And one final question.....If 18 months before Kaworu's death he was playing with the gang......somebody explain me why he introduces himself to Shinji for first time after the destruction of Neo Tokyo 3.

As I said before, Death only had sense tied with Rebirth, as an appetizer. After EoE release, a lot of people watched the movie without checking Death, just straight from the series, because a clip show in is never a compulsory rite. It's just another example of cash cow.

Enjoy the show, don't think everything about Evangelion is a conspiration to turn us crazy.

Mr. Tines wrote:We are starting to approach the reading that anything involving NERV and Angels are in fact Shinji having a psychotic interlude that makes events of normal life seem much more interesting than they actually are.

The Asylum Buffy interpretation of Evangelion. It would at least explain the 3I plot holes. Maybe Seele and Gendo are the intervening medical team/committee?

Bagheera wrote:This is why I offered the notion that everything else except the title cards is metaphoric. Makes sense of a heck of a lot, IMO.

In that case their ages are even more off, since that would make Shinji and Asuka 12 (and frankly, elementary schoolers playing in a high school auditorium doesn't make any sense). And, moreover, that doesn't negate my other points -- the meetings we see in the clips don't make sense if they'd played a concert together 18 months earlier, and what the devil are they doing in Tokyo-2, anyway?

You asked what evidence there was, well, there it is. Your theory raises far more questions than it answers.

Yes, it does raise a TON more questions than it should, especially when the goal of the theory was to explain the auditorium scenes in the way the title cards suggest that we interpret them.

I still don’t agree with the idea that everything outside of the title cards is metaphorical, though. The title cards certainly aren’t portrayed in a vacuum from the rest of the film. On the contrary, they’re there in the context of the scenes around them in order to set up the rest of the film.

SSD’s post mentions the Refrain from Evangelion booklet’s explanation to this whole thing, and it’s honestly the most plausible and sensible explanation out of all of them.

I mean, the title cards give us so much information that we know that the auditorium scenes don’t even take place in Tokyo 3, which is where it would have to take place if it was going to involve Rei. (Rei doesn’t travel in the series at all, shown in both DEATH and NGE.) If the information in the booklet is to be taken as canon, then we can still incorporate the canon in NGE into DEATH. This means that, at the time of the rehearsal in DEATH, Asuka at the time was still in Germany, and Shinji would probably still be living with his teacher. So those characters in Tokyo 2’s high school auditorium, while still canon to the real world events in Eva (nothing in DEATH suggests otherwise), don’t center around the Evangelion pilots themselves, but rather only doppelgängers of the main characters.

This is probably the real purpose of the title cards. Not only are they there to discourage any thinking that these are only symbolic scenes that don’t take place in the real world of Eva, but also provide all of the information needed in order to differentiate the Instrumentalists (playing in Tokyo 2) from the Eva pilots (later working in Tokyo 3) living in the same universe.

For example, notice how the title cards setting up the other scenes we see prior to the introduction of the auditorium scenes are a bit more specific when it comes to the characters in the scenes that follow:


The title cards in the above example use the written language (translated into English as the pronoun “she,”) to link the character from one scene to the other, telling the viewer that the little born and the grown woman in the two scenes are, in fact, the same person. (The series does the same thing for Asuka’s character, using the written language in the title cards to connect the various ages of the character to one another.)

But in the title cards leading up to the auditorium only the locations are given to us. Unlike the previous title cards, there are no references to the characters linking the character from one scene to the other:


In the above example, the written language does not refer to the character at all (which would have been translated into English with the the pronoun “he,”) and therefore it deliberately refuses to link the Eva Pilot and the Cellist as the same person.

The cinematography itself even enforces that these probably aren’t the same characters as the Eva pilots, as it never really gives us a clear look at the faces of the instrumentalists:


Outside of these shots all the film shows us are shadows of the Instrumentalists. There are a few shots of the Male Cellist's entire face (which really does look like a slightly older Shinji), but they are placed far off in the background and are quickly thrown out-of-focus, directing the viewer’s attention on the newly introduced character that the Cellist is looking at.

DEATH intentionally doesn’t focus on these Instrumentalists playing in Tokyo 2 because they are only there to provide a thematic frame work for the events leading up to Instrumentality. (It’s a play on words, so to speak.) While it does that, it also provides visual graphic matches for the Eva pilot characters that DEATH goes onto explore.

So, with everything DEATH shows us, the viewer, I think Refrain from Evangelion’s booklet is a fine explanation as to how the Auditorium Scenes interact with the rest of DEATH. Despite their real presence in DEATH’s world, the Instrumentalists aren’t the Eva Pilots. They only look like them, and are included in DEATH’s framework in order to provide the thematic glue to the movie's discontinuous editing.

TLR: It makes the most sense of these kids in the auditorium were just random high school kids in the same universe living in Tokyo 2 who looked a lot like the Eva Pilots in Tokyo 3. That’s all.

Cleaned this post up a little bit as it was rather huge. - NemZ

Evangelion, making people seek the hidden truth behind every frame since 1995

PD

As a curiosity : 18 months it's the time (more or less) between the airing of the first episode and the premiere of death & rebirth.

Ahh, EOE is also episodes 25' & 26', so it's linked with the series (I'm one of those people who think that the TV 25&26 and the movie 25&26 together make the full ending)

As I said before it's just a frickin' clip show and it only has sense attached to Rebirth, because nobody would go to the cinema to watch a clip show made to refresh te memory of a show which end a year ago neither a 30m preview of a full movie. Milking the cash cow, just that.

Jäeger wrote:As I said before it's just a frickin' clip show and it only has sense attached to Rebirth, because nobody would go to the cinema to watch a clip show made to refresh te memory of a show which end a year ago neither a 30m preview of a full movie. Milking the cash cow, just that.

Originally the clip show and EoE were supposed to be the same film, with an intermission between the two. Cinema goers were initially intended to only buy one theater ticket to see these in their entireties.

The issue was that production on EoE took longer than expected. So they released Death along with the first half of EoE, and called in Evangelion: Death & Rebirth. I guess pushing the entire release date further back without having that movie in the middle would have spread the studio’s income too thin. It’s one thing to not release a movie on time, but it’s a whole other thing to delay the income that movie would have provided. And since Eva was the only thing GAINAX was working on at the time, it was the their only source of new income. (Unlike a studio like Warner Brothers, which has several films in production at a time, allowing them to delay their Superman v Batman film a whole year while still having income from other movies that would theoretically keep them financially afloat.)

Er... say what now?

Freaky, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Are they from an alternate world without evas? Are they just other people in the world who are cosplyaing as pilots? Are WE just seeing them as the children but in reality they're just normal kids? Are they future versions of the children? Does this mean anything at all besides being a nice metaphor for all the pieces coming together before instrumentality (or playing instruments, in this case) can happen?

I don't know which of these you are or are not advocating at this point.

NemZ wrote:Er... say what now?

I don’t think this is an alternate reality. (There’s nothing to suggest that either.) I just think that, as the Refrain booklet suggests, these are random High School kids living in Tokyo 2 who look a lot like the Eva pilots. Nothing more and nothing less.

(I thought I made that clear, but I guess not. )

If they're not the pilots then why is the redhead wearing a neural interface headset?

Bagheera wrote:If they're not the pilots then why is the redhead wearing a neural interface headset?

I dunno. But those things on Asuka’s head have never made sense to me, anyway. I was never sure how her "neural interface headset” always seemed to behave like a pair of hair clips, even though we know that they can’t behave like a pair of hair clips. The way she wears them suggests she broke them to personalize them, but her character throughout the show never seems to be the type to break anything involving her precious Unit 02. They’re basically one giant continuity error throughout NGE, so I see reason why that their continuity error-riddled appearance should change in these auditorium scenes in DEATH. At least it makes the errors consistent throughout, ya know?

Honestly they’re probably just hair clips that happen to look like her neural interface headset in the auditorium scenes. It’s about as plausible as having two natural red-heads in Japan that look that much alike.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:I dunno. But those things on Asuka’s head have never made sense to me, anyway. I was never sure how her "neural interface headset” always seemed to behave like a pair of hair clips, even though we know that they can’t behave like a pair of hair clips.

And we know this how?

The way she wears them suggests she broke them to personalize them, but her character throughout the show never seems to be the type to break anything involving her precious Unit 02. They’re basically one giant continuity error throughout NGE, so I see reason why that their continuity error-riddled appearance should change in these auditorium scenes in DEATH. At least it makes the errors consistent throughout, ya know?

Calling the headset a continuity error just because she wears it all the time is a stretch. There's really no reason it can't be two pieces that do double duty as hair clips, and that's assuming it needs to be in two pieces to begin with (which seems silly to me, but whatever). I mean, hell, Ha even flatly tells us it's possible, so I don't even see the point to worrying about the matter at that point.

Honestly they’re probably just hair clips that happen to look like her neural interface headset in the auditorium scenes. It’s about as plausible as having two natural red-heads in Japan that look that much alike.

You realize that sinks your argument, right? I mean, three of those pilots are very distinctive by Japanese standards, so this lookalike nonsense is a tough sell. I'm sticking with "AU where Eva is an allegory" myself. I think SSD had the right of it here.

Bagheera wrote:And we know this how?

Well, their width, for one. Both Shinji and Rei (and Kaworu in NTE) wear their headsets on the front part of their head, whereas Asuka wears them behind her head. Even most adjustable headsets on electronics such as headphones or stage mice adjust that much. This might suggest that Aska wears her headset backwards so that they would be behind her head, but there’s no band across her forehead suggesting that either. And we do see Shinji’s headset in Jo, and it is without hair clips attached to them. I guess if Asuka’s “headset” isn’t a head set but a pair of hair clips, then they would have to be custom ordered. (Asuka would do something like that.)

The idea that the auditorium scene is all alternate dimensional is interesting, albeit somewhat unfounded in any scene specific to Death itself. But since EoTV and EoE both explore alternate realities, it is nonetheless a very plausible explanation when Death is considered as an extension of NGE’s and EoE’s canon. So, yeah. I can buy that. I just can’t buy that the scenes don’t take place anywhere at all in anything and are only metaphorical in the story being told to us, what with all of the title cards specifying the exact times and location and everything.

That being said, unlike the other alternate realities in EoTV and EoE, it would have to be an alternate reality that does include the presence of the Evas. Neural headsets aside, there’s still the fact that they’re living in a “Tokyo 2” for some reason, a city that probably wouldn’t exist unless something apocalyptic happened to the first Tokyo.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Well, their width, for one. Both Shinji and Rei (and Kaworu in NTE) wear their headsets on the front part of their head, whereas Asuka wears them behind her head. Even most adjustable headsets on electronics such as headphones or stage mice adjust that much. This might suggest that Aska wears her headset backwards so that they would be behind her head, but there’s no band across her forehead suggesting that either. And we do see Shinji’s headset in Jo, and it is without hair clips attached to them. I guess if Asuka’s “headset” isn’t a head set but a pair of hair clips, then they would have to be custom ordered. (Asuka would do something like that.)

Well, yeah, which means the problem goes away. And this is even confirmed in Ha (with the test clips), so I'm not seeing the problem.

Though again, I still don't see why it can't be one piece. So hers is wider than the others, so what?

The idea that the auditorium scene is all alternate dimensional is interesting, albeit somewhat unfounded in any scene specific to Death itself.

The fact that the alternative is ludicrous is foundation enough, IMO. You're positing that not only are doppelgangers of every pilot meeting for a concert, but that one of them also has her alternate's signature piece of ornamentation as well. That's stretching credibility to the breaking point, there.

That being said, unlike the other alternate realities in EoTV and EoE, it would have to be an alternate reality that does include the presence of the Evas. Neural headsets aside, there’s still the fact that they’re living in a “Tokyo 2” for some reason, a city that probably wouldn’t exist unless something apocalyptic happened to the first Tokyo.

Which does not necessitate the existence of Evas by any means. An alternate scenario for the existence of Tokyo-2 is a lot easier to swallow than the alternative you're providing.

Bagheera wrote:Which does not necessitate the existence of Evas by any means. An alternate scenario for the existence of Tokyo-2 is a lot easier to swallow than the alternative you're providing.

True, and that would be more interesting to consider.

But then, if they’re not Eva pilots then then why is the redhead wearing a neural interface headset?

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:True, and that would be more interesting to consider.

But then, if they’re not Eva pilots then then why is the redhead wearing a neural interface headset?

Because in that scenario they're just hair clips. Positing that that happens in an AU is a lot easier to sell than positing that it happens in NGE. One is symbolism, while the other is absurd coincidence.