Tarnsman wrote:I understand why you're doing it, because there is no way to argue that an explosion that destroyed
part of a city is equal to an explosion that destroyed an area 6,000 times the size of Tokyo and threw Earth off its axis.
No, that's not the reason I was doing it. If you check my initial post in the thread you'll see I was responding to Paul, who noted that an axial shift would be an extinction level event without question. Remember the arguments NemZ and Mr. Tines like to make about how the world is fucked after 3rd Impact? They're based on the tsunami effects of a 100 km-tall being falling into the ocean. Now, what sorts of tsunami effects do you suppose are likely if Antarctica is destroyed by an explosion? And, moreover, what sorts of additional tsunami effects do you think might occur if the explosion's severe enough to actually shift the Earth's axis? Leaving aside the very fine points TraxXavier made (which ultimately indicate that my alternate theory isn't any better than the standard narrative since it continues to ignore yet other problems that would be even worse in effect than what I was addressing), anything that could actually do what's described in the show would be an absolute game-ender. There's just no way to fanwank about it, it just fucks the story from the outset.
With the above being the case (and, I think, not at all in dispute), I instead said "hey, wait a minute, we have another record of an S2 explosion occurring over the course of the show, so why not use that as a point of comparison?" The idea was that Antarctica went away because of 2I voodoo, but that the actual explosion associated with it was no worse than what we saw with Sachiel, nor even what we saw in 3I (which didn't even involve an S2 explosion, and yet was obviously perfectly survivable). This would let us shove the 2I elements into the background and conclude that the actual explosion and ATF effects that Misato had to deal with were in fact survivable, whereas the standard narrative does not afford such an opportunity.
Like it or not this
is a gaffe, because the explanation presented just doesn't work. The alternative I provided doesn't really work either, at least not with the mechanism supplied, but the idea there was to provide a palatable alternative that at least somewhat worked, not to indulge in bogus comparisons merely for the sake of doing so (and, to be clear, responding to such an alternative with the standard narrative is disingenuous -- if everyone agrees that the standard narrative doesn't work you can't really use it as an argument against proposed alternatives. The entire reason the alternatives were proposed in the first place is because the standard narrative doesn't work!). What that means is that Adam's explosion
didn't destroy a continent, and that the axial shift bit is something we just have to ignore since there's
no way whatsoever to include it in the story and still have multicellular life on planet Earth afterwards. Sometimes authors screw up, and it falls to fans of the story to handwave like mad to come up with a way to make the story work regardless. This is one of those times!
In some ways Sachiel's self-destruction in ep 1-2 is a gift, since it lets us say, "okay, this is what happens when an S2 explodes, so that's all we really have to deal with when it comes to Misato's survival; the rest of 2I and Antarctica's destruction is something we have to deal with separately, and the less said about the shifting axis business the better."
That said, the rational alternative is "fuck it, it's a story, it's about kids learning to accept themselves and other human beings, I don't give a shit about the details", which is totally legit -- I've written a fanfic based on that very premise! So if people elect to ignore fanwanking that attempts to make the story work despite numerous elements that completely torpedo it, so be it -- I'm completely on-board with that. 
