Which Author Explained The Original Sins Themes In Interview?

I've been down this rabbit hole a few times while digging through interviews and liner notes, and I’ll be honest up front: there isn't a single, universal citation that every forum points to. That said, the person most often linked to discussions about "original sin" themes in modern anime interviews is Hideaki Anno—especially when people talk about the religious and guilt-heavy imagery in 'Neon Genesis Evangelion'. I’ve spent weekend afternoons rereading translated interviews and commentary tracks, and Anno repeatedly frames a lot of Evangelion’s psychological baggage in terms of human failure, guilt, and the weight of being. That’s not exactly a theological lecture on original sin, but he certainly invokes similar ideas when talking about human nature, failure, and the consequences of our desires.

If you tilt your search toward manga rather than anime, Kentaro Miura (the creator of 'Berserk') also crops up a lot. Miura borrowed heavily from Western religious imagery and Christian motifs, and interview fragments and afterwords often discuss the fallen nature of humanity, sin, and the struggle with corruption—elements that readers map onto the concept of original sin. Miura’s comments tend to be more visual-storytelling oriented: why he used crosses, why the Church-like structures are presented the way they are, and how characters embody corrupted innocence. Similarly, Hajime Isayama (of 'Attack on Titan') has discussed themes of inherited guilt, collective sin, and the cyclical nature of violence in interviews and notes; people sometimes interpret those remarks as aligning with an 'original sin' framework, especially given the series' focus on inherited burdens and moral culpability passed between generations.

If you're trying to pin down a precise interview quote, here are practical steps that helped me: search with Japanese keywords if you can—stuff like "インタビュー 原罪" plus the author’s name often surfaces magazine interviews that never made it to English sites. Use site-specific searches on Anime News Network, Den of Geek, The Guardian (they’ve done feature interviews), and specialist magazines like Newtype or Animage. For 'Neon Genesis Evangelion', look for translated interviews with Hideaki Anno in English-language anthologies or the liner notes for 'The End of Evangelion' releases; for 'Berserk', check author afterwords and interviews collected in Tankobon extras or in the English press around Dark Horse/Viz releases. If you want exact phrasing, searching for interview transcripts or archived pages via the Wayback Machine can pull up old magazine scans.

Personally, I like to trace the theme through the work itself, then match it to what the creator has said in interviews—often the most illuminating bits are casual comments dropped in festival Q&As or in the translators’ notes. If you want, I can pull up a short list of specific interviews and links (English or Japanese) that mention guilt, sin, or inherited culpability for whichever series you’re focused on. I always find that cross-referencing the creator’s words with their work gives you the clearest picture of whether they meant "original sin" in a theological sense or were using it as a metaphor for human imperfection.