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.
Since discussing the similarities to
Evangelion, especially when it comes to the cast, would take far too
long as a separate section and end up largely redundant, I’ll just
address those elements in parenthetical notes.
I’ll give the show that it at least
starts differently than Evangelion: Ayato (Confident, badass Shinji.
Big delta, I know) is living in Tokyo as a fairly normal boy when an
alien giant robot monster thing called a Dolem attacks. In the
confusion of the attack, Ayato is approached by Haruka Shitow
(Short-haired Misato), who claims to be from beyond Tokyo, an area
Ayato believed to be all of the world that’s left. What he really
gets involved with is a yellow-clad phantom known as Reika Mishima,
who leads him to the egg of the Dolem-like angel-mech RahXephon
(EVA-01, part 2), which with Ayato in the pilot seat goes on a
rampage and ultimately breaks out of Tokyo. This leaves Ayato in the
outside world where Tokyo is sealed in a Jupiter-resembling time
distortion bubble called Tokyo Jupiter. Once there he gets picked up
by TERRA (NERV Lite), a multinational military organization that uses
Ayato in his super robot to fight uniquely-shaped enemies that tend
to float gracefully at their targets and offer mass devastation if
unanswered. These are the D-1 (or Dolems) belonging to the Mu, a
villainous faction of blue-blooded people with unclear goals and
motivations.
Working for TERRA, Ayato meets and
befriends individuals like Quon (curious Rei) and Megumi Shitow
(watered down girlfriend Asuka) while dealing with adults like ace
pilot Elvy (angry rival-only Asuka) and sneaky manipulator Isshiki
(bargain-bin Gendo Ikari) and spends a lot of episodes building
connections, exploring characters, and fighting a Dolem if there’s
time. In essence, the core loop of RahXephon inverts Evangelion’s:
It’s a psychological character drama first and an action show second.
Ever more cloak-and-dagger backstabbing
emerges from the woodwork, largely centered on the Barbem Foundation
(Generic Brand SEELE) and Mu. Eventually, Ayato goes a little rogue,
revisiting Tokyo Jupiter, and to make matters more complicated he
emerges again into the endgame. The finale of RahXephon involves
massive Mu battle fleets appearing all over the world, characters
dying left and right, a desperate final battle over the fate of
earth, way more details being thrown at us than are entirely
needed… and the final conflict depending on none of that, instead
being a disturbingly suggestive struggle between Ayato and Quon that
results in the rewriting of the world so that none of this stuff ever
happened.
Now, I skipped a lot of details –
seriously a ton – in that, which I will try to dig into, but that’s
the basic outline. Original opening, somewhat inverted Evangelion
middle, ending you wish Evangelion had that still has a ton of
problems.
So, for those specific details… the
first thing that comes to mind is that I’m not sure I stressed the
themes enough. Remember how Evangelion only tried to be
psychological and symbolic some of the time? RahXephon goes full
bore with its symbolism from the beginning all the way to the end.
Whatever else I may have to detract from my enjoyment of the show or
respect for it, I have to tip my hat to the way the direction and
writing handles visually creating its environment and general look
and feel. The symbolism in RahXephon is so everywhere that you could
say the show is saturated with it, and it’s done very well. Some of
it is obvious, like the numerous shots where a character stands
perfectly in front of the TERRA emblem in such a way as to give them
angel wings, but other parts you’ll only notice if you’re looking
(like I got to do) and otherwise they’ll act subliminally.
The use of red and blue is particularly
precise – the colors represent the blood of normal Humans (red) and
Mulians (blue) and red and blue are used to frame the contrast
between humanity and the Mu throughout the show. For instance, an
affable old commander has a bright blue bird as a pet. Many of the
character’s interactions with characters, particularly the Mulian or
Mulian-adjacent Quon and Ayato have the strict but nurturing nature
of a master-pet relationship, and other characters may interact with
the bird in ways that are suggestive of their behavior towards
Mulians. In another scene, Ayato (himself identifying as a
red-blooded human) is on the lam with a Mulian girl he rescued from
Tokyo Jupiter. The difference in their species, true or apparent,
creates an emotional gulf between them, and in one charged
conversation they’re framed against a backdrop that, when cut by the
frame, sets the girl on bright blue, Ayato on bright red, and a gulf
between them. The colors in the background show the alignment and
relationship of the characters in the scene. Later, Ayato gets a
glass wind chime for the same girl as a present and, of course, it’s
bright blue. On the other side, Elvy’s mecha is bright red, and
despite having similar capabilities to the Dolems, it’s a machine
created and piloted by red-blooded humans, free of Mulian influence.
So of course it’s red. That one might even be an in-character
symbolic choice.
I’m still only scratching the surface.
I think a deep analysis of the symbolism and nonliteral visual
storytelling in RahXephon could probably go through the anime scene
by scene, and would absolutely do episode by episode, and most of the
material addressed would be well used.
Something I’ve now touched on, with the
discussion of Ayato and the red/blue symbolism, is the issue of
identity. A question RahXephon asks fairly constantly is “Who is
this person, really?”. It asks the question of Ayato most, but a
huge number of characters are addressed and examined over the course
of the show, and there isn’t an easy or resounding answer to what
grants a character their ‘true’ identity or what matters when
determining it. Different characters interpret the same situation in
different ways, according to their stakes and opinions. It’s a
fairly deep and complex discussion, to which I am now obliged to
provide some examples. At one point, it’s revealed that Ayato has a
“Mu Phase”. Even though he has red blood, this is apparently a
sign, or even proof, that he is a Mulian. For Haruka, this means
nothing. For Elvy, it means just about everything. And for Ayato
himself, it means enough to make him question his place in the world.
But Ayato’s Mulian or Human ties are only part. The character Reika
Mishima (also known as Ishitori or Ixtli depending on your
translation) is a curious case of uncertain identity. She seems to
write herself into the show with a definite persona, but it turns out
that she (or it) is more of a reflection, taking a form based on
Ayato’s inner desires (it later appears to Quon in Ayato’s form, for
instance) and leaving us with some severe questions as to whether
this entity is or isn’t something even vaguely human.
Isshiki has a more mundane case of
questionable identity: we see him as a cunning manipulator, always
grasping for power, but no matter what he achieves he seems to be
haunted by having been raised as a D-rank individual (as opposed to
at least one A-rank peer). The face he presents to the world is a
reaction against his inner vision of himself, and the ways he
succeeds and ultimately tears himself apart is predicated on that
difference in identity. Almost every character in this show, at
least the ones that appear in more than a few scenes, has at least
those three faces: how they see themselves, how others see them, and
how the audience, blessed with a relatively omniscient point of view,
sees them. And who sees what is constantly changing and constantly
debated.
The question of identity is a strong
one. How people define themselves, and how they let the world define
them, is something relevant and resonant. Ayato and Reika seem to be
counterparts in this even as they’re counterparts in big robot magic
nonsense: Ayato has a strong idea of his ‘self’ and determines his
own identity, while “Reika Mishima” has its form literally
dictated from the outside.
If there’s something else really worth
mentioning, it’s the romance and relationships. If you thought the
entanglements in Evangelion were messed up… they were, but wait
until you see RahXephon. The quick version is that once upon a time
Ayato dated Haruka. However, the whole Tokyo Jupiter thing separated
them and caused her to age far more than him, so that she’s 29 now
while Ayato is only 17. To make matters even more complicated,
Haruka is absolutely still in love with Ayato but Ayato has lost all
his memories of her. Elsewhere in Ayato’s messed up family there’s
the fact that Quon is the sister of the woman who raised Ayato… and
ultimately revealed to be Ayato’s biological mother, as well as the
biological mother of Itsuki, a doctor Ayato meets in the outside
world who treats Quon (who didn’t age and thus now appears to be
Ayato’s peer) as a little sister. Haruka, not knowing of the
connection, dated Itsuki in the time between the Tokyo Jupiter event
and recovering young Ayato. In the ending, Ayato and Quon
fight/merge in a very suggestive manner and Ayato rewrites the world.
In the new world after the end, Ayato and Haruka (not desynched) are
married and have a daughter. Named Quon.
Did I mention that, in the meat of the
show, he gains the interest of Megumi, who is Haruka’s little sister?
And that Reika Mishima’s form is based on a younger Haruka? Don’t
feel bad if you aren’t keeping up with this, it’s a bloody mess, and
that’s only the stuff directly connected to Ayato.
Time and Ayato’s family tree are both
pretzels.
Outside that we have a tangled saga of
clones, unrequited love, mourning, mind manipulation, and revenge.
It is, I’ll admit, very engaging to watch, as it should be since it
provides so much of the show’s meat when mecha battles don’t quite
cut it. Which, in this show, they kind of don’t.
The weakest part of this show is
probably its conclusion, and that despite having a lot of good
material there. The tangled web of the cast comes crashing down, and
confrontations become both pretty epic and heavily fatal. We don’t
necessarily want to see everybody die, but the deaths are given a
weight and gravity in the moment that makes us feel like the arcs
we’ve been watching are reaching proper conclusions, even if those
conclusions are unhappy. Then trippy stuff happens, Ayato tunes the
world, and the universe is completely reset to a plain, boring
timeline where nothing we encountered ever happened and possibly
could never happen. There are a few problems with this.
First of all, the reset ending. Reset
endings are not always terrible, but a few conditions are required.
First, we have to accept that a reset is is positive and meaningful,
essentially determine that the route we were on was a “Dead End”.
The massive death and destruction in the finale of RahXephon does
feel at least somewhat like a “Dead End”, but the problem is
actually how meaningful and powerful the deaths of most of the
ancillary characters feel. If the chain of slaughter hadn’t reached
Haruka and Megumi, we could have accepted it, and unwriting the
deaths of the others also unwrites their conclusions, the defeat of
the nastier sorts and the sacrifices of the heroes who fall. Second,
we need to understand that what we went through meant something.
There has to be a reason we went through the events that “never
happened”, either because it was necessary to bring the character
to the point where they could see the reset through, or because the
events of the story up until the reset remain true for at least
someone, carrying those thoughts and feelings into the new future.
Madoka Magica ends with a very similar reality revision to RahXephon,
but because one of the girls lives through it and emerges into the
new world with knowledge of the old (and because there seem to be
more echoes besides), it doesn’t feel like the old world was useless.
In RahXephon, the majority of the show
is actually rendered useless. In the new world, Haruka and Ayato are
together… which since they dated before disaster struck didn’t need
the events of the show to set it up. Mu doesn’t seem to exist, and
all its technology and magic are erased along with it, which didn’t
really need Ayato to go through over 20 episodes to do. And no one,
not even Ayato, seems to have any echo of the world we went through
unless that’s what Baby Quon was somehow supposed to symbolize.
Further, despite getting some pretty
amazing closure for many of the character arcs as they go out in
their final blazes of glory, there are some very important things
that are never resolved nor explained. Like why we’re “Tuning the
world” at all. The Barbem Foundation has apparently been at the
project for centuries, so there shouldn’t be any urgency to do it
now, and we don’t even know why Barbem wants the world tuned. He
doesn’t seem to care what the outcome of the tuning will be, so we
don’t know why he pushed for it to occur.
Mu is also, bizarrely, never explained
or expanded on. We know they’re a human (or at least human-looking)
faction with some weird technology and magic music, and we know that
they have blue blood, but we don’t really know anything else about
them. We’re never brought to understand their goals nor their
motivations. We don’t know why they attack Earth, why they’d create
time dilation bubbles, if they can be reasoned with, what their
endgame might have been… nothing. At the end, despite a good
portion of the show’s time and effort being dedicated to relations
between Human and Mulian, we don’t know anything more about the
comparison or contrast between Human and Mulian in the last episodes
than we did in the first. There were plenty of things we could have
done with the old world (at least minus the last few rounds of “rocks
fall, everybody dies”) but we don’t get to do because it’s
unceremoniously discarded.
In any case, RahXephon is clearly
pretty deeply flawed… but how does it hold up? Is it worth
remembering, is it worth watching, and how does it do challenging
Evangelion for the bizarre psychological symbolic mecha crown?
Actually, I think RahXephon does pretty
well on most of those counts. For all that it tries to take down
Evangelion by cribbing Evangelion’s notes, it does take some of them
in a fundamentally different direction. Most notably, it chooses
what kind of show it wants to be (a heavily symbolic character drama
with some giant fighting robots in it) and doesn’t suffer Eva’s
dissonance between being an action show and having a psychological
drama ending. Of course, for every problem that RahXephon fixes from
Evangelion, it introduces a brand new problem of its own.
The biggest thing RahXephon has going
for it is balance, both in the construction of the show and the
portrayal of the characters. There aren’t a lot of figures that are
just nasty villains and there aren’t a lot that are unsullied heroes
either, most of the characters exist with complex and personal
motivations for why they do the things they do. And the structure
has a good pace and narrative flow. RahXephon is a long show, but
its run largely isn’t wasted with padding. Even when I talk about
the “core loop” of the middle episodes, that is not to be
misconstrued as saying the show is failing to make progress.
And, I have to give RahXephon some credit, for all that it copies here and there, it does try new things. Quon is clearly a conceptual descendant of Rei Ayanami, but her character type is not the Rei Clone. The theme of star-crossed lovers (though the show does chicken out of leaving them star-crossed) done with Ayato and Haruka is interesting, and leaves a lot of very genuine tension. The Asuka role is split between Megumi (the Tsundere) and Elvy (the Rival), and though Megumi feels a little wasted thanks to being something like a distant third or fourth in line to the hero’s heart, Elvy is a somewhat fresh take. Removing the romantic tension from the Asuka role ironically makes a lot of their interactions stronger.
All the same, RahXephon doesn’t quite
make it. Like I said earlier, it introduces a new problem of its own
for every one it fixes. The symbolism and visual storytelling are
dynamite, but the story goes nowhere. At least with Instrumentality
and the ending of Evangelion there was some sense that what we went
through had an impact on where we go. Ayato in the final episode
could have been Ayato in episode 5 or 6 at the latest and it wouldn’t
have mattered. The characters are watchable and engaging, round and
deep, but oddly enough that applies mostly to the supporting cast;
Ayato, Quon, and to a lesser extent Haruka don’t get the same
investment as Megumi, Isshiki, and all the various military friends
who have their vast, tangled web of interactions. Which is a pity,
because it means that in the end the best characters are diversions.
The most core failing of RahXephon is
found in retrospect. While you’re watching through it, it carries
you along very well. Even the overly complicated tangle of time and
dimensions is something that you can deal with while you’re in the
moment. However, when you look back at the show, it starts to fall
apart. That tangle becomes obvious as the knot it is, a snarl of
continuity that didn’t have to be built in such a convoluted fashion.
Not everyone has to be related in unexpected ways, we could have
left it with the main pair suffering badly from “Hour inside, Year
outside” syndrome without all their ties to various and sundry
other characters that make the chart of relations look like a
portrait of Yog-Sothoth.
The romance of Haruka and Ayato, though
it plays its cards well with unrequited feelings and cruel fate, is
ultimately very shallow. We don’t really understand why Ayato was so
important to Haruka, enough that even after years and years separated
she continues to pine for him, and we don’t understand at all what
attracts Ayato to Haruka other than the possibility of phantom echoes
of his lost memories. And if that’s the case, we don’t know why they
worked as a couple to begin with. This makes the fact that the
ultimate ending is “happily ever after” really weak and hollow.
I like it when a couple go through hell, literally or figuratively,
and are able to come out the other side after insane trials, but in
order to do so I have to like and, more critically, know the couple
and the chemistry they have. The soap opera that is TERRA
headquarters is easy to get wrapped up in, but when you get down to
it there’s no real reason to care. Saint or sinner, victorious or
defeated, fulfilled or broken, it all amounts to nothing because of
the poorly handled reset. We don’t even follow up with characters we
cared about in the new world, leaving us to have to guess whether or
not they even exist. Their struggles had meaning when they were
struggling, and would have maintained their meaning if we emerged
into a world shaped by those struggles, but we don’t. Mu and the
Barbem Foundation aren’t explained. I know more about the Angels in
Evangelion and how they think and what their motivations are (thanks,
Kaworu) than I do about the Mulians or the Barbems. One doesn’t seem
to have a plan, and the other has a plan that makes no sense and has
no endgame or impact upon the planner, which is somehow even worse.
I dare say the bloody ending spoiled a
lot of my enjoyment for the show, and not because it was weird,
symbolic, or hard to follow.
In the end, my rating for RahXephon is
A-, the same score I gave Evangelion. If you didn’t know which came
first, I think which one you appreciate would be largely down to what
you in particular were looking for in a show. Do you want an action
show with some psychological play, or a psychological soap opera with
some mecha action? Moving from one to another, you win some and lose
some, and the net is basically a wash. If my rating system had a
tighter resolution I think I would put Evangelion a point or two
ahead of RahXephon, but it’s very close, and they gain and lose
points for different things. RahXephon really does just look a lot
worse because it’s known to be the copy – and whether or not
there’s a rule that a copy can’t beat the original, it’s sure to be
an uphill fight in the arena of appreciation.