Episode 26 Literary Inspiration

[CorporalChaos]

For those of you who didn't know, Episode 26's title comes from a short story by Harlan Ellison. And for those of you in the habit of lurking on the IRC channel, you would know that I've been planning to read the short story, think about it compared to Episode 26, and analyze the comparison between the two. Those who have been waiting patiently will be happy to know I received the book that contains the story today.

In a way, Evangelion led me to read Ellison. I used to be much more infatuated with Evangelion than I am now, and I ravenously attacked anything to do with it. When I heard that Episode 26's name had something to do with a short story, I spent about a year searching on and off for it. So, it comes full circle. Evangelion leads me to Ellison, and Ellison leads me back to take a closer examination of the inspiration behind Episode 25/26.

First published in 1968, "The Beast That Shouted Love At the Heart of the World" won a Hugo Award for Best Short Story the next year. Its been said that its reason for winning was self-evident once it was read, and I agree with that sentiment. "The Beast" is not a long story by any means. While the term "short story" applies to a wide range of story lengths, "The Beast" was only a five minute read. The first read was a little disappointing. It made little sense to me on that first read, but I immediately recognized the method of storytelling as something unique. And on the second reading, everything clicked into place.

I find this very similar to the Instrumentality episodes of Evangelion. Both made little sense the first go around, but the impact of the feeling that something unusual is happening struck home hard. It left this sensation that I just wanted to keep going back through until it made sense to me. The only difference is "The Beast" was a much simpler puzzle, with few threads to weave together. Still, it is a great piece of work, and as far as I know, one of the first uses of such storytelling methods.

What the reader is given are different threads of a story:

1) A homicidal maniac living in the suburbs
2) A statue in a distant galaxy that looks exactly like the maniac.
3) An insane seven-headed dragon who is about to be "drained" by a scientist and his politician friend.
4) Pope Leo turning Attila at the gates of Rome.
5) A homeless man accidentally starting World War IV.

Each of these threads are seemingly unrelated, but by the end of the story, they are built into a cohesive picture of what is going on. The story's true center lies with the scientist and politician- "draining" is removing emotion from a being, a project which is being undertaken with the politician's support, in a bid for them to remove all insanity from their race. The effects of this "draining" leave the dragon in the shape of a man, shimmering like a wave (which is to be stabilized and brought back into a corporeal form), with all emotion becoming a vapor, which is then sent out through the stars via "crosswhen", which is a sort of connection across space and time.

The scientist sees this as unethical, as the vapor of insanity is being pushed off on other beings in the far off universe. In a bid to stop the draining process, the scientist attempts to drain himself to overload the draining mechanism, which hasn't yet finished processing the dragon's emotion. The politician steps in and stops him from doing so. The scientist is put on trial for attempting to halt progress, and is sentenced to death. On his deathbed, he asks for a memorial to be put up to remind other beings that there is a center to the madness (his home planet), and once in that center, there will be peace.

This segment of the story is made clear to be the source of the other threads in the story. The maniac in the opening scene has recieved the insanity of the dragon, while Attila is turned at the gates of Rome not by Pope Leo, but the scientist attempting to overload the draining system. The statue in the far-off galaxy? The scientist's memorial. The final thread of the homeless man starting World War IV is caused by his discovery of a vial of vaporous insanity.

But the way these threads are woven is what makes the story interesting. Its told in a very experimental, non-linear way. In the introduction to the book, Ellison described the story as being written in a circular form, "as though a number of events were taking place around the rim of a wheel, simultaneously. The simultaneity of events around that wheel-rim, however, occur across the artificial barriers of time, space, dimension, and thought. Everything comes together, finally, at the hub of the wheel." Each thread, unrelated to each other at first look, are linked together by a central event.

Plot differences aside, is this beginning to sound familiar? Episode 26 takes nearly the same stylistic approach to the problem of Instrumentality. Instead of presenting it directly as a series of events from different points of view, it weaves separate threads around a wheel, of which Shinji is the center. Each thread, individually, explains little, yet, when taken as a whole, build up a very coherent picture of what is going on. I think that Anno adapted this method of storytelling to great effect, and brilliantly conveyed what was going on in Instrumentality to the viewer.

However, despite the structural similarities, I have a difficult time comparing the plots. However, I do find an interesting similarity between the center of the story. To wit, a race of beings is trying to purify itself of emotion in order to bring peace and understanding to their race to become a logical species. In Evangelion, a race of beings is trying to purify itself of things that separate souls from each individual in order to bring about love, peace, and understanding between all souls. About the only thing that is missing is if the barriers between men's souls were shot out into the stars to have an effect on other species living throughout the galaxy. Who knows, maybe it does happen, after all, Yui is now humanity's emissary to the stars.

While it didn't really give as much insight into Evangelion as I had originally hoped, it did give me a greater understanding of some of the science-fiction background the series was developed from. Its still an interesting read, and if you can track down a copy, I'd definitely recommend that you guys read it if you have the time.

[Lucretius]

Nice analysis. Unfortunately, I haven't read the story, so can't really comment.

[NemZ]

From a whole-story perspective, it might work better if you place Gendo at the hub, with his ruthless willingness to destroy the whole world if only to regain his lost joy.

Alternatively, the dragon (Seele) is still there from the start, but it is only through Yui and Gendo's attempts to subvert their plan that this madness is permitted to affect the rest of the globe.

[CorporalChaos]

Well, this really only applied to the final two episodes of the show, not the entire show as a whole.

[NemZ]

Yeah, I got that. I didn't have anything to add, but from a larger perspective I thought I might... hence prefacing my comments with "from a whole story perspective" to note the shift of focus.

[V]

Harlon Ellison is a disturbed, vengeful man with a self-inflated conception of his own self-worth as a writer

granted, he is by all means a "good" writer, but he has elevated himself to higher status...

...it says something about the fandbase that has grown up around Ellison, when there is an entire literary subgenre of fictional parody books about it! (There are multiple books in which the main character is a parody of not so much Ellison, as the rabid fanbase he has accumulated)

then again, its not so much his writing or even his personality I dislike, but the bizarre fanbase that has grown up around his works

[Mr. Tines]

The original GAINAX crew were hard-core fen (getting their start at DaiKon); they made a habit of alluding to SF titles throughout their own works. It makes a fun easter-egg hunt.

[CorporalChaos]

Yes, coming soon, James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Only Neat Thing To Do", the title of Episode 26 in the Proposal.

Easter egging is fun.

[Sailor Star Dust]

Thanks for getting this brilliant analysis up, this was an interesting read.

If I ever find the time I'll be sure to track down a copy of this and read it.

With Ellison's title, just what does "the beast" refer to? In Eva it seems to refer to a few different things (Shinji's hidden destructive impulse, Eva-01 when berserk and the Angels).

And IS the episode 26 title a double meaning with ai as in the Japanese word for love and ai as in "I"? I was under the impression for some time that this was the case, I'm just wondering what exactly each of the titles (Ellison's work and 26) mean.

[Sharaz Destler]

I do believe this story was mentioned in Little Boy as it talked about Evangelion...

[CorporalChaos]

The "beast" is a form of darkness, seeking love, but wallowing in hate.

"'I love everyone in the world. I do. So help me god, I love you. All of you.' He was shouting."

I'm also under the impression that the Episode 26 title is just a cool little word play that someone at GAINAX came up with.

Thanks for bringing those questions up, SSD, I'll try to integrate them into the version I'm typing up for the wiki.

[AuraTwilight]

I'm also under the impression that the Episode 26 title is just a cool little word play that someone at GAINAX came up with.

Love = Ai = I.

[V]

Yes, coming soon, James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Only Neat Thing To Do", the title of Episode 26 in the Proposal.

Easter egging is fun.

how do we defeat the Angels? "Screwfly Solution"

[Sailor Star Dust]

Love = Ai = I.

Yep. It is meant to be both in the case of EoTV: Shinji (as well as the rest of the cast) loving HIMSELF so he can love others.

[Sharaz Destler]

Yep. It is meant to be both in the case of EoTV: Shinji (as well as the rest of the cast) loving HIMSELF so he can love others.

Hold on, isn't that supposed to be End of Evangelion?

heh heh heh...

[CorporalChaos]

A thought, why not just translate the title as "The Beast That Shouted "Love/I" At The Heart Of The World" or something to that extent?

[AuraTwilight]

A thought, why not just translate the title as "The Beast That Shouted "Love/I" At The Heart Of The World" or something to that extent?

It's just Love, as part of the Love/Ai/I pun, and because at this point and time, Shinji's mind IS the heart of the world. Why say "Shouted I at the heart of I"?

[CorporalChaos]

James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Starry Rift" finally arrived in the mail this morning. The book itself is a compilation of three separate stories set in the same continuity, linked together by an narration a librarian in an alien library recommending interesting stories to two alien students reading up on the early days of human galactic exploration. Anyway, this book is noteworthy to Eva fans because it contains the novella "The Only Neat Thing To Do".

James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of psychologist Alice Sheldon. Sheldon started writing under the name in 1967, when she began writing science fiction. (Apparently she had been writing as early as the 1940s) She won a fair sized collection of awards for her body of work. She also suffered from depression for much of her adult life, and ultimately ended up committing a murder/suicide with her husband in May 1987.

"The Only Neat Thing To Do" was written in 1986, and was nominated for a Nebula and Hugo Award for best science fiction novelette that year, and won the Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle Awards. Significantly, this story also won the Japanese "Seiun (Nebula) Award" for Best Foreign Language Short Story of the Year in 1988. This may well be where the GAINAX crew first picked up on the story.

To tie this all into Evangelion, the original title of Episode 26 was going to be "The Only Neat Thing To Do". I decided to read the story in the hopes of gaining a little more insight on the whole "Arka" plot that was laid out in the proposal. As I read through the story, I do see a lot of similarities to the basic episode summary given in the Proposal.

Long story short:

A girl, named Coati, gets a fancy space-coupe for her 16th birthday. She takes the coupe, upgrades it, and runs away from home to explore past the outer reaches of the human-explored Federation. After arriving at a Federation outpost near a great galactic rift, she learns of a missing exploration vessel with a crew of two. She decides it would make a great adventure to find them. She sets off after the vessel.

The way the space travel is set up in the story, it is necessary to send "message tubes" from ships back to outposts for communications. As Coati searches for the vessel, she comes across a message tube that contains a message from the explorers, a disembodied alien intelligence, and several golden yellow 'seeds'.

Coati is then invaded by the alien intelligence which calls itself Syllobene. Syllobene is a young member of its race, who decided leaving its host body to ride the tube back to where ever it was headed would make a great adventure. However, it was about to die from the harshness of space when Coati stopped the tube to pick it up. The alien also "immunizes" Coati against the seeds floating around the cabin.

On the way, Coati interviews the intelligence, recording the conversation to send back to Federation headquarters. They then arrive at the planet, and find the exploration vessel crashed near the north polar cap. Coati lands to investigate, and finds that the crew was not acting at all normal when they landed. After watching the two explorers stumble around and have uncoordinated sex with each other, Coati decides to follow their beacon into the wilderness to find out what happened to them.

After a while, she comes across the bodies of the two men at the edge of the polar ice cap. They have large holes in their nasal cavities, and are surrounded by a blanket of golden-yellow seeds. Syllobene explains that the 'seeds' are actually spores produced by her race. All spores that develop from beyond their civilization grow up feral, and do not show any intelligence at all. The two men had hatched several of these spores in their brains, which had then passed their mating urges onto the men, while munching on brain matter to produce the spores.

SPOILER: Show

It is then revealed that Syllobene has not completed her training to control the urges, and that she is beginning to lose control. She tries to free herself from Coati to prevent anything from happening to her, like she did her host when she left, but is unable to. As Syllobene begins to take over, Coati decides to fly her ship into the star the planet orbits. Unable to let Syllobene onto what she is doing out of fear that Syllobene may stop her, she leaves clues as to what she's doing in her final message tubes to civilization, such as playing Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun".

She then plunges into the star, message tubes are analyzed back the Federation outpost (she thought ahead sterilized the tubes by baking them, so seeds invading the outpost don't happen), and scientists get her warning, the explorers name the star after her, and the story is wrapped up.

There were only a couple things that reminded me directly of Evangelion in the story:

(1) Coati herself sounded like a proto-Asuka. The opening paragraphs describe her as:

Given one kid, yellow-head, snub-nose freckles, green eyes that stare-at-you-level, rich brat, girl-type fifteen-year-old...(long description of her fascination with exploration)...She does a little math, too; it's easy for her. And she haunts the spaceport and makes friends with everybody who'll talk to her, and begs rides, and knows the controls of fourteen models of spacecraft. She's a late bloomer, which means the nubbins on her little chest could almost pass for a boy's; and Love, great Love, to her is something pointless that adults do, despite her physical instruction. But she can get into her junior space-suit in seventy seconds flat, including safety hooks

...In other words, a child prodigy. I also find it interesting that proto-Asuka's hair is a bit lighter, and she has freckles. It seems to me that Asuka may owe a little bit of her appearance to this story...

SPOILER: Show

(2) An interesting line that Coati says in her final recordings:
"Good-bye, all. To my folks....Oh, do I love you, Dad and Mum."
The "good-bye, all" line struck me as something being said near the end of Instrumentality, while the "oh, do I love you, Dad and Mum" reminded me of the final flashing frames of EoTV. They're probably unrelated, but still, I wonder if Anno was subconsciously channeling those lines.

As of yet, I really haven't made any connections between the story and a basic outline of the final episodes. A mere bit of fanwank, but here's what I've been able to think up with:

I've heard that Asuka dies in the Proposal version. Perhaps the laboratory conceals a bit of the FAR's intelligence, and Asuka decides to sacrifice herself when she discovers that the knowlege could lead to the end of humanity.

The problem is, information on the original version of Evangelion, at least translated to English, is scarce. Its really difficult to draw any connections from this story to anything outlined in the Proposal. The real interest in this probably lay in the heroine of the story, which, as described, is reminiscent of proto-Asuka, and that her design may have been partially based on Coati.

Questions/Comments/Concerns?

[Sailor Star Dust]

Questions/Comments/Concerns?

Does Proto-Proposal Asuka dying have anything to do with Werewolf Asuka craziness??

More on topic, I find it very interesting how Coati was like Proto-Asuka. I also agree that Anno could have been subconsciously channeling those lines "oh, do I love you, Dad and Mum" for EoTV and EoE.

One more thing:

and are surrounded by a blanket of golden-yellow seeds.

The first thing I thought of when reading this was the First Ancestral Race. Though maybe it could have something to do with the Angels.... Am I reaching here??

Also, the idea of exploring a new world does seem to parallel the Proposal idea with searching for Arka.

[gwern]

As it happens, I just came across TONTTD and read it.

CorporalChaos, nice summary. It's much better than another summary I read, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050919/notkin-c.shtml which doesn't even get the ending right.

Now, what relevance does it hold? I think the scrapped Heinlein title in EoE, _The Door Into Summer_, shows that there's not always a huge connection between titles and content. (Having read that too not long ago, the best connection I can draw is the cat searching for an impossible door.)

Coati does seem a bit like Asuka, but that strikes me as tenuous. The hair color is off (Asuka is at lightest a strawberry blonde) and the green eyes aren't right either. She also doesn't seem to have any issues. (And then there are issues with Sadamoto doing the design but not being a huge SF fan AFAIK.)

We ought to link her to Yui, if anything. Both are attractive females, both wind up in space intimately cojoined with another alien being, and both seek some good.

It's a loose connection. I originally thought that Coati points her ship off into deep space, and (shades of _Gunbuster_'s Exelion) goes off forever, but actually she commits suicide by diving into the sun. Yui intends to last forever.

CC: I don't see anything in the Proposal about Asuka dying. The last time she is mentioned, she is 'injured'. (http://wiki.evageeks.org/Resources:Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_Proposal_%28Translation%29#Page_28_.28Episodes_23_to_26.29)

The Kaibunsho does claim that Asuka was supposed to die of madness (http://www.evaotaku.com/html/kaibunsho-main.html#Sect1b). But that's not a self-sacrifice and it is the Kaibunsho, after all...

SSD: I didn't see any connection to the Werewolf ending. The connection with the FAL that struck me the most was the suggestion that a human colony in the area got killed by seeds drifting through space to them - which is an assumption of panspermia which fits in well with the FAL. Also, I don't see any particular connection with Arka - the Proposal says that the 'laboratory' has the 'ruins' of Arka, doesn't it? Not that it's a separate world. (Ruins surrounded by a laboratory are akin to the Geofront and Lilith.)