Shinji control: The Eva going berserk and opening its jaws has always been the unit reacting to Shinji's condition. Whether you believe its Yui explicitly taking control every time or not, the pilot is just a catalyst.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I mean, physically EVA-01 isn't even there in Terminal Dogma. It's all instrumentality warblgarbl anyway. What I meant is, well, Shinji is the one put in control of Instrumentality. It wouldn't be that he pilots EVA-01 when it bites Gendo's head off, but that it's just part of his Instrumentality scenario/wish.

Gendo's wish: he got that wish through the very scene you saw before. Being with Yui again.
Yes. And now he is a miserable, self-loathing piece of shit. His entire final dialogue was just self-loathing. To have Yui end it all for him would fit perfectly to that.

Unit-01 Absorbing Gendo: Why? Just, why is that necessary? What does that accomplish?
You seriously want to ask "Why" in EoE? :p More seriously, it would be the ultimate form of union. That way not only would Gendo be reunited with Yui, they would be together forever. Even after the sun and the moon have faded, inside EVA-01...

You seem to have misunderstood me. Maybe I should have given more context, sorry. What I meant is... what was the last thing Maya saw before being liquified? Ritsuko hugging her from behind. Only that of course it wasn't Ritsuko, it was just the form GNR took to lower Maya's egobarrier/to make it easy on her. Hyuga saw Misato, and Fuyutsuku saw Yui. Only Shigeru, the nihilist, saw no illusion but a horde of Reis.

So analogous to that... whereas Maya saw Ritsuko, Gendo saw Yui in the form of EVA-01. He was probably already dying anyway, and that was just his GNR-induced death vision, similar to Maya's Ritsuko or Hyuga's Misato. Which would make the whole scene a vision/illusion and nothing more, and Gendo is simply liquified like everyone else.
 
Yeah, I really enjoy the Rebuilds as well, I appreciate they aren't the same as the original but they're something that on repeated viewings I've found to get better much in the same way that the original/EoE has and I think that when the last of the four films is released they'll all be better for it.

I can appreciate the issues people have with it, I do agree that I think it's handling of the characters is a bit poor in places, especially with regards to Asuka/Mari but I still really enjoy them. I think the whole jump from 2.22 to 3.33 was incredibly jarring but I still liked 3.33 because it went off in such a different direction to the original.

That said, I also play video games with an inverted Y Axis, so what would I know :p
You have a brother in me. The Rebuilds are awesome and quite enjoyable. Not flawless, but we all love that in the original so... *shrug*.
 
You have a brother in me. The Rebuilds are awesome and quite enjoyable. Not flawless, but we all love that in the original so... *shrug*.

I always found that a bit strange. The Rebuilds are somewhat reviled by many, yet to me they seem about as much of an incoherent mess in story telling terms as the original...



(Sigh) I'm never going to learn my bloody lesson am I?
 
I always found that a bit strange. The Rebuilds are somewhat reviled by many, yet to me they seem about as much of an incoherent mess in story telling terms as the original...
I think it's better than the original in that regard. Though I may be biased because I understood what was going on already when I watched it. At least the romance angle is definitely more clear.
 
We can't even tell for sure if Yui intended to traumatize Shinji by bringing him to the Contact Experiment, but it sure as hell doesn't look good.

More than likely, what Yui was thinking was, "An assassin's bullet will make me just as dead, and leave my son just as traumatized. Maybe by 'hiding' in this robot until SEELE's plans come to fruition, I can be there for my son when he needs me." And she wanted Shinji to watch it because she wanted him to know where she was. She didn't know Gendo would abandon their child, and so traumatize him that he would suppress the memory until the last possible second. Heck, she may not have known that she would even survive in there and could be recovered some day, she was just sacrificing her life so Unit 01 would WORK.

Presumably, she felt someone would EXPLAIN it to him, once he was old enough to understand. Assuming she didn't leave a message for him, as in A&T. She had no way of knowing that no one would back her up in her plan, and that in fact it would result in making things even worse. She may have been hopelessly naïve in her assumptions about Gendo, but she couldn't predict the future.

Sure, her actions resulted in trauma for Shinji, but she's not solely responsible for that. Gendo bears a lot of blame for it, as does Fuyutsuki.
 
More than likely, what Yui was thinking was, "An assassin's bullet will make me just as dead, and leave my son just as traumatized. Maybe by 'hiding' in this robot until SEELE's plans come to fruition, I can be there for my son when he needs me."
If you wish to live in delusion that is your choice, but I cannot think of why a mother would want her son to watch her 'die' unless if she was simply wanting him to remember her in some way shape or form, because being ensured to be remembered is far better then any other choice, after all this is the woman who aimed to have an 'Eternal monument to humanity'.
 
Ultimately, making any judgement of Yui final hits one big roadblock: We don't know Yui.

Like, I can see the bit making sense where Yui expected Shinji to be told, that SEELE was coming for her, etc. But thats making sense of a dramatically small amount of information.

We, the audience, only glimpse her in passing, in pieces that don't give us everything.

Everything else? We're going off the recollections and attitudes of Kozou, a heinous/ly nostalgiac old man, Gendo who is obsessed beyond the point of sanity, and Shinji who barely remembers her except as an ideal mother figure.

If Eva has been consistent about anything, its been how ultimately small and petty a lot of people are. Gendo is an older, bitter Shinji who thinks armageddon would be okay because he BELIEVES literally no one can love him. SEELE, for all their power and influence, are terrified of simple mortality. And so on.

So when the show, the characters in it, try and paint her as this saintly zenith of womanhood? I get suspicious.
 
If you wish to live in delusion that is your choice, but I cannot think of why a mother would want her son to watch her 'die' unless if she was simply wanting him to remember her in some way shape or form, because being ensured to be remembered is far better then any other choice, after all this is the woman who aimed to have an 'Eternal monument to humanity'.

I could also see her simply wanting all her loved ones to be with her for her last earthly moments as a human being...
 
By that logic, it's better for anyone to simply die alone rather than burden others, especially one's loved ones, with being present at one's passing.
At the risk of opening a can of worms, I will have to say that I know of some people who would rather save the heartache of passing in front of their loved ones and would prefer to do it in their sleep while alone.
 
Personally I just think that Yui was scared of dying and wanted the last thing she saw to be her son. Selfish, yes. Malicious no.
 
I could also see her simply wanting all her loved ones to be with her for her last earthly moments as a human being...
Personally I just think that Yui was scared of dying and wanted the last thing she saw to be her son. Selfish, yes. Malicious no.

But that wording... "I want to show him the bright future"... hm. Sounds more like, at best, mad scientist self-delusion to me, or at worst, indeed having Shinji as a pawn in her game...
 
Oh, I've got a good bit of that scene already planned out, and yes, it's going to be a punch. One of the two beta's who I described it to called it 'brutal'. :)

It's not going to be an easy conversation for any of them. Misato has dedicated her life to one purpose: KILL THE ANGELS. To get revenge for her family. Now, on top of finding out Commander Ikari and SEELE were complicit in Dr. Katsuragi's death, she's going to find out she's had not just one, but two Angels at her dinner table?

She's not going to be happy about that.

Of course, one could also point out to her that:

1) Rei's a bit different in nature from the Adam-derived angels; if not for the progenitor she's descended from, there'd be no humanity at all. She's far from humanity's enemy by nature; if anything, it's more in her nature to be humanity's ultimate supporter. It took Gendo pumping her full of enough tranquilizers and dissociatives to kill a tyrannosaur to get her to think his plan was genuinely in humanity's best interest, and she turned against it on her own (or at least, with only passive influence from Shinji and Asuka) once she was free of the drugs.
2) Dr. Katsuragi's death is far more SEELE's fault than Adam's; as was pointed out, SEELE basically handed her father a lit torch and told him to inspect what they already knew was a powder magazine. Adam's role in 2I appears to have been more object than actor -- the metaphysical biology equivalent of a living nuclear meltdown, caused by SEELE's instructions to the Katsuragi team.
3) Kaworu's practically a defector from both the Adamite Angels and SEELE in all this; he'd rather die than allow the end of humanity, let alone cause it himself, although understandably he'd prefer to find a path that didn't involve either. Could be hard to convince Misato of this, in particular, though.

Hopefully the kids will be able to talk her down before she does anything too rash, or too permanent.

But that wording... "I want to show him the bright future"... hm. Sounds more like, at best, mad scientist self-delusion to me, or at worst, indeed having Shinji as a pawn in her game...

True. On the other hand, it also makes a good excuse to others as to why she'd brought her son to work that day. If she'd admitted she'd brought him to say goodbye, Gendo never would have let her go through with the experiment. Remember, at the time, nobody but Fuyutsuki knew what her plan was. In fact, he may still be the only one (prior to Shinji's chat with Yui) who realizes Yui's absorption was by her own will.

It could probably be read either way, or even a bit of both.
 
We can't even tell for sure if Yui intended to traumatize Shinji by bringing him to the Contact Experiment, but it sure as hell doesn't look good.

If you wish to live in delusion that is your choice, but I cannot think of why a mother would want her son to watch her 'die' unless if she was simply wanting him to remember her in some way shape or form, because being ensured to be remembered is far better then any other choice, after all this is the woman who aimed to have an 'Eternal monument to humanity'.

But that wording... "I want to show him the bright future"... hm. Sounds more like, at best, mad scientist self-delusion to me, or at worst, indeed having Shinji as a pawn in her game...
Responding to all of the above... I think @Susano might have hit on something when he called her a "mad scientist." I submit that there are two potential biases in play here. The first is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which can cause intelligent individuals to underestimate themselves and/or overestimate others. The second is that parents tend to think very highly of their children.
Combine those two with an expectation that Gendo would raise Shinji in the Eva program and its possible that Yui could have been expecting Shinji to form a positive association between her and the Eva. Much the same way that I carry my grandfather's pocketknife. Granted, no one in my family was raised in a doomsday cult, so grandpa Grimlock's pocket knife might not be a perfect example.
 
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