Well, while I definitely agree with the "franchise" problem nowadays, with everyone trying to make franchises from random shows and movies ,just because they saw the success of the Marvel CInematic Universe, Evangelion is different.
These are not different shows artificially connected, like let's say they would do with NGE and Tengen Toppa or ...Magnum.
It's just 4 movies, literally called the rebuild of Evangelion, with the first 2 movies basically just a graphic update-remake.

Full metal alchemist is different again- It was a show made before the source material was finished, so, just like many other anime- ended up having a different ending, made up buy the anime writers, a fan fiction. Fma brotherhood is the real, canon story.

With NGE we don't have that. Yes the last 2 episodes were...made in a certain way because of budget cuts etc, but we got End of Evangelion, which is considered the truer, more detailed ending for the series.

What is rebuild then? Not the original intended idea, but something the original creator comes up with right now, to make something different. Not sure if we ever seen anything like this before. Personally, with 3 of those Kaworu quotes "THIS time I'LL make you happy" "I've been waiting for you" "don't worry, we will meet again"
I feel a ....kind of limbo would be a good idea, connected to the EoE, where Shinji keeps reliving his life until he solves his problems.
Yes I get the "bad decisions must have consequences" message, but it's a show about giant god like beings, actually restarting life, so I definitely not think it's a stretch.

Shinji already is reliving his life until he solves his problems. The movies embrace the concept of recurrence within individual lives, and also how repetition is passed from one generation to the next.

Kaworu's lines are unexplained, but so is most of the movies' world. Even the main character has undergone mind-wiping to make him forget events from his own life. Everything is extremely byzantine and steeped in conspiracies within conspiracies. The children's lives were planned before they were born, and there's legitimately a chance they're reincarnated aliens. There is so much context that's simply not present yet.

Deciding that NGE is needed to resolve anything in this story is comparable to trying to resolve a mystery from your own past by attempting to contact previous incarnations of your soul.

Ryuichi wrote:with the first 2 movies basically just a graphic update-remake.

The first film might seem like that, but if you are paying attention, and know NGE well enough, you will realise that there are significant differences - and these differences enable a difference story to be told later on.

The second film has so much that is nothing like NGE that I sometimes wonder whether people watch anything other than the angel fights.

pwhodges wrote:The first film might seem like that, but if you are paying attention, and know NGE well enough, you will realise that there are significant differences - and these differences enable a difference story to be told later on.

The second film has so much that is nothing like NGE that I sometimes wonder whether people watch anything other than the angel fights.

From all I brought up in that post, is that half sentence really what you concentrated on?:S

I meant relatively to the third movie. The changes there were still inside the "let's just update some storylines, cut ous half the episodes and have a more understandable ending made for a popular market".

But what I meant by that sentence is that the changes were not that different in the first movie at least to make me think when it came out that it's a completely reimagined show.

One possibility is to have the last movie follow Shinji, Asuka and Rei, not showing what Nerv and Wille is up to, but them trying to travel through the ruins, while things are happening around them without we, the viewers knowing what exactly Ghendo is doing. JUst Shinji finding himself, and have a resolution which is completely disconnected from the lore. That would be unexpected, but ...a resolution.

What I didn't like about the movies is that Shinji's conversations with the other characters were cut for time constrain reasons, so the angel fights are the thing we got more in rebuild. This is why I prefer tv shows, time to explore the characters.

Ryuichi wrote:Full metal alchemist is different again- It was a show made before the source material was finished, so, just like many other anime- ended up having a different ending, made up buy the anime writers, a fan fiction. Fma brotherhood is the real, canon story.

How it was made wasn't my point. The 2003 series still exists out there as a work independent of both Brotherhood and the original manga and as a viewer you wouldn't conflate the three because of how they differ. From what I've read, Arakawa requested that the TV series have an original ending that differed from the manga's so the audience wouldn't see the same one in both media.

The movie series isn't the first official alternate take on Evangelion. The TV series is the "original work" of the franchise but Sadamoto's manga actually the first release, starting serialization 10 months before NGE went to air, and right out of the box it has some pretty significant differences from the TV series in terms of events and characterization. In some ways it's more different from the episodes it's adapting than 1.0 is. No, Anno didn't write the manga but Sadamoto was involved in a lot of the foundation work for the series and the world beyond just doing the character designs. It eventually meandered its way into its own telling of End of Evangelion, but even then the characters, events, contexts and the ending were very different from the show and the film.

That's the point I was getting at. The manga and TV show both sprang from the same core ideas but you can't just plug one into the other because they share similarities. People tried that with Mari once Sadamoto included her in the manga's bonus chapter.

Ryuichi wrote:What is rebuild then? Not the original intended idea, but something the original creator comes up with right now, to make something different. Not sure if we ever seen anything like this before.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind comes to mind. Miyazaki changed the story and characters he'd already written to better fit the format and needs of a feature length film while the manga went off in a totally different direction.

@Reichu: One of the things I find most dubious about the sequel theory is exactly this. NGE Shinji doesn't have everything 100% figured out, but he finally came to understand the lesson that would allow him a path to happiness and to part ways with Yui for good. Movie Shinji still doesn't hasn't figured it out yet, so if he and NGE Shinji were one and the same, then he'd be going through a different chain of events just to get back to the original conclusion?

BlueBasilisk wrote:
@Reichu: One of the things I find most dubious about the sequel theory is exactly this. NGE Shinji doesn't have everything 100% figured out, but he finally came to understand the lesson that would allow him a path to happiness and to part ways with Yui for good. Movie Shinji still doesn't hasn't figured it out yet, so if he and NGE Shinji were one and the same, then he'd be going through a different chain of events just to get back to the original conclusion?

That is a very good point!

BlueBasilisk wrote:Anno says made the decision to add Mari to the story all by himself, wanting to add a new female pilot from the outset because he didn't think he'd be able to change the course of the story otherwise

There's also this:

https://japanesetranslationblog.wordpre ... -for-flcl/

Well, in regards to Mari, she is the result of us trying to make a character that isn’t very ‘evangelion’-like. Perhaps the way she’s one step away from the seriousness of ‘Evangelion’ makes her appear more ‘flcl’-like. I didn’t make her purposefully into a ‘flcl’-like character, but rather she was the result after talking to and finding some common ground with Anno-san.

That's the equivalent of DC hiring Josh Whedon to make the dceu "more like the mcu"...

pwhodges wrote:The first film might seem like that, but if you are paying attention, and know NGE well enough, you will realise that there are significant differences - and these differences enable a difference story to be told later on.
.

The question though, is how specifically these changes improve the story. Simply noting that the movie "subverted expectations" isn't really a defense of it.

PenPen4life wrote:The question though, is how specifically these changes improve the story.

But "improve" implies that the same story is being told. It turns out that it isn't, though I agree that's not really clear until the second film - at which point it becomes obvious.

pwhodges wrote:But "improve" implies that the same story is being told. It turns out that it isn't, though I agree that's not really clear until the second film - at which point it becomes obvious.

Question is, how different the conclusion will be.

We already had two different ways to show a similar happy ending
-The series ended with Shinji getting to the happy conclusion through dialogues with the other characters ( mainly because the studio ran out of money)

-EoE had a darker, graphic, and more action filled way but led to the same ending, Shinji choosing the real world, with all its pain, because it's worth living.

How rebuild will end? Same conclusion through different means?

Thing is, when I heard them saying the movies are made to be more understandable for the public, I thought they meant more hints to the lore ,and a clear happy ending. But Anno definitely not made it easier to decrypt anything. So it's the same thing through alternate means? Or again, a different conclusion? And if the previous endings were positive...what else can we get? Surely it won't just end up with Shinji giving up.

Ryuichi wrote:Question is, how different the conclusion will be.
How rebuild will end? Same conclusion through different means?

It won't be the same as either EoTV or EoE because Shinji's main issue in this story is different!

^Plus Seele is gone and we don't know what Gendo is planning to do. But the fact that Fuyutsuki thinks it'd be in Shinji's best interests if Gendo just opened up to him and the fact that this Gendo seems more pro-humanity and more of a co-conspirator and less a victim in Yui's conspiracies leads me to believe that whatever the end goal is, it might not be all that bad. But the problem is that he's very similar if not the same as Shinji, just more extreme. You can see more of the old Gendo emerging from Shinji as Rei's situation begins to mirror Yui's.

I really doubt it will happen since Unit 01 is basically the face of the franchise alongside Rei, but I think it would be best if the story stuck to its guns and Shinji doesn't step foot in an Eva again, whether it be Unit 01 or any other. It doesn't make him happy. In fact it makes him increasingly unhappy the more he does it and keeps driving wedges into his relationships. Gendo evidently doesn't need him for what he's doing. He was going to let Shinji leave and let the Dummy Plug take care of things in his place. Yui's the one who wasn't having it and ended up drawing him back in.

pwhodges wrote:But "improve" implies that the same story is being told. It turns out that it isn't, though I agree that's not really clear until the second film - at which point it becomes obvious.

The story is relying heavily on characters and plot points established in the prior story regardless of whether it's different, hence it's fair to ask what these changes that made it different actually do for the narrative it's deriving so much from.

The story of the movies doesn't rely at all on NGE.

I've showed the movies to people that never watched NGE and they understand it pretty easily. Sure they still had questions like "what are the angels?" and such, but they weren't relevant to what the movies really are about, and to be fair they were never acknowledged in the TV show either.

pwhodges wrote: We need an apocalyptic conclusion to the war between Wille and Nerv (we've seen some of Nerv's mass-production preparations, and Wille has a ship beyond anything the terrestrial forces had in the series).

I think I wouldn't discount any possibility (though I agree with you on this scenario being likely).
What if we get a conclusion to Shinji's story, but with the war still going on?
I'm...starting to like this idea. It's pretty Anno too. Not all problems are solved by the end.

I'm not so sure those Evas are meant to fight Wille. Wille has significant air and naval power but Nerv is mass producing land transport trucks and pallet rifles with prog knives rigged on them like bayonets. They're very poorly equipped to fight an airship like Wunder which could easily pick them off in droves from the air. Way less effective than the existent Mark.04s unless they're super evas like the Vessel of the Adams. But I doubt they are if Nerv is wasting resources to build basic guns and ground transports. Is Gendo even trying to defeat Wille? They are both aligned against Seele's goals.

Besides, building an evil army for a big confrontation doesn't really sound like Gendo. So what does he need that many Evas for? My guess is that he plans to use them for some big operation within the L Containment Field. Without Rei and Kaworu to pilot and their one remaining Eva incapacitated Nerv is short on manpower that can function within it. Maybe they're supposed to do something with the Black Moon or the FoI?

To tell you the truth, I just don't see where the story could possibly go from here. Seele is gone now that Gendo shut them down, Lilith is gone now that she exploded, all the Angels are defeated, Kaworu is dead, Willie took Shinji and Rei Q, leaving Nerv without any EVA pilots, and Unit 13 is no longer in usable condition now that the two Lances of Longinus are impaling it, which likely can only be removed by another EVA, and I doubt a Dummy Plug would work with the unique double-entry system of Unit 13 since it requires two separate people being in sync (if Gendo only has Rei Dummy Plugs). At this point, what else is there? What's Gendo going to do? All his pieces are gone. With how things have turned out, 3.0 honestly could have been reworked into being the conclusion of the Rebuilds. They really should have just had the events of 3.0 be 3.0+1.0 and used the actual 3.0 to show what happened inbetween 2.0 and the 3.0 we got.

I don't think it's that hard to come up with a potential plot.

We have the Wunder, the Nemesis series and a ruined world. This could make for action set pieces already. What if there are crazy storms now and the Wunder has to survive that stuff (actually one of the concept artworks back in January 2017 during the khara expo looked like this)?

I have been speculating since 3.0 that there has to be some sort of small town where humans are currently residing, where Shinji could potentially meat the aged old cast, try to reconnect, etc. Remember how a big chunk of 3.0 was very laid back, just Shinji and Kaworu talking about stuff.

Gendo very clearly wants to initiate his version of Final Inpact, some sort of clash with Wille is inevitable (would be surprised if this doesn't happen).

And, c'mon, Final Impact will happen, and the potential once that abstract event occurs is infinite. Possibly flashbacks/memories of characters, experimental animation, mind conversations like in EoE (though I wonder if Anno will do that again), the entire Earth and humanity possibly mutating into one living core (remember the giant mouth on the ground in 3.0?).

And this is just based on stuff implied by the prior film. What about all the new stuff the could introduce?
What if some of Wille's staff aren't happy with Misato leading them and there is internal conflict? Where is Rei II and what will her role be? How will Rei Q react to the outside world? Again, I think this movie could be pretty laid back, focusing on human interaction.

Joseki wrote:The story of the movies doesn't rely at all on NGE.

I've showed the movies to people that never watched NGE and they understand it pretty easily. Sure they still had questions like "what are the angels?" and such, but they weren't relevant to what the movies really are about, and to be fair they were never acknowledged in the TV show either.

So?

Irrelevant of whether it stands on its own, it is still largely using much of another story's elements, hence, it's perfectly fair to compare it to the orginal story.

That's what happens when your story features Shinji, Asuka, and Rei.

Also, lol, at

Sure they still had questions like "what are the angels?" and such, but they weren't relevant to what the movies really are about

If they aren't relevant to what the movies are about. then they shouldn't be in it. That they're in it despite not being relevant to what the story is about is an example of

The story is relying heavily on characters and plot points established in the prior story

.

If something isn't meant to be evaluated when you judge the story, then it shouldn't be in the story.