix subtitles rendered it as like. Both are available readings of suki, which carries the whole range in Japanese, and Netflix's translator defended the choice on the grounds that leaving something for the audience to infer beats stating it.

The objection is not that the literal reading is wrong. It is that Shinji's reaction at the end of that episode does not parse as the response of somebody who has been told he is liked. A translation is a choice, this one changes what the following twenty minutes are about, and readers can see how the line sits on Kaworu's page.

The other thing the English release lost

Fly Me to the Moon, the ending theme, is absent from the Netflix version in English-speaking territories. That was a music licensing question rather than an editorial one, and other language tracks kept it. It matters more than a missing credits song usually would: twenty-six episodes of psychological collapse closing on a lounge standard is a joke the series is making, and without it the tonal whiplash the ending depends on does not happen.

What to do

Watch the Japanese track with subtitles, and treat any quote you find online as belonging to a specific script until you know which. If you are working out where the films fit, the watch order covers it, and the ending explainer deals with what the last two episodes and the film are doing.