Yes while the Red Earth Purification Ceremony was convoluted, and involved the first priority of taking out the Angels (who were more or less either trying to do the same thing for their own kind, revert all lilin based life back to square one, or doing diddly squat), one has to remember that SEELE still holds all the cards in that department. The first whiff that Yui and Gendo aren't playing by SEELE's rules, and bang, Shinji becomes a proper orphan (note: this might make for an interesting fan fiction if anyone wants that plot bunny...). Remember, from what Episode 21 implies, it took hardly anything to notice Yui wasn't all for their plans (considering that she's a daughter of one of the big-wigs of SEELE, this might have made things easier for them to notice this), so if both Yui and Gendo are all for stopping SEELE... what would happen?
Better question:
Gendo managed to maneuver himself into controlling NERV, and thus, the Evangelions, even while SEELE was aware of the fact that he was only
nominally working for them and therefore aware of his intentions to betray him.
Yet they allowed Gendo to live and continued playing out the charade, only because they weren't aware of Gendo's masterstroke of hijacking Adam until at least the loss of the Lance of Longinus.
So under what circumstances would Yui's continued presence and assistance actually negatively impacted the Ikari's ability to play along to SEELE's satisfaction? Because I'm not seeing it.
The way I see it, open rebellion against SEELE early on brings way too many risks. They have hitmen who can take out opponents with ease for one thing, and if Kiel isn't squeamish enough to end the entire world, then he isn't squeamish in just silencing Gendo and Yui while NERV is still Gehirn and find someone far more compliant to do the job. For the sake of debate though, let's say Yui and Gendo managed to pull a wall over their eyes and play their game, what then? Well, SEELE would find someone else to be the resident soul of Unit-01, which would mean both a resident soul and pilot who might be far easier to control then Shinji and Yui, and less likely to go berserk on them (meaning no Zeruel S2 Organ ingestion, no making Unit-01 a major threat to SEELE's plans.), making it only far more complicated in subverting the whole damn thing. Before even suggesting Yui asks Gendo to be the resident soul of Unit-01, let's consider the fact Gendo went apeshit and decided to go along with a plan that could potentially end the world (if we believe his implications that his plan was less devastating than SEELE's) just to bring her back, so most likely he'd shoot that plan down since Yui is pretty much his emotional crutch and he'd have trouble going on in life without her.
Then don't do it early on.
You're assuming that Yui's death was set in stone from the very start, and...I'm not sure that's an accurate assumption to make. Anyway, what you're arguing is that the canon events were a better plan because it involved sheer dumb luck managing to pay off....Up until the endgame where it all went down the drain and left two kids on a beach alone looking at half of the giant head of their fellow companion smiling at them as a stupidly gigantic corpse.
So long as the Angels were dead and humanity was not reduced to Tang, then things would have been better off than in canon. It's not a particularly high bar to reach.
And, because it bears repeating, I don't see the need for Yui to die. Its an assumption that I'm not willing to accept without actual hard proof, considering the shit that the Old Men allowed Kaji and Gendo to get away with in canon.
Going further along, and Gendo somehow agrees to Yui being the Resident Soul, and Shinji remains the pilot, and SOMEHOW Gendo can bring himself to NOT act like the bruiser with a bad temper he was in his youth towards his son, what then? Well, assuming that Gendo manages to move all the pieces under SEELE's noses and manages to hold himself together to NOT be a dick, then... there'd be no Rei (remember, she was created Just for Gendo's plan), meaning it'd be just Shinji, Asuka (maybe Toji, and Marie Vincennes if you count the RPG White Paper as grey-canon. By-the-by, it's not Maria, I double checked the katakana, it'd be Marie since there's no a sound at the end.), against the EVA Series, and we didn't even cover Kyoko's madness!
So what?
Asuka was, from the very beginning, unnecessary for the overall plan except as an asset in battle to kill the Angels. A role she fulfilled sufficiently in canon. Even if her life doesn't turn out any better, that has no bearing on an overall success rate, because even if her life goes to shit like in canon, then the necessary conditions to create a better conclusion will be met anyway.
That's all there is to it.
If Shinji was a well-adjusted boy meeting the not-so-well adjusted Asuka, hoo boy... that'd be even worse. They wouldn't have that "We're the same" moment that Kensuke and Shinji have in the canon series (or for that matter the same moment between Asuka and Shinji in this very fan fiction), because they didn't go through the same traumas... they would have no way to relate to each other and cause further complications. For all we know, there'd be a greater chance of Shinji fucking up and rejecting her just because she had a bad nightmare one night and decided to take it out on Shinji.
Again,
so what?
That just drives Asuka to further attempts to secure her position as Top Pilot up until at least the Arael battle, after which point it's all irrelevant anyway because Rei is still on the table and will be at least just as motivated to make the Heroic Sacrifice as in canon, and Kaworu is still trumped by Rei's AT field, just like in canon.
Worst case scenario is that he just puts up a bit more of a fight before he gets crushed like a bug.
The more one assumes that there's a way to avert SEELE's plan just by having Yui talk it over with Gendo, the more you realize that you have to assume everyone else would be equally rational and sane. NERV is populated by basket-cases, it'd be far too easy for the whole thing to unravel. EVEN IF one assumes they're all sane and that everything goes to plan and they have Unit-01, 02, 03 all working in concert, you still have SEELE's EVA-Series, whatever Armed Forces SEELE has at their beck and call, the governments of many countries at their disposal (via manipulation of facts, not directly paid off), the previously mentioned hitmen/ agents, and all the other NERV bases... who are more than likely able to manufacture their own EVA's. The end result would be quite obvious... a long drawn out bloody war between NERV and SEELE's EVA's where the risk of just one of SEELE's EVA's can be the one that can trigger Third Impact...
This would all be true, if we were talking as if they weren't actually predictable.
But we already have a roadmap of the various issues at play based on canon, and while the Butterfly effect is indeed quite real, none of those are based on factors that would overly impact the overall canon for the worse.
Because, once again, the entire point of the exercise is proposing a way that Third Impact can be averted.
Not accepting it as an inevitability.
So, let's be real for a second. Yui doesnt get absorbed in the contact experiment?
Who is most affected, right off the bat? Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu, of course.
She doesnt set up any protections for her own contact experiment, disappears right off the bat, and now young Asuka isnt traumatized by the concerns about potential abandonment issues, doesnt see her mom kill herself, and doesn't develop her crippling neurosis towards dolls that negatively impacts her ability to interact with Rei. Worst case? She becomes withdrawn like Shinji in canon due to her father abandoning her too.
The Akagis? They pine for Gendo, sure, but they don't go all nutso and try to kill Rei over it. If anything, Yui would be the one directly overseeing Rei's development herself. They stay on as staff, and because theyre all either a combination of thirsty for Rokubungi or just straight up scientists, theres very little odds of them being able to turned against the project directly via SEELE's meddling.
So the Old Men try and escalate stuff? What's the honest worst that could happen? Without an S2 core in an Evangelion, the Eva series cant recreate the Tree of Sephirot. They'd have to use Lillith's corpse directly, which is something that the Ikari's can very easily destroy from within it's place in Terminal Dogma.
Simple.
Now, let's take a step back, cause certainly there has to be a way to cut the proverbial gordian knot. For example, Yui and Gendo can just out SEELE to the Nations of the World and... oh wait... Yui and Gendo knew (and Gendo even probably aided and betted) that SEELE caused Second Impact. Not only would SEELE go down, everyone tied to that affair would be dragged down with them. The only way to truly stop SEELE would either be prior to Second Impact (which let's remember was to minimize the risks of ADAM waking up and ending the world early, so probably a bad idea), or go all Godfather on SEELE and murder them all the moment all the Angels are gone... somehow.
No.
The way to stop SEELE is to stop them from getting all of the stupidly circumstantial pieces necessary for their version of Third Impact to take place.
Deny them that, and they lose.
And please, if just anyone could make an Evangelion off the fly, then the MP Eva's being completed when they were wouldn't have been such an absolute shock to NERV during EoE, nor would there have been so few Eva's actually made prior to that. Giant Mecha are stupidly cost prohibitive, to the point where something like Jet Alone was
seriously considered to be more
economically viable.
To the point where Gendo felt it necessary to sabotage them so completely as to secure any and all funding that would have gone towards them to be given directly to NERV instead.
There's no need to fear imagined boogeymen when there's ample evidence of the circumstances involved which can be analyzed to lead us to more accurate conclusions.
He was referring to her position before she had herself absorbed by Unit-01. I can't believe I have to point this out.
At what point did her position change?
Because the whole "becoming a grave marker, an everlasting monument to the fact that humanity was here" sounded like it was Yui's intended payoff for that from the start, while also encouraging Shinji to encourage freedom of choice from being Tang.
...Which is, honestly speaking, a pretty bad endgame. Setting aside the "Deep" "symbolism" and whatnot.
