Last week's announcement that Evangelion is coming back with a fresh coat of paint got Lucas and Sylvia digging deep into their own SEELE files.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Sylvia, if the 2020s have made anything clear to me, it's that culture is cyclical and perhaps even accelerating! Less than five years after the premiere of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time, the conclusion of a reimagining/iteration on the original Evangelion anime, we got the news that there's ANOTHER Evangelion series in the works, and that this series will be written by the internet's favorite sad boi goofball, Yokō Tarō.
This has inspired a wild amount of discussion and speculation in the anime and gaming circles. It's about time that the TWIA crew weighed in! Will you get back in this robot with me???
Sylvia
I don't think I have a choice! Try as one might—and I know for a fact that many have tried—you can (not) escape Evangelion. Getting into the robot will continue until morale approves. Or until the heat death of the universe. Whichever arrives first.
The immediately funny thing about the past week or so is the sheer volume of Evangelion news and discussion I saw. The socials were abuzz. And it felt especially remarkable for a series that loudly advertised its previous, and supposedly final, entry with the tagline "Bye-bye, all of EVANGELION."
Didn't we all know it was a lie? Don't get me wrong, I was also hoping that Shinji and company could all finally be free of their tortured existences, but a main feature of the Evangelion series for years now is how it endures and manifests in surprising ways.
While most of these surprising permeations of the series are due to either Gainax being hard up for money or, paradoxically, series creator Hideaki Anno feeling like past iterations of the series were creatively compromised or no longer reflective of himself as an artist, this has had the longtail effect of Eva becoming a template for artistic expression as much as a singular media franchise.
I would agree! While my instinct is to think of Eva as a monolithic entity, that has rarely been the case. Even if we're just talking about "classic" Eva, you can point to the divergence between the end of the TV series and the End of Evangelion. While these two versions are not irreconcilable, they nevertheless exist superimposed on top of each other. Neither is necessarily more authentic than the other, but they represent distinct artistic visions.
And of course, this picture only becomes gnarlier when you take into account, well, everything you can see on this page, for starters.
That's a whole lot of "remakes," "spinoffs," and "alternates"!
I'd even argue that there are enough meaningful differences between how the original broadcast of Evangelion was localized and how the Netflix version of the series was localized as to make them fundamentally distinct texts! While Eva is absolutely just a TV show and a couple of movies, it is also a media franchise that is perpetually in conversation with itself, as are a few other works.
While this is both a little exhausting, it also makes the franchise the perfect media piece for Yokō Tarō to take a crack at, as he is widely celebrated for his ability to weave emotionally affecting stories that incorporate meta-narrative elements.
The Yokō Tarō factor is certainly a curveball. That announcement was about as shocking as finding out that Hideaki Anno was going to cowrite GQuuuuuuX. Like, yes, obviously this is a good fit that makes a lot of sense, but also, how the hell did we get here?
Yokō Tarō, for those not in the know, is the creator and director of the Drakengard and Nier video game franchises, which are renowned for their messy characters, dark fantasy settings, formal experimentation, irreverence, and overall idiosyncrasy. He is, in other words, responsible for some of my favorite games of all time, and he is also a fellow Evangelion acolyte. The signs are there if you look for them.
There are a variety of business-minded factors likely responsible for Yokō Tarō getting signed onto this project, but I'm choosing to believe that the actual reason he was brought on is that he functionally made his own version of the Rebuild film series with NieR:Automata.
While I know most folks played Automata in a vacuum, it's deeply iterative on the previous Nier Replicant/Gestalt games, and thematically in conversation with the Drakengard titles (well, the ones that Yokō Tarō meaningfully worked on at least). There's basically no one better to put a new twist on Evangelion than Yokō Tarō, as he's taken a similar narrative approach to his own work for much of his career.
More generally, he and Anno strike me as similarly-minded creatives who keep hammering and chiseling away at a specific set of ideas and themes to hone them into their purest form. You can track Anno's thought processes from the start of the TV series through to the end of 3.0+1.0, and you can do the same with Yokō Tarō if you follow Drakengard through to the end of Automata. An unkind adjective you might throw at them is "obsessive," but honestly, what artists aren't?
Additionally, I have to imagine it wasn't too difficult for Khara to recruit Yokō Tarō onto the project when Square Enix, by all accounts, certainly doesn't seem interested in utilizing him right now. For heaven knows what reason.
I wonder if Yokō Tarō might be in a position where he's a victim of his own success. He was pretty candid in a recent interview about Square Enix cancelling games he's been working on midway through development, and I can easily imagine the company wanting another Automata sized hit from him when his body of work largely consists of mid-sized, more arthouse affairs.
Though SE did let him do the Voice of Cards trilogy, which, uh, I liked at least! There's about one and a half good video games in that franchise! I don't know if anyone played them besides me, but Yokō Tarō has been doing some neat stuff since Automata was released (turns to dust as I confirm this) nine years ago.
I mean, if we want to keep up the Anno comparisons, we easily can! In between 3.0 and 3.0+1.0, Anno worked on the various Shin films as a way of flexing his other creative muscles, which in all likelihood helped him put his finishing touches on Evangelion. Yokō Tarō, similarly, has spent the years following Automata working on several smaller games, theatrical productions, manga, and anime. Should he ever return to Drakengard or NieR, I'd be eager to look for what he may have learned from those.
And now we're bridging into why my optimism for this Yokō Tarō-led Eva project is largely cautious. While I know most folks lean positive on the NieR:Automata Ver1.1a anime, his other anime, KamiErabi GOD.app was bad.
And when I say bad, I mean BAD. Kennedy gave the second season an "F" grade in their review, and it made ANN's "2024 Worst Of" list! Between this and Yokō Tarō's largely forgettable (and I think now offline) mobile games like SINoALICE and Nier Reincarnation, dude's had WAY more misses than hits with his in-between projects than Anno.
If I may play Taro's advocate for a moment, we can only blame him for the concept of KamiErabi, not the composition or execution, so I don't think that's as egregious a sin as it looks. But I don't believe he's beyond skepticism either. Penning an original anime would be a new frontier for him, after all.
Which is why I don't think we should ignore the other names attached to the project either. Your mileage may vary with how much you withstood GQuuuuuuX, but speaking personally, Kazuya Tsurumaki has a lifetime pass for putting together FLCL and Diebuster. For my money, though, the most interesting addition here is co-director Tōko Yatabe. She's a younger female artist with an impressive resume, and I'm very excited by the prospect of her take on Evangelion.
Not that having a women in a position of leadership on this project guarantees this, but I would LOVE IT if this new Evangelion project engaged with how the fandom (and some folks at Gainax) twisted the ways the work engaged with sex and sexuality into something a lot more perverse and promotional for its young female characters.
This is also an element of the franchise that I think Yokō Tarō is super qualified to address, as he's handled sex and sexuality super well in his past work. There's an earnestness to how he writes attractive characters that would work very well in Evangelion, and the way he writes Kainé in the original Nier games shows a thorough understanding of the intersection between sexuality and social stigma.
But to your broader point, it's clear that Studio Khara is putting together a roster of heavy hitters, which means this should at least be a technically proficient project.
One more final point I want to make about Yokō Tarō and the female perspective is that he has a history of working with women writers like Hana Kikuchi and Sawako Natori, so I would be really happy if he collaborated with them again on this new Evangelion project.
But that's a good segue back into talking about Evangelion as an entity. Like, what, truly, is Evangelion? When Anno founded Khara, he did so as a reaction to the corruption he saw fester in the halls of Gainax. The Rebuild s, therefore, were his means of not only retelling Evangelion, but redoing its production in a way that could actually benefit the animators and other artists who worked on it.
I don't doubt there was some egotism involved there, too. Whom amongst us? But I do believe he wanted to change things for the better.
Agreed, and much like Studio Khara's founding reflects how much of a different place Anno's career is in than when he started Evangelion, the Rebuild series showcases how much of a different place he's in mentally too. Though still pretty brutal, the Rebuild franchise is way more optimistic than the original series, and the entire franchise serves as a kind of subtextual chronicle of Anno's own mental health journey.
I hope Shinji and the other main cast don't return in this new Evangelion project, and this new team creates new characters to explore their own deeply personal lived experiences. Evangelion is about more than a sad sack teenager being forced to get into a purple meat robot, and my biggest hope for this new project is Evangelion becoming a means for creatives to overtly turn their personal baggage into art.
So Anno has gone on record saying that he wants Evangelion to essentially become the new Gundam—a template on which other artists can craft their own stories into perpetuity. And he hasn't been shy with prior hints that the series would not truly "end" with the final Rebuild film. So this new development is consistent with those past statements.
At the same time, though, it feels weirder with Evangelion than with Gundam, doesn't it? The original Mobile Suit Gundam certainly could have only been a product of Yoshiyuki Tomino's bizarre brain, but even that didn't feel as psychologically entwined with its creator as Evangelion. Like you said, some of the satisfaction of Evangelion's "true" ending stems from the audience's knowledge of Anno's personal relationship with it. As with any insanely popular media franchise, we have to reconcile that connection with the realities of capitalism and consumption, but "fragmenting" Evangelion in an honest-to-goodness franchise is only going to exacerbate that weirdness.
Maybe a part of the issue here is just how big Evangelion is as a media franchise. Especially with the way the last couple of weeks and/or years have gone, we're used to seeing news and changes around major entertainment properties come from the overtly cynical motivations of bad-faith actors. This, coupled with the history of Eva being used as a cash cow by folks with less of an emotional stake in the project, makes it easy to think that this change is the consequence of some nefarious machination.
But, if we think of Evangelion as a deeply personal work that just so happened to escape containment, it makes a lot more sense that new folks would take it on after Anno finished telling his story! In comics, new writers put their own spin on iconic characters and storylines all the time and are often celebrated for finding ways to put their personal touch on firmly established properties and characters. If we can ignore our (well-earned) impulse assume capitalistic shenanigans are driving this new project, there's a lot to be excited about here!
Evangelion is already weird and dense to the point of me having a hard time recommending it to people, but I'd sure as hell be willing to suggest people check out this new project if it does seem like a mostly clean break from previous iterations of the franchise.
A lot, obviously, is riding on the execution. I want this to be good, too! The first of hopefully many. But a part of me also wonders if the audience is ready and receptive to a "new " Evangelion. I mean, people went kinda crazy last week when the 30th anniversary short film leaked online and showed a short scene of Shinji and Asuka enjoying their happily-ever-after in another universe. People are so attached to these characters. Will they be willing to let them go? Will the creative team on the new series have the moxie to abandon them?
Like, if this ends up being another multiverse project that explores a slightly (or even not-so-slightly) different concatenation of events, I'm probably going to feel a lot less enthusiastic. I grow weary of the multiverse.
Not to mention that a lot of the multiverse or "what if" fan theorizing around Evangelion is often clashing with the source material. In this specific instance, I completely understand the impulse to ship Shinji and Asuka, as their having a traditional and romantic relationship means that all the trauma they endured together was building towards something. However, Evangelion shows us repeatedly why these two characters would be terrible together, and I've always found any arguments for why they should be in a relationship to be pretty ignorant.
All of that being said, I'm sure the various folks involved in Evangelion would love a fresh set of characters to drive merchandising efforts, and I'm hopeful that this team recognizes just how thoroughly we've tread all the ground afforded by these characters. If Evangelion is getting fresh blood at the top, this needs to be a new experience all throughout.
Now, if they do stick with the original cast to any extent, I hope they know what they must do: trans Shinji. It's the only way. Yokō Tarō would make it happen. I believe.
But I agree that I want some new blood. Figuratively and literally.
There's so much fan art of Shinji wearing fem clothes circulating alongside official artwork that I have to keep reminding myself that Anno didn't canonize that obvious progression for the character years ago! But I'm completely with you. The only thing I want from this Evangelion project is something that I would never expect, and if anyone can catch me by surprise, it's this team!
It is a bit of a shame that Khara will probably never be able to escape the shadow cast by Evangelion, but if they can change what Evangelion means, that will at least allow them more freedom. We live in a world dominated by undying franchises and cycles of nostalgia. Maybe holding onto the Evangelion brand is unavoidable. Maybe we can (not) advance. I genuinely don't know. But I will be following along and scarfing down each crumb of news with the rest of you, that's for sure.
I'm happy to hear that, Sylvia, because there's no one I'd rather be in this robot with, and I can't wait to break down whatever this new Eva project ends up being with you whenever Yokō Tarō deems us worthy of its grace.
Last week's announcement that Evangelion is coming back with a fresh coat of paint got Lucas and Sylvia digging deep into their own SEELE files.― Last week's announcement that Evangelion is coming back with a fresh coat of paint got Lucas and Sylvia digging deep into their own SEELE files. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime Ne...
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