One of the most popular Evangelion porn artists, Mogudan (NSFW), has announced they would no longer be publishing drawings or other works of characters following new fan work guidelines by Studio Khara.
外国の方の質問があったので文章を書きます
「綾波の絵は今後描けなくなりました ファンサイトでも今後は新作はありません 今までありがとうございました 今後は他の絵を描きます」
と書いてあります(´(ェ)`)ノうふふ— モグダン@ヾ(´・ω・`)ノ (@mogudan555) December 29, 2020
In a tweet, they highlighted that not only would they not be posting art of the popular character Ayanami Rei to their twitter, but there would also be a cold-turkey stop to publishing paywalled content involving the character.
“I can no longer draw Ayanami’s picture. There are no new works on the fan site in the future. Thank you so far. I will draw other pictures in the future.”, they said, with translations provided by Twitter.
This follows Studio Khara’s own publishing of the guidelines, likely ahead of the upcoming Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 release next month and its likely re-introduction of the characters to a mainstream audience.
While many of the guidelines are fairly standard things, the one that stood out the most to netizens was their clause on pornographic content:
Please refrain from creating works that: are hurtful to the source material or to another person; are created to further a specific religious or political agenda; express hateful points of view; are overly violent, grotesque, pornographic, or otherwise offensive; infringes on another creator’s ownership rights; or are works that could be mistaken for an official product.
Not wanting porn of your character isn’t that uncommon, and many IP rights holders have requested it, most famously in the west with Bioshock Infinite studio Irrational Games asking people to stop producing lewd art of the game’s protagonist, Elizabeth.
The only difference here is that Evangelion has been around since the 90s, and Evangelion porn has likely been around just as long. The game’s two heroines, Ayanami Rei and Asuka Soryu-Langley have been the topic of waifu wars for as long as waifu wars have existed, and to this day many see them as the shining examples of their personality archetypes.
That being said, as the IP holders for Evangelion, Studio Khara is fully in the right to request a stop on Evangelion porn, no matter how many decades of floppy disks and flash drives there are of it.