This week on Why It Works, I run through a wide array of recommendations for all those brave souls who’ve just finished their first watch of Neon Genesis Evangelion. There are plenty of shows that directly echo the narrative tropes or iconography of Evangelion, but capturing its underlying appeal is a lot trickier, and I felt I did a fair enough job of offering selections for a variety of Evangelion’s strengths. March comes in like a lion feels like a weirdly appropriate spiritual successor to Evangelion, while other choices like Flip Flappers are more obvious, but still well-worth watching. Anyway, here’s the piece!
So You Just Finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. What’s Next?
This is wrongeverytime.com, and Crunchyroll’s comments are all pyramid scheme spam, so I’m going to place the wrongest theory here.
The show to watch after the Sturm und Drang of Evangelion is the show Gainax made next, Mahoromatic, which has odd echoes of Evangelion all through it – especially echoes of the Episode 26 Toast World Eva.
Some parallels:
In Eva, Shinji is the son of the leader of a top-secret organization using advanced technology(?) to protect the Earth from the Angel attacks. His mother is deceased. In Mahoromatic, Sugaru is the son of the leader of a top-secret organization using advanced technology to protect the Earth from alien attacks. His mother is also deceased.
This is awfully suspicious. There are similar parallels between the composition of the two protagonist’s respective school classes, the nature of their teachers, the conflation of their mothers with the Eva/combat android that’s a big part of their life, etc etc
Each show has an episode where all of the electrical power generation of Japan is diverted to a huge laser gun to take down the opponent.
And finally, each has a confounding final episode – though the last episode of Mahoromatic makes more sense if you realize that ir was Evangelion Lite (tastes great? less … filling?) all along.
Watching the two series back-to-back will have you saying “Wait a sec, didn’t I just see that?” in every episode.