(Over-)analysis
I'm often to be found on the following
- The Eva Geeks Forums (profile)
- The AnimeNation Evangelion Forum (profile)
And I've contributed to
I agree with a lot of
Other fics — other sites
There's a lot of Eva fics out there — just ask Google! Alas,
Sturgeon's Law (90% of anything is crud) applies. Some fics are posted
by people who are still working on how to construct a narrative; others,
alas, by people who are still working on how to construct a web-site
that doesn't hurt the eyes. (Without naming names, there is one fic of
which I've seen positive review by content, that is presented as pre-formatted
— <pre>…</pre> section, and
hence rendered in a mono-space font — text,
white on black, 60 characters per line. That, to me, is unreadable as
it stands, and adjusting the font and size in the browser is little help.)
Unlike other lists I've seen, I'm not so much of a purist when it comes to portraying Shinji — the character for whom the advice “Get a life!” seems to have been invented, since he doesn't even have the active obsessions that many of us tend to indulge in instead. Indeed, it could be said that as the series went on, I found that I liked Eva despite Ikari-kun. For that sort of reason, fics revolving around the Shinji/Asuka pairing tend to pass me by — Red could do so much better than that.
But my own real bug-bear is with fics that try to carry on after an implicitly unaltered Instrumentality, or just brush it under the carpet by ignoring the developments implicit in either take on episodes 25 and 26, and bring on another series of Angels to provide background for more of the same. (yes, this does include Eva-R, and that's before we get to any of the first paragraph issues of literary style or web presentation in that particular case). Remember — even in the original TV episodes, we see Misato and Ritsuko lying dead in the corridors of NERV during Instrumentality.
- A truly ambitious work, The Second Child — Promises To Keep is nothing less than a retelling of Episode 26: Sincerely Yours/I need you from Asuka's point of view. The only mistake it makes is in carrying on beyond the end.
- In the realms of what if/crossover/fusion, I really liked
Shin Kakumei Evangelion (Neon Revolution Evangelion). It
fuses NGE with Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), but in
such a way (including cast list with pictures, an idea that I stole
shamelessly for NAG) that it doesn't matter if you haven't
seen the latter, and merely encountered the ubiquitous Arisugawa Juri in other
contexts. Obviously I can't comment on how it works the other way around.
Purists have objected that Shinji is given a life in this one, but to my mind, he's actually pushed into the background enough by the other new characters that I don't have to worry about him — this is at least as much Tenjou Utena's story.
The characters one might quibble most about being OOC are in fact Kaoru Kozue and Saionji Kyoichi, being portrayed as much nicer people here than they are in SKU.
This one is white on black, but uses HTML sensibly, rather than as a wrapper for text/plain content, and I found it easily legible. - Erishiumu kara no Shoujo (Daughter of Elysium) is the only other fic I've found with an Asuka/Kaworu pairing. The only complaint I have about this one is that it failed to confront Third Impact or Instrumentality, stopping dead after the equivalent of episode 24.
- [If you don't understand the jargon in this section, then beware. I've provided
tool-tip translations for modern graphical browsers.]
Meanwhile, speaking of Arisugawa-san, if your tastes incline that way, there are some reasonable pieces on the Neon Genesis Evangelion Fanfiction part of the ShoujoAi.com archive.
I have amused myself in Neon Angelic Genesis (above) in subverting some of those reworkings, in particular Maya and Asuka at the time of that wedding, (A Little Different — just plain shoujo-ai) in NAG part 3 and and an Asuka/Rei just out of the shower scene (The Visitor — lemon/yuri) which gets turned completely about in NAG part 9.
By the very nature of the site, Ikari-kun appears only in marginal roles. :-)
Courting controversy
It is not chic to admit to liking the following; but if you don't expect it to be Eva, but a competently written Mary Sue (with emphasis on the competency — you don't realise until long after the event that you've just worked your way through pages of intense luggage packing action ) then Neon Exodus Evangelion might be more your sort of thing. It's technically well written enough, and appealed to my sense of humour enough (anyone who has read it will understand what I mean when I refer to Rei's line “Should I be?”), that I forgave its wildly different character interpretations such as:
- Infectious omnicompetence, especially when Ikari-kun eventually appears
on stage — he does something in stressful situations involving the possible need
to harm other people other than
- bitch and moan or
- curl up into a ball and whimper
- It's also not the Soryu-san of the cramps scene in Episode 22; however in all the fics I've read, I've not found a more suitable mate for her than DJ.
- Nor is it the Ibuki-san who dissolved blissfully in Ritsuko-senpai's arms, requited at last by her Transition Guide, in End of
- And a church-going Gendo-san — beyond a white wedding, something which the Japanese seem to have wholesale stolen for the pageantry involved (see e.g. the 2002 film Dolls) — is just one step too far.
And this does seem to be the source of the “Barons of Hell” misinterpretation.
Write to the author at — webmaster at steve gilham dot com.
