All Purpose Evangelion Fanfiction Thread

Why MUST there be a Satsuki?

To serve as the fanatically rule-abiding/enforcing foil to Misato's Rebellious Rebel, naturally.

On a different note, I would appreciate it if you guys could give me title suggestions for this 2-year-old one-shot that I had written. My current placeholder title is Misato's Superhero Cosplay Party, which IMO is quite lacking since the story is mainly about Rei cosplaying as Emma Frost and the reactions from Shinji, Asuka, and Misato (I'm even contemplating expanding the story to include scenes with other characters, like Touji struggling to hide his appreciation of Hikari's choice of superheroine cosplay).

"Shinji's Cosplay Mindwipe", maybe?

BTW, thanks for bumping that, that's still a great read.

That makes it sound like the story is about Shinji suffering Loss of Identity due to wearing a (probably enchanted/possessed/living) cosplay outfit, to be honest. And yes, I've seen actual examples of "lose your identity due to wearing an outfit" before... in pornographic doujinshi, mind you. Usually they involved "skinsuits", i.e. artificial suits that make you look like a completely different person, only in those doujinshi's case the skinsuit is supernatural or super-tech and actually transforms the wearer into the suit's likeness — complete with Gender Bender if said likeness is of different physical sex than the wearer's own!

And you're welcome. Maybe you guys would kindly put it on the Fanfic Recs when I get around to putting the final touches and publish it?

...I really should stop reading other people's Eva fanfiction. It just gives me more ideas and plot bunnies at a time when I really don't have the time to write.

This time, I wondered what it would be like if I were to write something in the style of SCE but by mashing together original and Rebuild instead of worldbuilding a new setting from zero?

Things that came to my mind:

• The Vertical Mecha Fins are explicitly called multipods and can store a lot more varied stuff than just a single prog knife each: ammo mags, kunai-style exploding throwing knives, micromissiles, etc.
• The Evas all have compressed air boosters on their backs. They don't have the endurance for flight, don't work in space or underwater and take quite a while to recharge when used, but can give the Eva a quite powerful kick for long jumps, dodging an attack or cushioning falls.
  • Provisional Unit 05 has an improved version built into the legs, allowing it to retract its wheels and glide around at high speeds like a Hover Tank, even over water, at the cost of being problematic to use in enclosed spaces (that's what the wheels are for). This function (and the Eva itself) would debut against Gaghiel.
• Unit 00 is the Eva that was made of Lilith and ate Yui, not Unit 01. Thing is, a combination of Lilith's flesh, Lilith's soul in Rei and a Lilim control intelligence in Yui made the Eva so apocalyptically powerful that the second they turned it on, it instantly manifested a Rebuild-style Door of Guf and NERV barely managed to restrain it by force-ejecting the entry plug using a backup circuit physically isolated from the rest of the Eva so that it can't reject the command. After a second attempt ended the same way and several people (including the Suzuharas' mother) were liquefied into LCL by the Eva's anti-AT field, NERV got desperate and surgically removed the Eva's core, swapping it with Unit 01's to simultaneously restrain Unit 00's power to a controllable level and give Unit 01 a power boost from the new core naturally synergyzing with the pilot.
• Smashing an Angel's core doesn't kill it, merely "banishes" it for a while as it retreats to regenerate. Actually killing it requires Ludicrous Gibs, though that takes a while for NERV to figure out.
• Shinji is less wimpy and more indecisive.
• Gendo's and Rei's relationship dynamic flipped. Instead of Rei seeing Gendo as a surrogate father figure but Gendo considering her nothing but a tool, it is Gendo who sees Rei as a daughter figure but Rei doesn't consider him much more than her creator and the person who gave her a purpose. This is because shortly after Gendo made Rei, he had a breakdown of the My God, What Have I Done? kind and gave up on getting Yui back. Gendo explicitly doesn't want Shinji to pilot but has no choice and being Gendo, he doesn't dare let Shinji know because he's afraid Shinji's reaction will be along the lines of "Oh, you care now?! Well, fuck you too!" It's classic hedgehog's dilemma.
• Asuka's personality is more in common with Shikinami than Soryu.
• With Gendo having given up on his canon agenda, Rei's purpose is to pilot. And she basically got Asuka's level of unhealthy obsession with it: she doesn't mind being helped or backed up, but actively trying to wrestle away the position of best pilot is the fastest and surest way to get on her bad side because she believes that becoming obsolete means losing her very reason to exist. This causes serious friction with Asuka's own competitiveness to the point where the two get into at least one fistfight over Rei warning Asuka to back off, Asuka telling Rei to go fuck herself, Rei feeling threatened, Asuka feeling being looked down on... cue the two coming to blows.
• As mentioned above, Mari will be a factor from Gaghiel onward by way of using Unit 05's hover capabilities to fight the Angel on her own terms. In fact, the reason why the first battle against Israfel is lost isn't because of an anvilicious aesop about teamwork but because Shinji had a Naked First Impression of Mari exiting the shower and can't put the image out of his mind, preventing him from concentrating on the fight.
• Due to Gendo's crisis of faith, as described above, his belief that nobody can possibly love a man like him is reinforced to the point where the breaks up with Naoko. As a consequence, Naoko is still alive, in charge of NERV's research division and the foremost expert on the Evas' cybernetics. Ritsuko, on the other hand, is the foremost expert on the Evas' metaphysical biology stuff, but Naoko frequently bullies her into deferring to her mother's opinion whenever their opinions clash. Ritsuko also explicitly has a thing for Gendo but it's clearly unrequited.
• Misato and Kaji didn't have a messy break up, they simply became separated by work. Thus when they get reunited, Misato doesn't play hard-to-get tsundere but simply makes it clear that if Kaji wants to continue things, she's single.
• Sakura is the same age as Toji and is a factor right from the beginning. Ends up as the pilot of Unit 03 sooner than Toji did in canon and Bardiel doesn't emerge immediately, so she gets to do stuff as an Eva pilot. Doesn't get very badly injured during the Bardiel incident and may get Unit 04 for the endgame as a hand-me-down from Kaworu. Has chemistry with Shinji and doesn't back down even when Asuka enters the picture and stakes her own claim, forming a love triangle; in fact, Naoko picks her as an Eva pilot specifically to make Shinji behave. Resolution is up for grabs, but I'm currently leaning towards OT3 resulting from Kaworu pointing out that they'll only break Shinji's heart if they force him to pick one.
• Kaworu still dies, though how he does is still up for grabs. Currently leaning towards him sacrificing himself to perma-kill Zeruel by inverting his AT-field into an anti-AT field and liquefying them both.

No Shinji/Rei/Asuka OT3?

One, personalities are too different. Two, Shinji considers her a stepsister. Three, Rei is too busy getting the message that being a pilot is not all she can do with her life.

Maybe Kaworu could help her out with that last part.

Question about SCE yet again.

This time, it's about Kaworu's past. Namely, he spent somewhere around 2-3 years in an orphanage, directly preceding the memory cutoff point for his amnesia. In the pre-rewrite version of the fic, the plot I was going with is that the orphanage burned down under mysterious circumstances with no survivors, with the eventual reveal that either Kaworu did it due to subliminal Super-Soldier training kicking in in response to emotional stress caused by the other kids burning his only picture of Rei in an act of bullying or that Tabris did it for... some reason.

I recently thought about this and realized that I just can't come up with a believable reason for why five year old Kaworu would kill a few dozen children and several adults then burn the building down for good measure. It's simply not in his nature and personality.

So I thought, what if the fire was accidental? It's in the middle of the winter anyway, so a heater malfunction is a plausible reason. But why would Kaworu be the only one to survive if the building were to catch fire in the middle of the night, seeing as the others could wake up from the smell of smoke too?

So I thought, let's change that. New idea is that there was no fire. Due to the building having been built before Second Impact, the chimney wasn't designed for the post-Impact winters' considerably heavier snowfall, so the snow clogged it. With no adequate airflow to keep the gas heater's combustion chamber ventilated, it started leaking carbon monoxide in the middle of the night. Kaworu happened to be sleeping a bit higher than the other kids that night, hence why the heavier-than-air gas didn't reach him immediately. Even so, Tabris sensed the other children's minds fading away as they died from the gas, so he woke Kaworu up to make him go outside. I initially thought that Kaworu lost his memory because Tabris blocked it to keep him mentally sound but while looking up carbon monoxide's effects on the human body, I found this interesting text on Wikipedia:

So the current plan is that since the outside door was understandably locked for the night and thus Kaworu was forced to use the window, he was delayed long enough to be exposed to the gas himself. It wasn't strong enough to kill him, but it did give him brain damage that messed up his memory. This also gives me a bit of a breather concerning him regaining his memories later on: he doesn't. Or rather, the resurrection stunt he pulls after Zeruel fixes the physical damage, but he only actually remembers about the same as what any random person would remember about their early childhood: flashes and fragments.

Does that work better?

edited 13th May '17 4:17:02 PM by amitakartok

Yeah, definitely. Reminds me of the few times I had come up with what seemed like a story idea that I honestly believed had no actual basis in reality even though it seemed hypothetically possible to me, only to later discover that it does exist in reality.

Example: This species is a thing. Puts the Hermaphrodite and Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism tropes in a whole different light, doesn't it?

On a different note, while thinking about my aforementioned story Misato's Superhero Cosplay Party (which I'm still waiting on title suggestions for), I've had a few ideas and Imagine Spots regarding the expanded version.

• Instead of being strictly superhero-themed, the cosplay range is more or elss unlimited, it's just that Misato decided that "Team Katsuragi" (composed of herself, her two live-in wards, and Rei) would have a Marvel Universe superhero theme.

• Mari and Mana convince Mayumi to form a team with them, their theme being female anime/manga characters... specifically of the Ms. Fanservice kind (a tidbit which they "accidentally" neglect to properly explain until Mayumi gets her outfit). Mari cosplays as Yoko Littner in her third outfit◊ (using hair extensions to nail down the proper hair length). Mana goes with the ever-classic Faye Valentine. And Mayumi? Mari and Mana take her to the party location and get her to change clothes there with only a few minutes left to the arrival of the guests, then deliberately distract her while she's dressing up with embarrassing questions about her interest in Shinji so that it's not until after she already put on the last piece of the cosplay that she realizes she's cosplaying Boa Hancock from One Piece... specifically her very first outfit◊. Which, from my observation of her pre-Furo Scene Dress Hits Floor sequence, is implied to lack any undergarments whatsoever ^note Reasoning: The dress shows off enough skin that she clearly wears no bra and the only possible kind of bottomwear she could be wearing under that dress whose straps wouldn't be visible despite her hips and upper groin-lines being clearly visible would have to be a lowleg type (which, while possible, is pretty unlikely, especially since she's never subject to Panty Shot), no underwear were dropped with the dress as she was preparing for the bath, and next time we see her after an interruption by an exposition scene, she was stepping into the bathing pool in steam-censored full nudity.. Poor Mayumi. And yes, this Mayumi is more well-endowed than she looks in more wholesome clothing.

• Marie Vincennes (who here is the utterly unsympathetic Alpha Bitch in Sheep's Clothing to Asuka's Lovable Alpha Bitch) dresses up as Madelyne Pryor — which rubs Asuka wrong twice over because she sees it as 1) a ripoff on her own choice of cosplay, and 2) a jab at her hair color since this Vincennes spread rumours about Asuka not being a natural redhead — and tries to woo Cyclops!Shinji in public. Cue Humiliation Conga when Rei teams up with Asuka to do a PG-13 version of Teamwork Seduction on Shinji that leaves Vincennes utterly shamed, partly because he was clearly resisting Vincennes' advances despite being unable to bring himself to physically push her away, whereas Rei and Asuka's joint advances were met with absolutely zero resistance from him and got him to both forget and ignore Vincennes' existence.

• Maya convinces Ritsuko to join her in dressing up as Sailor Moon characters. Guess which characters they're cosplaying. Answer: Venus (Ritsuko) and Mars (Maya).

edited 13th May '17 7:00:22 PM by MarqFJA

Sounds promising.

@amita: re: SCE: Sounds awesome, man.

Although, I'm feeling kind of weird at how I found the PERFECT song to go with your Original Flavor Evangelion-and-Elfen Lied crossover.... and it somehow manages to totally not fit at all, even though it also fits perfectly.

I mean, when you think about a bloodthirsty Yandere of Mass Destruction who's pretty comfortable with the notion of killing every human on the planet except for this one guy she's pining for being together with said aforementioned guy.... you don't normally think, "Man, this would be a perfect place for the soundtrack to cue up The Backstreet Boys!" ...do you?

Heh, thanks. On a related note, I think I know who Gendo should cosplay as: David Xanatos.

On a different note, remembering this one doujinshi that had the Kaworus and Shinjis of three different timelines put together in the same room made me think... What do you guys think of this What If? scenario: instead of Shinji Ikari as the only son of Yui and Gendo, we have Shinta, Shinji and Shinzo^note names derived by replacing 二/次 ji "two, second; next" with 太 ta (as in 太郎 Tarou, lit. "big/great son", one of the common names for designating one's first son) and 三 zo(u) "three, third". as identical triplet sons of said couple, with each being a slightly different variation of canon!Shinji in personality (e.g. Shinta is more anger-driven like manga!Shinji, Shinji is more like anime!Shinji, and Shinzo is more like AU!anime!Shinji).

edited 14th May '17 8:29:57 PM by MarqFJA

In that non-SCE idea of mine I mentioned higher up the page, I mentioned that Asuka would have more in common with Shikinami's personality than Soryu's. I was thinking, why would that be the case?

So I thought, we know that Asuka didn't really like her father in canon. But he's still her, as far as we know, only living blood relative. So what if he were to suddenly die, leaving Asuka with literally no blood relatives, thus well and truly alone in the world? Would that happening less than a week before she were to depart for Japan mellow her out enough?

... That seems somewhat far-fetched for the degree of mellowing out I think you're thinking of.

I'm not thinking of turning her into a stereotyped tsundere, if that's what you're thinking.

I'd take issue with your choice of "stereotyped" as the qualifier for Tsundere here, but that's neither here nor now.

What were you thinking of, then?

First sighting of Asuka we'd have is her lying on a hospital's corridor bench a few hours after her father passed away, staring at the ceiling with empty, half-lidded eyes and one arm hanging off the edge of the bench. Imagine a non-nude, monologue-less version of the bathtub scene from episode 24.

Then Kaji shows up and tells her that it's time for them to leave, as the carrier group transporting Unit 02 is due to leave port in a few hours. So Asuka just lets out a tired sigh, gets up and leaves with him, glancing back at her father's hospital room's window before their car rolls out of the parking lot.

She also wouldn't go out to greet Misato and co. on the flight deck; instead, Shinji would spot her from a distance, gazing out at the sea with her hair billowing in the wind.

Whoa, I missed a lot of text.

While I'm catching up, I'd like to comment:

edited 21st May '17 2:45:31 AM by TheNobody

Do note that I'm also planning on the pilots being two years older than in canon to make them less childish in a hopefully believable manner.

Then it feels even more weird, calling the person who gives one a purpose less significant than a father. Because, the more adult one gets, the more they appreciate actually having a purpose. Or, at least, I would think so.

Rei doesn't care who gave her purpose. All she cares about is having it, where it came from doesn't matter.

It's very much not a healthy attitude.

On Asuka being "truly alone" after her dad dies... She technically would still has family in her stepmom (who apparently she doesn't hate personally; perhaps she's not a total bitch and even is as much of a victim of Langley's immorality as Asuka is) and, if you go by the manga, said stepmom's daughter, who is younger than Asuka and may or may not be Langley's biological daughter (possibly from a past affair — which would imply the man had been cheating on Kyouko for a long time).

On a different note, I've had an Imagine Spot involving BioShock, where Shinji is essentially the equivalent of a Big Daddy and Asuka, Rei, Mari, Mana, and Mayumi are the equivalent of Big Sisters, with the six forming a pack of sorts that look after a bunch of mutated orphan children serving as their equivalent of Little Sisters. The six Big Siblings are all speechless due to their involuntary modifications degrading much of their higher cognitive functions, so interpersonal communication involves a lot of body language; Headbutt of Love is their way of saying "I'm here for you", for example.

You're trying to force too big of a Cast Herd IMO.

I'd say have Shinji as a Big Daddy, Asuka, Mari, and Mana as Big Sisters, with Rei, Mayumi, and Sakura being included among the Little Sisters (Rei gets to be a Little Sister instead of a Big one because she's the best at pulling off the Creepy Child routine, Mayumi because quite frankly three Big Sisters is enough IMHO).

edited 24th May '17 10:50:20 AM by EvaUnit01

He always does that. Told him not to include the extracanon girls merely for completeness' sake if he has no idea what to do with them; apparently he didn't listen.

Anyway... I have this weirdest mental image of Shinji quoting Lelouch Lamperouge, of all people.