The symbol Stands for the (Ending of a Repeat) in sheet-music. (When the repeat-symbol is absent at the beginning)

We know that (though your example is musically ungrammatical); the question is whether the two dots are a colon introducing what follows (as in the titles of the other films), or an integral part of the sign (in which case it's a repeat sign, though what's repeated is still unknown), or a deliberate ambiguity (to ensure that we don't have a clue what it means).

Evangelion 1.0 : You Are (Not) Alone
Evangelion 2.0 : You Can (Not) Advance
Evangelion 3.0 : You Can (Not) Redo

Shin Evangelion : || (?)

It could go either way for me. I honestly can't wait re-watching the whole series over and over again in order to find out. (Which, in turn, might make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and isn't the whole series about fulfilling prophecies by yourself anyway, and- ARGH! MY BRAIN HURTS!)

How would you actually say that symbol when reading the title? Would it just be "Shin Evangelion: End" or "Shin Evangelion: Repeat?"

Could be a double meaning

BlueBasilisk wrote:How would you actually say that symbol when reading the title? Would it just be "Shin Evangelion: End" or "Shin Evangelion: Repeat?"

When Misato says the title during the next film preview, the symbol goes unpronounced.

^Perhaps why they didn't do that is so that this type of discussion can happen as we're waiting. Bold move Anno When the movie comes out, may it be delayed another 5 years, we'll have our answer.

I like how Anno's titles are more meta than all of NTE.

I know it's both an old an (at moment) useless discussion but none mentioned the fact that on the Evangelion site the buttons for the movies show the ":" before the numbers.



The :X.XX / :FINAL thing has been going on the site for a long time, dating back to december 2011.



The website is of course not an indication of anything but at the same time I can see Anno intentionally putting the ":" there, the timeline is a bit suspicious too, around that time Anno probably had most of the movie planned.


SPECULATION TIME: Maybe Anno is implementing the same trick he has been using the (Not) part in the international title. Shinji (the viewer) will initially think that it's going towards "the end" only to discover he has been gifted of "one more play/try/chance", fulfilling both the "||" and ": ||" meanings.

riffraff11235 wrote:Also, if you go the the official Evangelion website, you can see the numerical titles listed along the bottom of the page as ":1.0", ":2.0", ":3.0", and ":FINAL". If we superimpose this onto the Japanese title, the reading becomes "Shin Evangelion Gekijou-ban: FINAL".

This was brought up by a poster in 2013.

Although it is clearly ambiguous, and the ambiguity is arguably intentional, and I'd argue more to the point than "is it 'Shin Eva {:||}' or 'Shin Eva: {||}'" simply because you could make a decently strong case for either, even though obviously none of us are in Anno's head to know for sure.

I will admit I quite like the {:||} aspect, since my own headcanon is that NTE is in some kind of weird-ass parallel timeline to NGE, which it already pretty much is if only in a meta sense given the very existence of NGE and NTE as works of fiction in our universe (call it a loop if you want but I'm wary of getting too truther-y with this). But the very fact that Misato didn't read out the full title in the Shin preview is some indication that we're basically dealing with Schrödinger's anime title which I mean, fuck, whatever, we'll know by the time the 2024 Paris/LA Olympics roll around I guess.