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Advice and Trust [NGE]

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Character Notes #78 - Asuka's Last Stand
  • Informational
    • Gryphon said:
    That's certainly a valid viewpoint. I just feel that if the auto-pilot system was operating at full capacity and it still managed to lose a 9-to-1 fight as horrifically badly as it did, it wouldn't have ever gotten the go ahead by SEELEE during the testing phase. Especially since said auto-pilot was meant to go on their trump card, as you say.

    I feel that being sadistic assholes and playing with their enemy fits with the overall theme of the MP Evas better, overall. They have an auto-pilot system sick enough to freaking devour their enemy after winning, after all. :(
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    The thing is, SEELE is arrogant.

    Like, they spend their entire screentime sneering at people who are smarter than them. They don't understand things and assume that they know everything that's important.

    They don't realize the difference between an automated drone system and a live pilot. Let alone a live pilot who has literally just achieved enlightenment as the Boddhisatva of violence.

    As far as they're concerned 'operate the Evangelion' is not only sufficient, it's all there is to know - you put a kid in it and the Evangelion is what matters, the kid is irrelevant, and you can make the Evangelion matter just as much by finding an alternate means of making the thing turn on, like the Dummy Plug.

    And 02 is the Evangelion that doesn't matter, piloted by the kid that doesn't matter. They never had a single reason, within their frame of reference, to even glance at her after she passed or failed the binary 'can turn Eva on' test.

    SEELE are cultists, mystics, philosophers, politicians, and manipulators. These are their core frame of reference, and within it, they excel. When they do science, military, or anything else, they do it as a tool, subject to that core mentality.

    Scientists orders of magnitude more accomplished than they are - Katsuragi, Akagi x2 - are not figures to respect, they're figures they mock for not knowing or caring about their mystery cult jabble. People to manipulate to use their skills with 'the boring shit' to get their important tasks done.

    Soldiers are simply weapon systems to deploy at the things they want blown up, and left to take care of the details themselves.

    SEELE were not the type of people who would have noticed or cared about actual combative skill. If they were, they probably wouldn't have been the type to try and initiate the apocalypse, because Impact is pretty much entirely the result of SEELE's narrowmindedness and petty obsessions.

    And, like, let's give the Evas some credit here, an 'average' pilot probably would've gotten roflstomped. This was the single most-extensively-trained pilot on the team, in the depths of an emotional breakthrough, at the highest synchronization rate she's ever recorded, with shit to prove. She literally was spontaneously figuring out AT field combat applications by the second.

    This was Asuka's equivalent of Shinji vs Zeruel - her absolute high water mark as a pilot, those moments of batshit insanity that get real soldiers medals for pulling off what no one ever had any right to expect.

    Crazael said:
    I remember them repeatedly attacking her from multiple angles only to be utterly trounced by her superior skill and experience. They win because they start getting back up after she "kills" them all, not because they were somehow better combatants than her.
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    Turing Decidable said:
    One-on-one she'd curbstomp them in her sleep any time any place, but the MP Evas failed to adequately exploit their numbers. You could chalk that up to the Dummy Plugs not being particularly good at cooperation, I suppose.
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    So, martial arts note, but a good fighter preventing more than one person from effectively engaging them at a time is how they fight multiple opponents. Mook chivalry is a trope, but what a skilled fighter is doing to survive a group fight can make things look a lot like mook chivalry.

    So don't look at the fight from the perspective of what they allowed - look at it from the perspective of what she allowed.

    They were trying to deny her mook chivalry by surrounding her, but she just kept picking one opponent, charging them, killing them before they could cluster, and moving on around the circle. It didn't always work out for her - the distances here were, like, in kilometers, so it took some time, but towards the end she was pretty consistently getting jumped by the second while she was working on her target.

    Now, I'm gonna be fairish. Evangelion does not have smooth, high-speed fight scenes. This is a specific, aesthetic choice. Fights are slow, visceral, and impactful. So bear that in mind when you're watching - speed everything up by double or so if you want to imagine what this'd look like with humans in an action flick. Literally - I just watched Asuka's EoE fight at double-speed, and everything was at human-appropriate rates (a bit slower than, but that's the nature of action scenes, they need to be followable), and her offensive is frighteningly fast. Blink and by the time you catch what changes to the situation happened during that blink, she's killed another Eva and yoloed off after the next. There isn't time to coordinate much more than they did, because by the time you've made a decision, it's already obsolete.

    But if you don't just sort of accept that Eva combat is on a 2x slowdown, you see things taking a long time and wonder why people never did things in that timeframe. They did - they just did it at half-speed because that's how fast Eva combat works.



    And, like, coordinating in a fight is hard. Most things about a fight are hard, and now you need to understand how your buddy's combat is doing (not even your own) so that you can find places to be where you don't get in their way, and where you're still close enough to contribute a bit, and you need to keep recalculating that by the second.

    That's flat-out not achievable by my understanding of the Dummy Plug mechanism. My view is basically that it completes the circuit and makes the Evangelion move on its own initiative and judgement, with the plug providing the general 'kill that thing', 'don't kill that thing', 'perform that simple task' direction to the Evangelion brain - that they don't program this psychotic brutality in, but it's just, like, how the Evangelion thinks.

    But the Evangelion is kinda dumb. I mean come on, no matter how baseline-intelligent they are capable of being, they are ten years to three months old and have spent all that time strapped to a rack, their judgement is pure instinct, informed by nothing.

    So with this view of the DP mechanism, there simply isn't a 'coordinate' setting. There's a 'kill' setting, a 'stay away' setting, a 'go there' setting, and some poor wrangler at the remote control trying to juggle the three to make something vaguely resembling coordination happen.

    If you don't take my view of the DP mechanism, though, it's honestly even worse. Because now you need to program that in.

    Now, like, combat is hard. We'll assume for now that they found a few master martial artist computer programmers to handle this part, they're a thing, but even then, that guy has to try and translate an understanding that is in huge part instinct, muscle memory, and a trained subconscious into conscious, pure mathematics.

    This is a nightmarish challenge in all respects. If the human brain is not presently the most powerful ballistics computer on the face of the planet, it lost that title within my lifetime. And ballistics is one of the mathematically 'easiest' things humans do. The sheer amount of processing power we put into physical movement is mind-boggling - we're only now, in the last year, getting robots that can even begin to credibly walk. Any martial artists in the room, pause and imagine how much farther away we are from credible melee combat.

    Any non-martial artists, compare your physical ability to your average professional sports player, dancer, that sort of thing. Like, really understand just how incredible the things they can do with their body are. Now bear in mind that the most advanced 'body movement' electronics on the face of the world comes in a good bit short of you. And that Asuka is at least as good as that professional. Our conscious mind is only paying attention to the things we don't do easily and without the slightest thought. But to program that into a computer, we need to find the shit that billions of years of evolution taught all our ancestors so we didn't need to fuck around with anymore.

    This is the challenge involved in just getting the Dummy Plugs to fight, one-on-one.

    Now add that all over again to teach the DP to recognize how its buddy is fighting, and where it can go to not be in the way.

    Lord of Bays said:
    Last I checked, her power essentially ran out as the imitation Lance pierced her AT Field. Also what the person said about her going "The FUCK did they get another Lance from!?"
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    Also this. Like, in the end... they still won. They had to put time on their side, outnumber her nine to one, regenerate from all possible harm, and carry weapons bigger than she even realized existed, but they won.

    She didn't time out and then lose. She lost and then timed out. It hit her fair and square, she had full power when she was up, and she tried to change plans - she was literally turning to address the problem and raising her other hand to try and catch it the millisecond she recognized she was still under threat. It didn't work, but we're watching Evangelion, not a show where trying to do something equates to succeeding at it.

    She had a spear sticking out both sides of her head before the countdown hit zero. This is Eva so that's not, like, over, but the fat lady's taking a big deep breath to start singing.

    Even if she had infinite time, having a spear in your eye is a little bit of a combat debuff, and they were all getting up for round two.
     
  • Informational
    • Looks like I just got schooled. :D

    As a computer scientist student I should have been more conscious of the fact that AI is very much an unsolved problem, but well, the impossible happens all the time in Evangelion, so I tend to forget.
     
    Lilith: "FOR BILLIONS OF YEARS I LAY DORMANT; WHO HAS DISTURBED MY- oh hey, Rei. Give control of Instrumentality to a boy whose mind snapped like a Twix bar at the sight of the girl he loved being eaten, you say? A sound plan, let's do this."
     
    100% agreement with quite an insightful post, Pale Wolf.
    Pale Wolf said:
    Let alone a live pilot who has literally just achieved enlightenment as the Boddhisatva of violence.
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    I always took this a also another meta-note in Anno's deconstruction of Giant Robot Tropes: Asuka achieves perfect synch with her Eva, awakens and communes with the spirit of her mother, who has always been looking out for her, congeals a lifetime of training, experience, and pure natural talent into the perfect combat gestalt, becoming the Perfect Evangelion Pilot in the utter peak of her career....

    ...and still loses. This is Eva. It doesn't matter if you just had a glorious epiphany you've been reaching towards the whole show, that doesn't mean you're going to win. You can be as Zen as you want, that doesn't mean you're suddenly the Avatar of Victory, invincible by pure hot-bloodedness. Reality still gets a vote, and 9:1 odds don't care that you're having a moment of perfect clarity and joy.

    This is not the standard Giant Robot show where Asuka's enlightenment would have been the crowning moment that led to victory. This is Eva, where that doesn't matter, and you're still going to lose because you've got an entire army facing you down, no backup, 9 monsters that can outlast you, and 3:30 of battery life. Sadly, on a meta-narrative level the entire point of Asuka's glorious stand was so that it could end in defeat anyhow. And provide Shinji with that last straw to make him go "FUCK YOU, SANITY! GOODBYE! EVERYONE GOES 'TANG'!"
    Pale Wolf said:
    they found a few master martial artist computer programmers
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    Gorram Virtual Adepts... :V
    Turing Decidable said:
    Lilith: "FOR BILLIONS OF YEARS I LAY DORMANT; WHO HAS DISTURBED MY- oh hey, Rei. Give control of Instrumentality to a boy whose mind snapped like a Twix bar at the sight of the girl he loved being eaten, you say? A sound plan, let's do this."
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    10 minutes later: "I MAY HAVE MADE A MISATKE..."
     
    Strypgia said:
    100% agreement with quite an insightful post, Pale Wolf. I always took this a also another meta-note in Anno's deconstruction of Giant Robot Tropes: Asuka achieves perfect synch with her Eva, awakens and communes with the spirit of her mother, who has always been looking out for her, congeals a lifetime of training, experience, and pure natural talent into the perfect combat gestalt, becoming the Perfect Evangelion Pilot in the utter peak of her career....

    ...and still loses. This is Eva. It doesn't matter if you just had a glorious epiphany you've been reaching towards the whole show, that doesn't mean you're going to win. You can be as Zen as you want, that doesn't mean you're suddenly the Avatar of Victory, invincible by pure hot-bloodedness. Reality still gets a vote, and 9:1 odds don't care that you're having a moment of perfect clarity and joy.

    This is not the standard Giant Robot show where Asuka's enlightenment would have been the crowning moment that led to victory. This is Eva, where that doesn't matter, and you're still going to lose because you've got an entire army facing you down, no backup, 9 monsters that can outlast you, and 3:30 of battery life. Sadly, on a meta-narrative level the entire point of Asuka's glorious stand was so that it could end in defeat anyhow. And provide Shinji with that last straw to make him go "FUCK YOU, SANITY! GOODBYE! EVERYONE GOES 'TANG'!"
    Gorram Virtual Adepts... :V
    10 minutes later: "I MAY HAVE MADE A MISATKE..."
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    Pale Wolf said:
    The thing is, SEELE is arrogant.

    Like, they spend their entire screentime sneering at people who are smarter than them. They don't understand things and assume that they know everything that's important.

    They don't realize the difference between an automated drone system and a live pilot. Let alone a live pilot who has literally just achieved enlightenment as the Boddhisatva of violence.

    As far as they're concerned 'operate the Evangelion' is not only sufficient, it's all there is to know - you put a kid in it and the Evangelion is what matters, the kid is irrelevant, and you can make the Evangelion matter just as much by finding an alternate means of making the thing turn on, like the Dummy Plug.

    And 02 is the Evangelion that doesn't matter, piloted by the kid that doesn't matter. They never had a single reason, within their frame of reference, to even glance at her after she passed or failed the binary 'can turn Eva on' test.

    SEELE are cultists, mystics, philosophers, politicians, and manipulators. These are their core frame of reference, and within it, they excel. When they do science, military, or anything else, they do it as a tool, subject to that core mentality.

    Scientists orders of magnitude more accomplished than they are - Katsuragi, Akagi x2 - are not figures to respect, they're figures they mock for not knowing or caring about their mystery cult jabble. People to manipulate to use their skills with 'the boring shit' to get their important tasks done.

    Soldiers are simply weapon systems to deploy at the things they want blown up, and left to take care of the details themselves.

    SEELE were not the type of people who would have noticed or cared about actual combative skill. If they were, they probably wouldn't have been the type to try and initiate the apocalypse, because Impact is pretty much entirely the result of SEELE's narrowmindedness and petty obsessions.

    And, like, let's give the Evas some credit here, an 'average' pilot probably would've gotten roflstomped. This was the single most-extensively-trained pilot on the team, in the depths of an emotional breakthrough, at the highest synchronization rate she's ever recorded, with shit to prove. She literally was spontaneously figuring out AT field combat applications by the second.

    This was Asuka's equivalent of Shinji vs Zeruel - her absolute high water mark as a pilot, those moments of batshit insanity that get real soldiers medals for pulling off what no one ever had any right to expect.





    So, martial arts note, but a good fighter preventing more than one person from effectively engaging them at a time is how they fight multiple opponents. Mook chivalry is a trope, but what a skilled fighter is doing to survive a group fight can make things look a lot like mook chivalry.

    So don't look at the fight from the perspective of what they allowed - look at it from the perspective of what she allowed.

    They were trying to deny her mook chivalry by surrounding her, but she just kept picking one opponent, charging them, killing them before they could cluster, and moving on around the circle. It didn't always work out for her - the distances here were, like, in kilometers, so it took some time, but towards the end she was pretty consistently getting jumped by the second while she was working on her target.

    Now, I'm gonna be fairish. Evangelion does not have smooth, high-speed fight scenes. This is a specific, aesthetic choice. Fights are slow, visceral, and impactful. So bear that in mind when you're watching - speed everything up by double or so if you want to imagine what this'd look like with humans in an action flick. Literally - I just watched Asuka's EoE fight at double-speed, and everything was at human-appropriate rates (a bit slower than, but that's the nature of action scenes, they need to be followable), and her offensive is frighteningly fast. Blink and by the time you catch what changes to the situation happened during that blink, she's killed another Eva and yoloed off after the next. There isn't time to coordinate much more than they did, because by the time you've made a decision, it's already obsolete.

    But if you don't just sort of accept that Eva combat is on a 2x slowdown, you see things taking a long time and wonder why people never did things in that timeframe. They did - they just did it at half-speed because that's how fast Eva combat works.



    And, like, coordinating in a fight is hard. Most things about a fight are hard, and now you need to understand how your buddy's combat is doing (not even your own) so that you can find places to be where you don't get in their way, and where you're still close enough to contribute a bit, and you need to keep recalculating that by the second.

    That's flat-out not achievable by my understanding of the Dummy Plug mechanism. My view is basically that it completes the circuit and makes the Evangelion move on its own initiative and judgement, with the plug providing the general 'kill that thing', 'don't kill that thing', 'perform that simple task' direction to the Evangelion brain - that they don't program this psychotic brutality in, but it's just, like, how the Evangelion thinks.

    But the Evangelion is kinda dumb. I mean come on, no matter how baseline-intelligent they are capable of being, they are ten years to three months old and have spent all that time strapped to a rack, their judgement is pure instinct, informed by nothing.

    So with this view of the DP mechanism, there simply isn't a 'coordinate' setting. There's a 'kill' setting, a 'stay away' setting, a 'go there' setting, and some poor wrangler at the remote control trying to juggle the three to make something vaguely resembling coordination happen.

    If you don't take my view of the DP mechanism, though, it's honestly even worse. Because now you need to program that in.

    Now, like, combat is hard. We'll assume for now that they found a few master martial artist computer programmers to handle this part, they're a thing, but even then, that guy has to try and translate an understanding that is in huge part instinct, muscle memory, and a trained subconscious into conscious, pure mathematics.

    This is a nightmarish challenge in all respects. If the human brain is not presently the most powerful ballistics computer on the face of the planet, it lost that title within my lifetime. And ballistics is one of the mathematically 'easiest' things humans do. The sheer amount of processing power we put into physical movement is mind-boggling - we're only now, in the last year, getting robots that can even begin to credibly walk. Any martial artists in the room, pause and imagine how much farther away we are from credible melee combat.

    Any non-martial artists, compare your physical ability to your average professional sports player, dancer, that sort of thing. Like, really understand just how incredible the things they can do with their body are. Now bear in mind that the most advanced 'body movement' electronics on the face of the world comes in a good bit short of you. And that Asuka is at least as good as that professional. Our conscious mind is only paying attention to the things we don't do easily and without the slightest thought. But to program that into a computer, we need to find the shit that billions of years of evolution taught all our ancestors so we didn't need to fuck around with anymore.

    This is the challenge involved in just getting the Dummy Plugs to fight, one-on-one.

    Now add that all over again to teach the DP to recognize how its buddy is fighting, and where it can go to not be in the way.



    Also this. Like, in the end... they still won. They had to put time on their side, outnumber her nine to one, regenerate from all possible harm, and carry weapons bigger than she even realized existed, but they won.

    She didn't time out and then lose. She lost and then timed out. It hit her fair and square, she had full power when she was up, and she tried to change plans - she was literally turning to address the problem and raising her other hand to try and catch it the millisecond she recognized she was still under threat. It didn't work, but we're watching Evangelion, not a show where trying to do something equates to succeeding at it.

    She had a spear sticking out both sides of her head before the countdown hit zero. This is Eva so that's not, like, over, but the fat lady's taking a big deep breath to start singing.

    Even if she had infinite time, having a spear in your eye is a little bit of a combat debuff, and they were all getting up for round two.
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    There are not enough likes in the world to give you.

    Even Gendo is that arrogant. The Eva just needs to turn on? That's it? What about a trained pilot that knows how to fight? You stupid fucks. I think there was only one fic, that I remember vaguely, that had mama bear Yui NOT go berserk in Shinji's first battle and ended up with Shinji dead. They had to spam N2 warheads until the Angel was dead, but also ended up with Tokyo-3 destroyed, the defenses gone, ALL the civilians dead, Unit-01 destroyed and Gendo being removed from command and locked up for being a dumbass.

    All you have to do is sit in it. God, how stupid.

    Also, how well can you really program a bipedal, combat A.I.? In, what, 1-6 months? What about testing? De-bugging? Live trials? I always call bullshit on the dummy plug system. But then again, Eva runs partly on Star Trek logic and science.
     
    Pale Wolf said:
    Now, I'm gonna be fairish. Evangelion does not have smooth, high-speed fight scenes. This is a specific, aesthetic choice. Fights are slow, visceral, and impactful. So bear that in mind when you're watching - speed everything up by double or so if you want to imagine what this'd look like with humans in an action flick. Literally - I just watched Asuka's EoE fight at double-speed, and everything was at human-appropriate rates (a bit slower than, but that's the nature of action scenes, they need to be followable), and her offensive is frighteningly fast. Blink and by the time you catch what changes to the situation happened during that blink, she's killed another Eva and yoloed off after the next. There isn't time to coordinate much more than they did, because by the time you've made a decision, it's already obsolete.
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    I think part of that decision was because of the Evangelions' size. Larger animals tend to move comparatively slower simply because they're larger. An Evangelion can cover ground faster than a human, but it takes longer for it to change limb position and posture simply because of its great mass and the distances its limbs have to cover.

    Apalos said:
    Also, how well can you really program a bipedal, combat A.I.? In, what, 1-6 months? What about testing? De-bugging? Live trials? I always call bullshit on the dummy plug system. But then again, Eva runs partly on Star Trek logic and science.
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    Naoko might have been able to solve that one with her brain-mapping computer systems, but as huge as the Magi appear to be, I wouldn't bet they could fit that inside an Evangelion. That's assuming she could find a template volunteer and then pare down the computer to just combat skills.
     
    The Englanderish said:
    Unfortunately.
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    "Divine fallacy"? Never heard that term. Only ever heard it as "appeal to consequences".

    Anyway, that is true in real life, but we're talking about fiction here. In fiction, on a Doylist level, arguments like "it fits to the narrative" or "let the character have her spotlight" are entirely valid.

    DB_Explorer said:
    MP 3: Beethoven is overrated
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    Well, considering how Kaworu's attitude is, always smiling and so on, he would overall probably be more of a Mozart type.

    Or, what with his comment that music is the height of Lilim culture, maybe a Bach type.

    Ultimate Paragon said:
    Which raises a question: what would happen if Arael targeted Hikari?
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    Oh, she has all sorts of stuff she can question: Her relationship with Touji, whether she is doing her duties (as class rep, to her little sister, etc) right, what will happen to her family and so on...

    Pale Wolf said:
    The thing is, SEELE is arrogant.
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    Well, the evidence is on-screen, but it IS kinda disappointing... the huge, world-spanning conspiracy (I mean, they seem to have essentially, at least, the UN and the Japanese government at their call)... and they're all idiots :/

    It's also kinda unrealistic, come to think of it. You don't become or remain the top 12 people of the world by being idiots, no matter into what family you were born or what contacts you have.
     
    Susano said:
    It's also kinda unrealistic, come to think of it. You don't become or remain the top 12 people of the world by being idiots, no matter into what family you were born or what contacts you have.
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    Money covereth a multitude of fuckups

    Susano said:
    Fezzes are cool.
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    Not according to River and Amy. Remember the time Amy grabbed the fez off the Doctor's head, threw it in the air, and River shot the fez?
     
    As much as I do like fezzes...anything to do with Steven Moffat's series is tainted by the devil as far as I'm concerned. Even Hideaki Anno, the practical god of nonsensical stories filled to the brim with whimsy, puts the man to shame.
     
    Asuka: Rei what are you wearing?
    Rei: A fez, fezzes are cool.
    Asuka: You've been binge watching TV with Mari again have'nt you?
    Rei:.... She offered tea.
     
    The Englanderish said:
    Anyway, back to the Evangelion stuff now.
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    Righty ho!

    Now, as one Brit to another, do you know anyone on our windswept rock that sounds like Mari Illustrious Makinami? I have never heard an accent like that, and I can only assume that it's an American voice actress doing her very best to put on the stereotypical "British" accent. And she doesn't quite get it right...
     
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