FelipeFritschF wrote:It's high time people let go of this idea that Anno hates his fans... he does things for his own reasons, you can question them or his execution, sure, but they're not done in order to spite anyone. I find this to be very silly conspirational thinking.
It's also just not productive and inevitably leads to circular arguments. Anything any creator does in any piece of media you don't personally like you can just claim they're personally focused on making you feel whatever bad thing you felt, but like, that's almost guaranteed to not be in their mind whatsoever. It's basically narcissism on the part of a viewer.
LightDragonman wrote:Just saying, given how he has said that he intended Rei to be creepy and views her as his least favorite character...
Source?
LightDragonman wrote:But also in regards to the budding relationship between Rei II and Shinji, this film made it so that not only did he not save the former, but his attempt to do so ended the world. Which changes the whole message to "if you are little more than the object for one to try and escape reality, then you should die, and you really are worthless. Not to mention that you shouldn't bother to save someone you care about, as that person is little more than someone to coddle you, and the consequences for doing so are too great."
You have a great point here, and it's been an irksome thing to me that NTE, when you stand back and look at it in its entirety, really doesn't grapple enough with the foundational plot element everything ends up hinging on. It makes its cases on what happened and what it signifies, and how the characters take it, but it almost feels like someone making a tortured fan theory that doesn't really treat the situation thoroughly enough ... nothing about it really makes sense, and I don't buy how the characters end up compartmentalizing it. There's a complicated morality going on but there's no willingness to probe it.
Like, ok, let's say Shinji was selfish or escapist in saving Rei. But the extent to which the films then torture Shinji with the consequences of this only works when the premise involves treating Rei as truly expendable, and Shinji as fully free to choose in his situation. What would have made the situation even able to move in the right way, unless someone more responsible because they knew more of what's going on (so, like, everyone but the kids) explicitly informed Shinji enough to avoid what happened? But did anyone have foresight enough to know what would happen? I don't think every scenario of an attempt to save Rei logically concludes in what ended up happening, and so Shinji's intent can only be painted negatively because the writers put "I don't care what happens" in his mouth, but absent of that, then what? And what's more, does this attitude and his arrival at these words even make sense? Perhaps the game the films play for the sake of subverting expectation and tonal whiplash (and so the ability to read/treat the event in two polar opposite ways) renders the event itself inherently contradictory. What happened was surreal and yet extremely binary takeaways result. No one questions if a sort of madness took Shinji over, even though we're dealing with some eldritch mind-infiltrating creatures. So then why is a child orchestrated into this impossibly cruel scenario then blamed for acting in it how the one who orchestrated it predicted he would? It's like starving someone then blaming them when they lift a sandwich off a button that, if not depressed, blows up a box of kittens. Why is no one putting themselves in Shinji's shoes, or coming to the conclusion that someone who relied on someone's irrationality to get a desired outcome is the one to blame? Why is the least informed person obligated to act the most responsibly? It's a situation that only works if you assume all the adults have less reasoning skills than the children.
The narrative over-relies on the excuse that even though the way characters are behaving and the conclusions they've arrived at might not feel right, believe us, they are, you just never got to see it because time skip. This is why I kind of turn my nose up whenever there's talk of a theoretical time-skip covering film, because I don't believe scenes that logically connect 2.0 and 3.0 actually exist. What little of it we've gotten from the -hr features focus on such important explanations as why Midori's hair is pink. It didn't explain her hatred anymore logically, believably or effectively with 10 minutes as it did with the seconds we got in Thrice.
As for the rest, though, it kind of hinges on your premise that Rei means what you say she means, but I really don't think it's so simple as that. I think the fundamental problem with the situation is how poorly defined and explored it is, so I don't think you can pigeonhole her into being this clear metaphor.
