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

[Peter Svensson]

> Why don't we see Kaji in the case of Misato? Why don't we see all the
> Angels with Shinji?

Why don't we see Kaworu with Shinji? As per EoE he's around during the process, right? (This is me switching to the "EoE retconned Kaworu and thus they don't mesh up properly" tactic.)

As the telop says at the beginning of TV 26, they just can't show the whole shebang so we're getting a best of synopsis.

> Since there are no immortal souls in NGE, where are the dead people coming from?

When was this established?! 
 
> But Instrumentality Shinji has no particular like for PenPen or
> personal desire! All of humanity doesn't want to be congratulated by a
> penguin. 

But Shinji's soul still exists, tethered to the others by his personal connections. Shinji is subsumed by the whole, but the individual part is still there. It's like him being a puzzle piece and becoming part of a larger puzzle. The piece still exists. 

Heck, my main argument really is that PenPen is part of the Instrumentality because he is loved by Shinji and thus makes the transition. It's about the bonds we form in each others minds. We don't know how the cosmology in Evangelion truly functions, perhaps animals do have souls equal to those of humans. 

> A grassy hill that might well contradict the nascent EoE ending. Any
> real ending in reality proper would be even more confusing and
> distracting than EoE's beach. 

I sincerely disagree. If they wanted to make the point that Shinji rejects Instrumentality and returns to the real world, we would have seen the real world at the end. By having him escape into an unreal void, it sends a message that no, Shinji isn't back in reality.

> Also, lack of time yadda yadda.

> Even the first time watching it, ignorant of all the ancillary
> material, there was one thing very obvious to me about episode 26:
> Shinji goes in one direction for a while, but then suddenly does an
> about-face and is congratulated.

Yeah. That is pretty much the main concern here. People who argue for Shinji escaping Instrumentality focus on the first part, while people who believe he enters it focuses on the second. I've come to terms with the fact that TV 26, as artistically powerful as it is, was thrown together at the last minute and is horribly disjointed.

> So, when Shinji suddenly reverses course after the fake dramedy NGE,
> reversing from hating himself and wanting to run away and die, where
> is he reversing to? There's no other choice but to reject
> Instrumentality and return to the real world.

But he has no choice! He is never given the choice to return to reality in the TV ending! Shinji either gets to remain in limbo forever or join the choir. My interpretation that it's about Shinji getting to a mental place where he can make the transition from limbo to Instrumentality fits the evidence given. Yeah, it's a sloppy theory, but given that it's a sloppy episode it's the best I can come up with.

My main issue is that people watching the episode when it first aired is who the target audience was, and trying to figure out what they intended for them to interpret should be our goal in trying to make sense of TV 26. Retroactively adding "Shinji gets to choose to return to the real world" when it isn't in the episode as aired muddles things.

Oh, and good job on the cut scenes and the such from the films. *high five*

Peter Svensson