Theme
My contribution to Eva on the Web started with a pair of stories written with the intent of exploring options which might end up with Asuka better off than the bleak “This sucks” ending of End of. But this is Evangelion, which doesn't do happy endings, so we just have to see where those journeys take us.
And at the same time, writing fics provides a vehicle for putting forth some interpretations that I can read into the noisy data. At least in narrative form, the exercise in Rorschach blot reading feels better to me than merely expounding the raw “this is what I think happened” — I give back ambiguity as well.
While watching the original episodes, it was always more Rei that I found as an identification character with the quiet reserved personality (especially her “leadership” style in Episode 11) — Shinji was never a contender, always trying to assert himself at exactly the wrong, the most self-defeating, time. But after seeing End of Evangelion it really came to me that Rei was really always an NPC, an enigma, and it was Asuka who was the character who ended up with my sympathies.
Informing the spin I put on things, my take on the secret agenda of NERV can be read from this variant logo (roughly done, I fear, as the B-spline tool I have doesn't do fit-to-circular-path at all well).
No, this isn't Serial Experiments Evangelion (yet). But the sentiment of the Lain slogan is most appropriate to this purpose — NGE is the first visual media context I'd seen in which the narrative concludes after the launch of a Singularity (along quasi-Vingean lines), even if in End of the hard take-off somewhat falls to pieces. Third Impact as Singularity, or at least a metaphor for Singularity really informs the approach I've taken.
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Acknowledgements
Neon Genesis Evangelion is, of course, creation of and copyright to GAINAX/Project Eva, without whom none of this would have been possible; all this blatantly derivative work is offered up as a humble acknowledgement that the series did make people think, and care for the characters.
These fics are respectfully dedicated to Hideki Anno, for The End of Evangelion — a film that struck so deeply that it has taken me all spring (and many hours in front of a phosphor screen where I could have been reading in my garden while twilight lingered until well after 9pm) to begin to express the impact that it made on me.