Gainax Ending: Difference between revisions

* ''[[The Big O]]'', partly because of the head writer's love of [[Mind Screw]] and partly because it was only intended to be a season finale. To summarize: The former [[La Résistance|Union]] agent Angel discovers that her memories of her childhood are [[Fake Memories|false]], and the enigmatic Gordon tells her that she's [[Tomato in the Mirror|not a human being. He then leads her to an elevator going deep underground. She reappears either turned into or controlling a negative-colored mecha that erases everything it touches, finally leaving behind only a StarTrek-style holodeck grid, until]][[The Hero|Roger]] calls out to her to stop, giving an impassioned speech ending with "You must stop denying your own existence as a human being!". She seems to ignore him, but after both her mecha and Roger's erase each other, there's a flash of light, and the entire world reappears as it was before [[The Tokyo Fireball|episode 25]] [[Reset Button Ending|at the very beginning of the first episode]], with exactly one thing changed. Full synopsis [http://www.paradigm-city.com/scripts/article.php?a=ep26 here]. Message boards were flooded with "they pulled an Evangelion on us!".

** They weren't sure if they'd be able to have a third series, but only the epilogue would have changed - Chiaki J. Konaka originally had a different epilogue which went into more detail than the one we got and literally ended with a curtain falling, but was asked by the U.S. network to write a less conclusive ending in case they picked it up for a third season. They didn't.

** For that matter, nearly anything [[Tsutomu Nihei]] has finished has had a Gainax Ending.

* ''[[Xam'd: Lost Memories|Xamd Lost Memories]]''. An [[Ancient Conspiracy]] of soul-eating albino children. A stillborn [[Death Seeker]] [[Kaiju]]. Only a mass-sacrifice [[Combined Energy Attack]] can stop the [[Big Bad]], except not. The main character goes to a [[Journey to the Center of the Mind]] and defeats the [[Big Bad]] by giving him his name... Or was it the laser? [[Instrumentality]]! The main character dies, and gets better nine years later for no reason! ...Oh, and he has inexplicably aged in the meantime.