This, I may say, is a bit out of character for me. I actually chanced across Eyrie on the Elmer Studios MSTings page. I would normally classify myself as disliking fanfiction. I read MSTings often, and am appalled by the garbage people fling at their hapless computers and with which they ravish the poor, unsuspecting net. Normally, fanfiction irritates or amuses me, but I seldom come away from reading it with any sense that my time was well spent. Two or three sentences, and I'm done. I just finished reading NXE, seasons 1-3...

...IN ONE SITTING.

I'm saving Apotheosis Now for a treat later. I've got a feeling that THIS ending of Evangelion might not make me want to hit someone.

As you may have gathered, I really enjoyed it. This is, quite literally, unprecedented, and is a testament to what an impressive accomplishment this thing is. I looked back at the commentary by those who have MSTed the series (ep 1-9), and I start to get a bit of a mean-spirited vibe from the whole business. I'm not sure how Gryphon or any of the other contributors to NXE took the MSTing of their works, but I can't help but feel that the MSTers exaggerated all the flaws and denied all the strengths.

Primary among these exaggerations concerns DJ himself. DJ is somewhat ridiculously competent, and comes perilously close to snuggling up with the whole female cast of NGE, and he certainly can be a tad cocksure. It's characterization, as in, ya know, writing prose and stuff. Authors do that.

I mean, here is a version of Evangelion with characters that are interesting, three-dimensional, and capable of DOING something without flying apart and wallowing in angst for forty-eight hours afterward. Oh, I grant you, I still find the premise a bit...odd. The bastard son of Lara Croft and Fox Mulder? The heck? In EVA? X-COM? J&K from MIB? And did I see Sailor Mercury in there? And Worcester-3?

"Come on, Hutchins," says cynical bastard me, "What are you trying to pull, here?"

If I were forced to cite a real flaw, I would have to say that these people show a staggeringly unrealistic depth of emotional and psychological understanding for their ages, and indeed seem to pontificate on deep, abstract thoughts and feelings that most people wouldn't even be able to articulate. And with hormones-a'ragin, to boot. DJ, one gets the feeling, could talk the Hatfields and the McCoys out of their feuding, whilst simultaneously plumbing their inner psyches and healing all their inward hurts. One must admit, it seems a bit farfetched.

Then, as I read on, I realized that, MSTed, the story is disrupted. It doesn't flow properly, and you don't get a sense of the craft with which it's put together. Read straight, it's a heck of a piece of work, and you at some point just forgive all the wierdness and suspend your disbelief so you can busy yourself with the next page. It has the supreme quality that denotes good fiction. The reader WANTS to keep reading it. It's fun, intelligently written, and well paced, and the authors have obviously made an effort to bring the second-stringer characters to the fore once in a while, but in a plausible way. It does not deserve the criticism it's gotten, by a long stretch. I refer one and all to the works of Issei Mataloun or Tom Dyron if an example of bad fanfiction is to be made.

All in all, NXE stands on its merits. Never mind DJ's overwhelming Britishness. Never mind the references to In Nomine. Never mind that it's crazy. It's crazy and GOOD. I'm glad I took the time to read it, and I thought you should know you have another fan to welcome into the fold. I look forward to sifting through the other works on the EPU site, and would congratulate everyone who worked on NXE for their splendid showing.

____________________________________________________________________________

Bring on the Storm.

I am ready.

Yeah, Apotheosis Now pretty much wrapped up the NXE storyline, though there have been indications that they are working on a sequel (one-shot or series, we'll find out when they finish and post it).

Unfortunately that sequel is likely one of the backburner projects as the EPU crew seem to be concentrating on The Iron Age and UF's Cybertron Reloaded currently (at least until one of Gryphon's muses hijacks his train of thought *grin*)

Speaking of the current projects, the first 2 parts of each are out so go check em out. 8)

One of the things I love about EPU's stories are the way they take bits and characters from all these different sources and blend them together so well.

Norgarth

Wow, you started with an outlook like that and you still made it through season 1. I'm impressed.

>I looked back at the commentary by those
>who have MSTed the series (ep 1-9), and I start to get a bit of a
>mean-spirited vibe from the whole business. I'm not sure how Gryphon
>or any of the other contributors to NXE took the MSTing of their
>works, but I can't help but feel that the MSTers exaggerated all the
>flaws and denied all the strengths.

That is, I've gathered, rather the point of online MSTing in the first place. Somewhere along the line, most of the people who do that kind of thing online missed the point of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000. The show was a kind of celebration of bad movies - a snarky one, to be sure, but it was mainly about love. Online MSTers, by and large, seem to be more interested in just ripping on stuff.

That said, NXE was by far our most controversial work. I got flamed by people in China, got (virtual) visits from self-appointed Evangelion fanfic police demanding that I stop the project because I was Damaging the Franchise, the whole shmeer. One time a couple of redneck peckerheads threatened to DDOS the Eyrie server if I didn't take the series down and post an apology.

Some of the excesses you note in the series are by way of reaction to that sort of nonsense, about which more later.

>Oh, I grant you, I still find the premise a bit...odd. The bastard son
>of Lara Croft and Fox Mulder? The heck? In EVA? X-COM? J&K from MIB?
>And did I see Sailor Mercury in there? And Worcester-3?
>
>"Come on, Hutchins," says cynical bastard me, "What are you trying to
>pull, here?"

That's a fair question, given the above oddities (which I concede are all quite odd, though to be fair they're odd on purpose). It has a pretty simple answer, too:

"I'm trying to mess with your head, pendejo."

(Please note that this is the royal "you", referring to the amorphous readership at large, and I am not, in fact, specifically calling you a pendejo. :)

At its heart, NXE is about how colossally disappointed I was by NGE. The whole thing is basically an attempt to do the following three things, in this order:

1) Repudiate the insulting and nonsensical core premise of NGE as I saw it, which is that you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game, so you might as well be a wretched motherfucker and make everyone else's life around you a misery. The infinite corruptibility of Man and the impossibility of true redemption are, I think, only themes of interest to people who went to Jesuit schools, and I didn't, so the hell with that crap.

2) Take the positive elements of NGE - the interestingly flawed (if their flaws were over-relied-upon) characters, the excellent design, the fun giant-robots-against-the-gods premise - and put them to what, to someone with my tastes in fiction, would be a better use. It made me very angry to learn that everything I liked about NGE was just window dressing used in a cynical effort to raw me in so Anno could lay his nihilist truth on my unsuspecting ass. I wanted to use them as the core of the story instead.

3) Cause the people who actually liked NGE and its bait-and-switch nihilism as much pain as possible. I have never encountered a more self-important, self-righteous, artsier-than-thou, You Just Don't Get It Because You Lack True Understanding bunch of ponces than hardcore Evangelion fandom. Anywhere. Ever. They deserve a fork in the back and by God I gave it to them. It may be mean-spirited and generally beneath the dignity of a truly creative person, but I'm still proud of that.

Now, don't get me wrong - I freely acknowledge that there were times when I went overboard pursuing any and all of those goals. For instance:

- Season 1 is really not very good, especially in comparison to what came later. In a way, it couldn't be - it had to follow the original series more closely than the others, it had to set the scene, and it had to plant some of the conceits firmly enough that it would be startling later on when I went against them. Like any TV pilot, the early bits are kind of ponderous because they have to introduce everything and let the viewer know what the rules are before the writers can start breaking them for effect.

- The crossover elements, which were originally introduced either in a deliberate effort to set the series apart from NGE or just because we thought they would be fun, got unnecessarily complicated. Not much I can say in defense of that, except that when you have the momentum and you're as geared toward trying to draw fun parallels in crossover material anyway (as we are, by long training and inclination, in UF), the temptations become harder and harder to resist. Everything's there for a reason, but the reasons are not always really good ones; ah well. Live and learn.

Let me just say here that I mean none of these remarks as any reflection on my many excellent conspirators. They were and remain invaluable, supremely talented, and all-around beautiful people. I was the editor on the project, and the responsibility for its many flaws is mine alone.

>If I were forced to cite a real flaw, I would have to say that these
>people show a staggeringly unrealistic depth of emotional and
>psychological understanding for their ages, and indeed seem to
>pontificate on deep, abstract thoughts and feelings that most people
>wouldn't even be able to articulate. And with hormones-a'ragin, to
>boot.

Well, be fair - these are, by and large, supposed to be the finest representatives of their generation, selected after an exhaustive process of testing and evaluation as the ones most likely to overcome obstacles, exhibit a capacity for lateral thinking, and generally be better than the rest of the mob. Hell, the characters themselves touch on this a few times, most notably in DJ's indictment of Gendou partway through - you made sure we grew up before our time, and now you have the gall to be offended when we take charge of ourselves?

(Besides - and this is something I never really got a chance to explore in the series - none of the pilots was ever really a child in any conventional sense, even before they came to NERV. Jon was created in a laboratory and trained from infancy to be the perfect soldier. Asuka's life was made of equal parts pain, denial, and blind ambition from the time she was old enough to walk. DJ had a loving, supportive environment, but it was one with very high unspoken standards, and he was basically treated as a small adult and expected to comport himself accordingly. And Rei is a very old soul indeed.)

>DJ, one gets the feeling, could talk the Hatfields and the
>McCoys out of their feuding, whilst simultaneously plumbing their
>inner psyches and healing all their inward hurts. One must admit, it
>seems a bit farfetched.

Heh. DJ jokes darkly about that himself at one point, bitterly declaring himself to be "the great and powerful Croft, savior of women and mender of broken hearts."

DJ's real crime, in my mind, isn't being good at things, it's making it look easier than it really is. I tried to explore that more in the third season - the idea that he's not really as sure of himself as he puts on, not always, and that he's vaguely surprised - even perversely disappointed - when he gets away with it again and again. This is a young man who knows he plays a good game, don't get me wrong, but he also knows he talks an even better one, and he's fully cognizant that someday that other shoe is coming. At one point, he thinks it's dropped and nearly gives up entirely; only the appearance of his literal guardian angel saves him, after which he's stronger and more fully-realized. (I think, anyway.)

>All in all, NXE stands on its merits. Never mind DJ's overwhelming
>Britishness. Never mind the references to In Nomine. Never mind that
>it's crazy. It's crazy and GOOD. I'm glad I took the time to read it,
>and I thought you should know you have another fan to welcome into the
>fold.

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was an ambitious project and, like any ambitious project, it didn't fully realize all of its ambitions, but I remain proud of what it accomplished - even if I can't quite bring myself to go back and re-read a lot of the earlier parts now. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Personally I liked DJ’s character and the match up with Asuka worked quite well in my opinion.

Hopefully it won’t be to long before they come out with the sequel but with the Iron Age in progress and with the next stage of UF being planed that might take awhile.

Oh well you can’t have it all.

While NGE is reviled for its baits and switches, NXE's baits and switches had me looking at the rug and laughing at the fact that I'd had it pulled out from under me. For instance, the reference to "you already have TWO angels. Why do you need another?" immediately made me think of Adam and Lillith, when in fact it's nothing of the sort. Orcas' berzerk destruction of the 'bag of holding' angel had me consider for a second whether all of the EVAs had spirits, even though it was already being DENIED in the story. And the connections to X-COM with "wait, they're not angels, they're aliens?!" and then the revelations after THAT which made the entire reasoning behind that strategy make sense just left me going 'oh, you sly bastards...' For a series that, even with preknowledge of the original series' plot, I could BARELY begin to predict, I enjoyed it immensely.

And to this day, NXE's had one major effect on how I view EVA. I don't see 00, 01, 02, and 03. I see Moloch, Lucifer, Grendel, and Orcas, and honestly nothing's gone on to change that.

-OM

("PEN-PEN WAS IN THERE AS WELL?!"
"Of course. I'd like to know where the bird learned half those bloody tricks.")

"All good things come to an end...somehow I think Disney didn't get the memo."

Still, to be honest, it wasn't until NXE started breaking away from the storyline flow set by the original that I really began to like it. It stopped being "Evangelion with Shinji replaced with DJ" and started following it's own path.

>All in all, NXE stands on its merits. Never mind DJ's overwhelming
>Britishness.

Maybe it's just me and actually being british, but for the most part I never really noticed it.
Well, except for that breakfast scene in 3.5, where the british facade rather jarringly (to me, at least) falters. 'Oatmeal'? Pancakes? Paah. :p