Sailor Star Dust wrote:Sure, I think an internal time loop could be happening (but any weirdness could just as equally be metaphysically happening, in Shin Eva's version of Instrumentality). Though when it comes to Rebuild and EoE Sequel Theory or whatever else? I don't really think that's the case, because any evidence has so far been explained in-universe thanks to Rebuild's First/Second Impacts, etc. Or will be a mystery explained in Shin Eva.
That gave me a funny idea: what if Shinji mulls during the movie about what he could had been doing differently and how it would had made life better for everyone, and when (if) Instrumentality happens, whoever is inside with him (Yui/Rei/Kaworu..) let him gaze upon all the different possibilities... and none of them work out:
- leave for real after the 9th Angel and don't get involved in the next battle? Zeruel manages to reach Lilith before Kaworu could intervene, killing everyone.
- fight Zeruel but don't awake EVA-01 when it ends out of battery? Kaworu stops Zeruel in time, but he still had the time to massacre Misato and her staff on his way down, and Shinji dies of his internal injuries soon after. Without them, the WILLE rebellion fails and SEELE or Gendo win.
- manage to hold down Zeruel long enough for Kaworu to arrive without being mortally wounded nor Misato and co dying? Congratulations Shinji, you found the Golden Ending! Except that it's not really golden, yes Shinji survives, live the next 14 years alongside the rest of WILLE and become a respected member of the organization like Asuka and Mari, but without an awakened Eva, WILLE never manages to make the Wunder take off, and without that mobility, victory comes at a horrendous cost: even more people are killed around the world by the Mark/EVA-04s, even most of WILLE dies (including Misato, Ritsuko, Sakura, Asuka...)
Then in Instrumentality Shinji would learn that he can actually chose one of those possibilities and
make it real, so of course he'll be tempted by the last one: sure a lot of people will die but hey, no one would hate him, and no one will ever know, not even himself! But at this point of Shin he would had matured enough to understand that the world doesn't revolve around what he wants and that his actions has consequences (even if he won't remember them afterwards) and refuse to pick any of those possibilities, because it wouldn't be right to change the past just to benefit himself and if there isn't another path that leads to a better world, well tough luck, but that's how life is. At which point Yui/Rei/Kaworu will reveal that they expected such a decision from him, because he already took it before: another Shinji from the "golden" timeline already came to this point, and saw a possibility to change things ultimately for the better and chose it, that possibility being NTE as we followed it since the end of 2.0! Yes, it cost him 14 years of his life and the bonds he forged while in Tokyo-3, but the result was to give everyone a better chance for the future, so for him that sacrifice was worth it. And this "Prime Shinji" even left a message for the current Shinji, that yes it sucks to have lost all those years but hey, this isn't the end of everything! He's still alive and can move forward, build a new life for himself, try to mend the damaged relationship with the others and if it doesn't work, well he can make new bonds, he has all his life in front of him. That would also explain how Kaworu talks as if they already knew each other, because he remembers what happened in the first possibility.
Something like that would make Anno play with the Time Loop theory while also subverting it, and it would be beautiful!
Blockio wrote:The problem with sequel/loop theory in particular is that the premise of it undermines the premise of Rebuild. Q goes out of its way to show that there is no way to undo the past, and that you shouldn't cling on to things that lay in the past; Fuyutsuki
and Kaworu both tell Shinji and, by extension, the viewer.
Little nitpick, but on the contrary, Kaworu made Shinji believe that it was possible to undo the past, and even if that wouldn't had been what happened had the two spears been in Lilith's Chamber, that doesn't change the fact that Kaworu misled him.
If anything, it's
Gendo who indirectly showed his son the impossibility of undoing the past by thwarting Kaworu's plan.