Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Lions Led By Robots 21: Angel Slop

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

This is a preview. For the entire episode support the show on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/143938643

But anyway, one thing that has changed is the episodes that we watched for Evangeline. That is true. I did end up dipping my toes into some production notes. Because you told me these are where the episodes start getting good.

I'm not calling you a liar, but I was curious as to why. And I found out due to some production notes, some like anime-based journalism. Hanamay-based journalism is such a sentence. Journalism about anime,

because anime-based journalism sounds like a journalism being done by a 30-year-old woman who looks 12. Yes. So, I found out that, you know, obviously when this show gets pitched, Anno submits a document that that is supposed to cover the show. And that covers every

plot point from episode one to episode 24 when it ends, right? However, he decided at episode 12 that he wasn't going to follow it anymore. And this is something of a problem because obviously, as production is going on, people are working along the idea that they're following

this document. So pre-production has begun on a lot of this stuff. Then they have to throw it all out. And starting, and he comes up with this, after episode 12 is done. Yep. So it creates a constant, unrelenting production crunch from episode 12 till the end of the

series. Uh, and he was rewriting things after they were done and even like recorded. He was rewriting plot points after they were animated and shit like that. And, shit like that. And as a writer currently working on a book of which I had

to completely rewrite the ending, I fully understand where Arano is coming from. However, I do not have a team of animators having to wait for me to come up from whatever fever dream of where my ideas come from and change everything. I'm starting to understand why things, A, get really weird

and B, why the stories behind the production of Evangillion are kind of legendary. Yeah, it's kind of like, I look at the production of Ava in the same way I think of like, you know, really like legendary like kind of albums where it's kind of like everything is just chaos. Like there's the famous story of, I think it's the Happy Mondays third album. They had all gotten like so addicted to like Coke, crack, heroin that the record label sent them to like a remote

Caribbean island to record it. But they didn't realize that the island was rife with crack. So like they were like meant to be recording songs and it was like they were like pawning off the couch in the studio to go by crack. But it kind of came together in the end. But it's like, yeah, Ava in terms of like a media property, especially like an animated media property, because like when you have

like something that you're like shooting live action, there is sometimes rewrites. You can always go back in and kind of reshoot stuff or maybe kind of fiddle with stuff in terms of like the sequencing and the editing to match the updated edits or in the writing. But very hard to do

with animation. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about this before when it comes to historical figures running off on ideas and throwing all plans out the windows and all the subordinates just have to kind of wait for you to come out of your room and start screaming at them to know what to do next. That's kind of what it seems like Ava was like. And weirdly, Ano personally only wrote

three episodes by himself the entire original run of the show. One of them is episode 14, which is a fucking clip show. Yep. It is so strange. I will say for clip shows and for the sequencing is really important. So there is some direction there, but your point still stands.

Also, he made even making a clip show way too complicated. So for people who are watching the show while we do this, you'll notice, like I did, that the clips being shown from the earlier episodes are not the same clips from those episodes. So his production staff had to recreate them all to be slightly different in some big ways and some minor ways, but it wasn't just going back to

like episode one and episode two and cutting out battle scenes and putting them in 14. He made them redo them all. This dude is fucking insane. Yeah. And this is also the huge jumping off point from episode 12 on and we really see here of, you know, he

pitched Ava as like, you're going to have something to sink your teeth in every episode like something you're going to look at like battles and whatnot. They're going to be incredible. Starting at episode 12 and we really see it through the episode 13, 14, 15, even the clip show. That changes. The whole

gear of the show is now trauma processing. Like the change is very obvious. It's very much sudden. He jacks on the brakes pretty much.

And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing because as as nice as all the battle stuff was in the first 12 episodes and the animation is very good we've talked about that endlessly already it is funny to see him just like nope different anime now turn the car out yeah i think it like i think at this point it was like ano maybe kind of realized the show that he started making is very different from the show that he wanted to make and he realized that he realized that like if I'm going to make the show that I want to make, I'm going to have to do it right now.

That's what it seems like. And kind of funny enough, there are interviews with Anno who's asked why he did that. And he never gives a straight answer, which is very common with him. He's been asked this question countless times over the years and he gives a different answer almost every time. But one of the reasons why he says that he did it

is because the fans were annoying. Like he specifically says like otakus were annoying him. that's certainly one reason I mean I don't think that you should probably change your very high budget TV show because you wanted to piss off fans but if you're going to do it I suppose this is a very good way to do it

I guess this is why I'm not an anime director okay that's the only reason why I can think of episode 13 this is an odd one because well I feel like I'm going to have set up every episode going forward but episode 13 features like very little of, you know, Shinji Ray and Aska, it's actually much more about Ritziko.

Essentially, what they're doing is they're trying to do sync tests and compatibility tests to kind of boosts, kind of, sync rates and compatibility rates with the children. So they're in these like weird dummy suits. Yeah.

They look like Ava's, but with like the head blown off and just a nest full of wires and pipes instead. It looks cool as hell. Also, all of the pilots are naked because they want to test their, you know, sync rate without the plug suits.

Interesting. We also learn about the magi. So, Joe, are you familiar with what, outside of Evangelion, what the magi are? A vaguely familiar. Not probably, I would say I'm, I understand it enough to see what they're going

at, but, you know, not in entirely. I did like where they went with it. I didn't expect Ava to go in this direction, which really brings up some questions. Okay, for one, in this episode, the angel is effectively a computer virus. Ritzko insists that it's kind of like an AI body, like nanobodies being operated by an AI, which surprise, surprise, AI is the bad guy even in the early 2000s. Oh, this is 1997, Joe. Okay, 97. No, sorry, not the 95. I'm just imagining if you put on your your Joe hat here.

Okay. The angels, this angel specifically, because all the angels are different. It's ran by AI, which means hypothetically, if nerve does not kill this angel, this angel will live long enough

to make your grandmother loose its mind on Facebook. Yes, we're getting AI slop. Yeah, angel slop. You know, you're going to have angel run better health. and then after this

the whole point of it's trying to hack into the Magi system that's where we learn well before this we learned that Reitsko's mom actually created the Magi system and Reitsko helped boot it up

so for those who are unfamiliar or aren't I suppose Christian the Magi is the biblical name for the three wise men so yeah that is the like what is kind of going for once again Anna, like, pulling from this kind of, like, Christian kind of gnaustic thing.

We'll get in a couple of episodes, Joe, I'm going to have to spend 10 minutes explaining Kabbalah to you. Oh, cool. I hope you and Madonna can really school me on that one. Hey, look at, you know, I am a defender of Madonna, so, you know. I kind of have to be. She's from Michigan, and I am very distantly related to her. Has that bit of Joe lore ever been shared?

No. Okay. So Madonna's original surname, when she had a surname, was Sacconi. And my aunt is married to the Sikoni family. And the man that she married is distantly related to Madonna. So you're saying there's a chance we could get Madonna on the pod. Oh, no, none of us have ever met her. She's not coming down to the slop with us.

A fun Madonna fact, the very first music video Madonna ever appeared in is by a Mexican-American kind of Latin American disco punk band called conch in the like

late 70s early 80s hell yeah gotta put on that conk ha ha ha