my future holds infinite possibilities

neon genesis evangelion: the manga (yoshiyuki sadamoto, 1994–2013)

a typical day at BDM Industries

My main interest going into the Evangelion manga was what the material would look like in the hands of somebody telling a parallel, but independent, story. And the “somebody” in this instance, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, is also not a random guy, but somebody pretty involved with the creation of the show.¹ I’m not sure how many other cases of a parallel work being created at the same time exist in this way, where what you’re looking at is not quite a “novelization of” (or “manga-ization of”) the original but something written alongside it. I guess The Third Man is kind of like this. However, the Evangelion manga is also a serialized work and it ran for quite a while after the show ended (and started a little before it), so… it’s still a bit different!

But as a work, standing on its own—I didn’t have that much interest in it.

A habit I fall into often, and find hard to shake, is talking about collaborative works like Evangelion as if they are novels—that is, as if they can be treated as the product of one person.² The main reason that this is difficult for me to shake is that talking otherwise means you have to learn a lot about the actual production process. In any case, the Evangelion manga presents not only something that is recognizably Evangelion (without Hideaki Anno), but also something that basically is the product of one person. I didn’t like it—in point of fact I said, out loud, “oh, fuck you” at one point—but it left me thinking both that it was not a mistake to attribute a lot of the show’s qualities to Anno and that the show benefits from being the product of collaboration.

Anyway, here are some thoughts. I can’t really treat this as a completely stand alone work when writing about it, even though it is, so if you want a discussion that is just the manga solo you are going to find everything below very annoying. I never promised you I wouldn’t be annoying… only that I would be here.

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If the oft-threatened Hollywood adaptation of Evangelion ever happens, I think it would feel a lot like the manga. It would make similar adjustments in its arrangement of the story, its additions, and its deletions. Everybody’s a little more kick ass (including, somehow, Gendo). Asuka’s introduction is shifted from the sea battle (which we don’t actually see and which she fights solo) to beating up some random street toughs at an arcade while she does backflips. Kaworu actually fights an Angel.

I mean the statement “this is the Hollywood version of Evangelion” in just about every possible sense—complimentary, derogatory, and neutral. It is interesting to see how much Evangelion can become a more digestible creation while still remaining recognizably itself. Instances of repetition get smoothed out and some silliness disappears altogether. The tripartite structure of the show, with its more light-hearted middle section, isn’t present. Kaworu is introduced, as an idea, well before his appearance. Everyone is a little bit more of a type here, which makes their actions less mysterious, which means you don’t really ever feel puzzled as to what is happening.

But an Evangelion made a bit more like everything else turns out to be an Evangelion that holds little interest for me. A word I often used in the episode recaps was “intricate,” and I think the show benefits both from this intricacy and from the economy with which it has to present this intricacy. The manga is both less intricate and less bound by economy, and the result is something that would probably be a totally adequate action story if I didn’t have this other work existing in my head.

Here’s an example. Kaji gets a tragic backstory in the manga, which involves him causing his brother’s death. We discover he ran away from his relationship with Misato³ because he didn’t think he deserved to be happy. He’s dedicated his life to uncovering the truth because knowing what caused the Second Impact and why will let him feel there was some reason to go on living after the death of his brother. Every time he interacts with Misato, he makes it clear that he loves her, and even says he loves her straight out the last time they speak before he dies.

This story is much more “normal” story about male avoidance and motivation than the one the show tells. There, Misato dumped Kaji out of fear she was setting herself up for a life like her mother’s (and then hated him as a way of hating her own decision). We aren’t given a biographical reason for why Kaji has become a double agent, but his dogged and ultimately self-destructive need to uncover the truth is one of the qualities that aligns him with Misato’s father. The manga’s version of Kaji’s life and his breakup with Misato is easier to understand because these are typical fictional patterns of behavior. But this decision comes at the price of making Misato much less complicated while adding almost nothing to Kaji’s character.⁴

Shinji, similarly, is a more traditional male main character in the manga. He stands up to his dad more—he almost punches Gendo in the face in one scene. He’s much more emotionally together, often functioning as a stable place for more volatile people to figure out their emotions. Here he is counseling Asuka to drop her perfectionist act by telling her “I used to be like that too.” This moment is the manga’s equivalent of when he angrily thinks to himself that for all her bravado Asuka’s just another kid:

read right to left

You can also see this in the manga’s version of Misato’s promotion party: Shinji has a great time. Later, talking to Rei, he tells her that he always thought he’d have a bad time at something like that, but it was good. He says she should come the next time they have a party. In the show, Shinji’s not having a bad time, but he gets overwhelmed and has to leave to go up on the roof. Misato goes to check up on him there, which is when she tells him the story about her father.⁵ Here, they don’t get to have that moment. Their relationship in the manga is pretty lightly sketched.

Making Shinji into a more traditional lead character means two things. First, Evangelion becomes less of an ensemble piece and more of The Shinji Show. Second, Shinji is less interesting. Shinji is pulled into the mysteries of NERV a lot earlier, and is generally less in the dark than he was in the show. That robs him of some depth—for instance, his refusal to fight the Angel-possessed Evangelion unit no longer stems from a refusal to fight another human being, a kid the same age as him, but a refusal to fight his friend.

I personally think this change really cheapens the drama of that moment—what makes the episode in the show so agonizing is partly the gap between what we know and what Shinji knows, but also that Shinji is making a stand on a general principle and gets overriden. He is willing to throw away what scraps of his father’s approval he possesses to avoid taking a human life. He is not choosing one personal loyalty over another. That’s a big deal! That’s not a small change.

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The biggest victim of the changes, however, is Rei, who goes from the much more enigmatic figure of the show to a girl living out some kind of “robot learns to be human” storyline. To a lesser extent, this happens to Kaworu too, who shows up as some kind of sociopath baby (his first noteworthy action is… to kill a kitten) and then is like “what is this ‘love’ humans prize so much” and starts harassing Shinji at every opportunity about how they need to be friends.⁶

Rei’s very delicate search for identity becomes, basically, “Shinji can fix me.” And… Shinji does fix her. By the end of this story, everybody is fixed. Even Gendo! And we have a happy ending in which the world has been remade as a better place:

I suppose what I’m saying is that the manga lacks both a sense of tragedy and a sense of mystery. When Asuka’s about to die at the hands of the Eva Series, Shinji pops up and saves her. When Gendo shoots Ritsuko, his dialogue is right there. When Rei is questioning herself, we know precisely why and in what ways. Nobody in this story ever struggles alone or struggles in vain or struggles in the dark.

And when we get that longed-for happy ending, it’s not meaningful—not only because these are not the same characters but because Shinji does get restored to a world that has been fixed, in which the effects of certain disasters have been reversed, and that deprives his choice to return to the world of a certain kind of depth. In the TV show what he returns to is unclear, and in End of Evangelion what he returns to is an almost empty (but slowly repopulating) world. Choosing the more difficult thing means… choosing a more difficult thing. Here, though, that’s just not what really happens.

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• There’s a little add on story in the last volume that is, I think, a tie in to the Rebuild movies. So I’m not going to talk about it except to say that it involves Yui and Gendo’s courtship… which is also made quite stereotypical, where she’s the cutie obsessed with getting under his rough exterior.

• One side effect of looping Shinji into the story is that the careful distinction the show maintains between the adults and the children kind of disappears.

• By the time Toji died I was frankly sort of desperate for this outcome because the way the translators rendered his accent was unbearable to read. There’s no right answer when it comes to how to translate things like accents or dialects… but there is a wrong answer which is creating an bizzaro accent no English speaker has ever had:
  

  

  seriously what is this

• Misato’s moment of rescuing Shinji from evil goons is replaced by Gendo rescuing Shinji, which is, if you were wondering, the moment I said “oh, fuck you.”

• Gendo then explains to Shinji that he’s never loved him because he took away Yui’s attention. Dumb for lots of reasons, but dumb above all because what is interesting about Gendo’s treatment of his son is not that Gendo does not love Shinji but that he cannot even pretend to love him the way he seems able to do to manipulate other people.

• In the manga’s version of “the hospital scene,” we are thankfully spared Shinji’s masturbation (one point Sadamoto) but instead Asuka wakes up and tries to strangle him (negative five thousand points Sadamoto).

• The first Rebuild post will be July 5 JULY 12!!! NOT FIVE!!!!!! I will be honest, though—I’m not sure there’s going to be that much to say about the first Rebuild movie? Whatever version you’re encountering—the TV show or the manga or the Rebuild movies—the story of the first five episodes of Evangelion seems pretty locked in. It doesn’t really change. But we’ll see.… I sort of hope everything doesn’t become me complaining that the TV show was better because that sounds really tedious for all of us.

• But then… what if the TV show just was better?

• On that note: I wanted to give a shout out here to

  D. Luscinius
  , who has been commenting faithfully and very thoughtfully on all the Eva posts a little bit after I am in the “engaging in the comments” zone and who has a totally different reaction to the end of the TV show than myself. I find this reading plausible textually but not emotionally, I think.

• Also, a shout out to

  Alex Scott
  for mentioning the existence of a parody manga to me.

1. Sadamoto stayed involved with Evangelion through most of the Rebuild movies except that hm, I think something happened.… What was it…?

2. Yes, yes, editors, yes.

3. By cheating on her, I guess?

4. The scene where Kaji reveals all this is also a scene in which he tells Shinji that Shinji could have saved Toji’s life if he’d really tried so Shinji doesn’t deserve to be happy either.

5. Misato’s own internal conflict about whether or not she really wants this promotion is also basically gone.

6. He’s like… a tsundere for friendship (read right to left):