PenPenSakura wrote:This doesn't negate that Asuka's name was deliberately changed and so was her hair color.

Exactly. "It didn't mean anything back then, so the change must be meaningless, too" is an all too common fallacy that I really wish people would stop falling for. Remember the old saying, first time is chance, second time coincidence, third time a pattern. There are now three Eva pilots going by ship names ending on -nami ("wave") and one whose name means "anchor". That's not something that "just happened", there is intent there

Blockio wrote:

PenPenSakura#904754 wrote:This doesn't negate that Asuka's name was deliberately changed and so was her hair color.

Exactly. "It didn't mean anything back then, so the change must be meaningless, too" is an all too common fallacy that I really wish people would stop falling for. Remember the old saying, first time is chance, second time coincidence, third time a pattern. There are now three Eva pilots going by ship names ending on -nami ("wave") and one whose name means "anchor". That's not something that "just happened", there is intent there

I don't think so, but...in a few weeks we'll know

And I wouldn't take into account the change of colour. It reeks of an aestethic choice, it wouldn't be the first time for her.

Asuka's hair texture and colour in Rebuild is much more in line with her design in the manga. On an aesthetic consideration the strawberry blonde colour stands out much better against her plugsuit (Non Eva example- Luke's lightsabre in Return of the Jedi was changed from blue to green because the former didn't work against the Tattooine sky-the first time it'd been shown in daylight)

Now I may be attributing to the Japanese what little of nautical culture I know of in the West, but aren't ships and vessels generally considered female? Perhaps Shinji and Kaworu not having the -nami suffix or being named after ships is - in part - due to them being boys? For what it's worth, I think that the girls all having the -nami suffix very likely also has some kind of lore/backstory meaning in NTE, perhaps related to things like the 'Curse of Eva" stuff, or whatever happened in the past in regards to the possibility of cloning, or soul shenanigans, but it could also be for this too.

Blockio#904765 wrote:And I wouldn't take into account the change of colour. It reeks of an aestethic choice, it wouldn't be the first time for her.

Asuka's hair color isn't entirely consistent in NTE media either. A lot of the promo pieces for the movies make it bright orange like it was in NGE instead of the more muted auburn color seen on screen. It's also much more orange in Q than in 2.0 or the Shin trailers.

Chroma wrote:Now I may be attributing to the Japanese what little of nautical culture I know of in the West, but aren't ships and vessels generally considered female? Perhaps Shinji and Kaworu not having the -nami suffix or being named after ships is - in part - due to them being boys?

Ships and vessels being considered female isn't actually standard everywhere in the west, and I know for a fact that many Scandinavian vessels tend to have masculine names. Russian vessels are always referred to with masculine pronouns. I found a couple of discussions on the subject of ships and gender -

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArpeggioofBlue ... languages/
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/why-do-s ... e-a-gender

The Japanese language doesn't actually assign a gender to ships. Furthermore, there are male characters named after ships in Evangelion - Shigeru Aoba and Makoto Hyuga, as well as the new characters Koji Takao and Hideki Tama. So the idea of Shinji and Kaworu lacking the -Nami suffix has nothing to do with them being boys, but rather because their backstories and roles are different from the three -Nami girls. I should also point out that Asuka Shikinami is a rather different character from the old Asuka Soryu, and it was explicitly mentioned that changes in her "settei" (background material) were responsible for the new name.