Anime as an industry and a fandom in the late 90s was really kind of messed up, and not too comparable to… well, any state Western gaming has ever been in, either as a fandom or as an industry. People complain about games now being too similar, but it’s nothing compared to how stagnant anime had gotten in the mid-90s (and especially robot anime). It’s not an exaggeration to say that many studios were literally just churning out the same shows over and over again. While Evangelion’s cheapness was mocked even by its fans at the time, just the fact that it was something people hadn’t seen a hundred times before made it seem remarkable. If you haven’t seen dozens of robot shows before, then obviously it’s going to be much easier to appreciate what a show like Rahxephon is doing.
What you list as being a traditional ending is actually a well crafted ending.
I didn’t say traditional endings couldn’t be well-crafted, or that anyone objected to them because they weren’t well-crafted. A lot of the traditional endings that come out of this period are just fine, some are even quite great. When you’re dealing with Japanese anime fans in the mid-90s, the problem is they’ve seen well-crafted variations on the typical mecha show ending dozens and dozens of times. An audience that incredibly jaded takes craft for granted. What really shocks an audience in that state is seeing something totally different than what they expect.
You can easily view that as a gimmick. I’d say even someone who didn’t think it was gimmick in Evangelion would have to admit it was used by Evangelion’s many imitators as a gimmick. It held the audience’s attention for awhile while that was in vogue, but all fads pass in time. Eventually, fans who hadn’t seen traditional endings done in anime for awhile warmed up to them when they came back into style some years later. In that regard, Rahxephon was really just a bit ahead of its time, in terms of predicting what audience tastes would be.
It is more or less Monster of the Week for much of its length.
It is! Something to keep in mind that a lot of people in Japan who watched Evangelion didn’t view the first half of the series at all when it was broadcast. At the time, most fans just tuned in for the endings of mecha shows, where the most spectacular battles showed up. It was generally felt that the rest of the shows would be fairly boring, and nothing but a build up to the last ten or so episodes anyway.
People who tried to do this with Evangelion got something entirely different than what they were expecting. It was so different that whether it was a good or bad something was almost beside the point, it still got people talking. Since Evangelion was only broadcast to about one-third of Japan (it ran on an obscure cable network), you had a perfect set-up for word-of-mouth to exaggerate the show’s strangeness and must-see nature.
That lead to it being a smash on home video, the theatrical showing that promised to answer all questions (and didn’t), years of spinoff material, and finally the current Rebuild movies that once again are mainly an exercise in wildly subverting a specific audience’s expectations. I’m not really arguing Evangelion is good or bad here, simply stating that it is what it is for very specific and slightly bizarre reasons.
