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Coming to theaters January 8th 2021
---------------------------------------------------------------------- OLD OPEN POST
Many thanks to random Marifan-kun I found on my Twitter timeline
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As many of us firstly noticed with AVANT1 and the teaser 2, Mari and Asuka got a new redesign in Shin. If Mari's design was explainable in universe, as Mari is back with Wille at the end of 3.0, Asuka's change of design made little to no sense as she was in the desert with Shinji and Rei. The two explainations we as a community gave we either "she changed plugsuit at the very beginning of Shin" or "the plugsuit was changed by the exposition to core material".
After reading Marifan-kun's Twitter however I propose a different explaination. khara is retconning the designs in 3.33 in a DC version to be released later.
Before dropping the AVANT1 bomb at Japan Expo in 2019, khara also showed a "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition - Story so far" montage edited by Hideaki Anno. It was also uploaded on YouTube at the beginning of this year (link). I personally tried to spot any difference from my BD, but I didn't find anything. Marifan-kun however had a much better eye than me and he did spot some differences: take a look at Asuka's plugsuit!
This is the scene at the end of 3.33 right before Unit-02 goes out of energy when fighting Eva 13, the plugsuit is the new, red legs, black arms design!
I then went back to my BD and this is the very same frame how it was in 2013.
Here she has purple legs and white arms, the same look she had for the rest of the movie. The accent on her chest is different too by the way.
[The difference in color tone is due to my italian BD of 3.33 having slightly warmer tones compared to the JPN version, a difference in master, this doesn't appear to have changed]
At this point I decided to look into Mari's plugsuit too, and I found some differences here too.
This is how she appears in "The story so far" video.
And this how she appeared originally in 3.33
The color of her finger is lighter in my BD and darker in "The story so far", the difference is not much, but considering my BD should be the warmer of the two the difference is actually bigger than it first look. More evidently, we can clearly see the shoulder area (left side of the image) is white in 3.33 while it's dark in "The story so far".
There are other subtle changes here too: take a look at her eye, in 3.33 they have a glossy look, while in "The story so far" they are more opaque. The glasses also got a new look, they are no longer completely transparent but there is a barely visible reflection at the bottom!
For reference, here are the new designs in Shin
And here the designs in 3.33
Considering this evidences I now fully believe khara is planning a re-release of (at least) 3.33 featuring (at least) a Asuka-Mari redesign and some improved visual quality, as I don't see the point of introducing a continuity error that only gets fixed in a recap PR video.