Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

Discussion of the new series of Evangelion movies ( "Evangelion Shin Gekijōban", meaning "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition"). The final instalment made its debut in Japan on March 8, 2021.

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby kuribo-04 » Thu Apr 21, 2022 12:36 pm

View Original Postnerv bae wrote:I understand the issue you're expressing, that Asuka doesn't get an arc, and I agree with it general.

Are you sure Asuka doesn't have an arc? She goes from lomer uncapable of working with others to someone who's great at teamwork. Someone who can't admit her feelings to someone else to openly telling the other person. And from someone who can't accept their own value to someone who learns it's ok to be who she is.

It doesn't really bother me, though, and I'd like to be able to explain why in literary theory or storycrafting terms but I'm just not equipped to do so.

I think it's ok to say whatever you think, even if you think you lacl vocabulary or whatever. I'd say undertanding storytelling is about rationalizing what you're witnessing, understanding how different aspects work together, how it worls in a certain context, etc. and I think you can voice your opinion on that anytime with whatever words you find.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Konja7 » Thu Apr 21, 2022 12:56 pm

View Original PostArcher wrote:I’d argue that Rei is very much a “main character” of the Rebuilds, especially in 3.0+1.0.

Rei is an important character in the Rebuilds, but she seems to have mainly a supporting role.

Rei Q has a pretty important role and character arc in Village-3, but she dissapears after that. That's why I feel her role in 3.0+1.0 story is still mainly a supporting role towards Shinji.

Maybe it's because our definitions about main characters and supporting characters are different. I think supporting characters could have clearly-presented internal conflict that actually gets resolved, but they are supporting due to the role in the story.


PS: Technically, Gendo, Kaworu, Rei II, Misato and Midori have clearly-presented internal conflicts in 3.0+1.0 that get resolved, but they are supporting characters.

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby nerv bae » Thu Apr 21, 2022 1:44 pm

View Original Postkuribo-04 wrote:
View Original Postnerv bae#935181 wrote:I understand the issue you're expressing, that Asuka doesn't get an arc, and I agree with it general.

Are you sure Asuka doesn't have an arc? She goes from lomer uncapable of working with others to someone who's great at teamwork. Someone who can't admit her feelings to someone else to openly telling the other person. And from someone who can't accept their own value to someone who learns it's ok to be who she is.

Well, no, I'm not sure. I guess I'm waffling between no-arc and broken arc per discussion on the previous page. I guess my arcthinking is a little unwieldy. :tongue:

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Archer » Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:06 pm

@konja7 you’re right, probably a semantic issue lol.

I do think that Misato and Gendo are main characters. I don’t remember Midori getting much of a resolution and I even hesitate to call her attitude of “Shinji sucks” an internal conflict; I disagree that Kaworu has much of an internal conflict, just the implied character motivation of “I want to make Shinji happy”; and the whole issue with the Rei’s and their questionable identity as separate individuals is a whole clusterfuck I don’t want to get into right now.

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Axx°N N. » Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:22 pm

View Original Postnerv bae wrote:Maybe the reason I'm not bothered by this is that I'm just not educated to think in these terms, and as a result I'm blind to these issues and my brain just fills in a lot of what's missing on its own. Like, I can, and do, actively imagine the "missing" aspects of the arc and once that's complete I find the result satisfying! The joys of being uneducated ... :tongue:

Could be, but in my experience my awareness of these things doesn't override or even inform much of my viewing experience, it's more that it allows me to articulate and explore my initial, personal, emotional response; we all have our blindly intuitive gut reactions. Someone could defend the handling of Asuka's arc using the same vocabulary, I'm just not inclined to do so. And anyway, echoing kuribo above, "it's subjective" is more reliable than much of anything I've learned. I've read many academic pieces that make a very persuasive argument why a certain work is masterful and why I ought to agree, and I'll tend to agree on an intellectual level, but there are times I come away still just really not jibing with something. Or the opposite, I see a very good argument for why I ought to find something dreadful, but I still like or love it.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Archer » Thu Apr 21, 2022 6:44 pm

It’s definitely a very subjective thing. Personally, I am VERY sensitive to supporting characters being given more attention than their role in the narrative would justify. Which is why this stuck out to me in particular. Nine times out of ten, if I have a complaint about a “serious” plot-driven story it’s gonna be related to a mismatch between (perceived) authorial intent vs. actual narrative impact of a character. On the other hand there’s certainly stuff that I’ll happily gloss over knowing full well that it’s kinda stupid, that might really bother other people.

Personally I like understanding WHY I liked or did not like something, being able to break down a story and analyzing it from a “scientific” point of view; identifying what I thought the authorial intent was, identifying what I thought worked or didn’t work, and trying to come up with solutions to the issues I have with them is the most fun part about watching something for me. In fact, I find that things with “lost potential” - a solid concept with botched execution - more fun to talk about than something that does everything right. Which is why I love talking about the Rebuilds, there’s so much to chew on and think about how it could’ve been done differently.

But if that’s not how you enjoy stories, that’s totally fine. It’s like listening to music because the beeps and boops sound good vs. listening to music with an ear for the technical understanding of WHY it sounds good.

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby kuribo-04 » Thu Apr 21, 2022 10:06 pm

View Original PostArcher wrote:I don’t remember Midori getting much of a resolution and I even hesitate to call her attitude of “Shinji sucks” an internal conflict

Well, she is a minor character after all, meant to represent how humanity deals with a figure like Shinji. Her resolution is letting go of her hatred for the greater good, and her inner conflict starts the moment the object of her hatred becomes the only hope for salvation. She almost shoots Shinji lol. Add to that doubts about Misato's leadership and such.

I think Midori is as great as a minor character like that can get.
SPOILER: Show
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I disagree that Kaworu has much of an internal conflict, just the implied character motivation of “I want to make Shinji happy”;

Well, making Shinji happy is at the core of it. But we see how that leads to other conflicts and motivations, like wanting to save the world. I'm sure Kaworu is also a character people have yet to wrap their heads around in Rebuild. His final sequence in Shin I still don't think I've fully understoo.

There's also the final curveball that his selfless desire to make Shinji happy might not be that selfless after all.
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Konja7 » Fri Apr 22, 2022 6:23 am

View Original Postkuribo-04 wrote:Well, making Shinji happy is at the core of it. But we see how that leads to other conflicts and motivations, like wanting to save the world. I'm sure Kaworu is also a character people have yet to wrap their heads around in Rebuild. His final sequence in Shin I still don't think I've fully understoo.

There's also the final curveball that his selfless desire to make Shinji happy might not be that selfless after all.


It's implied that Kaworu feels he couldn't be happy due to being trapped in the Eternal cycle. So, he tries to make Shinji happy, since he sees himself reflected on Shinji. In other words, Kaworu wants vicarious happiness from making Shinji happy, that's why his desire isn't really selfless.

In a similar way, it's implied Rei II wants to give Shinji a life without the Eva because that's the life she really wants for herself. Rei II always believe a life without the Eva was impossible for her, so she wants Shinji to have it.


That said, these conflicts are shown in a very short, subtle and implicit way in 3.0+1.0. So, it isn't weird people consider these aren't clearly-presented internal conflicts

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby BernardoCairo » Mon Apr 25, 2022 1:34 pm

Déjà vu! I feel like I already read and replied to this thread some time ago XD
I don't know, man. Shikinami is such an insignificant part of the narrative that it's hard for me to have any say in the matter. The only thing I can do is compare her to Soryu, a much more prominent character. But that's probably not the way to go.
She should have died in 2.22 as that would have left a stronger impact on the viewer. They were so reluctant to give her character anything to do anyway. I only touch on this because the team actually considered killing her off.
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Postby Archer » Tue Apr 26, 2022 7:41 am

I think killing her would have been even more of a waste. At that point you might as well just not put her in the movie at all. Like seriously, she barely does anything in 2.0, killing her off at the end of the movie would just feel like a cheap attempt to drum up drama.

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Postby BernardoCairo » Tue Apr 26, 2022 4:00 pm

It's funny because she has a decent amount of screen time. It's just that, for some reason, it amounts to basically nothing. I would attribute that to her surprising lack of character progression. She does change a bit, but it's abrupt and, as a reason, feels aimless.
It's clear to me that Asuka was a difficult character for the team to translate into this new movie format. Soryu is a complex and nuanced character whose personality is a product of her creator's mindset at the time. She was tailor made for NGE and it's themes. So much had to be cut or altered that, yeah, perhaps it would have been better to keep her as a NGE exclusive and focus more on Mari and the other new characters (with perhaps a cameo at the end of the tetralogy or something). That would actually subvert my expectations in a interesting way.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Archer » Tue Apr 26, 2022 4:35 pm

Even ignoring the fact that NGE Asuka obviously gets a lot more build-up just due to the logistics of runtime, the most important factor is that the Rebuilds skip past the episodes that actually pay off on her character development (namely 22-23) without ANY replacement. If you’ve read the 2.0 CRC’s, they basically admit that sticking her in Unit 3 was borne out of narrative convenience and to actually give her something to do rather than in service to her character.

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Postby BernardoCairo » Wed Apr 27, 2022 5:13 pm

Not only that, but Asuka's journey had an actual conclusion in NGE. It's reasonable to consider Soryu as the deuteragonist of EoE (as her development is deeply connected to the movie's themes and Shinji's journey as a whole). But even before that, she had a great presence in episodes 25 and 26. I mean, she's one of three characters whose backstory had an entire segment dedicated to it (one of the three cases as the show puts it).
Shikinami, on the other hand, had what? Four minutes on the spotlight? Don't get me wrong, it was fun to watch. That said, it definitely felt rushed and gave the impression that the team put everything together at the last possible second. It was a nice goodbye for Asuka as a character in the Evangelion franchise, but not necessarily Shikinami and her journey.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby FelipeFritschF » Sat May 07, 2022 3:13 am

I strongly dislike that Asuka seems to have little autonomy as a character now and kinda revolves around Shinji. In NGE+EoE, part of what made them interesting was the fact that she didn't, that she was her own individual, with different ideas and needs, something Shinji had difficulty in wading through. Shin by itself resolved this in a weird way, and then the prequel manga kinda made her character regress further.

But I think that Misato was the true victim here, she suffered the most cuts to her character.

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sat May 07, 2022 8:12 am

View Original PostFelipeFritschF wrote:I strongly dislike that Asuka seems to have little autonomy as a character now and kinda revolves around Shinji. In NGE+EoE, part of what made them interesting was the fact that she didn't, that she was her own individual, with different ideas and needs, something Shinji had difficulty in wading through.

I dunno about Asuka having little autonomy. She has lived her own life as a warrior for 14 years without Shinji around, and constantly makes some of the wildest decisions in combat, without relying on anyone.

Obviously her being in love with Shinji is a big part of her character, but not in a way that feels fake or unnatural. I'd also argue Shinji being the center of attention for many characters was the point of Shin. Shinji was dealing with a different set of issues than in something like late NGE or EoE, and the film shows how support from people around him helped deal with guilt and the passage of time. And Asuka plays a big role in that.

and then the prequel manga kinda made her character regress further.

As described above I don't see any regression. The manga definitely felt pretty haremy, which is fine with me. It's a spin-off not even written by Anno, and I enjoyed it for what it was.

But I think that Misato was the true victim here, she suffered the most cuts to her character.

I won't elaborate on this too much, but just as stuff was "cut", new things were added. Pilot of the Wunder? Guilt over Shinji? Dealing with having a son?
Rebuild isn't trying to be NGE.
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Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby ElMariachi » Fri May 13, 2022 7:52 pm

Personally, "done dirty" is not the term I would use on Shikinami, but rather "wasted potential".

Back when 2.0 was released, the "dumbing down" of her character arc looked like either a simplification of her character arc due to the time constraints of the movie format and/or an effect if Anno making the movie more "fanservicy", then the timeskip made many people think that this simplification was because the real "meat" of her character will be after said timeskip, but with the revelations of her past in Thrice, it completely recontextualizes her entire behavior in 2.0: not only her faster crush on Shinji (implied in the movies and confirmed in the manga to be because Shinji treated her like a person with her own value instead of a weapon and brought a sense of normalcy in her fucked up life), but also her much more introvert behavior in school and the "cooking war" (both because of her lack of social skill, again due to her upbringing) and why did she seemingly changed her competitive nature to accept help from others and having friends to rely on (due to her longing of partners after her training/upbringing forced her in a battle royal against her "sisters", unlike Soryu whose competitive nature was about her desire to be the number one pilot by fear of being abandoned due to her mother's insanity and suicide, in short more "self-imposed" while in Shikinami's case it was a literal question of life or death).

This revealed backstory showed that there was much more than meet the eye with Shikinami, that she was a very different character than Soryu, justifying the name change beyond just a question of theme naming, and that said character could be brought to completely new directions than Soryu or even NGE, on top of the things that happened with the timeskip that added even more to her character (the years of battle, the Curse of Eva and Angel infection) also shows potential for further character arcs to explore (the most obvious one being her feeling of not being human and thus not needing/deserving anything that humans enjoy, such as being around them or even having clothes), and as BernardoCairo notes in a previous post... it amounts to basically nothing.

Rather than having a character progression, she's basically stuck as a living symbol of Shinji's failure that he must fix as a payoff of his character development.

And this I think, is a consequence of both the runtime limitations movie format that prevents her character to be properly explored in one movie, not with all the other things it already has to tackle, and the fact that the writers didn't wanted to have her relegated as secondary character, due to the importance that the character historically has in the franchise.
Archer wrote at the beginning of this thread about a scenario where Asuka physically grew up to 28 years old, and indeed, that would had been a perfect way to "relegate" here to secondary character: after the ship teasing in 2.0, do like in the anime
SPOILER: Show
ERASED
, with Shinji in a coma, Asuka grew up and moved on in her life with new responsibilities and got her character arc offscreen and now is more or less in peace with herself, maybe have even her hooked with Kensuke, the opportunity was there but it passed due to tragic circumstances, it's a little sad but such is life, time to move on. Maybe take the opportunity to expand on other characters that are new, like Sakura, Kaji Jr... or maybe Mari. :whistle:
But Anno and the rest of Khara didn't do that, instead they kept her at a physical age of 14 and mentally not much more (despite what several members wrote on the subject, from my POV she doesn't act at all like an adult) and with her issues and new ones, to keep with the dynamic of her and Shinji being two faces of the same coin, but instead of being about being two lonely people who can't open themselves to others as it was in NGE, this time its more about being people groomed for a role their whole life and who somehow managed to outlive their usefulness and now try to find out where to go from here (with the twist that Shinji doesn't have any use for the bad guys, unlike Asuka), on top of coming to grips with their perceived inhumanity (due to the Curse for both, as well as his guilt for Shinji and her Angel infection for Asuka): as masterfully noted by another member in the thread about Shinji and Asuka's relationship in Thrice, this theme of them being the two faces of the same coin is conveyed through visual language in the movies (instead of dialogues and monologues such as in NGE and EoE), with several parallel shot of them unwittingly having the same poses and reactions at different points of time, and especially in how the beginning of Shinji living in Kensuke's house is basically a mirror of Asuka barging in Shinji's live in Misato's apartment at the beginning of 2.0, but with Shinji and Asuka's role reversed - up to a (dark) redo of the incident of him walking on her being naked - and with her Wonderswann, which was implied in 2.0 and pretty much confirmed in Thrice to be her equivalent of Shinji's SDAT as a tool to isolate herself from the world.
Except that, as noted before, it doesn't really go anywhere: the first half of Thrice already having its hands full with Shinji going back from cuckoo town and Rei Q's Harvest Moon adventure, so there are no place left for a character arc for Asuka, who thus stay stuck between observing Shinji from afar and playing her console alone in her room, and by the time both arcs are finished, it's already time for the final battle. Even the confession in his cell feels more like Asuka putting her affairs in order before going to die rather than the culmination of a character arc.

Then there's the revelation of her past and origins, the key that make all the pieces of her character fit together and reveal her character as being a different one than Soryu and not just because of the timeskip, that explains her entire behavior in 2.0, why she fell in love for Shinji so fast and why she kept that love for 14 years (because he was the first person that treated her and made her feel like a human being in her entire life, by the time Kensuke entered her life there was the Curse and the Angel that put a wall for him to have the same effect as Shinji), and put a new context on the relationship between her and Kensuke... and it happens in the few minutes before her last scene, so there's nothing the story can do with it as it's already time to wrap up her story, so in the end this plot bomb only serve to retroactively show that her behavior in 2.0 wasn't random or a "dumbing down", which is nice yes, but I feel that there was so much more they could had done with it.

The most frustrating is that there was a build up to a character arc... or rather a "retroactive build-up": it was not subtly teased during the Village 3 half of Thrice that she hated her body and that she thought herself as not human and unable (or rather unwilling) to relate and mingle with them, then the hair cutting scene with Mari and manga prequel put that in words, but the former happens near the final act of movie, after the half where such a character arc could happen, and the latter was released after the movie itself, so again, there's nothing that the story can do with it except giving some more context to her past actions.

As noted previously in this thread, the writers said in the 2.0 CRC that they had a very hard time determining what to do with Asuka in the compressed runtime of that movie, and I'm curious to see what they have to say in the Thrice CRC, because I have the feeling that they ran upon the same problem there, and that the hair-cutting scene and manga was them throwing in what they potentially wanted to do with her character. I don't think it's a coincidence that she was completely absent from Village 3 in the initial draft of 3.0 (present as a bonus in the 3.333 BR), back when the time at the village was supposed to be the second half of the movie, and teased in the last page that the last movie will be more centered on her.

Then there's the deal with her love of Shinji. Putting aside the shipping wars, I can understand why some people feel that it holds back her character, even with the revelations on her past and origins giving some context on why does she still have said feelings, not helping is the fact that of her outside of battle interactions with Mari (by far the character she's seen interacting the more with post-timeskip), prequel manga included, only one is not about her feelings for him (again the hairdressing scene). Not helping is that while she and Shinji talk to the other in several scenes in Thrice, they seldom talk to each other, the closest to an actual conversation is the scene in Shinji's cell, and even it's limited to Shinji answering to one question from Asuka before she spills the beans on her feelings (while never looking at each other the whole time), even their last scene on the beach is Shinji being the one spilling the beans on his feelings while Asuka doesn't say anything.

So yeah, "wasted opportunities" resume my feelings on Asuka in Rebuild, I feel that there was a lot that the story could had done with her character, notably on the theme of humanity and what it means to be human (which was build up as being one of the big themes of Rebuild, between the Curse of Eva, the Angel infection, all those clones, and Gendo's roboticization and then transformation) and self-imposed barriers towards others, but in the end her character issues were reduced to being something for Shinji to fix as a milestone of his character arc. At least there's her relationship with Kensuke which was something really original, even if I would had liked to see how such a peculiar relationship came to be.


View Original Postkuribo-04 wrote:As described above I don't see any regression. The manga definitely felt pretty haremy, which is fine with me. It's a spin-off not even written by Anno, and I enjoyed it for what it was.

IIRC the manga's story was written by Anno, and is canon to Rebuild.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby ElMariachi » Sat May 21, 2022 9:14 am

As a tangent, that feeling that her character arc didn't evolved but was abruptly resolved due to time constraints is something that I similarly feel with Rei Q, but of course differently: like Asuka, there's a character arc that takes shape through 3.0 and Thrice (her identity), unlike Asuka's, Rei Q's arc follows a classical path and evolution toward its obvious ending: the establishing of her own identity, illustrated by the many people asking her for her name as "Ms Lookalike" isn't proper... and then it suddenly stops and takes the completely opposite direction (she's "just Ayanami" and in the end just good for Rei II to take her memories for her own character resolution), as if the writers wanted to give to Rei II a similar resolution, but couldn't figure out how to do it so they "fused" Rei Q and Rei II's character arcs to make it work. (the same way they made Asuka pilot Unit 03 in 2.0 to have her do something while freeing the space for Mari in the battle against Zeruel, pushing Asuka's character arc for later in the saga)
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Seriously, that is the most fananked theory I've ever heard, more than Mari being Marty McFly travelling through time to keep her parents (Asushin) together. -- Jäeger

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sat May 21, 2022 6:59 pm

I don't see it that way. Rei II's story was already completed in 2.0, and Rei Q's was completed by the time she dies.
Shinji saying she's still Ayanami is his view, but I don't know if her character ever was about being different from Rei II, I thought it was more about learning to enjoy life and forming bonds.

What happens at the end I think is not so much a fusion but an acknowledgment by the fourth wall breaking last act that both Reis reflected each other. They might have been two characters but they served similar thematic purposes.

About the Eva Extra Extra manga, that was written by Tsurumaki. Canon or not, I think it has little impact on the film series. It was neat though.
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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby ElMariachi » Sun May 22, 2022 5:55 pm

View Original Postkuribo-04 wrote:I don't see it that way. Rei II's story was already completed in 2.0, and Rei Q's was completed by the time she dies.
Shinji saying she's still Ayanami is his view, but I don't know if her character ever was about being different from Rei II, I thought it was more about learning to enjoy life and forming bonds.

What happens at the end I think is not so much a fusion but an acknowledgment by the fourth wall breaking last act that both Reis reflected each other. They might have been two characters but they served similar thematic purposes.

Well, being different from Rei II was her entire character arc in 3.0, from Shinji saying that she's not (his) Ayanami, to her growing existential dread and questioning of who she is as she see the giant Rei head, culminating with her wondering what would Rei Ayanami do, to which Asuka answers to do what Rei Q herself want to do (which retrospectively is an even more powerful moment with Thrice's revelation that Asuka herself is a clone), then there's the several moments in the Village where people asks Rei Q about her name and that she should find one as "Ms Lookalike" isn't a very good one, those were all the steps of a identity quest 101.
As you note, her character arc only gets a resolution in a meta way by having it as a reflection/extension to Rei II's arc in NTE and on a broader sense, to all the Reis in NGE, but since the way Thrice uses meta to turn the plots and characters of NTE into a commentary of the franchise's characters as a whole (to the detriment of the characters' arc as presented in NTE) is one of my main grips against this movie, it's probably why I think that the way Rei Q's character arc was handled was a waste. (for example, like how NTE's Rei II's arc of wanting to reunite the Ikari family with herself and her conflicting loyalty between Shinji and Gendo is resolved because it was resolved in NGE and Thrice's ending makes all the characters through the franchise one and the same, or to go back to the thread's subject, how Asuka's arc about her sense of inhumanity and that she's a clone is swept aside to have a conclusion of the romantic subplot with Shinji that is more relevant to EoE then NTE - up to have the scene happening in same beach at the end EoE with the serials filled off, as BernadoCairo says in a previous post: "It was a nice goodbye for Asuka as a character in the Evangelion franchise, but not necessarily Shikinami and her journey.")


View Original Postkuribo-04 wrote:About the Eva Extra Extra manga, that was written by Tsurumaki. Canon or not, I think it has little impact on the film series. It was neat though.

Yeah, in the end the manga was just a nice little extra to explain why Asuka wore a tapped up plugsuit in 3.0, confirms that deep down she was still head over heels for Shinji (which was already clear in 3.0 and Thrice), and the real juicy bit was how Mari predicted everything that would happen during Operation US (that Shinji was still inside Unit 01 and would react to Asuka being near it) and convinced Asuka to be in the first line of the operation, which implies that she knew exactly what would happen (possibly thanks to her secretly working with Fuyutsuki), which would also explain her playful apology when she crashed back on Earth during the operation, despite Asuka being in a very bad situation.
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Kensuke is a military otaku who, at one point, is shown creepily taking pictures of girls to sell. He would clearly fit right in as an animator at Studio Gainax. -- Compiling_Autumn
EoTV is a therapist, EoE is a drill instructor. -- Chuckman
Seriously, that is the most fananked theory I've ever heard, more than Mari being Marty McFly travelling through time to keep her parents (Asushin) together. -- Jäeger

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Re: Does anyone feel that Rebuild had done Asuka dirty?

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Postby Archer » Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:18 pm

Bringing in a tangent from the Mari thread…
View Original PostElMariachi wrote:Yeah, her behavior in 2.0 does indeed fit well with her new backstory. By the way, if it was really planned from the final version of 2.0, it was a very good play from Khara, to make us think that her new behavior is a "dumbing down" of the character, only to reveal that there was an in-universe very good reason why she behaved the way she did. (now if only that revelation could had come earlier so the story could had done more with it...)

I think it’s the other way around: the clone explanation is a post-facto justification for the unfortunate reality that runtime/story limitations that made it so Shikinami couldn’t be anything but a dumbed-down Soryu.

From a pure story perspective, there is no benefit to tricking the audience into thinking your character is shit, only to reveal that she’s actually not total shit, just kinda mediocre. I think it’s just them making the best out of a bad situation, though I still think the best solution would’ve been to properly age her up and just fully embrace her being a plot device instead of a character.


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