All Purpose Negima Fanfiction Thread

What makes Shinji badass in his own way is he's terrified of his situation, he's vaguely aware it's all ultimately hopeless, and he knows everyone's just using him in one way or another, and he still keeps going. Granted, often only after a hard kick in the butt, but which action hero in a story at least several chapters long hasn't ever had a moment when they need a strong push forward?

There's no need to 'fix' Shinji to make him 'badass'. The core of Shinji is he's a badass pussy.

So... he's a Cowardly Lion?

He is a tool, a cosmic plaything manipulated by vast, unknowable and uncaring gods, and indeed, the existence of humanity is of no consequence to any but themselves...

Hmm... Shinji meets Nyaruko-chan...

edited 29th Jul '15 6:00:57 PM by SCMof2814

Exactly.

That depends on what one is thinking of when one says "Badass!Shinji", and also what one intends to use this version of Shinji for. A Shinji Ikari who is basically manga!Shinji with much less insecurities, an iron spine in his backbone, a strong moral/ethical sense, and surprisingly competent for his age? That has great potential for the Catharsis Factor in a scenario where the whole point is to see all of the manipulators' schemes fall apart because this one kid refuses to abide by their expectations, laugh at their repeated failures and misfortunes, and make a drinking game of each time someone says "This was not in the scenario."

edited 29th Jul '15 5:51:05 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

That's great except for the part where 99% of the time it's executed like garbage. And also that part where Gendo spent years reshaping Shinji into his tool. Without removing Gendo's influence, you can't get this iron Shinji in any way that makes sense.

On the subject of Raptor NGE Girls, but applied to Negima/3-A Girls. You think if they made themselves into dinosaur hybrids Negi would be more inclined to engage in romantic pursuits with them?

edited 29th Jul '15 6:17:55 PM by WorldTurtle2

Is there one where they take the original scenario of the Evangelion anime but use the characters of the Angelic Days manga?

I know. See Sturgeon's Law.

Except that canonically, Gendo didn't do anything to "reshape" Shinji for the whole 10+ years that they were separated from each other. He simply relied on compounding the childhood trauma of being a first-hand witness to his mother's death by abandoning him shortly afterwards, with their only reunion in the interim being a brief encounter at Yui's grave a couple of years before Shinji was ordered to come to Tokyo-3, and then subtly manipulate what events he could during the Angel War to further worsen Shinji's psychological state.

Most Badass!Shinji setups I've come across screw Gendo's plan entirely by either killing off or otherwise incapacitating the "Uncle" that Shinji was left in the care of, and then have a badass mentor/distant relative take him in, or just have Gendo make the exceedingly rare mistake of not doing the proper research into whoever he's leaving Shinji with (who happens to be a badass mentor/relative), thus derailing his own plans through one of his own decisions.

I don't believe I've seen anything like that.

One of us wrote a one-shot where Negi named Tamaki (the dragon-girl Fatette) as his one and only true love exactly because she was a dinosaur-like dragon-girl (among other reasons, but that one was unique to her). Does that answer your question?

edited 29th Jul '15 6:22:58 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

So... trying various shortcuts to get enough of a head of steam to write a new fic (or just write, period). 2 ideas came my way

• Idea one: Ala Alba plays Pathfinder, and the fic consists of the meta arguments of rules-as-written versus but-in-real-life-you-can, eg, Negi arguing that the fireball spell will NOT create a perfect sphere, and he should get an area bonus for using it in an enclosed corridor, Chisame going meta and dissecting the plot of the module they're playing, and Konoka slowly turning to the dark side as she wonders why no one told her as a healer she could have the power to control an army of undead...
• Idea Two: Negima-Earth is in the Prime Material Plane, Mundus Magicus is a demiplane in the Ethereal Realm anchored to Mars, Venusians are Native Outsiders, and and everything essentially runs on Pathfinder rules. They end up going to Mundus Magicus and have to run through the Carrion Crown adventure path...

Well at this point what the hell are you doing using Shinji in the first place?

Shinji has a shitton of insecurities, has a spine comparable with a particularly flaccid wet noodle, has a very weak moral and ethical sense and is about as competent as any given teen his age. Or, put in other words, Shinji is a normal teenager, that's the frikkin' point of Shinji, and if you change him so he's more of a shonen protagonist and less of an actual human being, then you're missing the point of Ikari Shinji.

I am not an Evangelion Fanboy. Far from it, in fact, I only watched the series the once and read part of the manga, but geez, even I understand and respect the character of Shinji far more than your average 'badass!Shinji' writer does.

This is like writing a Black★Rock Shooter fic in which Stella and Nana are not the last two sentient beings on Earth. And speaking about that, I want to write a fic for that game, but damn if it ain't hard to find something to write about. It's not like there's much more the story actually needs...

So of course it'll need to be a crossover. Maybe I can do it with the backstory of the game, with the actual Alien Invasion, and work in Chao coming in to prepare the Earth for the fight with the 15 Apostles... Hm... WRS was around so they could make clones of her around 1999, and she was masquerading as an idol while exploring the world... I think I can get away with making her a student at Mahora. Also an excuse to get her to decide to attack the world. Given that Mahora is, by virtue of being an Academy of Adventure, the most interesting place in the world, I'm sure she'd think the world would be just as interesting and worth Neblading.

edited 29th Jul '15 7:17:09 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

himitsu keisatsu seifu chokuzoku kokka hoanbu na no da himitsu keisatsu yami ni magireru supai katsudou torishimari

Well, excuse us for disliking tragedy, especially the ones without delicious Ham and Cheese or gratuitous explosion to distract us" from our own helplessness and giving us Cosmic Horror Story at personal, mental level!

If you like tragedy... then why work so hard to remove all the elements that make Shinji well suited to the tragically hilarious trainwreck that is his life?

Look, I hate Shinji as a person, but I think he's an excellent character... which is why it annoys me so much when people shit all over his character.

edited 29th Jul '15 7:39:35 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

himitsu keisatsu seifu chokuzoku kokka hoanbu na no da himitsu keisatsu yami ni magireru supai katsudou torishimari

Bomber didn't say they liked tragedy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Hence the reworking of a tragic character into not that, one presumes.

Well, that's sorta akin to turning Negi into a blatant self-insert and doing whatever the hell you want with him...which tends to happen to Shinji nine times out of ten. Cool if that's your speed, but its hard to stay true to the character he is in NGE, unless you're going for the Raising Shinji project route.

The kids got issues, and that's not always an easy thing to write about. Granted, the whole cast is like that to some extent.

I'm sorry, I guess I must have misread, because I cannot fathom how someone who dislikes tragedy could even begin to like Evangelion. I mean, yeah, the start of it might have you fooled at first, but once Anno got off his meds it was no longer being anywhere near subtle.

Either way, I still think Shinji is a great character and turning him into a badass completely defeats the point of Shinji being Shinji. You might as well just bring along Touta, because you just turned Shinji into a character just as generic as Touta is.

himitsu keisatsu seifu chokuzoku kokka hoanbu na no da himitsu keisatsu yami ni magireru supai katsudou torishimari

Hence why I never downplay Shinji's issues when I up his feats.

I just exacerbate his issues even more.

Or else find a way to give him a brand new kind of neurosis.

I'd like to remind you that Shinji's 'greatest feats' are done aboard a giant armored clone-thing of a godlike being infused with the soul of his mother that does most of the work for him.

His true biggest feat? Not any of the angels he killed nor anything he did aboard his mom.

No, the biggest feat Shinji has to his name is surviving.

Sounds kinda lame, doesn't it?

But it isn't.

Shinji, a completely normal teenager, is surviving the same situation that normally requires a shonen action hero to survive. If you take away the 'completely normal teenager' part... then he loses that, and becomes worthless.

edited 29th Jul '15 7:54:53 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

himitsu keisatsu seifu chokuzoku kokka hoanbu na no da himitsu keisatsu yami ni magireru supai katsudou torishimari

Don't worry, Shinji already has the self-worth of a amoeba. Which is strangely enough more then Asuka ever had starting out.

The funny thing is, he was actually making progress into becoming a semi-functional human being up until the kissing incident. Everything after that just sort of went down the crapper for him, which is perfectly reasonable given what happened.

edited 29th Jul '15 8:08:32 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

...when discussing a mecha show, especially when Empathic Weapon is a major trope in play (as happens from time to time in the Super Robot Genre), oftentimes the feats of the pilot and his/her machine are implicitly shared.

Although I do agree that Shinji doesn't get credit for EVA-01 going berserk on Sachiel nor for the Dummy Plug doing its thing on Bardiel/EVA-03, I absolutely give him credit for jumping in a volcano to save Asuka, as well as partial credit for Zeruel (he beat the tar out of it with his own drive and experience and was on the verge of killing it before he ran out of power, at which point, yeah, Yui gets the credit for finishing it off).

The three kids all get team credit for Matarael and Sahaquiel, though pedantically Shinji got the kill on the former, and had the most difficult part of the job on the latter.

Shinji never anything more than a pawn in the schemes of others. The anime, several manga, and the movies all agree on this. He has no agency, and he's not supposed to. The times he's shown to have tried to do something using his own decision-making, it ended up in 3rd impact. SHINJI, WHEN THE GUY WHO KNOWS MORE ABOUT THE PLOT THAN YOU TELLS YOU THERE'S SOMETHING SUSPICIOUS ABOUT HAVING TO PULL OUT THE LANCES, LISTEN TO HIM YOU MORON!!!!!!! It's not like you had anything better to do! Were you missing an episode of Gate or something?

edited 29th Jul '15 8:12:57 PM by SCMof2814

He has minimal agency, being free to just ragequit if he wants to.

He started to once, and then actually went through with it after Bardiel.

Then he accepted his responsibilities and returned, without being prompted to - and, it's worth noting, to the surprise of his dad the star schemer.

Which led to End of Evangelion. So him making choices is BAD thing. Much better he be hustled along by other people's plans.

edited 29th Jul '15 9:31:18 PM by SCMof2814

Part of that is that he's in a setting where the world's already fucked, regardless of what he does.

Run away, like a pussy? Sooner or later one of the Angels gets through to ADAM or Lilith, achieves complementation, and initiates Third Impact.

Stay and fight, like a man? Get subjected to an ever-worsening Trauma Conga Line as your emotional support structure is steadily torn apart while you're helpless to do much of anything at all.

Pull out all the stops in the name of saving your waifu? Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.

At least in EOE, we do see that Shinji and Asuka reform out of LCL. And while a lot of people take this to unsubtly imply a spectacularly fucked up Adam and Eve Plot, it's still a feasible assumption that anyone else who got tanged could, in the future, also choose to reform into a physical, individual life-form.

So basically, the finale of the movie is only as bleak as your personal headcanon tells you it is.

...How is that not Gendo shaping Shinji to be pliable? Denying him parental love for years and sending him to live with relatives who explicitly did not give him affection only to manipulate him to the point that Shinji goes absolutely nuts when Gendo gives the slightest sign of approval isn't shaping him into a tool? The only difference is that Gendo delegated part of it to someone he knew would do what he needed done.

edited 29th Jul '15 10:15:57 PM by Hyp3rB14d3

Because a major part of the reason he abandoned him and never made contact with him against is that he was afraid of hurting him; the manipulation thing came in second. Also, there was no guarantee that Shinji couldn't have come across someone who actually makes a positive influence on him that ends up screwing Gendo's plans to kingdom come; and no, from the looks of it, Gendo doesn't seem to have much reach outside Tokyo-3 in terms of undercover agents (Seele logically wouldn't allow him that much power, anyway; he already has too much for their comfort, and that's only because it's necessary), otherwise he wouldn't have had to rely on Ritsuko hacking Jet Alone.

And besides, Shinji could have died anyway in the 10-year interim period (traffic accident, murderous burglar, tripping on stairs, etc.), if he did not become suicidal enough to just kill himself. If I were a master schemer whose plot hinged on a particular person being alive, I'd do everything in my power to keep him well within my sphere of influence and make damn sure that he receives just enough psychiatric help to keep suicidal thoughts away from his mind for the time being, yet avoid actually fixing him and instead leave him fragile enough that I can break him the moment I want to.

Face it, a good deal of Gendo's "scheming" in canon is just astonishingly risky Gambit Roulettes and borderline Indy Ploy improvisations, heavily dependent on the whims of the cosmic Powers That Be being in his favor on many occasions.

---

RE Badass!Shinji defeats the point of canon!Shinji's character: I don't dispute that canon!Shinji is a great character already. That doesn't mean that making him into a different sort of character is automatically a bad thing. Heck, if we are to be really honest, Badass!Shinji is probably what canon!Shinji himself wishes to be deep down in the dark depths of his heart (though he probably isn't sure about the specifics). In a way, this as much a "what effects on the plot would result from using a Shinji Ikari with a radically different personality and/or competence level" thing as much as it's an unconventional form of Wish-Fulfillment, in that it's applied to the author's educated guess of what Shinji Ikari wishes himself to be is rather than what the author himself wants him to be (then again, the two can and do often coincide).

And of course, there's the whole "come on, let's give Shinji a break and have the plot go his way for once" aspect taken to eleven in many cases.

edited 30th Jul '15 3:25:16 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.