So remember how I said I dreamed a whole episode of Family Guy once? Well last night I dreamed a few episodes of a new (yet another) Eva reboot, this one as a 26-episode series.

In this version, there had been a bunch of Children, but before the first episode they were all doing a synchronization test when they started to synch together racing past 100%. The test was emergency shutdown because they were threatening to start an Impact wrong, and the kids were left unconscious in LCL-filled stasis tubes in NERV HQ.

Shinji was revived in Episode 1, I think Rei was already awake. By the 6th episode the 5 Children from the recent movies were all up and running.

It was fairly light and fun, there were some cool battles. One running thing had been that whenever the Eva units operated outside there would be a few spectators who would gather to watch them and cheer, like picnickers at a Civil War battle. I was thinking “heh, Eva fandom”.

Then in the 7th episode things got darker. It was mentioned that some of these fans had become a cult worshipping the Evas, and then suddenly Nerv HQ was invaded. By who - the cult, SEELE, ??? - I don’t know. But Misato was shot through the chin point-blank in a perfect reversal of that scene from EoE, and the invaders smashed all the stasis tubes and executed the Children inside.

Ritsuko organizes a counterattack and kills the attackers, and then the last shot is this wide hall of NERV HQ littered with corpses, blood mingling with LCL.

Then there was a black card with white Japanese text on it, subtitled in English. It was a message from Anno, saying that now was the point when fans who got into Eva from this series (he called them “tan fans”) should consider looking into the other versions.

It’s funny that of all the fucked up shit that happened in this dream, “tan fans” was the one thing that seemed odd.

(Update: Oh you know what? Maybe he didn’t mean the color but the stereotypical childish mispronunciation of “-chan”, because this series would be the “baby” of the Eva metaverse.)