ElMariachi wrote:Cookie H Wilson#932209 wrote:I have read all of this thread and I still can’t find any real answer to how an impact is done and what is needed for it to happen
Really it seems so random at each impact
It's simple: the recipe for an Impact is "whatever is needed for the narrative purpose of the current scene", then you justify it by having one of the characters says that it's "another ritual" or that an Eva served as "trigger" for another one.
That's how sometimes you need an Impact Trigger inside it and sometimes not, sometimes you need one or two spears and sometimes not, sometimes you need to have the Eva eat one Angel and sometimes two or three, sometimes you need a very specific "True Evangelion" yet WILLE treat their pilots as if their run-of-the-mill Production Type Eva can make one too if pushed too far even without an Angel around.
I have to agree with both above points. I've been sort of underwhelmed with the theory work post-Shin, as it feels like it doesn't amount to much so far. Long, in-depth posts appear to have a semblance of reasoning only for replies to immediately point out one or two instances of contradiction or outright omission that completely undoes the entire chain of logic. I'm not seeing the dialectical one hopes for in even argumentative interpretation. It seems one can only come to a unified system of thought by omitting something, because taken altogether, the rules in NTE appear to be fundamentally obscure, and by that I don't meant that it's without purpose.
In other words: attempts to reach unified theories start going off-script pretty soon, and end up getting too far away from the actual function in a script-writing sense. Their utility isn't for the generation of theory and debate or even articulation, but dramatic effect. The film doesn't seem concerned, anyway, with the rules, and in fact seems to be casting the rules as an oppressive force (despite, ironically, being convenient for plot momentum due to their undefined nature) thematically, something undone anyway, and the emotional beats are pretty apparent. What's left behind is the question of whether, outside of the intentions of the hand-washing of the ending, the rules are done away with in a manner that justifies itself based on how they operated beforehand; or to put it another way, how well the math checks out the entire way, not just in the terms of how the film wishes for it in the end.
The script takes it for granted that the audience will take it for granted that there's underlying information that makes sense of everything, even without it being fully and coherently revealed in a consistent and thorough way. This is more or less what has always driven Eva's storytelling, but it was easier to swallow in the old material because of linearity. We begin at second impact and end at third impact, and it's simply easier to draw connections between events and their causes. Enough was established to take Asuka's awakening in her hibernation before the MPE fight at total face value and thus be absorbed in its intended effect: cathartic drama. In contrast, was enough established to react to Asuka's scene against Eva 13 for its intended effect to occur? We're meant to feel shock, but are we feeling shock that draws attention to absorption in the scene, or are we left alienated and unable to identify and relate to the human element, since we can't naturally imagine a cause-effect throughline that makes sense?
With the repetition of third-, near third-, final-, another impact, etc., the calculus has become exponential and it becomes more of a challenge to suspend disbelief and go with the flow, even if it all levels out into the same dramatic demand: the basic assumption that shadowy workings are going on, are perhaps beyond comprehension, and the dramatic effects that result are really the crux and what we can obviously work to understand, anyway. But when we can't reason out what Asuka knows, where she acquired her knowledge (in the immediate aftermath of Q? somewhere along the line of the massive timeskip?) and how she meant to apply it, the shakiness of the rules start to intrude, impede, and muddle up the drama too. And really, that's where the important discourse seems to lie for me: not the rules and how they work for their own sake, but whether or not these rules are buried or revealed in the right ways for the drama to function in relation to them. Note that in this example, it's not exactly necesarry for the rules in total to be comprehensively laid out; it's more about Asuka's extent of knowledge of said rules and if enough of
that is elaborated on for the drama to function.
The film opens with hybrid angels/evas in massive quantities, there are millions of new units on screen at once, an entire dimension is introduced, an object that is powerful because it was bestowed with power, or in other words, is powerful because it is, and operates totally outside the realm of physics, and in itself makes speculation moot, is revealed. I think, based upon the sheer onslaught of new ingredients, events, and trump cards, the only thing we're really meant to reason out is that
the rules are fluid. In absence of another infodump ala the Evangelion 2 game (were the rules established therein even possible to deduce off of information from NGE & EoE alone?) there really doesn't seem to be much tangible progress able to be made.
