End of Eva was the bleakest thing Anno's done by far, and even that ends on a hopeful if bittersweet note. Gunbuster, Nadia and Eva TV all have happy endings, and he's worked on stuff like freaking Cutey Honey.

He loves referencing his older works in Rebuild, so here's an image from Diacon IV to consider:

Desolate red Earth looks awfully familiar. And in this bit it's being changed back into a lush, living world. What was changed by an Eva can be changed by it again, and there are at least three of them left. I fully expect to see this in 3.0+1.0, either as a reference to Daicon IV or as an inversion of the Earth turning red in End of Eva with the giant crosses disappearing. Shinji revitalizing the Earth after 28 years would more than earn whatever redemption he might need.

Gob Hobblin wrote:And what about people who willingly give their lives? What benefit do they get when they sacrifice themselves to help others?

Think about everyone who ran into the towers on 9/11: none of them wanted to die, but they all knew it was a possibility, and they went into the towers anyway. And a lot of them died because of it.

Truthfully, your assertions say a lot more about you than they do about humanity.

I agree that people tend to help people for no reason then to ensure that other people can be alive and happy. 9/11 responders acted so that innocent people wouldn't have to be hurt. People do generally help each other, if just because they want to see another person be hurt.

But Shinji is seen by many as the CAUSE of suffering for many innocent people. So from looking at the prison system, there's plenty of evidence for how he'd be treated in how mass shooters are. For a far worse example, think of genocide that goes on throughout the world if only because of the hatred between groups of people. The Armenian genocide was also the result of groups of people banding together for a common cause.

The one piece of evidence otherwise is how Asuka helped him get up and Misato's letting him live, indicating that they don't entirely blame him. Because what would you do with someone who nuked the world?

Anyway, I think that it could go either way for Shinji in 4.0, depending upon how he and others act.

This whole thread is based on the assumption that Anno made something with a sad ending. Now, we can get into the subjectivity of sadness all day long, but at the end of the day EoTV ended with Shinji finally feeling optimistic about life, and EoE ended with everyone have the ability to return to Earth if they chose to. Whereas I still hold to the idea that the two endings make the viewer consider two different outlooks, one of them far more bleak than the other, I can't call either ending sad.

EoTV's ending was the happiest thing I saw in the TV series since, well, Episode 7 or thereabouts. Maybe Ep 9 as well. (It's hard to not feel happy about that training montage and battle.) EoE promises a hope that Shinji can't seem to come to terms with himself, but that hope is still there. The dream can still exist at the end of his reality. This... isn't sad either. It's emotionally draining, sure. It's a grueling emotional experience, it's an ending that keeps the viewer guessing about Shinji's emotional state, it's a lot of things, really. But it isn't sad.

Misato death scene is sad.

Ritsuko's death scene is sad.

Asuka's death scene is sad.

Gendo's submission into Instrumentality is sad.

But EoE's ending is not sad. In some senses, it's even happy. In the beginning of EoE, Shinji asks Asuka to ridicule him like she used to. Then he jerks off. In the middle of the movie, Asuka tells Shinji that she knows about his jerk-off fantasies about her, then says that if she can't have all of him, then she wants none of him. At the end of the movie, Asuka ridicules Shinji like she used to, and Shinji learns not to be so destructive. They both have all of each other, all to themselves. They got what they wanted. Asuka isn't sharing Shinji with billions of other people inside Instrumentality, and Shinji can finally see Asuka in a form where he believes his emotions were real.

Actually, the fact that Anno took time off for Eva Shin due to his emotionally weak state suggests that he is striving towards a happier ending. He doesn't want to end Eva on a sour note. He doesn't want to end any work of fiction on a sour note. They might be bittersweet, joyous, revealing, or even surrounded in a bleak atmosphere by his endings, but they are never sad, and they are never hopeless. His characters always find solace in some form. We're just always surprised by what form that solace takes.

Thank you, Freaky. Thank you so much for this. You hit the nail on the head, and said exactly what so many of us were trying to say. Excellent post!

BlueBasilisk wrote:End of Eva was the bleakest thing Anno's done by far, and even that ends on a hopeful if bittersweet note. Gunbuster, Nadia and Eva TV all have happy endings, and he's worked on stuff like freaking Cutey Honey.

This honestly makes me all the more curious as to how he'll handle Godzilla

^ Anno's Godzilla will start with Godzilla wandering the streets of a Tokyo that he already destroyed. In the movie, Godzilla has to come to terms with the destruction he caused, the resulting loneliness, and why Tokyo needed to be destroyed in the first place.

Followed by all the human characters lining up to congratulate him on discovering these things for himself.

...followed by panic, because Godzilla is truly the King of the Monsters, who has no time for the puny sentiments of man.

^followed by the realization the beast inside him was Brad Pitt all this time.

As per tradition there will be too much talking and not enough Godzilla smashing.

Seeing how the 54 movie was that way, that's just how i like it

i dunno... Xanderkh believes I'm a pessimist, but i believe I'm a realist; Evangelion was never supposed to be a happy anime, its grim from the very moment you know that they use children to pilot and defend humanity, It was basically established that way deliberately, and if anything who knows Anno could surprise us--there could be a happy ending, there is potential, i won't deny that

I think it's important that we don't confuse "optimistic ending" with "happy ending."

EoTV had a happy ending. (*everyone claps* "Congratulations!") EoE had an optimistic ending, with a lot of heavy weight attached to it. (*all but two are contently tanged* "How disgusting.") None of them are sad or pessimistic endings. The finales of either of these aren't tragic.

Nadia had a "happy ending", with the result that I promptly forgot about everything I'd seen and moved on with my life. I certainly hope that the new Eva movies don't suffer such a fate. What a waste that would be.

^ Well, that certainly wasn't the response I had to Nadia's ending. The last episode's graphic match cut into the end credits, with all of the children chasing the arial representation of their dreams, hopes, and ambitions, made me crippling nostalgic for things I had seen only 5 minutes ago. And it was the same recycled end credits animation I had seen for the past 30+ episodes.

...Also, I've always considered the happy scenes in question to be more or less an "Epilogue." The true ending of Nadia is