"Fuck you! I'm doing Ultraman now, which is literally all I ever really wanted to do anyway!"

--G.
I fear for that movie. I fear for that movie so much.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"I dunno, I can imagine quite a bit."
- Han Solo

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Which, on paper, is fair, but he make a whole movie about how he was fed up with it and wanted to move on and ‘struck the set’ so to speak. As literally as he could in animation.

As a concept and setting, this movie was actually fascinating, but nothing was explained, nothing was done with anything, it was just a load of ‘wait what the fuck just happened and why did that work, what even is anything that’s happening’. I think this entire series of movies was purposefully made to be incomprehensible and infuriating to drive as many people away as possible to they’d stop bugging him. All while he cashed those absolutely massive checks.

IIRC, SRW V pretty much stopped Rebuild right at the second movie.

-- Slider da Feral (NYAR!) (she/her)

Well, it's a flaw in the sense that it was not really ever part of the design, at least not entirely. Mari was always supposed to be part of Rebuild as Anno wanted to add a character to the narrative if only so he avoided repeating himself for the length of the project, but her appearance in the trailer for Rebuild 2 was such a hit with fans during the initial screenings that he decided to expand her part. Problem with that? He didn't really know how to do that without running the risk of making her a Mary Sue, which (arguably) he ended up doing in the end anyway.

>As far as Anno flipping off the fanbase, yup, Rebuild 4 does
>that in fairly obvious ways in its back half, while also making it
>clear that Anno has always seen and approached this franchise from a
>different perspective than the fans. He's been making an edgelordy
>Star Wars* where everything in the world exists to be cool set
>dressing for the emotional drama he's trying (with admittedly clumsy
>articulation a lot of the time) to tell, while the fans have been
>treating it like it's Babylon 5 if that series had 5 times the
>world building effort put into it before scene 1 had ever been
>story-boarded.
>
>The man has gotten some death threats in the past about this series,
>so him having a somewhat adversarial dynamic with the section of the
>fanbase not familiar with the MST3K theme and/or Bellisario's Maxim
>doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. And giant biomechanical golem
>robots having their brawl in the TV set versions of the various
>locations seen previously in the series amused me greatly. IMHO, YMMV,
>etc.

Anno's relationship with the fans and that influence on the work is basically a love/hate one. He absolutely loves the work, even though working on it (both times) has ended up driving him into a deep funk that his friends had to drag him out of to complete the work without killing himself in the process. Apparently that was part of the delay for Rebuild 4, that the process of working on 3 drove him deep enough that not even Old Man Miyazaki could drag him out (granted, word is Hiyao isn't exactly the most unlifting of people on a personal basis).

At the same time, his opinion of the fanbase varies between "Accepts their praise with barely disguised loathing" and "Hates them with a fiery passion hotter than a hypernova." It was really a large part of what ended up fueling End, his disgust and anger with the response among the otaku culture for all the work he'd put into NGE only to be met with a general response of "WTF was that?!" It's sort of a testament of the man and his dedication to his own work that, instead of just burning the whole thing down and walking away forever, he decided not even a full decade after the last project to stand up and declare "I'm gonna do it again, but this time I'm gonna do it right."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"Also, we made a new Rei who has no initiative or free will of her own. She will literally stand there until she passes out unless someone gives her instructions."
"... That's messed up."
"You ended the world so fuck you."
"Well, at least she's capable of learning how to think for herse-"
*SPLUT*
"She just died, didn't she?"

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

That or it was more horseshit, but I think this one was fairly literal.

Has anyone ever picked that up in North America? I've been hearing about it for what seems like ages, but never found it anywhere.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Not that I'm aware of (legally).

But this is the most relevant bit of his episode:

https://youtu.be/Ojka0ELI5Us

And yes, that's the actual soundtrack AND the original Shinji VA...

I'm not going to lie, I'm a little annoyed that someone came up with a universe in which Shinji Ikari could potentially team up with Miku Hatsune and it wasn't me. :)

Speaking of, in case any of you missed it when it was making the rounds on social media a while back, here is an actual, official documentary film about (one aspect of) the 1998 Winter Olympics. You'll want to have the sound on, particularly at around a minute and 15 seconds into it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And later... Godzilla! (Sort of)

You can’t tell me he’s just going to stop letting stuff happen with Evangelion from now, especially Super Robot Wars, he actually overrode Gainax when they initially refused Banpresto’s request for its inclusion.

On a point of order, have we not known that since, like, 1996?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think the issue was just that he was tired of it before they even finished the very first incarnation of Evangeleon. IIRC, the series was fraught with all kinds of issues - budget overruns, deadlines missed, corporate meddling, and in the middle of it all, you have a guy who more likely than not has clinical depression and anxiety disorder, trying to create the ultimate deconstruction of the giant mecha vs kaiju subgenre of shounen anime.

In a very real sense, I get the idea that Ano actually was Shinji at the end of the series there. File that one under "Unexpected Self-Inserts". (Not to be confused with intentional self-inserts, the sort of which Nabeshin is well known for - he utterly ruined Tenchi Muyo GXP with his BS.)

Funny thing about the man: he seems a LOT happier doing surrealist and absurdist comedy. Go google for something called Funky Forest, and brace yourself for some weird shit. Anno directed that, and from what I understand, he immensely enjoyed it.

I suspect that the only thing that will move him to block the use of Evangelion in other places is a lack of zeroes to the left of the decimal point.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Well, that's because people here in the West have sort of misunderstood what Anno's ultimate goal is with regards to the franchise and its future. Fans have heard translations of his statements about "destroying" Evangelion and assumed it was his indication he intended to (as TVTropes dubs it) "Torch the franchise and run." But really his intent all along was to use Rebuild as a way to put a more positive end on his involvement, but keep the franchise alive so that others could offer their own "interpretations" much as they have franchises like Gundam.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

I'm pretty sure that's the idea, actually. If it was remade once by Shinji-Kami, what's to say he doesn't decide to try something different? And therefore, different timelines with different events.

A friend of mine has been working on a story based on the Rebuild series where the main character is a gender-flipped version of Shinji, only with someone else truck-kunned into being Natsu Ikari because Shinji really didn't want to deal with it anymore... and being Ikari's *daughter* instead of Ikari's *son* brings with it its own complications in terms of abuse.

Kinda reminds me of how the makers of Macross pretty much gave themselves (and everyone else) free reign to do as they like by making it word of god that all games, series, and other media we enjoy IRL are the same media enjoyed by the people in-setting. Which is to say, everything is dramatizations of the events that actually took place in-setting. Which is pretty damn clever if you ask me.

At this remove, without direct context, this is starting to remind me of the overstory of No Man's Sky. The ATLAS, its time running out, desperately resetting the simulation over and over again, always searching for a different outcome, always failing.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Or even better yet, then ending to the second season of Big O. :P

Hence the comparison to Gundam, the idea that Anno's branch of the franchise has gone as far as he wants to take it but the franchise as a whole remains for others to do their own thing. He's not saying there's a set canon, just different interpretations of the same universe. So if someone comes along and sells his studio on a series where the Evangelions are transforming robots from another universe, then it can still bear the "Evangelion" badge without being a direct continuation of Rebuild.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

They did at least half of that already.