Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely. (Funny to think how they weren't sure if they'd finish the first season of Futari Wa Pretty Cure so their budget for writing and direction was zero for a few episodes in the middle that were mostly incomprehensible scenes of people being corrupted, turned into monsters, and walking around doing things Kung Fu masters would do in Dragonball Z until suddenly the show started making sense again... And of course they went on to make another 20+ seasons)
> Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely
Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.
Heck you could even make each series explore a different element of the human psyche.
IMHO the real issue is Evangelion is such a mind fuck that finding ways to reach that level of WTF is hard, and also the cultural zeitgeist moves on, and I doubt if Evangelion was related today it'd have the same impact. Kind of like how a lot of cyberpunk stuff is still around, but it has to be somewhat re-invented for each decade, because while some of the themes of the original 1980s stuff is still relevant, you can't just cut and paste, today's youth feels a different sense of hopelessness than what was felt in the 80s!
Same thing with 1990s material, super edgy goth cyberpunk vampires don't hit the same in 2024 as they did in 1994.
So finding writing staff that can keep up with making Really Good Stuff decade after decade, and who also want to do rehashes of the same material, may prove hard.
But still, a series of Evangelion universes all focused on different types of trauma would be interesting to see!
>Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.
NGE has done that plenty. The early works, dating sim games, plastic models, fan fiction, manga, etc have all had 'alternate universe' entries -- which suits the series just fine since that concept is explored even in the original series via Shinji's 'instrumentality scenes'.
Gundam (MSG, in particular) is sort of about the world ending. Colony drop killing billions right off the bat.
Yeah the other spin-offs not related to the UC storyline are definitely more in the "angsty ace pilot teen with completely-overpowered-weapon-as-a-plot-device" category but there's so many of them, who's counting at that point?
While the mecha are all cool as heck, definitely felt the OG series and the spinoffs (008th MS Team, 0079: Stardust Memory, Zeta Gundam etc) are the best because they tell different aspects of a larger story.
NGE isn't really about the world ending, it's about the forced ending of humanity as we know it; we're even left to see what the world looks like post-humanity in EoE.
