Misato's Fan Service Center: Book 7, Issue 6

Have you seen the ad on pages 442 and 443 of the August Previews? It's for a new, very well-sculpted 8" figure of the Third Angel, Sachiel. But over an appropriately Futuristic original logo for "Neon Genesis Evangelion" is scrawled the word "EVIL," announcing below that this figure is "THE FIRST VILLAIN IN THE NEON GENESIS LINE!" It seems that this new Sachiel is the first time a non-japanese designer has been allowed to make an authorized Evangelion figure. it's sculpted for release through Kaiyodo by New York City's Art Asylum, whose slogan is "PSYCHO TOYZ FOR CRAZY KIDZ." Jiminy H. Christmas, who's clearing the licenses around here, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope? This is the worst thing since that cream-colored rally Vincent action figure came out.

Dude. In Evangelion the Angels never ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—it's only men and women who are good and evil. The Angels are literally beyond good and evil; and they, unlike people, know exactly what their individual place is in creation. This difference means far more than their weird appearance (Ezekiel 1, 10) and great power, their ability to swing their flaming swords to keep the tree of life (Genesis 3:24). There's a profound conceptual gap. This, in part, is why the Angels seem to act in such an illogical manner by our standards, and why they eventually seek to probe the Eva pilots (uh-huh-huh-huh), just as NERV examines the Angels' substance. Each side comes to realize they are somehow not different from each other.

To quote N.W.A., "Silly, you say?/I say you're silly when you say it." It's no stranger than the concept of the fourth-century Nicene Creed, which is still the official position of the Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant churches. You may have recited it many times yourself if you attended such services. There's a part in the Creed where you say you believe that Jesus was "begotten not made, of one substance with the Father." In the original Greek in which the Creed was composed, "substance" is homoousion, Greek for "made of the same stuff." In other words, that even through Jesus was a flesh-and-blood man, he was somehow made of the same stuff as God, who is beyond mere physical being. If that's a bit hard to understand, you're joining a pretty large club of people over the centuries who think so. It's just to point out again that Evangelion suggests perhaps science-fiction and religion are to some extent homoousion, too. Like when people used to see visions of saints and prophets, but nowadays it's UFOs and aliens.

So with this ad, Art Asylum's getting away from some of the very things that made Evangelion such a stand-out, and so talked-about—the reasons why five years later you can still sculpt a figure from it and expect it to sell. If they want to make a figure of a "goddamn, they roofless" villain, why not Guu from Jungle wa Itsumo Hare Nochi Guu? Imagine someone as attractive and mysterious as Rei, if Rei made horrible faces and pulled ghastly pranks on people every time she got the chance. Guu's my favorite character from my favorite new anime show. You gotta check it out. It was recently on TV Tokyo, the same network which aired Evangelion. And as the Lyrical Dani-Chan observed, it's from the same people who made Utena, so you know right there it is effed up.

By the way, I heard a report from SHONEN JUMP editor Jason Thompson that there's an Evangelion reference in the new Robin Williams film, One Hour Photo. It's not a comedy, but a story of a photo developer at a local drug store who has made copies of all the pictures taken by a certain family for years, and has brought himself to believe that he is somehow a part of that family. If that sounds disturbing, apparently that's just how the film plays it. One Hour Photo has gotten good reviews from the critics at film festivals, and many commented that Williams is a real actor here for once. Apparently in the movie, the family's son plays with a figure of the winged mass-production Eva units from Death & Rebirth, calling it a "good guy" (!) You actually get to hear Robin Williams say the words "Neon Genesis Evangelion." Do you think the makers of One Hour Photo really did see the movie, and this is just their little dysfunctional in-joke?

August 13, 2002

Hi! I attended Otakon 2002 just recently. On Sunday there was an Evangelion panel. I went as a part of a cosplaying group that had met on Saturday with one thing in common. We all loved Evangelion enough to dress up as characters from the series. We each saw each other at different times of the day on Saturday, not thinking we'd run into each other ever again. Saturday afternoon a Gendo and a couple of NERV security agents were walking the hall and called together a rally of the Evangelion characters.

Whoever heard the call got together in the main lobby at 6. From there we all went to see the parody Evangelion::ReDeath, by Sukodei productions, and we split for the night, planning to meet the next day. We all met again, exchanged email addresses, and went to the Evangelion panel, where the manga and the "unanswered questions" from Evangelion were debated over. Since the end of the convention, we have all kept in touch, and have created a fan based group called the 'E-Team'. We now have an rp going, a mailing list, and also and official site (which can be found at http://evangelionpics0.tripod.com).

I got a flyer during that panel, and without the rest of the group knowing, I decided to send an email in, hoping that maybe we could get posted somewhere, because we are looking for newer members all the time.

Thanks!!
Jamie Bonsignore
(via e-mail)

That was my flyer, and thank you for your letter, as well as for coming to see the panel! I was the guy talking (and talking) there (as opposed to Asuka's U.S. voice, Tiffany Grant, who was the other person getting a word in edgewise). Again, I saw how fans of Eva are still going strong, especially on the East Coast, it seems—that was one of the best-attended panels I've ever seen. But "newer" members? You seem to get jaded quickly!

Last issue I gave the advice to try the English-language section of Mandarake's Japanese web site (www.mandarake.co.jp) to put in a request for getting used copies of the Eva book 2015: The Last Year of Ryohji Kaji. But did you know that you can also order books from Japan and have them mailed internationally through the Japanese branch of good old Amazon.com?

Much of their Japanese web site is in Japanese only, but they do offer some basic English-language Help pages, which include, most importantly, the ability to order in English. To get started, go to http://www.amazon.co.jp/help/english, and remember that of course because these books will be shipped from Japan, you can't combine the order with those placed at other Amazon sites. With that, I'd like to talk about some books you might want to check out. Remember that these books are mostly in Japanese, with some English content. Letting Amazon Japan know the ISBN number will be the best way to make sure you get exactly what you want.

The Evangelion Style (actual title is in English), edited by Kaichiro Morikawa, 1500 yen, ISBN4-8074-9718-9. Very cool and the most interesting visually-oriented book on evangelion that wasn't authorized or produced by Gainax. About 7 1/4" by 10", and 144 pages, of which 16 are in full color, The Evangelion Style is a collection of essays, supported by many B/W graphics and illustrations as well, that seeks to explain the visual motifs of the show. The book demonstrates that the look of Eva has relevance to things as diverse as contemporary fashion, Western art history, science-fiction movies, and even color theory (Morikawa breaks down Asuka into her Pantone equivalents and shows the relative CMYK values of the Evas and Angels!). One thing I particularly like are the beautiful reproductions at large size of the various readout screens you see in the show, such as the "Psychographic Display," the "Libido-Destrudo Graph," and the monitor for the immortal "Pribnow Box."

E-Mono—Neon Genesis Evangelion All Goods Catalog, edited by Gainax and published through Newtype. 1500 yen, ISBN4-04-852868-8. About 8" by 12", and 144 pages, in full color. "E-Mono" means "E-Things," and the book is a complete catalog (as of Christmas 1997) of all the authorized and semi-authorized Eva gear you could buy. The stuff you see at cons here is just like the NERV pyramid; much more room underground. Cards, dolls, models, posters, of course—but you will simply not believe how many things period, came out for Evangelion. It was this that led the National Tax Administration Agency (the Japanese IRS) to simply not believe Gainax's tax returns, which is what led to a spell in the "slams" for two of its senior officers. When you reflect that all this merchandise needed 144 pages to list, you really understand why at AnimeExpo, Hideaki Anno called the American fan who boasted that he had spent all his schoolbook money on Eva gear "fool." Right up to your face and DIS you.

Sore wo Nasumono—Neon Genesis Evangelion Concept Design Works, by Ikuto Yamashita and Seiji Kio. 1400 yen, ISBN4-04-852908-0. About 7 1/4" by 10", and 144 pages, of which 16 are in full color, Concept Design Works is an illustration-heavy book by two of the principal creators of the show's mecha design and architecture. It shows how these designs evolved all through the pre-production of the anime, including many concepts that were rejected. But it's more than that—it also contains two endings to Evangelion that were written by Ikuto Yamashita but never used, one for a movie, and one for a final TV episode. Yamashita gives details, script excerpts, and concept illustrations. If you were surprised by the actual endings in the TV show and movies, think about your feelings if you'd seen a gigantic human female emerging from underneath the Eva armor and Rei holding a pistol sideways like Chow Yun-Fat! I swear I'm not making any of this up.

Also 100% for real is the Neon Genesis Evangelion RPG, designed by ORG based on materials from Gainax. 1900 yen, ISBN4-04-714513-0. About 7 1/4" by 10", and 158 pages, of which 20 are in full color. No box with white and red percentile dice inside—the whole thing in one book. The Evangelion role-playing game is used with 71 colored cards representing events, locations, combats, characters, the Eva Units, and the Angels, which are included in the book on tear-out sheets. Note you get two new Angels, Iblis and Baraqijal (Iblis is an important figure in the Koran—it says to Adam in 7:21, "Your Lord has only forbidden you this tree, lest you should become angels or such beings as live forever"). Scenarios in the RPG include a hunt for certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the arrival of the new Eva pilot from America, Maria Vincennes! (Those of you who know about the naval references in Eva character names will not be surprised to hear the AEGIS cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes is based out of Yokosuka, Japan). The RPG also contains a certain amount of sourcebook material for the series, such as an organizational chart of NERV and a map of event locations in the greater Tokyo-3 area.

All about 6" by 8" in size, are three offbeat books on Evangelion. First is A New Millenialist Perspective on the Daughters of Eve, written by Mari Kotani (who cos-plays as Ritsuko in her author photo). 1200 yen, ISBN4-8387-0917-X. 194 pages, of which 27 are in full color, this book is a feminist analysis of Evangelion. Although it is almost entirely in Japanese, except for certain footnotes, Kotani includes an excellent seven-page translation of the synopsis of her arguments. The second book is called Neon Genesis Evangelion JUNE Book: Zankoku-na Tenshi no These (taking its title from the opening theme of Eva, "Like a Cruel Angel's Premise"). 1143 yen, ISBN4-906011-25-X, it's 236 pages, of which 12 are in full color. JUNE is the famous manga magazine of boys' love, and this book's emphasis (with original comics and many illustrations) is on Shinji and Kaworu (although there IS a 2-page comic on Gendo and Fuyutsuki by Yoshito Asari—on the design team of Eva and perhaps the most feared man in Japanese comics—that was once prominently posted in Gainax's office). Asari shows up again (with a joke about Anno only he dared make) in the third book, Evangelion Yon-Koma Zenshuu, 850 yen, ISBN4-04-852707-X. 102 pages all b/w. The title means "The Eva 4-Panel Gag Strip Collection," and it so contains almost 200 different four-panel Eva gags by 22 different manga artists. You will have to provide your own rimshot and "Thank you, I'll be here all week" for each.

For more background context to Eva, A History of God, by Karen Armstrong, is also a highly-recommended book. As the title suggests, it shows how the human perception of "God" has developed over the last 4000 years, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Not only will it put Evangelion's use of the Kabbalah in perspective, but it's a highly-readable book that will show you just how complex, and intertwined, the history of all three of these religions are. To give one example that would sound very strange today, in the tenth and eleventh centuries Jewish philosophers were so impressed by the thought of Islamic intellectuals that rabbis started writing in Arabic to better exchange ideas. In the ninth century, the great Muslim commentator on the Koran, al-Kini, said, "We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples."

So this book, A History of God, might also make you angry, because it shows many times in history where those of one religion respected and sought to learn from another. You'll get the definite impression that the problem isn't in the Book, be it the Torah, New Testament, of Koran—it's in the preacher. People all too often go looking in these books not to see a higher truth about how they should live, but only to find something that will justify what they intend to do anyway.

You could easily preach a compassionate religion from any of these scriptures, if that's what you want to do. If you think of these complex books with their often multi-valued logic as computers to consult (a role they in fact played for people for thousands of years), you'll see that the old rule of GIGO is at work—put garbage in, get garbage out. Those who are taught a hateful religion are being preached to by those who approached those books with hate. You should be able to find a good used copy of The History of God, as it was a New York Times bestseller in 1993.

That brings us, more than ever, to the present. This English edition of the Evangelion manga has been published for five years now, during certain events which seemed to resonate with the mood and themes of the story. One was the Columbine murders, which MFSC remarked upon in Eva 4:5. But I was thinking also about September 11.

It may just be because Kaji reveals himself more in the manga than the anime, but I've come to take his viewpoint that the moral gap between NERV and SEELE is not that great. In Evangelion: Death & Rebirth, Misato tells Shinji the Second Impact was intentionally engineered to "minimize the damage." Minimize the damage! It cost three billion lives! Whether or not that outcome was intentional, would you trust an organization run by those same people to do right fifteen years later?

Skuld might have a tantrum, but you know it's going to be Urd and Skuld that's going to do any whip-cracking and mocking laughter on Keiichi, except at Comic Market. You can tell Urd is the wicked one because unlike her sisters, she's got small eyes and permed hair. Every once in a while in anime, like Patlabor 2 and Sadamoto's own Royal Space Force, you get some homely heroes. The villains might not be good-looking—that's an old tradition in anime—but it's rare that the good guys aren't.

So you have to be careful. From one perspective, despite it being staffed by beautiful women and cute guys, NERV is no better than organizations staffed by ugly-ass dudes, like SEELE...or al-Qaeda. A highly organized group, seeking advanced technology, and guided by ancient scriptures, sacrificing whomever they please for what they claim is a greater destiny for human beings?

Gendo would never speak in such terms at the NERV monthly staff meetings (I picture Ritsuko handing out crudely-mimeographed forms about the new dental benefits). But in private? When Fuyutsuki looked with horror upon the red tides where the Antarctic ice cap had been, whose instant melting wiped out half the human race, Gendo justified it thus: "This land has been cleansed...it washed away the original sin." I can see Osama bin Laden saying things like that.

We know Kaji has a gun and sometimes carries it. We see him carrying it in a mission that's different from the anime, at the beginning of Book Five. Instead of meeting a contact, as he did in the TV show, he investigates an abandoned office linked to the Marduk Group, now half buried in silt. He thinks that he now knows "who's pulling the strings." We see that very man, Gendo Ikari, looking down on the building from a bluff and smiling. The implication is that he's tailing Kaji. I can't imagine him getting so personally involved in the anime; of course, it is just possible that the proper interpretation of the scene is that he's working with Kaji, perhaps having come to pick him up in a NERV 'copter, just as later on in Book Five he leaves and arrives from the cemetery.

To just come out and say it, I wonder if Kaji ever considered assassinating Gendo, the main carrying out the plan, if he's really concerned about where all this is going. It may be that because of his own life experiences, he has a very hard time approaching the idea that he might have to kill someone. From his expression when he enters that office, he may mack like Sean Connery with the ladies, but he's not the cool 007 type when it comes to violence.

But he knows that in order to stop things for good, he'd have to take out SEELE as well. However, could he get to them? Does he even know who, or where, they actually are? Although we can see from this issue that they seem to be flesh-and-blood men, they never appear in person before others, speaking only through holograms that show their actual faces (I guess no "cute" icons were available on MAGI's chat board) or the monoliths they later use. Or is it that Kaji thinks trying to justify murder, for any reason, will put him in the same category as his enemy?

The plot of Evangelion seems to view the Third Impact as inevitable. But at that I raise an eyebrow like Roger Moore. Some things actually are inevitable. It's inevitable that earthquakes will strike California. It's inevitable that hurricanes will hit the Gulf Coast. But if these things were human creations, you certainly wouldn't call them inevitable. Once anything that is claimed to be "inevitable" turns out to actually need people to accomplish it, shouldn't you be a little suspicious?

You can say that in Evangelion "it was all prophesized." Terrorists also say their acts are merely fulfilling prophecy. But even in this issue, the accuracy of prophecy is questioned. I observe that in Evangelion it was people that found the Spear of Longinus, people who carried it to the martini-chill environs of Antarctica, and people who then jammed it into Adam like a cocktail fork in the olive of wrath.

Terrorists also say they're acting as the instrument, the tool of God. So you're saying that the same God that created the whole universe out of nothing decided he is going to use you to blow up a bus stop? For that matter, as Bob Costas pointed out, when a running back thanks God for winning a game, he's saying that God apparently let the massacre in Rwanda happen, but let him catch the winning touchdown.

Whatever happened to not babbling out the Lord's name like it was a quote from Goldmember? What ever happened to praying to thy Father which is in secret? If one claims to respect God, read that part in Exodus about how the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Or as Real Deal would phrase it: Thou knowest which way My foot swings. And if you don't want it to swing up your ass, you better keep your "jib" shut!

I'm beginning to sound like Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction. I personally will be keeping my jib shut for the next several months, until the Evangelion manga can resume. Sadamoto hasn't finished Book Eight yet, but I'm going to do my best to make the hiatus this time as short as possible. In the meantime, you can still write to Misato's Fan Service Center. For some reason, most of the letters seem to come in during the hiatus between Eva books. But remember that fan service is what we're all about. Actually, it's what Mahoromatic is all about.

Oh, one more quote before I chirp out, from Trent's "boy" on Taildaters:

"She's gotta move those pants up or down. They're high waters. What's up with that?"

They really need to get a bunch of anime characters together from different shows and make their own version of Taildaters. I bet J.C. Staff could hit that one out of the park.

Carl Gustav Horn