Shinji and The Spears

[Charsi]

Kaworu started the festivities by selling an exaggerated story about how bad the world was. He took him to a lookout point and showed him the world as it appears at ground zero. Of course it's going to look awful. It's the epicenter.

Gendo and Fuyutsuki then stepped in (after noting that Kaworu took Shinji for a little sightseeing tour) and manipulated him into wanting to pilot again. Fuyutsuki told him straight up he was brainwashed, and told him about his mother's fate in the Eva and that Rei is a clone, all to destabilize him and rob him of his puppy-love of Rei. So he has nobody to turn to, no hope to cling to except what Kaworu offers - a shot at redemption.

Then Kaworu shows up and says "come on, let's pilot this thing". He grabs at it like a drowning man, because that's exactly what's happening to him. He's drowning in guilt and robbed of all the people that accepted him "as is". Misato. Rei. Asuka. All are strangers now.

So he pilots Eva 13. Kaworu realizes he's also a sucker, used to talk Shinji into pulling the spears Gendo wants pulled, not the spears Kaworu wanted pulled. (Note: We're told Longinus + Cassius will "fix" things, but we have absolutely no proof that is actually the case.) But Shinji's been pushed too far - Kaworu's guilt trip was good, but Fuyutsuki's sucker punch has completely destabilized him. He doesn't just want to undo 3I impact, he's past giving a damn about the world. He probably wants to redo his entire life over again. Undo the original contact experiment. Everything.

I don't personally like it, I do feel like it was very contrived for a) Kaworu to abandon Shinji to fight Asuka alone while mulls over the spears for minutes on end, b) Asuka and Mari to show up for a pointless battle that robs Shinji of any time to think c) Shinji to fail to heed the warnings of the only person in the world he still trusts. But hey, they had an ending they had to write towards and that's all. And it's not entirely bad - all the markers and setup are in place, there's clearly cause before effect. I just personally feel like it's a stretch. I get that not everyone feels that way.

It's not sloppy writing, it's just contrived events to achieve a specific goal. Gendo's planning and manipulations are *too* perfect. He even knows how Misato and WILLE will react to stop 4I after it's given him time enough to pull the plug on Seele and blow Kaworu's head off.

[pwhodges]

Well, pretty much by definition, all fiction is "contrived". The issue in this case is whether the viewers see a possible realism in it - and this is where people differ, presumably because of their differing experiences of the real world. "Good" and "bad" writing are just subjective judgements based on that experience.

[Giji Shinka]

Gendo's planning and manipulations are *too* perfect.

Well, not quite, remember how he failed to complete his plans regarding Eva-01? After the failure he had to wait 14 years, abandon 01 and change his plan's execution method(s).

[Fireball]

Kind of reminds me of the end of Death Note now that I think about it.

SPOILER: Show

You knew the maker was going to kill Light but the way he had to rig the entire second half just so it could happen was so utterly contrived that any credibility by that point was already lost.

so yeah, Anno can go fuck himself when he believes I'll eat up all that nonsense just so he can kick Shinji in the balls once again.

[Giji Shinka]

so yeah, Anno can go fuck himself.

[UrsusArctos]

Hey guys, this thread isn't about Anno and his machinations. That goes elsewhere.

Frankly, while the actions of Shinji and Kaworu may be contrived, one is sleep-deprived and severely traumatized, and the other one has been zapped by something we don't understand. Pulling the spears was something Gendo wanted from Shinji all along - and he rigged things to go his way.

[ChaddyManPrime]

You know now that I think about it, wouldn't it be fucked up and kinda funny that after you use the two spears together, the way they fix the world is they send the person who uses them back in time before all the fucked up shit happens and it's up to the user to keep the bad stuff from happening?

Now what would be even funnier is if Gendo is the one who uses the spears, that would explain a lot of the differences to me.

[UrsusArctos]

The way you put it, the person most likely to pull the spears out and cause the loop in the first place should be Kaworu, not Gendo or Shinji. He's the one whose lines are the most suggestive of sequel theory, and he's the one most likely to be a time looper, what with those coffins of his on the moon. Why does Kaworu pull the spears out alongside Shinji? Both of them are needed together to initiate the loop.

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
Or Kaworu's the only other person who knows cause he's got Quantum powers like Rei and is able to view the time stream.

Now for me Kaworu isn't necessary for the spear pulling itself, Shinji was shown capable of pulling them without any aide. Kaworu was just there for guidance and moral support.

Unless you think Kaworu has to be there to form the Spear Cassius.

[UrsusArctos]

Or Kaworu's the only other person who knows cause he's got Quantum powers like Rei and is able to view the time stream.

If he really has foreknowledge about these things, it might be simply that he died and woke up again and again, and so did Rei. But that's a huge if. Remember, any of this stuff is subject to change in an unexpected manner.

The real question keeps boiling down to why two people had to pull out the spears or why each spear had to be associated with a particular soul. We know what a soul was meant to be in the old series, what does it mean this time around?

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
I don't really recall but in the Tier 2 canon stuff didn't they mention that one of their spears broke? By their I mean Adam and Lilith. Maybe the Cassius Spear was the one that broke?

[UrsusArctos]

You're mixing up continuities horribly. The Tier 2 canon material you're talking about refers to the TV show, the old Neon Genesis Evangelion. Unless confirmed otherwise, it's being treated as a different universe from Rebuild, following different rules. There is nothing to change that impression so far. According to the Classified Information, Lilith's spear was destroyed or lost. The spears in the old series were only ever Spears of Longinus.

The Spear of Cassius is a creation for the Rebuild series, and what specialized functions the two different spears provide, or how exactly they were supposed to revert the world to its original state, is anyone's guess. My idea that Kaworu and Shinji were needed to loop them back to the start of the Rebuild continuity - i.e. to the origin of 2nd Impact in the Rebuild continuum - was just a guess as to what is probable.

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
So you think Shinji and Kaworu will travel back to 2nd Impact? What happens then in your mind?

[UrsusArctos]

Hideaki Anno says "congratulations!" :P

Well, if there's a reset loop going on and the loop is centered around Shinji being happy, I'm going to call Anno out for being a huge troll. However, the SDAT player, representing Shinji's reality, keeps looping between 25 and 26, and then 27 and 28, implying that Shinji has gone to instrumentality and beyond. Pulling the spears in this context could simply mean a return from the artificial world of instrumentality to (possibly a live-action) world where the Evas, Nerv, and so on did not exist. He already did that in EoE, what's stopping him from pulling that again?

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
But why would that happen if it's not a sequel? Like why mention 25 and 26 of EoE but EoE never happened.

I could go for a live action sequence but Anno needs to play an adult Shinji married to a redhead.

[Monk Ed]

Again though, I'm not bothered that things turned out in favour of Gendo and Shinji once again messed up. That's the way the story had to be. They could have just done a better job of covering up the fact that it needed to happen and not that it just so happened to be - in a story telling sense. That's my gripe with it.

Is that not the gripe I was addressing?