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ANNCast - Giant-Size Double Feature ANNCast

Interesting follow-up to the previous thoughts on Franxx!

Might the aliens be a metaphor for foreign influence in Japan? You mentioned how heavily inspired the show seemed to be from Evangelion, which reminded me of a quote that Anno made in an interview with The Atlantic in 2007:

Quote:

“Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces. Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”

(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/let-s-die-together/305776/)

Might the premise of the show be nationalist?

Eva itself would be a Devilman clone, given it was hugely based on it and even Anno admits he copies things from Nagai's series. The whole notion of 'show clones' seems like it gives people an excuse to act really flippant about established tropes and themes from groundbreaking series.

Might the premise of the show be nationalist?

Finally I think that Anno's perception's about Japan tell us more about Anno's mongrel dog inferiority complex than about Japan. The idea that it is "wrong" for salary men to read manga and porn while commuting to work is based on the idea that what is correct is what Westerners consider correct: in the West, which is an anti-comics and anti-sex culture (on the level of public perception), these things are regarded as wrong, so Anno interprets the fact that Japan doesn't follow Western mores as being something wrong. It reflects Japan's inferiority complex regarding their own culture and the Japanese attempt to artificially self supress their cultural peculiarities in regards to Western culture. Well, self hate is also part of Japanese culture so nothing is more naturally Japanese than a cartoon director like Anno, who devoded his life to cartoons, to insult people because they enjoy cartoons.

By the way, the word he uses to insult the Japanese people are that they are "not adults", as if a person wouldn't be an "adult" just because he or she appreciates something that Westerners do not often do while commuting to work. Well, first, being an "adult" is biological fact: people who already stopped growing are adults and that is not disputable, if you say being "mature" is being an "adult" that's also a problem since what is "mature" or not is ultimately subjective. A mature person is a person who engages in mature behavior and mature behavior is behavior that is considered socially appropriate. But what is considered socially appropriate varies from group to group. Hence, there is does not exist an objective notion of being "mature".