Joke about Anno and...

[CrazyCucumber46]

Hello everyone,

Sorry for bothering, but I wanted to ask you something I've been having on my mind recently, wondering if you know anything about it.

Couple of years ago, before I started watching anime actively, I used to hang out with these two "Neckbeard"-type guys from work, anime fans, who saw every title out there and knew better than anyone else and so on... you get the idea... One day, we were hanging out in local weeb-shop and I was asking them questions about various anime series, trying to figure out, which one I should start with, to fully get into anime. They, naturally, said, that everything that's sold in the store is crap for children and that the true gentlemen watch something obscure (because the fewer people know about it the finer the quality is, I guess?)...

Having heard somewhere that Evangelion is a good place to start, I asked them about it and first guy snickered "Hmpf... Well, you what they say about Evangelion... That joke about a boy and a girl..." and the second guy went "Oh! That one?! Yeah, hahaha..."... So they told me this joke, goes like this:

"Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl in Japan. They were very weird and because of that, nobody wanted to be friends with them. But one day, they met each other while playing in the sandbox and became best friends. They got along great, playing together, chatting and always making up weird stories, that they shared with each other. The boy was named Hideaki Anno and when he grew up, he created Evangelion, and the girl was named *** and when she grew up, she created ***..."

Question: If you ever heard this one before, who was the girl in this joke?

I can't remember her name, or what she produced, but to make the joke work, it has to be someone with similar "Imagination" to Anno's work (well, the purpose of this joke is that it's someone as crazy as him and the work she produced is as bat-sh*t insane as Eva, but I don't want to call it that, Evangelion was great) and her work probably was something a guy like me at the time, a nerd, who never watched any anime series, wouldn't have heard of before (So definitely not "Sailor Moon" nor "Death Note", not the mega-mainstream stuff normies could be aware of).

Judging by the reaction of second guy, this seems to be something both heard at one point somewhere, as if it was a well known joke, yet I can't find it online. The guys spoke Russian, btw, this could be something out of the Russian side of the fandom, but checked it as well, found nothing. Oh, and I'm on non-speaking terms with both of them now, so can't ask them, sorry...

So just curious, anyone knows anything about it? There is a possibility I might misremember things. Thank you so very much! Don't run away in 2024

[Blockio]

Oh god, that's an arcane one. Many, many moons ago I have heard something to that tune somewhere, but I don't remember who it was about, or if it even was the same joke.
Anno did study and work with a good chunk of other big names in the industry early on, so unless it was some form of absurdism (which it may well be all things considered), it was probably riffing on that, likely someone from the DAICON days

[CrazyCucumber46]

The one similar Joke I found on Russian Livejournal was this:

Once upon a time, angels descended on Earth, more specifically in Japan, and abducted a little boy and a little girl. They decided beat the living crap out of them, torture physically and mentally, abuse them with childhood trauma and depression, while kicking and punching them simultaneously. When angels thought they had enough, they brought them back to Earth.

When the boy grew up, he got a job at Gainax and when the girl grew up, she joined Clamp.

Dunno much about Clamp, so guess I'll go and explore that.

[Blockio]

I think that's a joke about Angelic Layer, although I admittedly do not know much about that one myself

[Mr. Tines]

CLAMP are the all-female mangaka group responsible for Cardcaptor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth, Chobits (itself an Angelic Layer sequel of sorts), Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, XXXholic, Wish and more by way of manga, and character design for such disparate anime as Code Geass and Mouryou no Hako. They have their own set of weirdnesses (pretty much all the relationships in CCS are questionable in one way or another, for example); so I can see where the joke was coming from.

Angelic Layer as a concept is pretty much Gundam Build Fighters only with more human-appearing dolls rather than plainly bipedal robots; it's also the rare case where CLAMP wrote a battle shonen series.

[CrazyCucumber46]

Huh... Interesting. Thank you so much for replies, this joke stuck with me and re-emerged after I finished Eva, since "the girl side" of this joke implied something similar, so was curious to experience it.