Welcome back to Mecha March! Today I’m reviewing RahXephon, aka Xerox of Evangelion. Yeah, I’m just going to come out and mention the biggest issue with this show right at the start, because it is in everything and better to just get it out of the way: RahXephon is a show that lives almost entirely in the shadow of Neon Genesis Evangelion and really, really wants to simply be its famous predecessor. Characters, themes, images… a lot of them are lifted straight from Evangelion, serial numbers filed off and remixed just enough to claim to not be just Evangelion all over again.
But does it work? Drawing influence,
even strong influence, from a predecessor can be alright. Being a
mimeographed copy of your predecessor, slowly degrading from
replication, however, is not. There isn’t an exceptionally sharp
line dividing one for the other, the “too similar” failure state
from the “more of the same, but ultimately OK” pass. Even though
RahXephon strives to become Evangelion, if it puts in enough of its
own work, it could be fine. Evangelion had a lot of good material,
after all, and didn’t always implement it perfectly, so there might
be room in the shell for something else.
The task set, let’s start digging in to
RahXephon.
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