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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Peter Svensson <sun1jack at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.)

Ah, drat. I was going to bring in the Proposal and ep 24 drafts to
argue that Kaworu started as relatively unimportant, briefly bloated
up to Shinji's first yaoi love, got toned way down for the actual TV
episode (and hence wasn't considered for inclusion as too minor &
brief a character) when fan response convinced Gainax to pump Kaworu
back up to a major character and retcon him in for the edits & movies.

Fanwank: Kaworu was excluded because Shinji didn't want to be reminded
of his guilt in killing him. Heck, I dunno.

> 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?!

In my long arguments with Carl Horn previously. :) You're welcome to
try to show immortal souls inside the Eva universe, but I doubt you'll
have any better luck.

>> 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.

Even puzzle pieces still have edges. If there are no edges - no AT
fields - it's not a puzzle.

> 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.

The Instrumentality of Petkind!

>> 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.

Showing the real world is *hard*. Like Vernor Vinge was told trying to
write the story of the first superintelligence, 'You can't write that
story. Nor can anyone else.'

Look at EoE, where we all agree he rejects Instrumentality for the
real world. 'Just show him on the grassy knoll', you sez.

But we have at least 3 endings (Last A, Last B, script, actual), and
no doubt there exist more even if you exclude Yamashita's werewolf
movie, the other (unknown) staff submissions, the Proposal TV ending,
whatever _Rebuild_ does, and the Cardass cards.

I'm not sure any (except the werewolf) are clearly worse than one of
the others. Anno took Miyamura's suggestion pretty darn quickly if
there was a clear view of how the real world ending should go.

Given how much contingency there was in picking the ending, and how
much focus has been put on interpreting the actual one, this says, I
think, that one *can't* show the real-world ending because there is no
satisfactory ending.

Have you ever read _The Invisibles_, or _Chapterhouse: Dune_? Both
sort of fade out on the last page, because they open out onto endless
new possibilities. The characters must go on, yes, but we aren't so
interested, nor ought we to be; Shinji will have a hard life by any
rational analysis, but the important thing was that he learned that
one can be 'happy on a rainy day'.

"Our revels now are ended". If I may quote from one of my other
favorite authors, Gene wolfe, from an essay on multi-part works, 'Nor
the Summers as Golden':

     "The ending of the final novel should leave the reader with a
feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main
Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off
into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main
Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least,
it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will.
He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will
face in the future will not be as important to him or us, nor the
summers as golden."

>> 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.

Not sure I follow. It isn't which of the two parts you focus on, it's
which one you think Shinji is accepting and which one rejecting.

>> 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.

He has no choice - just like he has no choice about piloting Eva? Or
squishing Kaworu? Or coming to Tokyo-3?

> 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.

Well, why not go with the letters flashed in EoE? Hard to think of a
better source of 'people who watched it'. You've seen the
translations; they are mostly letters expressing sentiments of growth,
healing, etc. These sound to me like they fit better with the
accepting life and not running away interpretation, not to mention
Anno's many remarks about not living in fantasies and anime.

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

I don't deserve *too* much credit. I would likely never have found
them if Lili on the Evageeks forum hadn't begun translating the 2
drafts of Episode 24 which that site also hosts, leading me to look
and see what else it might have.

-- 
gwern