After spending most of Thanksgiving working on PhD applications (though I still have a couple deadlines left), I’m back to work at the Consortium and ready to blog it up over here at the Department of Alchemy. Alongside all of these applications, it’s time to begin preparing other applications and abstracts for next year’s academic conferences and fan conventions. Last year, I had an excellent time traveling down to New Orleans for the Popular Culture Association national conference, where I spoke about the discourse surrounding otaku identity. This year, the PCA conference is being hosted in St. Louis, MO, but it’s also sandwiched between PAX East and Anime Boston. Regardless of whether or not I can attend in the spring, I submitted the below proposal to the Asian Popular Culture track, which was readily accepted. If I attend in person or if I Skype in to the panel, I’ll be relating most of my secondary research from the Consortium on transmedia and fandom to the Evangelion franchise in Japan and America.
From Narrative to Character: Transmedia, Emotional Economies, and the Success of Neon Genesis Evangelion
Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” has been heralded as one of the most influential Japanese animations in the history of the medium. Met with wild success among Japanese otaku after its premiere in 1995/96, Evangelion strangely also became a media phenomenon among the general public, particularly following Eiji Otsuka’s criticism of the series in the Mainichi Daily News.
Even after the series ended in 1996, Neon Genesis Evangelion continued to remain a key franchise in the otaku community. Beginning with toys and video games and branching out to pachinko machines and cell phones, Evangelion’s narrative extends well beyond Anno’s original “text.” However, it is in these extensions where Evangelion’s success emerges.
This paper argues that the emotional economies present between fans, narrative, and character drive Neon Genesis Evangelion’s transmedia success. The emotional connection that fans establish between the original story and the stories they create fuel this fan-produced narrative that underlies cosplay, galge (female character-driven video games), and the moé phenomenon.
This paper also explores questions posed by the most recent developments in the Evangelion franchise: the quartet of movies (of which Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0 have already premiered in Japan). Although these movies are clearly an adaptation of the original narrative, they also represent an instance of transmedia storytelling that provides new perspectives to a previously-built world. How does this conflict between adaptation and transmedia storytelling affect the comprehension of the Evangelion narrative for a new generation of fans? Is the emotional economy regenerated or merely prolonged? And how can we better understand the relationship between fans and media by examining the Evangelion franchise as in evolves before our eyes?