YMMV / Shinji and Warhammer40k

• Crazy Is Cool:
  • The fic starts out pretty placid, with just a few moments of awesome and a bit of crazy in the prologue, then steadily increases both. By ch. 19, when canon!Eva has pretty much been left by the wayside, there's so much of both that it rivals Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann at times.
  • Shinji gets an especially large dose. Multiple personalities inspired by toy soldiers are keeping him functional.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Moments after Shinji proclaims, at the end of chapter one, that he will pilot the Evangelion for the first time, the author tells the reader to cue the theme song to Neon Genesis Evangelion... If one continues to do this at the end of each succeeding chapter, the effect might soon become overwhelming. "Cruel Angel's Thesis" does seem to fit more with this fic than with the original series, urging with the words, "Young boy, become a legend." The original Shinji was not very legendary. This Shinji, however...
• Fanon: More than a few reviewers of the work on This Very Wiki have commented on it almost replacing the theoretically "correct" version of events, in their minds.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: This very fic started one where the Fix Fic works by making the world awesome.
• Faux Symbolism: This shows up a lot:
  • To Shinji's great annoyance, Asuka points out the obvious religious imagery when he begins teaching her how to do AT-field weirdness by walking on the surface of a swimming pool.
  • Shinji tries to convince himself that many of the symbols from Warhammer 40K he sees were just based off random things Games Workshop picked out because they looked cool, and him repeatedly running into them is mere coincidence. Doesn't quite work for the skull throne, though.
  • As if NNHIS's name sounding like "IN HIS" wasn't blatant enough, all their products get the designation "experiment #X, IN HIS NAME the Y". Asuka thinks it sounds like they're cult members. Really, they're doing it to tick Gendo off... at first.
  • According to Lama Feckeldraft, Asuka is supposed to be Thor. Or something. This has the effect of making Angels into Giants and Kaworu into Loki. What did Shinji lose in his first combat with an Angel? An eye. What is it that the Imperial aquila lacks? An eye. This makes Mana, who lost her left arm, Tyr. And the Trident (T-Raiden-T) has been bastardized into a Werwulf. 'Leavings of the wolf', indeed.
    • "Achtung! Jotunn Morderkopf!"? Isn't that around the lines of "Giant Slayer"?
    • "Ahem": Didn't Odin (Shinji) also have two ravens named Huginn and Muninn (a.k.a. Jiro and Kentaro) that brought him information and acted as his "eyes"?
    • Thus it looks like that the pseudo-Jewish theology of Evangelion is replaced with Norse Mythology through the help of Warhammer 40k.
• Fridge Logic: Invoked by Bpen, in one of the author notes: How exactly does The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya still exist in a world where the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime was never made and thus (for example) the Emotionless Girl trope would never have been established? Not to mention that it would've been written after Second Impact.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This fic uses the same reasoning for Gendou's behaviour towards Shinji and NERV's ultimate goals as in the Campus Apocalypse High School AU manga. The Rei/Asuka dynamic is also near-identical.
• Les Yay:
  • The End of Evangelion indicated that Maya was in love with Ritsuko, when Ritsuko's image makes her drop her AT-field. This series takes it up to eleven... or should we say... 40,000.
  • And those massages Rei gives Maya could just be friendly...
  • Mayumi has a serious girlcrush on Asuka... and even gets in on the massage action herself.
  • Rei lays this on thick around Asuka, partly because she's serious and partly for her own amusement at Asuka's reactions (see Double Entendre and Noodle Incident).
    • Asuka's attitude towards Rei V seems to indicate the reverse was also true.
    • Mana gets as much Nosebleeds from watching Rei and Asuka interact as from being held by Shinji.
  • No mentions of Ritsuko and Misato yet? Granted, it's only early on, but "I will find you and I will strap you down to a bed like we did in college and this time you won't enjoy it!"...
  • To sum up: all of "Shinji's girls" seem to be quite willing to share him (and each other) with each other the more the series progresses, though it's most focused on the pilots. The only outsider here is Mayumi, she's single-targeted on Asuka.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Pilot Sohryu, I am charging your laser."
  • "Halt!... Hammerzeit!"
  • All Your Base reference in Uncertain space part 4.
  • "Dropping armament buildings meant left open shafts, not to mention the gaping hole left by the Ashino Lance Cannon. Obvious points of vulnerability were obvious."
  • "What is this I don't even."
  • There are several chapters built around weaving specific meme-laden dialogue into the story, be it the entirety of the All Your Base Are Belong to Us intro text, the lyrics to All Along the Watchtower or multiple instances of What Is A Man, A Miserable Pile Of Secrets.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Gendo executes the second Rei after she learns how to use her AT-field offensively outside of her Eva.
  • Kaworu is a sympathetic character up to the point he stabs Rei and helps Iruel turn the Earth's Cradle, the self-sufficient, fortified final bastion of humanity, into grade-A, militarized horror.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Angelspawn and the Black Moon's Zombie Plague.
  • Iruel emits a tone that's the literal form of this trope.
  • Makoto, while reading The Melancholy Of..., reaches the obvious conclusion and proceeds to freak out for a little while.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Dare we say most of the cast?
• Strawman Has a Point: The Government bureaucrats in episode 22 are portrayed like idiots concerned about their position and afraid of losing power and influence if people does not obey them. However their concerns were not unreasonable: give weapons to a teenager and allow him hoard them is a recipe for a disaster, moreover if he keeps them in his school.
• Ugly Cute: The Trident Land Dreadnought◊ is an unsubtle walking tank covered with weapons and slabs of heavy armor. It also tends to waddle around with its arms waving and is only waist-high to an Eva, leading Misato to describe it as "like a deranged, homicidal puppy."
• Wangst:
  • Happily averted as early as the prologue.
    Shinji: What am I doing? This is so worthlessly dramatic. I'm brooding. Brooding, damn it!
  • And possibly just as happily reacquired, for at-last-decent reasons, with his concerns that he might be destroying entire other universes through his exploits.

---