[EVA] Concurrency tangent (WAS: Alternate Rei on DVD cover)

[Peter Svensson]

> Just going to say that if either ending weren't needed, then they
> wouldn't have been made period, whether it's EoTV or EoE.

Well, there wouldn't have been an EoE had the Japanese PTA not gotten on the case of TV Tokyo over Misato having sex and Unit 03 drenching a town in blood, or if Gainax had better control over their budget and scheduling issues. As it stands, we only got the TV ending because Gainax at the last minute realized they couldn't do their original plans justice and rushed out something else to serve as the ending to the series at the last minute. 

End of Evangelion exists only because the original plan for the ending never made it to screen. That doesn't invalidate the TV series ending, which is I think the artistic peak of the series despite its uneven nature, but it does mean that in some parallel world where Gainax understood the concept of how to manage time and money there probably was just the 26 episodes of Evangelion and then they came up with some fanservicey OVA or three. 

That we have two endings is really a happy accident.

> The fact that EoTV only features Instrumentality--not 3rd
> Impact--tells me that EoTV helps "fill in" the missing pieces of EoE,
> and vice-versa. /My two cents.

Well, my two cents are that EoTV tells a different yet similar story to EoE, and that while the two are similar they have wildly different endings as well as premises and thus can't be woven into a cohesive whole. 

I think that the end of TV 26 has Shinji learning that he can be happy as he's inducted into a cult and lives happily ever after in magical psychic lala land.
I think that the end of Movie 26 has Shinji deciding that life is worth living in spite of it being painful, and then returns to live what will almost certainly be a short and painful existence on the ruined Earth.

But, I totally get the desire to have the TV ending mirror the events of the film. Heck, for the most part you can do so almost perfectly with Episode 25. I just think that the two have very different endings and themes, and that trying to combine them to me feels like trying to fit Smallville and Superman: The Movie into the same narrative. There's plenty of similarities, yeah, but the differences are enough that I can't treat them as one and the same without major handwaving.

Peter Svensson