Specifically, the weird notion that the series protagonist, Shinji Ikari, is straight.Īs with a lot of the other more frustrating reactions to the series, it's not just a reproduction of the shitty backwards attitudes that a lot of geeks hold, it reproduces them in such a way that it garbles the actual thematic arc of the series and makes character actions and development alike borderline incomprehensible. No, I want to hone in on another particularly bizarre idea that the fandom has adopted. That's not what I'm here to rant angrily about this week though. well, about the whole Eva phenomenon really. Whether or not that's true, the fact that the fanbase regards it as plausible should tell you a lot about.
According to fan lore, End of Evangelion, the film that acts as the conclusion to the original series, was deliberately dark, brutal, incomprehensible, and full of psychosexual revulsion directed squarely at the protagonist because creator Hideaki Anno was so outraged and disgusted with the Otaku misreading of the film. The most fanservicey scenes are frequently profoundly uncomfortable, if not outright nightmarishly surreal. One of the more obvious examples of this comes from the heavy sexualization of the two teenage female pilots that the fandom-and, frustratingly, the marketing team-participates in, despite the fact that the show goes to great lengths to deconstruct everything from harem anime tropes to the specific character archetypes of those characters to the idea of fanservice in general. No, the really weird ideas that I want to talk about today are the notions that the fandom has adopted that fly in the face of just about everything the text attempts to establish thematically. We're still waiting to see whether the fourth one explains what the hell happened in the third one).
These are ideas that despite their strangeness simply attempt to clarify the basic narrative of the original series, the film that followed, and the heavily altered narrative of the reboot films (of which, out of four total, three have been released.
I'm not talking here about the speculation regarding the actual narrative itself-the questions of "what the hell did I just watch, what happened in the last two episodes, why is there a live action shot of people in a movie theater, was this sort of a Freudian thing."-which do get pretty bizarre at times, but which are on the whole pretty innocuous.
The fandom for acclaimed anime Neon Genesis Evangelion has developed some remarkably bizarre attitudes and ideas about the series they love.
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