Kodaemon wrote:This has been my interpretation pretty much from the beginning - NGE happened, in another timeline/dimension/whatever, and "echoes" of those events influence the current Rebuild reality.
I get lumped with the silly literalist sequel theorists anyway.
Bagheera wrote:Something that's been vaguely acknowledged here and there but never really discussed outright is the possibility that the NTE has nothing to do with NGE/EoE but is still a loop within its own right. I mean, I don't really see evidence for that, either (apart from some of Kaworu's lines), but it's nevertheless possible to have repeating events without need for a sequel proper.
They exist as separate fictions, full of intertextual references, callbacks, and echoes of each other.
They exist as separate dimensions, full of echoes of each other, similar events, eddies in the flow that show up concurrently within the two.
These are in essence the same thing, especially given that EoE is full of imagery that acknowledges itself as a fiction, and especially in light of the high school comedy AU that appears within the series itself.
To use the musical metaphor that infuses the series, Rebuild Shinji is not his predecessor in a direct way, they're the same song in a different key.
I find it fascinating that the fandom and fans of this sort of material in general have so much interest and difficult working these things out. If a novelist writes multiple drafts of his book, what is their relationship to each other? Do the characters live in parallel universes, or a time loop?
Is that what's happening here?
"Is it a sequel or not" is too restricted and literalist a question. I'd rather bend my mind.