"Evaholics Anonymous"

I sent the following to the guys running The Otaku Monologues, and wanted to post this for reference sake in case I wanted to use it again.




My name is Dan Pinsky, and I failed my freshman year of high school because of Evangelion.

This requires a bit of explanation. I had just tranferred from a very small middle school, with a class of about 30 people, into a public high school, with a class of about 900. Not only was I immensely intimidated by the scale and institutionalized nature of the public school system, but going from the kind and friendly teachers of middle school to the harsh, uncaring mistresses of public high school, whose stranglehold over my grades left my GPA in shambles, was somewhat staggering. Add that to the fact that none of my friends had come to the same school, and that I had taken to anime only a few years beforehand and knew no one in my new school who shared that interest, I was in a pretty bad place.

I only that year discovered Evangelion. At the age of 14, the exact same age as the protagonist, it was a little too easy for me to fall in love with the series, with its characters, its action, it comedy, its romance, its drama. There was just one small problem - it didn't have an ending.

I don't care what side of the fandom you come from - if you've watched Evangelion, then you KNOW it doesn't have an ending. By the time I got to the last episode, I had already developed an unhealthy infatuation with Rei Ayanami, not to mention, with no shortage of father issues myself, a complete character identification with Shinji Ikari, pathetic though that may sound.

And the show had no conclusion, no happy ending. This couldn't be - this was Eva, the anime that I had fallen in love with, the analog to my life! It couldn't just NOT end! That was like knowing that your life wouldn't amount to anything by your first year of high school, before you even had a chance to live it! It HAD to have an ending! It HAD to!

Well, it got one. Spring semester of freshman year, I saw End of Eva. And that's when therapy began.

I shit you not - noticing my increased depression, my parents sent me to psychological counselling. It was mostly just me going through puberty, but I had woven my identity so entrinsically with Eva and anime in general at that point, that it contributed to pretty much every moment of my free time.

Even with the direct intervention of teachers, parents and counselors, I still had to retake half my classes that year. Not to mention being a complete emotional wreck. The thing that really saved me, however, was the fandom.

The fandom is what allowed me to put a cap on the non-conclusion that Eva put in my life. Through fanart and fan fiction, I was able to relive the moments (and even create new ones) that drew me into Eva in the first place. By trading fan theories on fan-run message boards, I was finally awakened to the fact that there were more people out there who were like me. And when I went to Tekko 1 as a junior in high school, I discovered, really for the first time in my life, that I was not alone.

I love and adore Evangelion, and I will never stop doing so, no matter how much the industry rehashes it, and despite the fact that it chewed me up and spat me out like nothing else in my life has. Because Eva to me is not about what the industry does to it -- it's about what the FANS make of it. And this is true of any anime, I think.

An anime is what you - the fanbase - decide to make of it, and it is here, at conventions like these where that fan interpretation - whether it be in the form of cosplay, panels or AMV's - gets to be celebrated.

So I thank you all, for being fans, for saving me from myself, and for providing a community in which my own fanboyism could be welcome.