Dr. Nick: As much as I don't want to make a downer comment here, this is something that must be mentioned now at the end, as it relates to the Japanese audience's reaction to this original, first ending of Evangelion. The Aum Shinrikyo saga has been a constant background presence whenever we’ve talked about the show’s messy production, and this story ends with a pretty depressing twist, as originally discussed on the Evangelion Mailing list back in 1999. Many people in Japan supposedly hated the ending because "it smacked of the same kind of brainwashing seen from things like Aum", but there's an even more disturbing dimension to this, as relayed by translator Bochan Bird, a famous name in the early English-speaking Evangelion fandom who had lived in Japan in the late nineties. Although the leader Shoko Asahara was convicted and ultimately executed for his crimes, that was not the end of the cult he had started, and Aum continued its activities under new management - and as part of these activities, it used Evangelion as a recuitment tool:
[...] they [Aum recruiters] did show scenes and episodes from Evangelion (introspective scenes, etc.) at recruiting/training seminars. In fact, that was part of the draw for the seminars -- the cult would distribute fliers saying that there would be an airing of Evangelion at a certain place and time (ie: piggy-backing on Eva's popularity), and then when unsuspecting (and mostly younger) victims showed up they would try to equate some of their teachings with the soul-searching in the show and 'recruit' them.
As ironic as it would be, could one create an Evangelion-based cult, even a new religion, by exploiting the otaku that have internalized all the wrong messages from it? Well, there was the Church of Nerv in India... And according to an interview segment translated by the Evageeks forum member 1731298478, Anno has considered the possibility:
I really hate the fact that animation - or at least "Evangelion," the work I've been doing - has become merely a "place of refuge." Nothing but a place where one escapes from reality - by becoming deeply absorbed in it, [people] simply ran from the pain of reality, and from there was hardly anything that came back to reality. To that extent I feel like [the work] did not arrive [at reality]. Steadily the number of people taking refuge [in the work] increases, and if this keeps up, in the extreme case, it would become a religion. It would become the same [situation as with] the Aum adherents and Shoko Asahara. Perhaps, if I did things correctly, I would have had the potential to become the founder of a new religion, but I hate [that idea]. For clutching at straws [lit. "grasping at a spider's web"], one person is enough.
What is Evangelion these days? Reboot-sequels, spin-offs and truly depraved amounts of merchandise, a cynic might answer. But at least Anno has enough integrity that we’ve been spared from an Evangelion-flavored Scientology.
