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GOODBYE, ALL OF - Neon Genesis Evangelion General

I mean also just. How long do you think they had? Sachiel's entire presence from emergence to berserk was like less than six hours. A commercial flight from Vladivostok to Tokyo-3 takes longer, let alone loading an Evangelion onto a superheavy transport and getting it there from literally the opposite side of the world.

There was no feasible way to get Asuka there for Sachiel even if 02 is ready and raring to go.

They didn't bring her in when Rei was injured because they brought Shinji in when Rei was injured. They didn't know Sachiel was going to attack specifically in the window between Rei being injured and Shinji receiving a modicum of training, they got blindsided.

And once they survived and Shinji got trained up, he was completely sufficient. He took down the first attack by pure luck, he took down the second attack because his skill was adequate to the task, and by the time the third hit, Rei was recovered and ready to go. No need to rush to get Asuka on-station.
 
Someone on Reddit brought up a bit of a plot hole: whether Adam embryo infusion / situating in Gendo's hand was an afterthought. It appears that there was no original plan to have Gendo unlock TD and start 3I until EoE, and so the image above and its subtext were added in after for the Director's Cut of Episode 24 (Source: discussion on Reddit late January 2022). That's all well and good, the question that now arises is were the production teams just throwing in an Easter egg for fans of Parasyte (1988 to 1995 manga)? Especially given the eventual Parasyte anime has this iconic scene suggesting some carryover of talent or appreciation.
 
Pale Wolf said:
No need to rush to get Asuka on-station.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were a 'script' that was being followed, and the timetable needed three pilots by a specific point

Gendo taking Adam was him going off script, and he became less subtle about it as time went on, like being able to use the lance to take out an Angel with the convenient side effect of seemingly removing it from play
 
Vinylshadow said:
The Dead Sea Scrolls were a 'script' that was being followed, and the timetable needed three pilots by a specific point

Gendo taking Adam was him going off script, and he became less subtle about it as time went on, like being able to use the lance to take out an Angel with the convenient side effect of seemingly removing it from play
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Common misconception, I think. The DSS weren't a prophecy or timetable. Just an instruction manual for Seeds and Lance's, that SEELE were intentionally misusing to trigger an event the FAR wanted to avoid.
 
While listening to the radio, there was mention of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. Reading the Wiki spoke of its sequel in the 1890s.

Well well!

Article:
In the year of 189–, an international auction is organized to define the sovereign rights to the part of the Arctic extending from the 84th parallel, the highest yet reached by man, to the North Pole. Several countries send their official delegates, but the auction is won by a representative from an anonymous United States buyer.

After the auction closes, the mysterious buyer is revealed to be Barbicane and Co., a company founded by Impey Barbicane, J.T. Maston and Captain Nicholl — the same members of the Baltimore Gun Club who, twenty years earlier, had traveled around the Moon inside a large cannon shell. The brave gunmen-astronauts had come out of their retirement with an even more ambitious engineering project: using the recoil of a huge cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth's axis — so that it would become perpendicular to the planet's orbit, like Jupiter's.

That change would bring an end to seasons, as day and night would be always equal and each place would have the same climate all year round. The society's interest lay in another effect of the recoil: a displacement of the Earth's rotation axis, that would bring the lands around the North Pole, which they had secured in the auction, to latitude 67 north. Then the vast coal deposits that were conjectured to exist under the ice could be easily mined and sold. The technical feasibility of the plan had been confirmed by J. T. Maston's computations. The necessary capital had been provided by Ms. Evangelina Scorbitt, a wealthy widow and ardent admirer of Maston.

The cannon needed for that plan would be enormous, much larger than the huge Columbiad that had sent them to the Moon. Once the plan became public, the brilliant French engineer Alcide Pierdeux quickly computes the required force of the explosion. He then discovers that the recoil would buckle the Earth's crust; many countries (mostly in Asia) would be flooded, while others (including the United States) would gain new land.

Alcide's note sends the world in panic and rage, and authorities promptly rush to stop the project.


Speaking of DSS chokers, the original title for Verne's sequel work was "San dessus dessous", or 'Upside Down', playing on the subtitle 'topsy-turvy'.
 
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Vinylshadow said:
The Dead Sea Scrolls were a 'script' that was being followed, and the timetable needed three pilots by a specific point

Gendo taking Adam was him going off script, and he became less subtle about it as time went on, like being able to use the lance to take out an Angel with the convenient side effect of seemingly removing it from play
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Barachiel said:
Common misconception, I think. The DSS weren't a prophecy or timetable. Just an instruction manual for Seeds and Lance's, that SEELE were intentionally misusing to trigger an event the FAR wanted to avoid.
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Mostly as Barachiel says. It's somewhat wibbly in the direct explanatory text, which does refer to the DSS as a prophecy, but possibly in a metaphorical sense, because it doesn't really make sense for it to be a prophecy.

Because, as he says, any kind of Impact is entirely against the actual clearly stated objectives, desires, and preferences of the First Ancestral Race that made all that shit and produced the DSS. The intended operating procedure of Adam and Lilith was to be on entirely separate planets, never once encountering one another. Third Impact was the scenario they were actively trying to avoid, the union of the two Seeds. They would not package a step-by-step prophecy to achieve that. Had any such prophecy existed, they would have immediately made it as invalid as they could and send the Seeds out in entirely different directions.

What it makes sense for them to have left was technical documentation on the Seeds. Basic functions of how each one worked that could be put together to create a Manual To Third Impact. Exactly how that information was discovered and put together is very much offscreen, but it had apparently been transcribed into the Dead Sea Scrolls at some point (I somewhat doubt that ancient god-tier aliens wrote their details on calfskin parchment) and turned into SEELE's Manual To Impact.

This isn't prophecy, and it's really not that detailed. And it just doesn't have to be. All they need to know is the supertech fiddly shit.
They didn't need it to tell them how many Angels there are because they could literally satellite-observe the South Pole and watch the Angelseeds get tossed out by Adam.
They didn't need it to tell them the pilots' psychological state because in their ideal plan it was fundamentally irrelevant - they would kill whatever resistance NERV and the pilots managed by drowning them in twelve Evas and the military, and then do it manually. It did not matter who the pilots were or how functional they were, because those kids would have been standing against the rulers of the world.
They didn't need it to take over the world because they were already the mega-rich, the world was a political disaster zone, and they'd been poised for it (had in fact caused it, because they knew the supertech fiddly shit and therefore knew exactly how to have Katsuragi poke Adam to set off Second Impact).

In fact the way it fell apart makes it explicitly clear they had no foreknowledge regarding the pilots' physical or mental state.


So, let's lay out how this broke down.
SEELE's Third Impact plan was to fuse Lilith and Adam, and employ the Lance of Longinus under the control of their remote-controlled Evas to control the damn thing. Unit-01 and the knockoff Lances were backups for the Lilith and Lance part, and standard Evas could serve as backups for Adam if necessary.

Gendou had Adam stolen. This was suboptimal but within acceptable margins, the MP Evas could serve the role well enough.

Gendou had the Lance thrown off into the Oort Cloud. This was the first violation they really took serious issue with, because it was clearly tied back to Gendou, and the Lance was replaceable, but less so - they needed bulk supply with the knockoffs to do it, and they may have been unable to force control over the actual Lilith, so they had to go to 01.

And here's the real thing that had them exploding when they found out: Gendou had Rei created. She wasn't supposed to exist. SEELE initially took no issue with it (presumably they thought Gendou just cloned his wife like a normal creep and they weren't gonna kinkshame a guy), but it was after they found out she was a Lilith clone that they got pissed - it's possible she rendered Lilith unusable, or it may have been purely because it made it clear that Gendou was making his own control system to control Third Impact.

In the end, the plan SEELE had to go with was sending the JSSDF to destroy as much of NERV as they could, then finish the job with the MP Evas, stab Unit-01 with the false Lances, merge the Evas, and use the Lances to control the result.

Ideally Shinji would get murked in the JSSDF attack, but failing that... well, they were boned, actually. They'd had to attack with nine Evas because they couldn't take the time to finish the last three before Gendou would trigger his own Impact. Between that, the false Lances, and the robotic intelligence they were working with, they fundamentally could not actually assert control over a resistant pilot. The moment he got into the cockpit, their only hope was to bank on him being such a basket case he could not muster effective resistance.

So like. That's SEELE's plan, as it evolved throughout the series.

And it's fundamentally impossible for it to be a prophecy that details anything about the pilots, because if it was, it went wrong like seven years ago when Gendou made Rei, and SEELE took no notice.
It's fundamentally impossible for Shinji's psychological state to have been prophesied or intentional when A: the key figure in establishing that psychological state wasn't working towards their plan at all; and B: that psychological state was fundamentally irrelevant at every step of SEELE's plan except the very last gasp, and they took active effort to keep it irrelevant in attempting to have Shinji executed by the JSSDF, and him locked out of his Eva by bakelite.

There's no prophecy. Even the schemers were really playing it very much by ear, making plans based on an ancient alien instruction manual. It's because those plans were so fundamentally basic and simple, with so few actually relevant parts, that they were so resilient and made it so close to the finish line.
 
Shouldn't it be red?
mainichi.jp

7-meter spear from hit anime 'Evangelion' installed in western Japan - The Mainichi

YAMAGUCHI, Japan (Kyodo) -- An over seven-meter-long spear inspired by the animation series
mainichi.jp mainichi.jp
The replica of the "Spear of Longinus," the giant extraterrestrial weapon that plays a key role in the story, pierces the ground in Tokiwa Park in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the city where the series' director Hideaki Anno was born.

The spear is the work of young employees at Ube Steel Co., a unit of chemical manufacturer Ube Corp., which has many plants in the city.

The employees first proposed creating the spear in July last year, and about 40 people became involved in using scrap steel and other materials to make the sculpture, which weighs about 1.2 tons.

The sculpture will be displayed until Jan. 8.

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Another attraction I won't ever be able to see with my own eyes... So... who's up for a Change dot Org of "please make this a seasonal attraction"? No way they would accept leaving it there forever.
 
deadline.com

Gkids Sets Two-Night Nationwide Release For Anime ‘The End Of Evangelion’

Anime film 'The End of Evangelion' has been set for a two-night nationwide release by leading animation distributor Gkids.
deadline.com deadline.com
Gkids announced on Wednesday that it will soon be bringing The End of Evangelion, the feature follow-up to Hideaki Anno's influential anime series "Neon Genesis Evangelion", to North American theaters for the first time. The film will be screened in its original Japanese language with English subtitles, bowing in select theaters nationwide on March 17th and 20th.
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I've seen three different articles in English, and all of them, including this one, have useless click-baity headlines. :V
japantoday.com

'Evangelion' creator says there might be more Eva anime to come

"Evangelion" has “ended” at least three times. The first time came in 1996, when the final episode of the original "Neon Genesis Evangelion" TV series aired. This was followed, though, by a trio of theatrical features a year later, culminating with the unambiguously, but in hindsight very...
japantoday.com japantoday.com
... Series creator Hideaki Anno spoke with Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun in an interview published earlier this week. While the impetus for the interview was the Hideaki Anno Exhibition that's currently being held at the Kanayama Minami Building Art Museum in Nagoya, "Evangelion" inevitably came up during the conversation, as Anno was asked if he had any ideas for a continuation of the Eva series, or of letting someone else take the helm for the franchise, to which he responded: "Hmm…there probably are some ideas like that. And I think it'd be an option for someone other than me to be the person to make it. There's the question of whether or not there's a business case for such content, or whether it'd be interesting or not. It's not like I've decided 'We will never make Eva anime again!'"

Within the same interview, the 63-year-old Anno also mentions that he's "thoroughly exhausted" from his workload over the past three years, in which he wrote and directed "Thrice Upon a Time," wrote and produced "Shin Ultraman," and wrote and directed "Shin Kamen Rider."

"I think I'm OK with not directing anything for a while" he muses.
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And here's one lucky guy who's in the area.

View: https://twitter.com/dietkramer/status/1790889846564958673
 
silentorphan said:
I've seen three different articles in English, and all of them, including this one, have useless click-baity headlines. :V
japantoday.com

'Evangelion' creator says there might be more Eva anime to come

"Evangelion" has “ended” at least three times. The first time came in 1996, when the final episode of the original "Neon Genesis Evangelion" TV series aired. This was followed, though, by a trio of theatrical features a year later, culminating with the unambiguously, but in hindsight very...
japantoday.com japantoday.com


And here's one lucky guy who's in the area.

View: https://twitter.com/dietkramer/status/1790889846564958673
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I don't mind the material like storyboards and models but-

>more anime

COME THE FUCK ON

WE HAS THE PERFECT ENDING LEAVE IT ALOOOOONE
 
There have been a lot of arguments about Thrice Upon a Time, in this thread too, and it's easy to find people who don't like it or even really hate it, but in general the film was well received. 100% critic and 92% audience ratings on RT, 8.6 on MAL, 8 on IMDb, comfortably 4 stars on Letterboxd, the home release is nearly 5 stars on Amazon, etc.
 
silentorphan said:
I've seen three different articles in English, and all of them, including this one, have useless click-baity headlines. :V
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That's nothing really new actually: Anno has said several times in the past, even before the Rebuild movies were finished, that he would like Evangelion to become like Gundam: a franchise that other authors can use to tell their own story while keeping the basic elements of the giant cyborg robots.

Personally, the problem I see with that is that what made Evangelion so unique and groundbreaking was the characters, their neuroses and the themes of escapism and depression, all tied to Anno himself, and that removing that for new projects would leave us with cool cyborg robot animes, but without the substance and impact of the OG series.
 
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Honestly, even if it's not the same as the original Eva, I have faith there's someone out there with their own story that could fit the aesthetic.
 
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