Loop Theory (I Really was born to meet you)

[Axx°N N.]

I'm not someone who ever liked the idea of a loop, but...

The only reason the loop theory exists in the first place is because of things Kaworu has been doing and saying since Jo. I'm not aware of any cohesive group agreement by so-called loopers regarding what the nature of the loop ever was, just that there was some implication of some kind of loop in their eyes. Shin seems to retain ambiguity on if that means the sequel theory is true, but to split hairs, I'd consider sequel theory seperate from loop theory.

Kaworu himself in no uncertain dialog says he's been looping, and Shinji even gets in on the action, so loop theory is true.

It's untrue only if you play a game of revisionist history and decide for yourself what the prevailing narrative ever was on loop theory, and in that way say it was off or 'not exactly true because...'

What remains to be seen is if the loop makes any sense on a thematic, character or cinematic level.

[Heaven Piercing Man]

The main "sequel looper dogma" fanboy belief is that Shinji created the movies by deciding to start over in EOE's instrumentality (like in several fanfics and Re-Take) to live a Peggy Sue second chance at wooing Asuka, becoming more like a stock shonen protagonist and pay meta-penance for being a wimp in the TV show, and all the cryptic weirdness in the movies are "remains of the TV show after Shinji resetted the world". Kaworu's cryptic hints at him looping a la Groundhog Day, and the meta self-awareness of the movies low-key admitting they're a reboot beyond the fourth wall were just adding fuel to the fire. The mental gymnastics done to fanwank became ludicrous as an annoying collage archiving all these "supposed remains of the TV show" was posted on 4chan's /a/ more than a decade ago and was later updated when 2.0 came out, and has been persistently reposted a thousand times ever since, despite the third movie completely changing gears and having nothing to do with the theories predicting that "characters and things from the original TV show would start showing up in the movies to drop the masquerade and reveal this is a sequel". Yep, they started doing more mental gymnastics to say that Q somehow validates the sequel theory even more, don't ask me how.

As far as I've seen, Shin goes all out with the meta-awareness tugging on your memories of EOE and Kaworu saying out right he's "groundhogging" the movies' lifetime (and perhaps the Evangelion meta-verse through the fourth wall). When we lash out at the loopers, it's more because they've been smugly spreading "sequel" garbage for more than 10 years to a level even worse than the people who have spent years thinking Evangelion is a Roman Catholic anime.

[DantesInferno]

When we lash out at the loopers, it's more because they've been smugly spreading "sequel" garbage for more than 10 years to a level even worse than the people who have spent years thinking Evangelion is a Roman Catholic anime.

You mean the pope never issued a “fatwa” to have Anno killed for blasphemy?

[cyharding]

When we lash out at the loopers, it's more because they've been smugly spreading "sequel" garbage for more than 10 years to a level even worse than the people who have spent years thinking Evangelion is a Roman Catholic anime.

Wait, that is an actual theory? I've never heard of it.

[Kendrix]

The impression I got is less an actual sequential loop and more that Kaworu has some sort of "quantum immortality" - ie, after he dies in one universe, he simply pops out in another, and he wouldn't have known that when he first tried to take the way out by dying in ep 24.

One might wonder why that is.

a) Is is because he's got the soul of a SoL? (or, in Rebuild parlance, because he's "the first angel")
In that case, shouldn't Rei also have this? Maybe she doesn't because she is closer to human, but her ascended quantum incarnation might.
On the other hand, the village sequence is full of references/callbacks to various classic Rei moments, it also has some from the og series mixed in - like the way she looks at her hand when she cries before her death, or when she's all embarrassed when a random village lady says she would be a "good wife".

You could see it as ReiQ simply having some similar reactions because as clones/twins they'd have similar predispositions to an extent, or maybe 'remembering' some echoes like when the third Rei cries in her room in ep 23.
Though the matter of Rei's soul is never really clarified beyond Kaworu's cryptic line in Q, and it clearly doesn't work exactly like in the OG series. *shrugs*

b) it's because he's an Angel. In that case, the other Angels might remember, too. Maybe Zeruel really did nom Unit Zero as revenge for being nommed the last time around XDD

Or maybe it's unique to Kaworu, having both the Fruit of Life and SoL status.

Even in Q I got the impression that this was a "more experienced" Kaworu, though I simply chalked it up to the timeskip: He doesn't spent the whole time dithering, racking his brains about wether to kill the humans or not - He has already made up his mind from the beginning about siding with the Lillim, and he has a plan, but he doesn't have such godlike knowledge that Gendo can't outwit him. (well... what he failed to predict was actually Shinji's desperate behavior. Maybe not considering sufficiently that Shinji doesn't have the same knowledge.)

If we link it to three coffins, this doesn't suggest a giant multiverse involving the manga, anima and even the spinoff games, but only EoTV and EoE.
It's not even a real 'reset' because Kaworu was just beamed to a different universe, and never found out what happened to OG Shinji after his death or EoE Shinji after the GNR disintegrated.

Kaworu might possibly be responsible for Rebuild being so different due to his alterations to the 'book of life'. EVA 2 did hold that Adam (or the FAR that became Adam) wrote the Dead Sea scrolls himself. So Kaworu might in fact have gotten beamed back to the start of the universe, or all the past lives of his soul, including Adam and his FAR predecessor, though he might not have fully realized that he's the one who rewrote it until EVA 13 came to minus space.
It seems like what he actually did is pass down some information that the FAR never wanted their creations to have, like the Golgatha object. Alas, it was unavoidable that this would give Gendo and SEELE ideas, so in that sense it totally backfired at first, and Kaworu must have known this when he only got to see Shinji after a long, long wait, and... then it was a totally broken version of him that he couldn't help or even cheer up despite his best efforts, & that's why he rushed the mission into Terminal Dogma, which ended with both of them falling into Gendo's trap.

Even without added info, I already got the sense that he was despairing to see Shinji suffering like that & being unable to remedy it, which caused him to be less cautious than he should have & take Shinji down into a situation that he knew would be filled with bespoke traps tailored to Shinji's particular weaknesses - that's why he says at the end of Q that everything is HIS fault due to HIS miscalculation. The truth is probably that they each fucked up a little and were both trying their best, but each of the two blamed himself completely for the bad outcome.

In any case a loop that really starts from the beginning of the 'verse would explain how characters like Yui, Gendo & Asuka ended up with different surnames/ tweaked backsories.
That is if we assume that the "book of life" is the same as or part of the dead sea scrolls; It might be something else entirely.

It seems that at the ending, both Kaworu & Rei are now liberated from the "karma" of their past lives, free to be simply Ayanami Rei and Kaworu Nagisa. I never dared to hope that they'd get it but having "known them for so long" I consider this the best possible ending for them.

In any case it's (probably quite intentionally!) ambiguous enough to involve for various interpretations, including the big multiverse or just an internal loop in the Rebuild canon whereas the place where past Kaworu met past Shinji simply looks similar to ep 24 because Meta Reference.
It does seem like Shinji too gained some 'multiversal' awareness from being in minus space - he remembers Kaworu, but I think the reason he 'sees' the beach scene with Asuka like that could also be down to something like that - He's deciding to do what he should have done instead of choking her, also informed by how he had the hots for OG Asuka (much less apparent/pronounced in Rebuildverse proper, though Asuka's own interest was a lot clearer) even though that's clearly 'Rebuild verse Asuka' in the actual scene - She's older, for starters.

Not sure how much Rebuild Shinji ends up knowing after his return, though, it might be as simple as that he vaguely remembers seeing some flashes of other worlds while he was in minus space.
And Kaworu only witnessed episode 24 (twice) and EoE (once) which is a small slice of that timeline really. He would probably know that Rei followed Gendo once and betrayed him the second time, though.
If you go by the take that the DC scenes are unique to the EoE timeline, then the confrontation between Shinji and Asuka in the DC early ep 24 ("Kaji-san is gone!" * coffee spilling noises * ) could have been the divergence point.

Eh. I still prefer my old theory that it was Misato choosing wether to confront Ritsuko or go get Shinji. Interestingly there's Ogata interview (see the "untraslated materials" thread in the 'everything else' forum) where she theorizes that Misato's partially responsible for Rebuild divergence too - She thinks Misato set a much better example for adult-like behavior by telling Shinji about Lillith & the full importance of why they were all fighting, & that this caused him to act more proactive in the latter films.

[Heaven Piercing Man]

When we lash out at the loopers, it's more because they've been smugly spreading "sequel" garbage for more than 10 years to a level even worse than the people who have spent years thinking Evangelion is a Roman Catholic anime.

Wait, that is an actual theory? I've never heard of it.

Take a stroll through the Spanish language fanbase (both Euro and LatAm) and you'll stumble upon people still talking about the bible, jesus, God with a capital G, etc. under their own religious beliefs when it comes to fanwanking. This was much bigger during the 00s but it still persists to an extent. It's mostly been replaced by sequelism in these circles, but they act like it's "sequel FACT not theory" and become more concerned that new details "don't fit in with sequelism"

[BernardoCairo]

The impression I got is less an actual sequential loop and more that Kaworu has some sort of "quantum immortality"

If I'm not mistaken, "quantum immortality" is all about surviving "quantum suicide". If there are an infinite number of universes and they are all different, there is one in which I, for example, cannot die. In other words, if our lives are roads with several branches, there are always paths in which death is not an option (quantum immortality). Likewise, there are passages in which we are doomed to die (quantum suicide). If you think about it, this theory runs under a similar idea to the Schrödinger's cat experiment (it plays with the concept of quantum uncertainty).
This is not what's happening to Kaworu. Instead, as you said, he seems to die in one universe and then pops out in another. As a matter of fact, I agree with you! I have the impression that he is jumping between unrelated realities. I mean, there exists a bunch of parallel universes that are equally real, but not intertwined. Kaworu, being an angel, can travel through this omniverse while retaining his memories. That’s why death isn't much of a problem for him.
The omniverse is a hypothetical group of infinite universes. I've always considered NGE and NTE as being parallel realities. This does not mean that they are necessarily connected. However, both exist. If that is the case, they can be grouped into a larger set of universes. In fact, any reality (fictional or not) can be. This is what happens when we start thinking about infinites within infinites. Everything is possible hahaha!

[Arcadia's legacy]

The only thing that's really got me in a bind in all of this is those coffins, or more specifically, that there's only a finite number of them. If Kaworu can do this as many times as he wants, why isn't there an infinite number of them? And if he is limited in resurrection attempts, why is this, and why only so many?

[Konja7]

The only thing that's really got me in a bind in all of this is those coffins, or more specifically, that there's only a finite number of them. If Kaworu can do this as many times as he wants, why isn't there an infinite number of them? And if he is limited in resurrection attempts, why is this, and why only so many?

In 3.0+1.0, the coffins are a symbolic representation of the infinite loop.

In 3.0+1.0, I read we will have a scene pretty similar to his first escene in 1.0, but this will have an infinite number of future coffins on his left this time.


I think it isn't totally clear what the coffins in 1.0 really are.

[Arcadia's legacy]

If it is infinity then, then in theory the coffins should be fill every possible available space in the universe, and yet they're limited to just a small strip on the Moon, so what's up with that?

[Konja7]

If it is infinity then, then in theory the coffins should be fill every possible available space in the universe, and yet they're limited to just a small strip on the Moon, so what's up with that?

As I said, it seems we don't really know what the coffins in 1.0 really are.

In 3.0+1.0, in Instrumentality, it seems an infinite number of coffins will appear as a representation of the loop.

This is a visual imagery. So, we will need to see the scene.

[Kendrix]

There were NOT infine coffins in 1.0;
Seems more like the exaggerated number of coffins in that shot (if the reviewer was not, in fact, mistaken) would represent Kaworu's feelings that it will never end/ he will never succeed.

The instrumentality scenes are all somewhat metaphorical.

[CharPenPen]

The main "sequel looper dogma" fanboy belief is that Shinji created the movies by deciding to start over in EOE's instrumentality (like in several fanfics and Re-Take) to live a Peggy Sue second chance at wooing Asuka, becoming more like a stock shonen protagonist and pay meta-penance for being a wimp in the TV show, and all the cryptic weirdness in the movies are "remains of the TV show after Shinji resetted the world".

I expected some kind of Loop or sequel element, but not at all in the form you're describing.

I got the impression that either Rebuild was a meta sequel to the original show, in which only Kaworu was explicitly aware (which seems to have been the case), or that it was something closer to Turn A Gundam, where Evangelion repeats but with millions of years in between. A kind of ouroboros structure where history repeats in slightly different ways, becoming more positive each time. This is a very common theme in anime and manga, specifically the mecha genre. You can see elements of it in Ideon, Getter Robo, Gundam, and also Devilman.

Seems to me y'all were projecting a monolithic narrative onto folks who were expecting some sort of Meta sequel/loop aspect which was never really there.

[tenrousei]

To extremely speculatively support that there's something going on with the timeline.

Here's a shot from 3.0 when Shinji and Kaworu were looking at the night sky: https://ibb.co/McTzCtM
The most prominent and distinguishable is the Orion constellation with its belt pointing at Sirius, the brightest star of the night sky in the Canis Major constellation, right above M41 cluster. The Hydra constellation is seen partly and highlighted roughly, but the main idea is that they all are something we have in the sky right now.

What we don't have in the night sky visible to the naked eye as of now are the things highlighted in yellowish. I've added the codes of real objects located in the same places.
They can't be our solar system planets since their trajectories are high above the part of the sky present in the shot.

So I opt for these two to be either supernovas or some other astronomical events. Could they both happen in 20xx? Sure. Is the probability high? Not really. That could mean that some substantial time has passed between, let's say, NGE's Second impact in 2000 and Rebuild's Second impact.

[ChaddyManPrime]

I'd say it takes place after that manga too cause the MP Eva husks are gone

[Mr. Tines]

What we don't have in the night sky visible to the naked eye as of now are the things highlighted in yellowish. I've added the codes of real objects located in the same places.
They can't be our solar system planets since their trajectories are high above the part of the sky present in the shot.

Unlike OG, the Rebuilds have a lot of space infrastructure. Large objects in molniya orbit could appear anywhere, and would only have a slow drift against the background fixed stars towards apogee.

[tenrousei]

Large objects in molniya orbit could appear anywhere, and would only have a slow drift against the background fixed stars towards apogee.

Yes, could as well be satellites with huge solar panels, as I mentioned, the idea is extremely speculative )

[UrsusArctos]

Speaking of Molniya orbits, Japan has a satellite system called QZSS that follows a highly inclined elliptical orbit as well -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zen ... ite_System

What we don't have in the night sky visible to the naked eye as of now are the things highlighted in yellowish. I've added the codes of real objects located in the same places.
They can't be our solar system planets since their trajectories are high above the part of the sky present in the shot.

Very interesting! Reichu had the same idea about the timeline as you do, and both of us were trying to make sense of the star patterns presented. There's another pattern of celestial objects on the door to Lilith's chamber in 1.0, but neither of us were able to identify it.

However, now that you've identified Canis Major and Orion in that picture, I'm starting to have second thoughts about potential timeline shenanigans. If that sky is meant to be accurate, it wouldn't last more than a few millennia from the present. Betelgeuse and Rigel are almost certain to go supernova within the next million years, and Sirius is so close to the sun that its apparent motion would distort Canis Major's shape in a matter of a few millennia.

[Lavinius]

I find it amusing, and embarrassing, how Shinji in Q says that he likes the stars because they don't change, and Qaworu doesn't even call him out on it.
Contrast with how in NGE Rei casually notes that mountains are things that change, and of course that would be common sense to someone who's lived for billions of years (even though Rei doesn't consciously know that).
So Shinji not being aware of the stars' motion is rather a strike against the theory that he's an Adams incarnate.
---
I'm not going to talk about the loop theory. I hate time loops so viscerally that if a loop is canon in NTE I don't even want to know that it is.

[Konja7]

I find it amusing, and embarrassing, how Shinji in Q says that he likes the stars because they don't change, and Qaworu doesn't even call him out on it.
Contrast with how in NGE Rei casually notes that mountains are things that change, and of course that would be common sense to someone who's lived for billions of years (even though Rei doesn't consciously know that).
So Shinji not being aware of the stars' motion is rather a strike against the theory that he's an Adams incarnate.
---

I've never heard the theory that Shinji is Adam's incarnate.


That said, we don't know if Shinji is aware about star's motion or not. Also, star's motion doesn't change the stars we see, right?

The point is that Shinji is comfortable that the stars are the same after 14 years. After all, the stars will not change in his whole life.