Here is a thread from that other forum that contains just the sort of over-analysis, (mostly by our friend Mr. Tines), we're talking about. It's a quick read at just 2 pages but here are some of the the things he speculates about:

1. How detailed do you have to be in imagining yourself in your own mind in order to bring yourself back? ...musn't forget to imagine my kidneys.

2. All that dust kicked up in EOE must have caused nuclear winter.

3. Giant Naked Rei falling to Earth must have caused a Califronia destroying tsunami.

He was not joking either.

Mr. Tines, do you still stand by any of this?

thewayneiac wrote:Here is a thread from that other forum that contains just the sort of over-analysis, (mostly by our friend Mr. Tines), we're talking about. It's a quick read at just 2 pages but here are some of the the things he speculates about:

I'm not sure if these actually count as over-analysis, as these were my snap interpretations made while watching the film, based on a library of precedents, and without having delved into either the received wisdom of the fan base nor the extra background details of the DC add-ins.

thewayneiac wrote:1. How detailed do you have to be in imagining yourself in your own mind in order to bring yourself back? ...musn't forget to imagine my kidneys.

The memory triggered by

Rei:
Anyone can return to human form as long as they can imagine themselves in their own heart.

was of a short story involving a couple of teenagers, a wishing-machine, the meat mannequin resulting from an attempt to wish up an ideal woman, and the whole law enforcement mess that resulted after the attempt to hide the body. Combined with the surrounding escatological themes, my first image of the resultant form animated by will that the returnees would manifest was something akin to the "perfected body" in some strands of Christian eschatology.

thewayneiac wrote:2. All that dust kicked up in EOE must have caused nuclear winter.

3. Giant Naked Rei falling to Earth must have caused a Califronia destroying tsunami.

As I noted, Giant Meteor Impact is something I know enough about for it to have been part of my immediate reaction - if her head can make this sort of splash



well, then that's the global ecosystem screwed.

The over-analysis came later when I did the calculations that confirmed my initial impression, that a 100-mile-tall human body collapsing would liberate roughly the same amount of potential energy as the kinetic energy from an impact by a 10km^3 asteroid impacting at 20km/s (a run-of-the-mill dinosaur-killer event).

thewayneiac wrote:He was not joking either.

Mr. Tines, do you still stand by any of this?

Well, we don't have autopsy data to tell for certain, but if the return is to frail mortal flesh, the role of soul-based morphic fields was underplayed, and that of imagination overplayed. Plus the ending is even more of a "not even a consolation prize." than at first I took it.

Though it's not as if EoE is the only movie to goof when it comes to displaying impact events - the "happy ending" of _Deep Impact_ would actually have placed the whole of North America under the grill for a few hours.

But do you really think that any of this occured to Anno? Isn't it more likely, for instance, that we're just supposed to take it at face value when they say that people can bring themselves back, and that Anno didn't even consider what the mechanics of it would be? Similarly, isn't it likely that Anno decided that when Rei no longer needed Lilith's body that it would die and fall apart, and it never once occured to him to consider the effect this would have? After all, he was writing a story, not an environmental impact statement.

thewayneiac wrote:After all, he was writing a story, not an environmental impact statement.

It's not like they're mutually exclusive. Stuff like Miyazaki's works, Arjuna, and even Gojira come to mind.

Granted, NGE never dealt very heavily with environmental themes.

Mr. Tines wrote:The over-analysis came later Laughing when I did the calculations that confirmed my initial impression, that a 100-mile-tall human body collapsing would liberate roughly the same amount of potential energy as the kinetic energy from an impact by a 10km^3 asteroid impacting at 20km/s (a run-of-the-mill dinosaur-killer event).

Could you provide more info on your calculations? Those numbers seem a little absurb considering Rei's head (god it feels so wrong to talk about this) had a starting velocity of 0.

Dave wrote:Could you provide more info on your calculations? Those numbers seem a little absurb considering Rei's head (god it feels so wrong to talk about this) had a starting velocity of 0.

Taking Reichu's figure of 150km ~ 100 miles for GNR's height, putting her centre of mass about 50 miles up - not enough that we have to worry about inverse square effects.

Earth's escape velocity is 11.2km/s, which is the speed attained by falling one radius (4,000 miles) under 1g; and kinetic energy goes as velocity squared, so an asteroid with relative velocity 22.4km/s at infinity has the energy of a 16,000 mile fall under 1g; add in the potential energy from falling, that's a 20,000 mile fall or 400 times the energy per unit mass that GNR has.

Assume GNR to have the density of water (or human flesh, much the same in bulk), while the asteroid is mainly silicate (density about 2.7 times that of water), then the asteroid has energy about 1000 times as much per unit volume. 1000 = 10³, so GNR will impact to zero altitude with the same total energy as an asteroid about one tenth her dimensions.

The big assumption is about her density - but the splash image is clearly of something significantly denser than air; and Lilith's regeneration showed that she was not limited by anything quite so tawdry as classical conservation of stress-energy.

thewayneiac wrote:But do you really think that any of this occured to Anno? Isn't it more likely, for instance, that we're just supposed to take it at face value when they say that people can bring themselves back, and that Anno didn't even consider what the mechanics of it would be?

I think this is another instance of NGE showing itself to be a mirror or a sounding-board for the viewer. All of this was me bringing a lot of my own baggage to the table, in assuming that what was reconstituted would be like the original purely in external form.

thewayneiac wrote:Similarly, isn't it likely that Anno decided that when Rei no longer needed Lilith's body that it would die and fall apart, and it never once occured to him to consider the effect this would have? After all, he was writing a story, not an environmental impact statement.

GNR could simply have evaporated away in a cloud of sparkling lights, or dwindled back to her original size {e.g. Scene - Finale: Shinji knelt weeping over pale pathetic corpse of Ayanami; he does not look up to see her standing out across the lake looking at him.}

And at that point in the movie, after the engineered escape from the slow decline of post-2I humanity had been aborted, my take-away was one of "it's all going to Hell in a handcart, do not pass 'Go', do not collect £200" even before a personal set of buttons was pushed.

Something with that much surface area is bound to lose quite a bit of energy while passing through the atmosphere, wouldn't it?

Dave wrote:Something with that much surface area is bound to lose quite a bit of energy while passing through the atmosphere, wouldn't it?

Actually it would be quite a small fraction (the significant part of the atmosphere is not very tall; and terminal velocity increases linearly with size); but the fact is - it doesn't matter. All that potential energy is going to be dumped into land sea and air in one manner or another - this is just a second order investigation into how the prompt energy input (roughly 10^7 megatons TNT equivalent) is partitioned.

In another thread

Reichu wrote:So... if you were pregnant when you go splat, do you reembody with or without your unborn child(ren)?

which led me to thinking:

If as is tacitly assumed, lower life forms re-embodied instinctively, but the more self-conscious an organism the greater the effort of volition - what about parasites and symbiotes? I have this image of everyone's gut flora re-appearing, shortly followed by tapeworms, lice, the strange mites that live in hair follicles etc...

Mr. Tines wrote:In another thread

Reichu wrote:So... if you were pregnant when you go splat, do you reembody with or without your unborn child(ren)?

which led me to thinking:

If as is tacitly assumed, lower life forms re-embodied instinctively, but the more self-conscious an organism the greater the effort of volition - what about parasites and symbiotes? I have this image of everyone's gut flora re-appearing, shortly followed by tapeworms, lice, the strange mites that live in hair follicles etc...

If the first part of what you said is true, you would be right. Although a tapeworm would be the least of your worries. There are much nastier parisites out there that infect the human body.

If lower lifeforms reembody straight away, then we are going to have a LOT of homeless parasites and microbes. Would the residents of each 'human condo' actually wait around for their host to reembody, then appear in the exact same place where they left off? That would involve a slew of souls obsessively following each human soul around, perhaps even latching on lamprey-style. Or maybe they are just 'compounded' onto the central soul; when Keel got the meltdown, we only saw one red particle exit.

Overanalysis, indeed.

DatDude wrote:I get the feeling a lot around here that people tend to look at EVA to closely. They search every fram of animation for new details and hiddin meaning. Now I understand that theirs a lot of of >I hope this is the correct word< subtext in this show, but I just can't believe that Anno made the damn show so packed with hidden meaning that you need to go to lengths like this to " get it ".

Anno was trying to say somthing with EVA and IMHO you do not ingeneral try to trasmit a message to people that you want them to understand, by filling it with so much hidding meaning that you need to be a bible scholar/anime nut/psycologist inorder to understand.

More often then not a writer writes to be understood, Anno was no diffrent with EVA. He was telling HIS story and wanted people to know the depths of his dispare, and his feelings of being unable to " connect" with people. I'm sure he didn't mean for people to look at eva under a microscope.

I think we at times stare so closly at the picture looking for meaning in every brush stroke that this picture gets lost even though its easier to see the then the strokes.

What do you people think ?

I agree. There are somethings that are a little over analyzed, but there are some smaller things that allude to other stuff. Anno really wants us to focus on his main message. The other stuff reinforces it simply.

cain luppus wrote:Anno really wants us to focus on his main message. The other stuff reinforces it simply.

Oh, come ON. If Anno were anal about his MAIN MESSAGE being the only thing worth paying attention to, he wouldn't have triple-dipped it in scrumptuous sci-fi fudge, with more-than-generous sprinklings of otaku catnip.

Reichu wrote:

cain luppus wrote:Anno really wants us to focus on his main message. The other stuff reinforces it simply.

Oh, come ON. If Anno were anal about his MAIN MESSAGE being the only thing worth paying attention to, he wouldn't have triple-dipped it in scrumptuous sci-fi fudge, with more-than-generous sprinklings of otaku catnip.

Which means we'll overly obsess in it, which will pour more money into Gainax.

Just because the Writer, Director, or Song writer didn't intend for a message or symbolism to enter his work, does NOT mean a message or symbol can be not be found in his work.

Anno wrote his story, Gainax animated the Show. But the fnas watch the show, and people can take just about anything from a piece of work they want to. That doesn't not really mean it was supposed to be there, only that the human mind can assimulate many different patterns out of chaos and order. (Or chaotic order)

Call, it over analyzing, call it fan backlash, just don't call it wrong, because we all do it.

And it IS Anno's fault for making a work that is so subjective, how can someone watch EVa all the way through, and then watch it again withhout trying to pull together pieces they may or may not have found the first time through.

Someone CAN'T. The human psyche dosen't work that way.

Besides, it's fun!

Yes but if you take it to far you miss the point.

case inpoint " all in the family " Archie Bunker was ment to be an igorant racest to make FUN of people like that. Their are people still to this day that watch the show cuz they agree with ARchie's views on things. Meat heads all of them :P

It is possable and i've seen this a lot with eva to be so raped up in finding hidden details that you miss the point all together.

DatDude wrote:It is possable and i've seen this a lot with eva to be so raped up in finding hidden details that you miss the point all together.

"So raped up", huh?

Surfeit is possible in anything. ANYthing.

Jabbs on my spelling and grammer aside I agree with you thier reichu. :)

Its cool to like eva, but when It turns into your life wheeeeel mabe its time you watch EoE again and try to imagin your self with in your own heart and COME BACK TO REALITY !

Now for homework I want everyone to go out to the video store and rent " Trekies " This is what happens if you lose touch with reality people, don't let it happen to you.

DatDude wrote:Now for homework I want everyone to go out to the video store and rent " Trekies " This is what happens if you lose touch with reality people, don't let it happen to you.

Heck, one simply needs to watch the live-action portions of Otaku no Video.

You've never watched trekies have you? Its soo much worse. People doing volinteer work along the side of the highway dressed in kilngon armor, driveing cars to work made to look like shuttle craft, and my favorate going to court for jurry duty dressed as a starfleet captin.

Let me be blunt in saying if Anno at the hight of his depression were to go to a trek convention he'd leave smiling :) cuz he'd have said to him self im not as bad as these people.

Ii'll give you an extention on your homework, now go to blockbuster