AsukaShikinami10 wrote:There's also the interrogant of what happened to the original Shikinami

I wouldn't get my hopes up, since Shinji was in charge of that. He failed to see Rei6 as a person in her own right ("Ayanami is Ayanami, I can't think of you any other way" -> gives her no name, Rei6 dies), referring to her simply as "the other you" when talking to Rei2. Rei2 is holding a mock-up Tsubame, implying she got Rei6's memories somehow. One mechanism for that would be if Rei6's soul combined with Rei2's soul after death. Souls are screwy in NTE; non-locality, multiplication and reunification are nothing unusual. If that's indeed the case, then Rei2 is at that point a combined entity, including at least herself and Rei6. Yet we see no indication that Shinji is aware of something like that, and we only see one Rei leaving, not two.

With the Shikinamis, we have even less indication that Shinji even knows that there are two of them. If we assume that the Kensuke in Asuka's Instrumentality is in fact Shinji in disguise, he even repeats something he said to Rei to Asuka: "Asuka is Asuka." There's only one Asuka in his mind, and there's only one Asuka shown in the Entry Plug. The possibilities here range from Shikinami recombining with her Original, forming a new combined person who gets ejected in a single body, to both of them staying apart and Shinji only sending back one of them. As sad as it is, it seems that out of all the clones of the Ayanami and Shikinami series, due to lack of knowledge and neglect, only one of each were allowed to live on as individuals. While it can be argued that Rei6 was lost anyway, due to dying too early, Original Shikinami was alive and well when we last saw her, so her loss weighs much more heavily.

Derantor wrote:One mechanism for that would be if Rei6's soul combined with Rei2's soul after death. Souls are screwy in NTE; non-locality, multiplication and reunification are nothing unusual. If that's indeed the case, then Rei2 is at that point a combined entity, including at least herself and Rei6. Yet we see no indication that Shinji is aware of something like that, and we only see one Rei leaving, not two.

In 3.0, it was implied that Rei 6 doesn't have a soul in her body.

I've always assumed Rei 6's soul is Rei 2 (who is inside Eva-01). That could explain why Rei 2 has Rei 6 memories.

Yeah, it gets complicated because of soul-non-locality. My pet theory is that Rei, in the process of actualizing herself, actually began growing an independent soul of her own; that she was in the process of becoming independent from the "source" soul, which is somewhere else. She's not soulless like the clones in the NGE Reiquarium. So her soul not being inside her body doesn't seem to preclude her from acting as if she has a soul.

I would have forgiven anything else, but I'll be damned if they gave her a decent fight scene to really flex. Sure she loses her big fight in EoE but it's just plain awesome. Turning into a rainbow dragon angel in Shin was neat but the fight was an uninspiring wrestling match with few dynamic moments.

Small consolation that she gets the best animated fight in the movie, but it's not while piloting an Eva.

But maybe this is me just not liking CGI copypasta in movies generally, and if I did I would have thought that Asuka and Mari's fight was awesome.

So her soul not being inside her body doesn't seem to preclude her from acting as if she has a soul.

Wild guess: Maybe in Eva a natural (not Lillith's or Adam's) soul is partially created by interacting with other people.

OutlawThirds wrote:Wild guess: Maybe in Eva a natural (not Lillith's or Adam's) soul is partially created by interacting with other people.

Yes, something like that. It's really curious that Rei6 dies after Shinji refuses to give her a name, right? She's trying to create her own identity and is denied. She later gets absorbed into Rei2, which kinda supports the idea.

Derantor wrote:Yes, something like that. It's really curious that Rei6 dies after Shinji refuses to give her a name, right? She's trying to create her own identity and is denied. She later gets absorbed into Rei2, which kinda supports the idea.

To be fair, Rei6 is happy with the Ayanami identity. The reason why she was looking for a new name is because she was denied the Ayanami identity by Shinji in 3.0

I feel that Rei 6 is an extension of Ayanami/Rei2, but she was able to develop her own will. Unfortunately, I think this means that her personality was lost with her death.

Although the Tsubame doll implied that Rei in the Instrumentality has memories of Rei6, she seems to be mainly Rei2. In the Instrumentality, Rei wants to stay in that place with the Eva, that's clearly a conflict of Rei2.

OutlawThirds wrote:I would have forgiven anything else, but I'll be damned if they gave her a decent fight scene to really flex.

I'm here to stan Asuka's combat scenes at the beginning and end of Q. Sure, they aren't MP Eva EoE battles, but they still own imo.

I like to believe that the Rei clones work like the shadow clones in Naruto did. All the memories and experiences gained by the clones return to the "original" when they pop.

It's not that I don't like it, but why making it overly complicated and obscure with this original Asuka or whatever it was?

What the point of introducing tons of new elements if they aren't even going to bother explaining most of it.

What the point of introducing tons of new elements if they aren't even going to bother explaining most of it.

This is a general problem with Q and Shin, they don't have enough screentime to worldbuild and they don't have the previously established world of Eva to lean on that 1.0 and 2.0 did.

I'm here to stan Asuka's combat scenes at the beginning and end of Q. Sure, they aren't MP Eva EoE battles, but they still own imo.

The animatic-looking combat scene in Asuka's instrumentality flashback might have been a good coda if they hadn't split it into three screens. She's doing John Wick stuff to those stick figures.

OutlawThirds wrote:This is a general problem with Q and Shin, they don't have enough screentime to worldbuild and they don't have the previously established world of Eva to lean on that 1.0 and 2.0 did.

But the issue here is that they didn't need to introduce all these new elements and could have focused on the existing material instead. Get rid of all these news eva units featured for 2 minutes of on screen time and replace them with mark 9-12 instead, don't make the final/additional impacts so obscure and nonsensical, just focus on the existing things and bring it to a conclusion. Don't leave use hanging with even more questions than we had before watching this last movie.

It's pissing me off in a way because it drives me to eventually agree with people who never gave a shit about the lore and focused only on the characters. The lore is fascinating, but it's handled so poorly that it can't be taken seriously. At least I'm somewhat satisfied with how the character's arcs are resolved, but we don't even know what really happens to them at the end of the movie.

Jinroh wrote:It's pissing me off in a way because it drives me to eventually agree with people who never gave a shit about the lore and focused only on the characters. The lore is fascinating, but it's handled so poorly that it can't be taken seriously. At least I'm somewhat satisfied with how the character's arcs are resolved, but we don't even know what really happens to them at the end of the movie.

I've seen many arguments that that's more or less the point: to be unambiguous, Anno decided to make it abundantly clear the mythology is the wrong thing to focus on. I'm not convinced that's true, but if it were, my issue with it is this: all persuasive, metatextual arguments it may be making are fine, but to display something on screen at length which has no point in itself is still eating up time. If the overall grand point is the characters, and seeing as so much (if not all) of the dissatisfaction from fans is that characters didn't get enough focus, then wasting time on mythology just to say mythology is bunk is time that could have, and maybe should have, gone to character development.

I agree, I couldn't have said it better myself.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qZuvRAFhCX0
Watch this. Tell me what you think afterward

I sat through the youtube video. It says:

1) It sucks that the characters didn't cry for Asuka on Wunder's hull during Shinji and Misato's reconciliation.
2) Mari sucks for smiling too soon after Asuka's death.
3) Kenken (forever a "creepy weirdo") and Asukas' relationship sucks and is boring and vague.
4) It would be great if the writers would subvert EoE's ending and give Asuka a happy ending this time.
5) *I got bored keeping notes for about six minutes here. Narrator sure would have done a lot of stuff differently if he were the writer or director!*
6) It sucks that Asuka didn't have any say in her own fate during instrumentality, and that Shinji made a choice for her.

We've been hashing out a lot of these points in this and other EGF topics. @Zer0, was there a point that you thought this video addressed particularly well?

(Personal aside: ugh, I would much rather read an essay for 15 minutes than watch a narration-over-screencaps video like this for the same amount of time. Feels like such an inefficient way to get a point across.)

nerv bae wrote:(Personal aside: ugh, I would much rather read an essay for 15 minutes than watch a narration-over-screencaps video like this for the same amount of time. Feels like such an inefficient way to get a point across.)

Agreed. Also no, I do not see how any of it was addressed well which is why I try to get input from others on it. I did not know what to even say and therefore had no reaction and was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me would provide their input. I’d have to say that 6th point is probably the most well structured and even that has been debated on whether or not it’s even relevant for the past month now

I think one of the problems is that Asuka's arc was almost NOT resolved on her own.

Taking NGE as an example, we see Soryu’s situation is that she seeks praise and validation through piloting the EVA. If there was any problem that needs to be solved, it would be that she should not rely on EVA or self-centered but try to improve the interpersonal relationship with others by herself.
In other words, she is the protagonist or leader who to solve these problems, and the ultimate solution lies in her own heart and actions, not other external factors or people.
(Of course her problems remained unresolved till the end of EoE, but at least the story did not pretend everything went perfectly.)

But in NTE, Shikinami is almost on a very passive side.
Surely, she does have some characteristics similar to Soryu: relying on EVA and obsessing to be the best pilot.
But not like Soryu who seeks validation, she pilots EVA just to survive (would be eliminated and die if she failed to become the best), which makes the cause of her problem moved to the external environment and conditions.
Also as for obsession to become the number one, we see that after experiencing only one Angel battle and a pep talk with Misato, it was not even a big deal anymore in just one hour.

And then what's going on after 3.0 ? Asuka’s problem was further replaced by: being polluted by Angel and cursed by EVA, which were all external factors beyond her control.
She could not live a normal life because of the curse of EVA, there's nothing she can do.
She was considered as a trigger for disaster because of the Angel in her eye, there's still nothing she can do.
And Anno could have made a further depiction of her connections with other people, for instance, she could have try to make contact with villagers and seek happiness by herself even she was not human....but no, because this plot has already been reserved for Rei Q.

So the solution left to Shikinami can only be the external savior (ex: God Shinji).
Those salvations and redemptions were given to her by others, not earned on her own. She wasn't in control of her fate, could not reflect opinions, or even made her own decisions.
The person who can take care of her was Kensuke, a mature, selfless, kindness and perfect father figure; and Mari, a complete Mary Sue who has zero psychological flaws, with superb social skills that can even get along with Gendo who possesses the strongest A.T. Field in all humans. It's hard to believe that their friendship was won by Asuka herself.

So painful to pilot EVA? No problem, let's erase all of EVAs, world peace.
Can't grow up and live like a normal person? No problem, no EVAs means the curse of EVA no longer exists. Now you have a healthy 28-year-old body.
Want someone to care for you? Here, this is your pat.
Can't find a home to belong to? Sure, send you to Kensuke.

Most of the time Asuka seemed ineffective and irrelevant in dealing with her own issues, if there was anything she can dominate, it may only be the relationship between her and Shinji, but since the two barely interact or develop anything throughout the whole NTE, it turned out to be more like Asuka just said her own words while Shinji said his own, however Anno still tried so hard to let them act like they had resolved EVERYTHING including from NGE and EoE (otherwise I have no idea why and how we got that beach scene and Soryu's plugsuit which all come out of nowhere).

YES

The only problem here with Asuka's character conclusion is fact that the last scene at the beach happens so quickly that I feel that we don't get to actually see the conclusion of her feelings towards Shinji.

It was always both apparent and fitting that Asuka still harbored feelings towards Shinji despite everything, and in this scene we get an explicit confirmation of this... That's pretty much it. This scene provides nothing else towards the narrative, as all other revelations here have been known to us since Shinji's and Asuka's conversation at the Wunder, which in contrast was good in concluding Shinji's side of his relationship with Asuka.

And it's a shame that the second half of her character conclusion was like this, because the first part was genuinely great, as Asuka made her own self - realizations through deep introspection and interaction with other characters like Kensuke.

But it's also a shame because Asuka's arc is imo the most underrated one in the Rebuilds, many of the criticisms towards which I fail to comprehend to this day. Clear backstory, clear character conflicts, clear character progression that can be traced with completeness from the time she was a child soldier, to her finding a home in Tokyo-3 and her established feelings towards Shinji, to her losing everything and suffering tremendously during the 14 year gap, and most of that with minimal exposition. That's why it's disappointing that the ball was dropped at the very end.

I feel as if Asuka's actual arc is struggling with the fact that there's no place for her in the Rebuild films. It feels like she's stuck in the tragic reality of now, all of a sudden, being a sort of redundancy of the whole Rei clone arc. Asuka drove so much of the interpersonal conflict in NGE when she had more room to be a deuteragonist, and it meshed perfectly with her spitfire character and the deeper underpinnings that would be progressively explored. Then she ends up being such a pillar to what happens in EoE, and feels essential to that film, since the whole thrust of interpersonal conflict is distilled down into Shinji & Asuka. In a way NTE is even more of an ensemble, because as of Q onward it tries to balance Rei, Kaworu, Mari, and Asuka all at once, instead of paring the cast down and isolating them into separate conflicts where their dynamics can shine. Shin is kind of everything being thrown at the wall, with the exception of Rei, who everyone pretty much agrees was embellished the most successfully compared to her NGE counterpart, and the closest thing NTE has to a strong throughline--Rei's expanded prominence from the first film onward, carrying through to her high degree of focus in Shin's village act. As a result, though, Asuka becomes such a questionable addition. I think I recall someone once saying it may have been better, counter-intuitive as it is, for Asuka to remain an NGE-only character.