EvaGeeks.org celebrates its tenth anniversary

A little bit over fifteen years ago, I started an ambitious little fan site called Eva Monkey that you may be familiar with.  Through much of my college experience, I spent far too many late nights tinkering with code and generally trying to build the “ultimate” Evangelion fan site, neglecting my studies in the process.  The irony is that all that misappropriated time led to an unexpected career in web development.  Upon graduation, however, I think my endeavors with Eva Monkey had taken their toll on me, as I had lost the passion for discussion and analysis of the work.  I wasn’t able to accomplish what I set out to do with Eva Monkey, and so, it made sense to merge with EvaCommentary.org and form a new entity, EvaGeeks.org.  After which, I had meant to go into semi-retirement.  In the end, Eva got the better of me, and sucked me back in.  So much for that.

The idea for Eva Geeks was that of a communal effort, where any one person shouldn’t be burdened with operating and maintaining a large site, as I was prior to transferring the Eva Monkey Forums to Eva Geeks.  Nowadays, we’d call that crowd-sourcing, I suppose.  Still, Eva Geeks remains a group effort, where anyone can get involved.  And I’m pleased to see some of the terrific and indispensable resources that have been generated by the community.  I find myself pointing to various wiki articles here on Eva Geeks on a regular basis.

I think something needs to be said about a fan site or community that manages to not only survive, but be active for a span of ten years, especially with the current state of the web.  Fan sites, fan communities, and web forums seem to be much less common places these days, with social media platforms like Twitter, sites like Reddit, and services like Discord fulfilling much of the needs of the various pockets of pop culture fandom.  To have weathered that paradigm shift, as well as the years of inactivity of the Rebuild film series should tell you something about the strength and importance of the Eva Geeks community.  In particular, I’m pleased and proud to see that the forum that I started back in 2004 is not only still alive and well, but has accumulated over 850,000 posts!  It may be a few years from now, but I eagerly look forward to the day when the forum community breaks a million posts.

Right now, you could say that Eva Geeks is in a bit of a quiet phase.  The activity of any fan community ebbs and flows with the developments of the property that it is dedicated to.  And so, I look forward to the details, speculation, discussion, dissection, and debate that Evangelion 3.0+1.0 will bring as its release comes within sight.  With the anime long completed, and with Sadamoto’s manga completed, it will be interesting to see what direction the franchise will take with the completion of the Rebuild series.  I don’t expect a franchise as significant and lucrative as Evangelion to die out anytime soon.

I look forward to the future of Evangelion, and the future of Eva Geeks.  Here’s to another ten years!