Axx°N N. wrote:Emotional through-lines don't exist in any premise until you breathe life into them, and every narrative scenario is inherently arbitrary until the through-lines are added. By that I mean that the same exact premise could be used to hang a comedy on as it can a tragedy or drama, and it's all about what you do in the space a premise carves out. "A world rocked by tragedy in which mysterious creatures attack a capital every week or so" could have gone any number of routes, and was initially supposed to, yet in the space this left a bunch of psychedelics and psychodramas were infused when they easily could have not.

Do you mean that a theoretical timeskip movie would be capable of supporting any and all emotional through-lines?

nerv bae wrote:Do you mean that a theoretical timeskip movie would be capable of supporting any and all emotional through-lines?

More like whatever throughlines it can support exist somewhere between "none at all" and "any and all." Every narrative begins with a premise, and what can make it thrilling (or terrifying) is the question that the writer poses to themselves at every step: "what, if any material can be furnished using this premise?" Going into the timeskip period is full of as much narrative potential as going into a post-Q narrative space. Q itself was going into a "what if EoE sortof/partially happened" space. Given any premise, you can go "there's no potential there" outright and stop before you start, or you can do your best with it. I personally don't see any gap in potential between a timeskip-set movie and Thrice itself; I mean, Rebuild in its entirety was gambling on what, if anything could be done with a reboot.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:**Sidenote: I know once upon a time in 2007 Anno said he wanted to "Gundamize" Evangelion but I think the major flaw with that thinking & what will be the biggest hurdle to ever doing that is the true strength of Eva has always been this specific cast. There's a reason despite the existence of like six BILLION manga spin-offs they're all things like "Shinji, Asuka & Rei work as Ghosbusters and take orders from Misato to hunt Angels in Tokyo-3. They are Evangelion: AngelBusters". If they ever do intend to just make more Eva that's gonna be the biggest obstacle. The characters are what has kept the series alive for almost 30 years. If Anno REALLY - and I'd argue his mindset is very different today than it was in 2007 when the Rebuilds were meant to be a few quickies finished by 2009 - wants to "Gundamize" Eva and have it last for another 30 years they're gonna have to tell stories that don't involve Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato, etc.

It goes far deeper than that, he has wanted that since at least 2000 and just a couple months ago on the anniversary Q&A he has said he still very much wants to do it and is supporting new projects right now. Of course I agree with your point regarding characters though, Gundam can do this easily because it actualyl is more about the setting, the robots whatever and the formula can work without repeating the same characters. If we look at how the spin-offs and games worked, they all used the same NGE cast, though they were altered. I think we'll probably see something similar happening, Eva EUs of sorts, though probably not anything as silly as SIRP, but instead alternate takes and developments like ANIMA. In the 1.0 CRC Anno mentions that one of his inspirations is Macross, which as far as I can tell was also trying to do something similar at the time (and wouldn't achieve this until 2008-2009). How is it compared to Eva and Gundam in regards tot this character/setting conundrum?

Given that the majority of quotations in that article are from before 2010 and the only quotes from Anno himself in that are about the things he isn't planning to do, as well as the notorious unreliability of the fandom wiki, take that entire article with a whole mineshaft worth of salt

See me constantly biting my tongue because I've been planning a 2.5 fancomic for a while now and I'm extremely familiar with the issues and possibilities.

Despite a lack of critical info, a 2.5 story that covers N3I to 3I itself is kinda easy and you can depict what you need to depict while getting decent arcs out of Asuka, Misato, Kaji and Kaworu feat. Mari and Rei and Ritsuko.

The other 13 and a half years are a different matter (and is such a huge stretch of time with so little happening that it honestly could have just been one year the setting for Q onwards would be barely any different).

Literally the only reason for the timeskip being 14 years is so that Shinji’s classmates can age up into adults. Aside from Fuyutsuki who looks super old and decrepit post-timeskip, none of the other characters even visibly age, lol.

Archer wrote:Aside from Fuyutsuki who looks super old and decrepit post-timeskip, none of the other characters even visibly age, lol.

Not true!

Archer wrote:Literally the only reason for the timeskip being 14 years is so that Shinji’s classmates can age up into adults. Aside from Fuyutsuki who looks super old and decrepit post-timeskip, none of the other characters even visibly age, lol.

The reason for the 14 years timeskip is so that Shinji feels totally lost and alienated from the world when he wakes up. That was likely the main goal for the timeskip.

In itself, they only needed to choose a large number of years, but they chose 14 years, because that is Shinji's age.

^
Nah... I bet the main reason is to age up Kensuke and Toji, so Shinji could have actual competent grown-ups looking after him, unlike in EOE. That's what set the two versions of Shinji apart in the end (that and how NGE Shinji was way better put together as a character, obviously).
Perhaps there was also the desire to "wow" the audience and introduce new concepts and landscapes that would be better implemented with a timeskip. And with that I mean that it would be easier to not go into detail about the drastic changes the world of EVA underwent and instead just throw us all in there. "14 years have passed, anyway. Things change."

If all they wanted to do was alienate Shinji, they could have done it in many other ways (more original, by the way). In fact, there was this one indie show that pretty much did just that and without a gigantic timeskip. You guys, being westerners, probably never even heard of this obscure gem that was developed by a Chinese company in the 1990s, I believe. It's called "New Century Gospel", or something like that.

nerv bae wrote:Not true!

The other characters get new haircuts and outfits and that’s about it. Like I’m not saying Misato should be a wrinkly old woman, but nothing about the 3.0 character designs screams “14 years have passed”. Maybe like 4-5, more like it.

Konja7 wrote:The reason for the 14 years timeskip is so that Shinji feels totally lost and alienated from the world when he wakes up. That was likely the main goal for the timeskip.

In itself, they only needed to choose a large number of years, but they chose 14 years, because that is Shinji's age.

Nah, the 14 years is almost certainly to have his classmates age up. Aside from that factor, there is literally no other narrative reason for the timeskip to be, specifically, 14 years long. If we ignore Sakura, 3.0 as a movie would not really be impacted if it was arbitrarily stated that the timeskip had been 5-6 years instead of 14.

We're forgetting some of the worst fallout of the 14 year war; Hyuga's hairline.

Misato looks older to me, but maybe that's just my mind filling in missing details again.

In 1.0:


In 3+1:


Admittedly she's just been gutshot, but still! I see a matured face here somehow. Wish she took off her sunglasses more.

Axx°N N. wrote:We're forgetting some of the worst fallout of the 14 year war; Hyuga's hairline.

In the first 3.0+1.0 pic she does look older but I’m not sure how much of that is solely attributable to the “dead anime mom” hairstyle. Other than that I’m not really seeing anything other than slight differences in art style.

Archer wrote:Literally the only reason for the timeskip being 14 years is so that Shinji’s classmates can age up into adults. Aside from Fuyutsuki who looks super old and decrepit post-timeskip, none of the other characters even visibly age, lol.

Aoba looks kinda emaciated, especially when shaving prior to operation Yamato. Both him and Hyuga show that facial thinness typical of middle aged men (I would know, I've noticed it in myself recently )... the loss of the "good fat" (and some muscle?).

Haha, fair enough. I’ll be honest I kinda forgot they were even in 3.0+1.0… even now the only thing I recall them doing is the fist bump from the trailer.

The years have been rough to both of them.

Blockio wrote:Given that the majority of quotations in that article are from before 2010 and the only quotes from Anno himself in that are about the things he isn't planning to do, as well as the notorious unreliability of the fandom wiki, take that entire article with a whole mineshaft worth of salt

I wouldn't say so, he said this multiple times in recent years, multiple quotes are from 2016 or more recently (so during production of Shin Eva itself), including the stage greetings last year and in the Q&A a couple of months back as I just mentioned. Older quotes are relevant because he's been saying this for so long and has stuck to it. Much like quotes from his assistant director, producer, and other staff involved.

It definitely is coming, I personally didn't even expect them to talk about the timeskip ideas (also in those stage greetings) so soon.

From March this year:

Q: You once said that you hope future generations can continue the EVA franchise like the Gundam franchise. Have you changed your mind?
A: I haven’t changed my mind. It will be great if my work should can be of full help to the anime industry.'

Q: Do you still think you’d like others to work on Evangelion?
A: I do. In the short project "Animator Expo" people are already creating [Eva] for me.

I should mention it's possible Anno was talking about the 2015 Animator Expo and not an upcoming one (I've seen differing translations and interpretations from Japanese fans), but either way he reinforces his stance twice. For what it's worth, he's also working with Tsurumaki on something after Shin Godzilla, though it's not necessarily Eva.

That is valid, the point about the wiki's reliability remains, however. Repetition does not equal truth; just like in some circles, it is still accepted "fact" that Anno forcibly choked Miyamura during the EoE recordings (or, if we are to take a step outside of the bubble of Eva, for years until a translator took a deep dive into decades of interviews and production material, it was commonly told as truth that Gundam Sentinel was stuck in copyright hell and the author hated Bandai, that's why it never got animated, when in reality the reason was a much more mundane series of priority shifts and production struggles that made the project fizzle out before going anywhere)
Obviously not everything is to be dismissed out of hand because of this, but in general, it pays to be very sceptical about English-language coverage of the production side of anime, especially of franchises as commonly mythified as Eva; the majority of even the things that are nominally accurate tend to be translated by amateurs, ripped from the context of the series of questions before it, on top of whatever issues of reliability may or may not be there on the original Japanese side. Sensationalist media is, unfortunately, not an English-only phenomenon, even the people directly involved in production may be misremembering details or speaking from an incomplete picture depending on their role on staff, and with every step of the long game of telephone, more parts of the bigger picture get lost

I'm not disagreeing with you on that, but the sources really do speak for themselves in this case. You know quite well how the both of us, Evageeks itself and both wikis (notably Wikipedia was FULL of them for years) have tried to combat those myths. I personally wrote about Miyamura's case on multiple places and was able to get additional translations disproving it while we also had certain tumblrs that kept spreading this myth in service of the "abusive Anno" narrative they're so fond of. Quite often they showed up on Youtube or some lesser quality media news sites, with CBR being a famous contemporary example. I'm not even going to link to some of their horror stories. The ADV people also had a hand in many of them, like with the combination girl theory and others.

Anyway, probably part of the problem is that much of this material was translated even more recently, the 2016 interviews were translated in 2019 for instance. The 2.0 CRC is great and all but it barely deals with this specific subject, the 1.0 CRC does but Rikki only translated it in April 2021 (!). You might remember that people sort of assumed NTE would become mostly a remake of NGE for some time and funnily enough much of this material kinda flew under the radar. I don't really blame anyone for it, but it really is a shame, because a lot of speculation that is still out there would have been avoided. Still, as we also know, the level of myths we have in the Eva fandom right now is much less than we used to see 3, 5, 10 years ago.

Archer wrote:What’s stupid was skipping it, instead of actually re-writing the story AROUND the fact that that period of time was no longer being covered.

The easy and obvious solution is just to make it so that the end of 2.0 actually WAS the end of the world. No near-third-impact bullshit, straight up just Shinji awakening Unit 1 causes the apocalypse and rewrite the rest of the story around that.

Which honestly isn’t even hard: instead of there being an extended period of time in between where apparently Gendo and Fuyutsuki get exiled, Kaji and Kaworu get promoted to commander, and Gendo and Fuyutsuki come back and sieze control and THEN the remaining NERV personnel rebel and form WILLE, literally just condense that all into the immediate aftermath of N3I: Gendo and Fuyutsuki summon Kaworu from the moon, Kaji makes a deal with Kaworu (which involves his own death) to betray Gendo. Then you can still justify it being called “near” Third Impact, because it wasn’t actually allowed to fully progress all the way. And now instead of the stupid Fourth Impact/Final Impact shit in 3.0+1.0, you just make the Gendo’s goal completing the still-unfinished Third Impact.

Not only does this get rid of the whole “entire movie’s worth of convoluted events that gets untold” thing, it honestly also makes it make WAY much more sense why everyone treats Shinji like a pariah, because at least in this scenario it’s pretty unarguable that he is directly responsible for the end of the world.

BernardoCairo wrote:I've come to the same conclusion as you a while back. Why not have Shinji actually destroy the world at the end of HA and that's it? It would've been so much more digestible to the viewer. But, no. Anno and Tsurumaki had to inject another impact there. I guess they have a boner for this sort of thing. Man, I just can't wrap my head around this whole mess. What were they thinking? It's so weird...
Some things could have been kept as mysteries, like the birth of WILLE or what exactly happened to Asuka. That way, the surprise and impactful nature of Q's first half would've been kept intact...

I've though about it, and an alternative of the timeskip, if you need to have some time to pass so WILLE's rebellion can happen would be that instead of that Near and Actual Third Impact thing, have Third Impact stopped by Kaworu at the end of 2.0, but it had the time to start the core erosion of the land around Tokyo-3 (come up with some technobabble to explain that the city is spared that fate because it had pillars hidden underground, or the Black Moon protected the space just above it as long as Lilith was alive or something like that), and it's now spreading uncontrollably, as there aren't enough pillars to close off the area.
So the story continues in Tokyo-3 as it's implied to had happened, with Kaworu and Kaji leading NERV in an abandoned Tokyo-3 while the rest of the world sink in increasing chaos as the core erosion continue to advance and every country dumps their resources into trying to find a way to revert it and protect their biggest centers of population with pillars (depriving NERV from resources) while everyone tries to move to the protected areas.
Then once the 12th Angel arrives, WILLE is born and everyone ask where did this began, they can say that this was this asshole Shinji Ikari who started this.


Or, more bold, since the theme of the movies are Shinji's immaturity and his journey to grow beyond it, have the events of the timeskip stay the same, but change what happens after his return to actually play on his immaturity and insecurities: instead of dropping the guilt of the end of the world on him, have WILLE simply... not having any use for him, like they know that he was a tool of his father, so no hard feelings, but now we only have two Evas and a pilot for each, who are now veteran fighters after 14 years of services, while you're still a rookie and literally 14 years old without any particular competency since you apparently lost the ability to sync with an Eva, so you don't have anything to do here, thanks for your service I guess? Oh yeah and sorry but you didn't saved Rei.
Of course, have Misato refuse to talk to him because of her guilt of having cheered on him and be responsible for him losing 14 years and life, plus her abandonment of her son, and have Shinji sent to Village 3.
That will vindicate Shinji's feeling that Misato is like his father, that she only kept him around as long as he was useful to discard him the moment he failed, for extra bitterness have Toji and Kensuke unable to connect to him because they are grown-ups and with their own responsibilities so Shinji always feels awkward and a bother around them (especially as each has a respected specialty - doctor and survivalist/handyman/professor respectively - while he doesn't have any special skill aside piloting the Eva and be a good cook), and meet Kaji Jr, only to come to the conclusion that Misato really replaced him with a "real" son, turning him into a closed-off and bitter loner who came to the conclusion that Rei was the only one who understood him and that he was sure that he saved her.

Then Mark.09 arrives, take him (because obviously it's Rei who's piloting it, so Misato must had lied!) and the his time at NERV is more or less the same (minus the soul-crushing revelation of his guilt) with Kaworu convincing him to pilot one last time to repair the world, not for redemption, but to show everyone that he's still useful, and to save Rei. Then have the fight in Lilith's Chamber is roughly the same as in canon 3.0, except that Shinji fight to show them that he still can be useful and that he'll show them, and that he will save Rei this time, refusing to listen to Kaworu to not touch the spears because he desperately wants save Rei, to show that he didn't lost 14 years for nothing, and because he feels that she's the only one who can understand him. (beside Kaworu)

So after Fourth Impact happens and Kaworu dies, Asuka will have good reasons to chew him as an immature brat, that they didn't "abandoned him" but gave him the chance to live the closest to a normal life in this world, and because he's a kid and had a past of being at best an instable fighter prone to losing his shit and do whatever he wanted, a liability in a real war, and he just proved them right. And that if he really wanted to be useful to the cause, then all he had to do was to surrender Unit 13 when Asuka and Mari arrived, then that would had deprived NERV and SEELE of a great asset while probably seriously fucking up their plans, he would had proved that he was able to turn one of Gendo's manipulation against him, and if he wants so much to pilot, him piloting Unit 13 proved that he still has the ability to pilot, so he would had certainly been accepted as an extra pilot for WILLE, he would had gained nearly everything he wanted.
But no, he had to play hero, the one who knows everything and will do things his way or the highway, and as a result delivered an awakened Eva to NERV and WILLE's own Evas were severely damaged cleaning his mess, so now they will have to fight in a worse position and with him kept as a prisoner, because while he can pilot, he also proved that he's too dangerous to be left alone.

There: you have the theme of Shinji's immaturity conveyed in a way that's more fitting than "lol you can't keep your cool after being put the guilt of the end of the world on your shoulders, be mentally and emotionally tortured to near insanity and have the last chance at redemption taken from you in the middle of an (apparent) battle to death", and you even have the theme acting like his father in a way more fitting than "you wanted to save Rei in the heat of the moment without having any idea that an Impact could happen, you're like your father who planned for this shit for decades".