I'll just say that we had this same discussion recently in this thread.

I don't think the preview was a deliberate fakeout at all but I cant think of how to explain why without massive spoilers.

Blockio wrote:

This was the plan all along. If one were to go back and rewatch You Are (Not) Alone and You can (Not) Advance with knowledge of the shocks in You Can (Not) Redo, one would uncover many exciting depictions that are sure to stir the imagination

Doesn't get a whole lot more explicit than that that Q was, in fact, planned to be this way from the start. They outright tell you that the foreshadowing for it is in place. And guess what, it is. There's ancient threads on here that did predict some of the major plot elements of Q long before the movie dropped.

I'd like to see these threads. Anyway, can't get more obvious than having Urashima mentioned as foreshadowing.

Heaven Piercing Man wrote:I'd like to see these threads. Anyway, can't get more obvious than having Urashima mentioned as foreshadowing.

It's not just Urashima, there's another, more subtle foreshadowing in the song that plays when EVA-01 destroys EVA-03 with Asuka inside (kudos to Kendrix who discovered it): said song is traditionally sung during school graduations, and neither Shinji, Asuka or Rei will ever go back to school after that scene, and there's also the line in the song that says "let's be friend even thought we won't see each other again for a long time" that foreshadows how Shinji and Asuka won't meet again for 14 years (from the latter's perspective, as for Shinji it was like one day and half ago!)

The Aquarium scene is also something that hits really different.


It seems like they had a rough outline (that was supposedly explained to Ishida) & fleshed out the details as they went along.

As wildly as 2.0 changed, it always started with Mari vs Tunniel, and ended with "Eva 01 goes out of control"

Most of the things in the Preview actually happened. If you assume that Q and TuaT were still planned as a double feature then, it actually didn't change that much.

Kendrix wrote:The Aquarium scene is also something that hits really different.


It seems like they had a rough outline (that was supposedly explained to Ishida) & fleshed out the details as they went along.

As wildly as 2.0 changed, it always started with Mari vs Tunniel, and ended with "Eva 01 goes out of control"

Most of the things in the Preview actually happened. If you assume that Q and TuaT were still planned as a double feature then, it actually didn't change that much.

You know, I wonder if the changes to the ending of 2.0 explain WHY it seemingly contradicts the beginning of 3.0, with Shinji explicitly triggering 3i and destroying the world instead of it being stopped halfway. If that were the case, 3.0/Shin very well could’ve been the originally planned ending even with all the changes made to 2.0.

Archer wrote:You know, I wonder if the changes to the ending of 2.0 explain WHY it seemingly contradicts the beginning of 3.0, with Shinji explicitly triggering 3i and destroying the world instead of it being stopped halfway. If that were the case, 3.0/Shin very well could’ve been the originally planned ending even with all the changes made to 2.0.

The basic explanation isn't hard at all and I've been saying it since 2012, years before I actually watched a rebuild movie- they had to take the Cassius out of Yui to stop the Twelfth Angel, and when they did this Yui went back to Impacting.
That said, I think it's possible that Ha was originally supposed to end with the full Third Impact, and that this was changed when Anno decided Third Impact needed three films worth of complex lore for him to not make films about.

Really looking forward to this!! Do we have a release date on the 3.0 CRC yet?

^
No, no release date has been announced recently.

Kendrix wrote:As wildly as 2.0 changed, it always started with Mari vs Tunniel, and ended with "Eva 01 goes out of control"

Yep, this is what I've been saying. That phrasing, "Eva 01 goes out of control" indicates to me that N3I was always part of the plan.

Archer wrote:You know, I wonder if the changes to the ending of 2.0 explain WHY it seemingly contradicts the beginning of 3.0, with Shinji explicitly triggering 3i and destroying the world instead of it being stopped halfway. If that were the case, 3.0/Shin very well could’ve been the originally planned ending even with all the changes made to 2.0.

There's no contradiction, because in Q it's said that it's Third Impact that destroyed the world, while what Shinji did at the end of 2.0 was Near Third Impact, 2.0's Next Time Preview, WILLE and Kaworu made the distinction between N3I and 3I, the thing is that we don't know what involvement Shinji had with 3I, and he too didn't thought about it, because Kaworu worded things in such a way that made him believe that he was the direct cause of it, and because he later failed to connect the dot of the discrepancies between what Kaworu told him and what he saw in Lilith's Chamber.