>>3687852things are changing. I somehow doubt YoI will be considered as iconic.
Shinkalion is maybe a successor to Eva for the Japanese audience: target audience is younger, the main cast is younger than the cast of Eva, but as far as I can tell it’s mostly all boys in cute situations together, and I think the show is filling a niche for people like Eva did with KawoShin. It gets nowhere near as romantic, but it’s quite popular, and it’s also nowhere near as catastrophic and dramatic as KawoShin was; which seems healthier.
Free! was really popular in the west when it aired; it’s nowhere as iconic as Eva, but I’d say that’s because it’s specifically cornering fujos/gays, where Eva has more mass appeal.
If you pay attention to videogames, they’ve been getting a lot more fujo/gay friendly in the past decade. If you know where to look there’s some KawoShin Eva-esque stuff showing up even in live action western movies and tv.
There’s an anime that just came out called The Orbital Children, which has a very cute potential pairing. Now that I think about it, it’s funny it hasn’t gotten a thread yet: but my point is that it’s definitely following in Eva’s footsteps.
Anyway we’re living in a post-Evangelion world. Things are a lot more fujo/fundanshi friendly. KawoShin was one of the best ships ever, but if you think about the context, it’s partly because it was airing at a time when having a boy confess his love to another boy was a bit of a risky thing to do in a shonen show. It seems basically socially acceptable to like BL in the west now. Things probably won’t match Eva because it’s less risky to make openly gay stuff, but that’s arguably better than the alternative.
Gay vibes are so high rn China banned depictions of traps, insisting their anime boys have to be manly, which might sound bad but is hilarious from the angle that it’s a major government doing pic related.
