Why Angelic Days is a Good AU

[Archer]

For some reason, Angelic Days seems to be one of those Evangelion spinoffs barely anyone seems to talk about. Hell, the only discussion I could find on it here (... in, like, the past 5 years at least) were some comparisons in the SIRP thread. I can sorta see why it’s not too popular - the art is admittedly not the best, it’s kinda short, it’s very explicitly a Shinji/Asuka love story, and of course it’s yet another “what if these characters were HAPPY?” story - all of these qualities are undoubtedly going to put off a lot of fans

However, after reading it, I think it’s more than just an AU where the characters are magically happier versions of themselves. In fact, I think ALL of the differences in characterization (... except Kensuke, more on that later) are fully justified by just two small changes to the background of the story. But before we talk about these changes, let’s discuss the setting...

Nominally, Angelic Days is a continuation of the Ep26 dream sequence. However, as is later revealed, it keeps a LOT of the same events from the main Evangelion story. NERV, angels, and evas still exist, and not just superficially - they’re the main driver for the plot in the second half of the manga. Essentially, this means that for the most part, the world is identical to that of the original story. Second Impact still happened, and it presumably still took half the world’s population with it. Tokyo-3 is still a NERV company town, and the kids’ school is still clearly NERV’s recruiting ground for potential pilots, though in this continuity, this fact apparently isn’t hidden at all: Ritsuko and Misato (still high-ranking NERV employees) part-time at the school as part of their duties, with Ritsuko pre-screening the kids for pilot aptitude.

Now, we arrive at the first difference, which primarily serves to justify Asuka’s presence in Japan: the angels’ pattern of attack. Instead of attacking individually in sequence over the course of several months, they instead launch an all-out group assault on Tokyo-3 after an initial scouting by Adam and Sachiel. This was presumably anticipated by SEELE/NERV in their version of the Dead Sea Scrolls, leading to one of the first big changes: now, Tokyo-3 is home to the entire Eva program, where they’re all docked and ready to launch in preparation for this all-out attack. This means that Asuka’s parents (presumably high-ranking officials at NERV Germany involved in Unit-02’s development in the main story) instead moved to Japan to work on the Eva units in Tokyo-3. Changing the Evangelion project’s home base to Tokyo-3 (in response to the different angel attack patterns predicted by this universe’s Dead Sea Scrolls) now gives Asuka a perfectly valid reason to be in Japan 10 years earlier than the main story. It should also be noted that in this timeline Asuka was NOT trained from age 4 to be an Eva pilot and does NOT have a college degree seeing as she’s presumably been in the Japanese school system since she moved there (even though there’s no reason to believe she’s any less intelligent than in the main story). This too serves as a valid justification for the toning down of her extreme superiority complex from the main story.

Now, here’s the second (and much larger) change which has massive sweeping ramifications for all the characters: creating an Eva unit doesn’t require the mother to “die”/lose their soul. My theory is that they instead use the DIGITIZED souls of the pilots’ mothers (a la the Dummy Plug system), but the specific why’s and how’s of the Eva’s functionality in this AU isn’t as important as the effects of Yui and Kyoko still being alive.

- Shinji and Asuka now both grew up with caring (if often absent due to their work) mothers and stable homes, and perhaps most importantly, they’ve always had each other. They’re still the same people with similar problems and insecurities and a similar dynamic in their relationship, they just never had to deal with the severe childhood mental trauma inflicted on them in the main story that amplified the worst of their self-destructive tendencies. If you’re a disgusting AsuShin supporter like myself, you probably believe that they would have been great fit for each other had they been able to get over their respective hangups regarding love and acceptance. If so, this manga was literally made for you, so go read it.

- Gendou is still somewhat cold and distant towards Shinji, accurate to his characterization per EoE (e.g. he’s afraid of getting too close to Shinji for fear of hurting him). However, Yui still being alive means that he never gets his motivation for devolving into a full-on evil villain - instead he’s just a bit of a shitty dad with a strained relationship with his son. Presumably, this also means that he doesn’t give two shits about Instrumentality and is really just in it to stop the Angels, which technically makes him a “good guy”.

- Rei, Rei, Rei. The extroverted, clutzy and insanely socially unaware elephant in the room. She’s the character that most would accuse of being Rei in name only, but I think she’s actually a completely valid answer to the question, “What would Rei be like had she NOT been groomed by Gendou into his subservient puppet for instrumentality?” Again, with Yui still being alive, Gendou has no reason to take a creepy obsession with Rei as her replacement, and consequently has zero interest in raising this child, who in this continuity was created solely to be an artificial Eva pilot (whether or not she’s still a clone of Yui with Lilith’s soul is not clarified but also not particularly important). Instead, she was raised by NERV personnel and constantly in an out of different schools, possibly the result of being shuttled around to different NERV sites for tests, before settling in Tokyo-3 in preparation for the angel attacks. Rei still has problems connecting and socializing with people, and lacks critical life skills and social awareness - but she’s had 14 years of emotional development compared to the several months that main-story Rei had to undo an entire LIFETIME under Gendou’s influence. I’m not saying Rei isn’t vastly different, but I think the differences in her personality are justified by the differences in her backstory that arise from Yui still being alive, and that her new personality somehow still manages to capture some of the feel of OG Rei, enough that I can imagine them both growing from the same seed even if the end result of their characters are quite different. It should be noted that she’s likely the first Rei clone: Yui being alive means Gendou never slept with Naoko (and Gendou never getting that close with Rei in the first place), which means Naoko’s strangling and suicide never happens.

- Kaworu is an interesting case. He’s definitely still supernatural and mysterious, and his backstory is never clarified, but I think it’s an interesting exploration of the question, “what if Kaworu HADN’T met Shinji at the lowest point in his life (...yet), with all of his friends either dead, comatose or evacuated from Tokyo-3?” In this continuity, Shinji has a loving mother, has been friends with Asuka his whole life, and has known his friends from school for years instead of months. Kaworu is still a close friend of his, who comforted him when Asuka was mean to him as a kid and who he clearly enjoys the company of, but unlike in the main story he’s not the first or only person to ever show Shinji affection. Because he still has eyes only for Shinji and has trouble connecting with the other kids, Kaworu actually ends up being the isolated loner here, and I think his personality is very much in line with his main-story self.

- Kensuke is the only character with an unprecedented change - he now has a crush on Asuka in order to give Shinji a romantic rival, and he actually IS selected as one of the Eva pilots. It’s not like this is IMPOSSIBLE, it’s just that in the main story he always struck me as someone who’s probably never seriously thought about girls beyond superficial attractiveness (re Misato) because he’s just more interested in his own hobbies, so it’s just weird thinking of him having a serious crush on anyone.

Everyone else I haven’t mentioned either more or less stays the same (Touji and Hikari are still the token “normal couple”) or is reduced to being a background character (Misato is no longer Shinji and Asuka’s guardian so we don’t get to see much of her at all) and thus isn’t worth a more thorough analysis.

So, in conclusion, despite seeming on the surface to be a “what if everyone were happy” superficial fluff AU, I think Angelic Days is actually an interesting logical exploration of the question, “What if everyone’s mothers weren’t fucking dead?” with some background events shuffled around to justify Asuka being Shinji’s childhood friend. Given how important a theme the mother/child relationship is to Evangelion, I think Angelic Days offers an important counterpoint to NGE by showing a world where everyone is much happier - not for any magical arbitrary reason, but specifically because their families hadn’t been shattered by the Eva project.

———————— END OF ANALYSIS, FANFIC TIER SPECULATION AHEAD!

I’d actually love to see an interpretation of this that more closely follows the original Evangelion timeline, e.g. the ONLY difference is that Evas contain an imprint of the mothers’ soul rather than the real thing. I imagine in this scenario that:
- Shinji would have lived his whole life in Tokyo-3 with his parents, and would have partaken in at least some tests with Unit-01 while growing up. Despite still being somewhat meek and unassuming, he’s a lot more confident and well-adjusted, for obvious reasons. He still has daddy issues - Gendou is still somewhat cold and distant and rarely at home, and always makes Shinji feel like he’s not quite living up to Gendou’s expectations. It’s just nowhere near as bad as the main story, since he still has a mother who shows him love.
- Rei would have been adopted into the Ikari household at Yui’s request, and possibly passed off as Shinji’s sister (easier to explain the similarity in appearance to Yui that way). We can say that she was “adopted” around Rei i’s age, when both she and Shinji were about 4 (incidentally this is when Shinji meets Asuka in Angelic Days). Rei will still be introverted and have trouble connecting with others, but will have a healthy sibling relationship with Shinji. Touji being the lovable jock he is would ward off any potential bullies from picking on Shinji and Rei, because that’s how great a guy he is.
- Asuka is still Asuka, college degree and all, and enters the story the exact same way. She’s still bratty and arrogant, just less filled with self-loathing. Now she’s more concerned about not living up to her image as the legendary Second Child, and pushes people away in fear that they’ll see behind her persona and hate the “real” Asuka.
- Gendou now leads NERV in hopes of defeating the angels, so that he and Yui can live in a world safe from those disasters. SEELE still wants to initiate human instrumentality, but now Gendou only works with them for their resources and is secretly conspiring with Yui and Fuyutsuki to thwart their plans (after all, in the main story his only motivation for being on board with Instrumentality is to get Yui back).

Damn, now I’m half-tempted to write a fanfic exploring exactly how the events of the story would unfold with this premise.

[Blockio]

I'm more than a bit tired, so please excuse any overgeneralizations and weird phrasings;

I haven't read it myself, but according to some people who have (I think Blue Basilisk is one of them, but I could be wildly mistaken there), the problem most people have with AD is less the overall premise, but rather that the story adds and takes away character motivations and backstory elements at a whim, while completely ignoring the implications that would have on the characters' personalities; that and from the bits that I've gathered, the writing in general seems to fall apart if you look at it funny.

That is not to say that you can't enjoy it of course, I know I've had a blast with my share of garbage as well, but calling it a "good AU" is very much stretching it even within just the Eva franchise, and compared to the AUs of other large franchises (Star Wars Legends, Gundam spinoffs and sidestories, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, etc), fact of the matter is that all Eva AUs apart from Rebuild are pretty objectively pretty shit.

[Archer]

Perhaps I should have been more clear - what I meant was that it’s a solid premise where almost all of the changes in how characters behave is plausibly explained by the single butterfly-effect change of “Evangelions don’t require a human soul to manufacture”.

Obviously the manga itself has a lot of issues, mostly due to the fact that the main story is only 4 volumes long and thus has trouble balancing rom-com hijinks (which is what people are reading it for) and Eva-related plot (which is actually of non-trivial importance and acts as a driver for plot and drama).

When I read it, I was kind of just expecting dumb wholesome fun, so it thoroughly subverted my expectations when it actually DID delve into some deeper aspects of the characters and DID have some themes about growing up and escaping the carefree world of childhood that almost sorta mirror the main story if you squint a bit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a LOT of development - obviously nowhere near the actual story - but it was way more than I expected from a short rom-com spinoff. It also did the impossible and turned the ridiculous Ep26 dream sequence into something that actually makes sense in context.

I actually don’t disagree with you - the 16 chapters of the main story do not do justice to the characters and don’t fully explore the implications that the change in setting would have on them. But that’s kind of what makes me sad, because its ambitions were too big for what it was allowed to be. It’s a shame that SIRP is the spinoff manga that got all the budget put behind it, because I think a lot of the issues people have with Angelic Days would be solved if it simply had more time and space to properly develop the characters and setting. The 16 chapters it got REALLY were not enough to do everything that it wanted, but it was enough to show me that there’s clear potential for a more substantive story here.

My main point here is given how important the theme of motherhood is in NGE, the premise of “How would the story be different if their mothers were still alive?” has the potential to explore those same themes from a more positive perspective. While far from perfect in and of itself, Angelic Days has successfully piqued my interest in wanting to see this concept and setting explored more thoroughly.

———

On an unrelated note, given that it’s been 8 years since 3.33 and consensus on the Rebuilds still hasn’t crystallized into “they were actually good, we just couldn’t see it at the time”, I think it’s a bit premature to call the Rebuilds a “good” AU before 3.0+1.0 gets released. All we have right now are questions, lots and lots and lots of them. Until these questions get answered (....or not) by the final film, I think it’s pointless to argue whether or not the massive change in direction is “good” or “bad”.