Do we have any theories what the message on the new poster is meant to be?

After that,
and
THE END.

NOT,
and
ANTI.

I took a stab at the bolded part. If reading the text in caps backwards, "ANTI NOT THE END", it is a double negative by having "anti" and "not" in the same sentence. Anti is commonly defined as "one that is opposed", so when putting the word in front of "not the end" it could be interpreted as "I am opposed to this not being the end" - be it as a literal statement that this is the final film or more story related as in "I want this to [be the] end".

So then why not just say "this is the end", why use the longer, less convenient method if there is a simpler way to say it? Perhaps it is written this way intentionally, almost as a jab at Shinji's actions in Q. The preview shows that there is a way to restore the Earth without using the Spears/Evas, maybe by writing the message using the longer more complicated method and arriving at the same result (be it in a confusing manner) - it is just like Shinji trying to restore everything via a more difficult process when there is a simpler and easier way to do it (how it's done in the preview).

Well, I decode it this way:

After that and THE END

Go out of theatre and back to life, and DIE THERE. Because this is the normal course of things for us, mortal beings. So grow up to this. This would be a message that Anno wanted to send to the audience, and the second part would be a response he received.

NOT, and ANTI

VETO.

Mr. Tines wrote:If you're using the Shinjuku showing then the delta you need is -12m03s.

Do you have any sense of what the most popular recording is? If it's the Shinjuku one I might as well adjust the ones on the page accordingly.

BlueBasilisk wrote:Third Impact is the most likely culprit, imo. Headquarters and the Black Moon were either unaffected or already recovered.

Third Impact supposedly has Central Dogma at its epicenter, but there's no apparent core-rosion effect. (The cage area is red from exposure, yeah.) If it's the SOURCE of the effect, how does that work? Are we meant to think that 3I chased EVERYBODY out of town, but sometime later Gendo and Fuyutsuki came back and had the perimeter of pillars set up, and decided to make the recovery zone an enclosed circle? What's the deal with the FoIs inside HQ if the place has been decoreified -- why don't they have Eva-01 colors or something?

Second Impact is such a pain. What the heck could have been there to just keep the place in complete stasis? The gates don't close, but they don't move either. Incidentally, we don't have proof of the Antarctic getting coreified; we only know that it contaminated Earth with LCL or whatever that red stuff is.

Looking back on the first two movies, I feel even more convinced now that the red liquid is indeed LCL, and "core" is just a possible form it can take. In the instances where the Angel's core doesn't pop instantaneously, it first loses the glowy particle effect and becomes just red; and the core is where the "bubbling & bursting" full-body dissolve originates. When core-stuff still has the particle effect inside it -- that means that it still contains "life" in some way. Implying perhaps that all life has been absorbed into the landscape, maybe with the eventual goal of 'consolidating' it.

So, in other words, LCL is just dead Core?

Kaji kun wrote:I'll definitely check that out. I remember talking to you years ago but I haven't posted in 10 years lol.

They probably are, I didn't know he ever put out translations for 1 and 2...they really differed from the home video releases. And in places flat-out wrong. I can at least understand when what's said in Japanese isn't what's in the subtitles (although sometimes I can't with something overly complex.)

Again I'm curious about the translation...I swear it's what they used..."I'll always pick you up" (something to that effect, but emphasis on that she will always) and then "my puppy". It really caught my attention. it felt somewhat like familial love tbh the way she says it, but in that typical whimsical Mari way, but, who knows honestly. Also watching some other subs, even fansubs and translations of the french, Dan translated Ritsuko saying that the "artificial angels" (that term wasn't used right here, I think, I don't remember) have almost formed a brand new civilization or a civilization of their own. I've seen colony, etc., terms used by others, but not civilization.

Some things I didn't fully retain because it was technical babble. A lot of that just went over my head, but there was something that they had to reach phase (errr phase? whatever) five in order to restore Paris and they were stuck on phase 4. then once they hit it "it's impossible to get past phase 4 blah blah then maya, stfu this is why i hate young men.) My memory is near-perfect autobiographically, and 99% of the time once I retain something once I remember it in perfect detail, but I only retained bits because I was pretty enthralled, not gonna lie, and there was so much technical talk, I was essentially wtf for most of it.

EDIT: Thinking about it (actually going back in my mind and re-living it), I am pretty sure Mari, at least in the subs, says "No matter where you are, I'll always come and find you. Just you wait, my puppy." I'm 99% sure. At least something to that extent with the same terminology maybe missing or adding a word or two, but the sentiment is the same: Mari will always come for Shinji wherever he is. And then given her connection to Yui and Gendo, even just this small bit gives me hope that we'll finally explore just who Mari is.

Mari saying that she will always pick Shinji up could just be referring to what happened in 2.0, where she both literally, and figuratively picked him up. Literally in that she picked Shinji up with Unit-02's hand and carried him outside, and figuratively in that she picked him up by giving him that little pep talk which motivated him to get back into Unit-01 and fight.

Personally, I still think the woman in the photograph with Yui is Asuka's mother and not Mari (I mean come on, she straight up looks like Asuka, but with brown hair). I do believe though that either one or both of Mari's parents were working with the European Nerv and knew Gendo and Yui that way, which is how Mari would connect to all of this. Here's an interesting thought, what if Anno wants Mari to be like a reverse version of Shinji, to sort of serve as a contrast to him? Both of them might have had similar bad experiences growing up due to their parents who work for Nerv, but the way reacted to those situations and how it shaped them and their outlooks on life ended up being vastly different.

Arcadia's legacy wrote:So, in other words, LCL is just dead Core?

You got it!

Melkor wrote:Personally, I still think the woman in the photograph with Yui is Asuka's mother and not Mari

The woman has three concrete points of comparison to Mari (red glasses, same hair color, wears pink) and one concrete point of comparison to Asuka (red hairclip). (She's not even fully facing us, so I'm not sure how people are deciding she "looks" more like one girl than the other. Just because she wears her hair a certain way? :p ) In my write-up I don't dismiss the possibility of an Asuka connection, but her being someone who is not only biologically Mari's mom but also raised her as a mother is the far stronger possibility. More here.

Reichu wrote:The woman has three concrete points of comparison to Mari (red glasses, same hair color, wears pink) and one concrete point of comparison to Asuka (red hairclip). (She's not even fully facing us, so I'm not sure how people are deciding she "looks" more like one girl than the other. Just because she wears her hair a certain way? :p ) In my write-up I don't dismiss the possibility of an Asuka connection, but her being someone who is not only biologically Mari's mom but also raised her as a mother is the far stronger possibility. More here.

What if Asuka and Mari are related somehow, like half sisters or something? Same mom, but different dads. Or maybe cousins?

Reichu wrote:Do you have any sense of what the most popular recording is?

By now, it'll be the one with the "Mrs small doll" hardsubs at https://youtu.be/B8vXOeFz38s, in which the first subtitles appear at between 39 and 40 seconds into the video.

@Mr. Tines: Eeew. That's just a tragedy. Hard subs makes retiming to that video not even worth it.

BlueBasilisk wrote:These movies serve as an excellent counterpoint to EoE, demonstrating why Yui eliminating Eva tech and leaving Earth was a good thing. This nightmare scenario is the end result of that technology being allowed to flourish and mankind is so much worse off for it. Nerv's producing so many Evas that Final Impact might be necessary just to get rid of the bastards!

Since the 44(44...) seems to be made from EVA-04's tech that was in the USA and the epicenter of the Impacts tend to be in Japan, I wonder if it's a deliberate parallel to the atomic bomb?

BlueBasilisk wrote:^It sticks another knife into Kaworu's credibility too. Those pillars are all over the place in 2.0 at Nerv/Seele facilities and are most likely Seele technology. There's little chance he doesn't know about them or what they do. Good thing Nerv got to Shinji so fast and he didn't see this or the more Eva-shaped Mark.04s or Kaworu would have had a much harder time gaslighting him. He was right that there was nothing Shinji could have done to help with that operation, I guess.

I always thought that the timing of Mark.09 in Q was just too perfect (after Shinji already learned just enough to be confused and lost, but not enough to know exactly wth is going and that NERV is now the enemy) to be mere coincidence. Gendo must had been spying on Shinji's debriefing somehow.

ElMariachi wrote:I always thought that the timing of Mark.06 in Q was just too perfect

You mean the Mark.09?

ArvisTaljik wrote:You mean the Mark.09?

Ooops, sorry, had a brain fart!

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

This scene is like 1.0's 4th Angel fight (positron cannon but the baddies have it; ESVs everywhere; blocking this beam creates same effect as blocking the 4th's) with some Ireul mixed in (racing against time on computers) plus the aerial wackiness of 7th Angel fight. A remix but also new.

Now that we have this partial homage to the Ireul fight, I think the only NGE Angels that haven't been acknowledged by NTE in any way are just Sandalphon and Leliel. A baby and a womb. Those would be easy to combine if they wanted to include a reference, though you'd think the previous movie would have been the logical place to include it, what with it being "Quickening" and all. At the same time, Takeshi Honda's cover art for the Q theater book seems to portent that Eva-01 will be "reborn" in this movie, which doesn't bode well for Wunder but could bode well for a spectacular reinvention of the last time Eva-01 burst out of something's innards...

RAINBOWS

Even after Lilith and Seele's apparent deaths, we're still getting rainbows when things die. While I guess the rainbows could just be meaningless, they're a pretty obvious reference to the covenant between God and Man from Genesis, so taking them as a sign that the covenant with Lilith is being fulfilled seems logical to me. The idea that the covenant is still active and applicable creates a host of interesting questions. Rainbows have appeared for a number of beings following Lilith's death: the 12th Angel, Mark.09, the 44As, and the 4444C. The discrepancies where the Mark.04s are concerned seems a bit odd:

4A - No Rainbow
4B - Rainbow
4C - Rainbow
44A - Rainbow
44B - No Rainbow
4444C - Rainbow

I'm not sure if there is any real pattern here, other than the "no rainbow" ones could be considered "subordinates" of another one (4As to 4B; 44Bs to 4444C), and thus the rainbow only appears for the leader. If that's the case then I guess the 44As really were an autonomous collective ( :3 ) and weren't "working" for 4444C in any capacity.

SEELE

With the sealing pillar confirmed as non-human in origin, a lot of stuff starts fitting together. The "red on black" motif shows up for most of strange occultish tech in the films, and since Seele have that red-on-black theme going and, we learned in Q, were something other than human, they must be the origin. Which raises a lot of questions about who and what they really were. There are seven of them, which, somewhat obviously, makes them "the Seven Eyes of God" in their symbol. The question then becomes, who is their "God"? They have a covenant with Lilith, who also just so happens to have nails (with seven-sided heads, no less) going through her eye sockets that have the "7 Eyes" symbol on them. Meaning, Lilith does not have eyes, but the "Seven Eyes" -- Seele -- function as them in a metaphorical sense. This and the covenant imply that Seele were merely acting on Lilith's behalf -- overseeing her creation (Lilin) and its development, with the intention of shepherding it to its final destination when the time came.

The potential parallels with Xenogears -- which had already reached outrageous levels for NTE -- are quite, er, potent. In Xenogears, a female-coded bioweapon called Deus -- which just so happens to be a massive structure with an organic being at its core -- crashed on an uninhabited planet, unable to leave because her systems were badly damaged. To remedy this, she created life on that world, in the hopes of eventually using them to achieve the desired repairs. (Cultivate biomass for later harvesting, along with technological prowess to exploit.) The first beings she made were a group of men called the Gazel Ministry, destined to forever oversee the human race. Once their mortal bodies expired, they uploaded themselves into a computer and continued to perform their role from there. In the end, they were shut down by a formerly trusted partner, a human named Karellan, who himself had formed an agreement with Deus that superseded the role of the Gazel Ministry. (It's been a while, so some of this may not be 100% correct.) If all of this wasn't enough, there's a point in the game where you seemingly see Deus' body deteriorate before your eyes -- only to encounter her being reborn inside a cocoon later on. The various parallels should be fairly obvious, though they're all the more so if you've played this wonderfully insane game to the end yourself.

In any case, *if* Seele were just seven beings created by Lilith to carry out her will, then the question becomes, did they actually invent all of that tech, or is it knowledge they received from Lilith? How far back does this go? If you've checked out my recent Adams/Children thread, there's further reason to think this hole could go quite deep indeed. Everything surrounding Seele and Lilith probably deserves its own thread for exploration, which will go on my list of things to do.

ElMariachi wrote:I always thought that the timing of Mark.09 in Q was just too perfect (after Shinji already learned just enough to be confused and lost, but not enough to know exactly wth is going and that NERV is now the enemy) to be mere coincidence. Gendo must had been spying on Shinji's debriefing somehow.

I think Gendo and Mark.09 just had a good timing, if Shinji had known more than he should have, Gendo would have likely brainwashed and erased his memories in order to make him easier to manipulate.

I'm surprised when people say Anno has written himself into a corner.
He can bring back any character he wants, including Rei II.
He has an almost blank slate character with Rei Q.
He is free to decide what Instrumentality is in this film, IF it is in the film.
He can still freely decide what the world is like. Who expected Paris and Euro Nerv?

About the supersposition thing:
THats the french translation they used for the english word Mari says in Japanese, "Overlapping", which considering the context and that that "Ultra Overlapping" was when two Ultra brothers combined to form one, yeah, she must be talking about Unit 8+2.

Overlapping being a term in Ultraman seals the deal to me.

Fusion incoming.

Stan wrote:After that,
and
THE END.

NOT,
and
ANTI.

After that = EvaTV
THE END = EoE

NOT = You Are (Not) Alone, You Can (Not) Advance, You Can (Not) Redo
ANTI = You Are Alone, You Can Advance, You Can Redo

and = congruence

Shinji is alone in space in Eva01. 3I never stopped; everything we've seen since EoE is an attempt to create a new, perfect world.
Shinji can advance, which is 3.0 or Will-e vs NERV. This is what happens when time moves forward post 3I (Red Ocean, Eyepatch Asuka, etc.).
Shinji can redo the entire process, which is Rebuild 1.0 and 2.0.

No matter what he changes, Not or Anti, the result is the same. 3.0+1.0 is an antithesis to 3I and the Rebuilds. Because Shinij rejected the LCL sea during 3I he is fated to make a decision that will finalize what reality becomes. Until that is done he and the rest of the cast will have to repeat this cycle forever (+1.0), end;repeat.

writer: I saw your previous post on this stuff, and things you're attributing to some kind of NGE!HIP-based cycle or whatever are just from the films' version of Second Impact. There is no connection to NGE beyond the meta one and the films are stronger for it. My Adams/Children thread in the main Rebuild subforum breaks down what all of this commonly misinterpreted evidence means within New Theatrical itself.

Reichu: I was reading your thread, coincidentally. I'm looking forward to your next post. I don't necessarily see how the information within would disprove any sort of continuity, especially since Shinji's recreation of reality would not include things such as how the mother's were implanted into the Evas. He knows that his mother is within Eva 01, but nothing about the other pilots or the entire theory behind that. In this case, each pilot is representative of their own Eva, and can exist as the "Soul" within those units that allows them to power up. My theory about Mari is that she's a time-traveller who is tracing various timelines in attempt to assist Shinji in learning the truth of his situation. This is why she must exist; any other character is within time alongside Shinji and does not know other realities. Even Kaworu seems to be a machination of the world, eternally a tool to SEELE. Mari, on the other hand, is the one independent character in the timeline and will serve as major significance to SHIN.

It seems the Rebuild has a less scientific measuring stick when it comes to how and why things happen; they just do, and the cast seems ready and expectant of those things. Information which is shocking in EvaTV does not resonate the same within Rebuild, and I believe that is due to Shinji implanting his incomplete knowledge of the events into everyone he brings back.