Category: Evangelion

The Acts of Evangelion

On August 6, 2023

In Comedy, Comics, Evangelion, Fumino Hayashi, Ming Ming, Osamu Takahashi, Romance, Tony Takezaki, Urban Fantasy

Okay, so…

Originally, this article was supposed to cover the video game adaptations of NGE. It made sense as a next step, since SEGA helped bankroll the original anime’s production on the condition that it had first dibs on the game rights to the Evangelion IP, and the first video game (also the first spinoff) of the series, Neon Genesis Evangelion: First Impression, came out in the middle of the show’s broadcast.

There’s just one problem: the game isn’t available in English. In fact, most of the Eva games are not available in English. I was able to find the two Girlfriend of Steel games and the Shinji Ikari Raising Project in English, but even with that small sample size I discovered an issue, namely that video games are a much greater time investment than shows or books. Yes, I know, that should have been obvious to me, but I am, alas, not a gamer, and I quickly realized that even investing time in these three games would cause the gap between my third and fourth articles in this series to swell like the Ultimate Warrior, unless I half-assed it and shat out a review of games I barely touched.

The Excursus of Evangelion

By Mark

On July 26, 2023

In Comedy, Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, Kaiju, Radio and Audio Dramas, Science Fiction

Should have worked. Didn’t.

Wait, you want me to go into more detail? Okay, okay, fine.

After the End

Evangelion: After the End is an audio drama made shortly after the end of the original NGE tv show, wherein after the massive success of the show’s finale, NGE is suddenly granted a second season, which leaves the characters struggling to come up with an appropriate plot. It’s something of a footnote in the larger history of Eva. I didn’t discover it until I was midway through my article on the other Eva manga (coming soon), and even after learning of it, my main thought was “Huh. This looks interesting. No way in hell it’s available in English though.”

But I was wrong! As luck or fate would have in its way, a fan-translation has been available since the early 2000s, and is readily viewable on Youtube in three parts. So, despite it not being part of my initial retrospective plans, I figured After the End was worth taking a slight detour to check out. The synopsis promised fun metatextual humor, and with Hideaki Anno writing (and guest-starring), surely his creative vision would steer the story in a satisfying direction, right?

Well, one would think.

The Forerunner of Evangelion

By Mark

On July 16, 2023

In Books & Texts, Evangelion, Kaiju, Weeb Shit, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

The popular image of a creator is that of Howard Roark, a lone genius who strives against those who would stifle or misinterpret his creative vision, such as fatuous editors who demand cuts or snobbish critics who only say mean things out of envy. And if there are other people involved in the production of Roark’s work, they are merely puppets carrying out his vision, their own talent judged by how much they dilute or distill the creator’s genius.

This is, of course, nonsense. Even in something like prose fiction, perhaps the least collaborative media, there are still publishers, proof-readers, and other people who help the writer come up with the final story we see on the page. And as for something like filmmaking, there are so many different moving parts in the process that it’s impossible to credit the final product to any single person, even if the screenwriter or director help steer the ship in a cohesive direction.

This is also to say nothing of how stories and art survive, not by being told, but by being retold and reworked with each passing generation. This is why the griots scoff at the idea of books, and why even the biggest King Arthur fan won’t defend the notion that the Icelanders are a slave race fit only to lick their English masters’ boots (even though that’s very much a part of early Arthurian stories). Even within the same generation, adaptations from one medium to another often involve different creators with different perspectives on the subject matter. That’s why Jack Torrence goes from a sympathetic character to a more villainous one in the film adaptation of The Shining. That’s why people fondly remember M.A.S.H. as a heartfelt tv drama and not a wildly sexist book. And that’s why I’m interested in checking out the manga version of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The Resurrection of Evangelion

By Mark

On July 6, 2023

In Animation, Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, Kaiju, Weeb Shit

The ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion is not the ending Anno originally wanted. After real-world tragedies forced the animation staff to rewrite the finale, and deadlines forced them to cut corners, the last two episodes of NGE ended up being the best they could do under the realities of tv production. Audience reaction to these episodes was mixed. While it’s commonly assumed that fans overwhelmingly hated the NGE finale, a better description is that most people were simply confused. They weren’t quite sure what to make of the ending, and like myself, while they still loved the show, the last two episodes coloured their overall experiences.

However, controversy attracts attention, and with the already sizeable fanbase that had developed over the course of the show’s run combined with newfound publicity from the controversial finale, home sales of NGE on VHS generated a massive profit for GAINAX, to say nothing of the money made from merchandise, manga, and mmmvideo games (I’m sorry I couldn’t think of an appropriate alliterative aaaa… y’know what let’s just move on).

The point is, Hideaki Anno was now in a position to do something few artists get to do: have another go at the ending of his story. He had the money, he had the audience, and he had the passion for the project. All he needed was to get to work. But with this opportunity came expectations; expectations from studios that they would get a return on investment, expectations from fans that they would get the ending that they wanted, and expectations from Anno himself that he had the ability to see his vision realized. And with these expectations came pressure.

The Genesis of Evangelion

By Mark

On June 26, 2023

In Animation, Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, Kaiju, Movies & Television, Weeb Shit

This article can also be read at AJET Connect here.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a phenomenon. Like Sherlock Holmes or Gundam, even if you’ve never seen a single episode of the show, you’re probably at least aware of it on some level, due to the sheer ubiquity of media, merch, pastiches, and parodies out there. If I tell my students most of the anime I watched when I was their age, they stare at me blankly, or even gasp at how old I am to have watched such ancient animation. But if I say that I watched Evangelion, my students light up as they gush about their own love of whatever piece of Eva media they first encountered. That is the ubiquity, the longevity, that is enjoyed by Evangelion in Japan, to say nothing of its popularity outside its home country.

Given the sheer scope of NGE’s popularity though, it raises the obvious question “Why cover it here?” What more is there to say about a show that has already been so thoroughly dissected and discussed? What new insight could I, Marco Cian, possibly lend to the series? It certainly is a daunting task, and one that gives me slight trepidation.

And yet, after I recently bit the bullet and watched the last two Rebuild of Evangelion films (something I’d been putting off for some time), the ending of the series left me with a morass of emotions, which I found difficult to process and put into words. Whenever I thought I’d settled on an opinion, some new aspect of the movies would remind me of itself, and my feelings would once again be cast into chaos. The only thought that remained consistent, the one conclusion I was able to come to, was that I needed to go back and explore the whole series. And not just the original tv show and Rebuild films, but everything Eva I could get my hands on. It felt like, if I could just see the full picture of Eva, I might be able to come to terms with its ultimate conclusion.

More than that though, I’m a different person now than I was when I first watched Eva over a decade ago. I’ve changed, my tastes have changed, and perhaps my perspective on NGE has changed in new and interesting ways. It’s certainly something I’m interested in exploring, and as any content creator will tell you, if you’re going to make content out of something, it better be something you’re genuinely interested in.

So, to start out with, let’s take a look at the show that started it all.