Does the NTE lore make anymore sense?

[boyfrand]

Hi everyone! I haven't been keeping up with the threads for a while and don't really want to read through hundreds of pages. After 3.0+1.0 being globally available for a few months, what do you think of NTE now? Does the lore make anymore sense after a few rewatches? Do you feel all 4 movies connect well? Or is it still really about the meta-story?

[pathstrider]

I got in via the rebuilds and enjoyed them but I don’t think they make a lot of sense.

3.0 + 1 doesn’t really help explain a lot of 3 for example, and in some cases outright goes against it or does it’s own thing.

The enjoyment of 3+1 comes from seeing (certain) characters having good things happen to them - and that’s not all meta but knowing the alternatives helps. As an explainer it’s very incoherent.

As to whether the movies connect well…. 1.0 is it’s own thing, 2 builds on it. 3 is a swerve and 3+1 does it’s own thing. In the case of the latter two we can see Khara changed their mind a lot so it’s hard to believe there is coherent thread unifying them.

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

The lore makes enough sense. I think expecting easy answers regarding Eva’s lore went out of style back in 1996. You have to dig for the rest of it.

[nerv bae]

I think these two posts in the first-page lore topic provide a good summary of where things stand:

SPOILER: Show

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.

The whole topic is worth a read!

[kuribo-04]

The lore does make enough sense, until it intentionally doesn't anynore with stuff like Eva Imaginary.

[Axx°N N.]

The lore does make enough sense, until it intentionally doesn't anynore with stuff like Eva Imaginary.

Actually, Eva Imaginary is one of the concepts I find easiest to swallow, because it seems rooted in real-world concepts like anti-matter, multiverses, and quantum mechanics. It's a theoretical entity in the same way that there are theories that posit we don't actually 'exist'; a lot of physics can get super abstract super fast. See the GITS 2 manga for further instances of this in anime narrative form.

Even the storytelling necessity is pretty cogent; if 3I as we know it has to be subverted for NTE to do a timeskip, what is Gendo left to seek and immanentize? Well, panfaced and as if none of the subversion matters, he scrapes his way to a parallel universe and a quantum mirror of an ingredient that was denied him. I wish the almost comedic desperation, ruthlessness and stubbornness of it had been played up more in the characterization.

Certain things like the mechanics of the spears and the imagninarium quality of the Minus Universe are too much like deus ex machinas/excuses/conceits to me, either overexplained or unexplained or, I don't know, just introduced too fast. The narrative wants these things to work in certain ways that I'm not sure it earns, but mostly 'checks out' to me on paper.

What doesn't make any sense to me is the consistency of the rules of Impact triggering, as covered in the thread nerv bae links to. There's not enough room to figure out what is concrete and what is variable about the ingredients and mechanics, but that's all fairly technical or maybe you could even say semantic.

[CATO]

The lore does make enough sense, until it intentionally doesn't anynore with stuff like Eva Imaginary.

Actually, Eva Imaginary is one of the concepts I find easiest to swallow, because it seems rooted in real-world concepts like anti-matter, multiverses, and quantum mechanics.

I rationalized that scene as Evangelions made of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence to maintain a predetermined (narrative) universe. Anno has fully embraced the idea that the universe does not need make sense.

[Giji Shinka]

Some things make sense and are answered like how Adams and spears originate from the world of Gods, but with other things like how Kaworu became the 13th angel we simply aren't given enough dots to connect to and we cannot come to any definitive, satisfying conclusions.

[WDS]

NGE lore focused on coherent worldbuilding over mythobabble, but explicitly contradicted itself a couple of times, mostly regarding the nature of Adam (which was originally introduced in episode 8 as the first human, not the first Angel).

Then the Director's Cuts and EoE came along and retconned a bunch of stuff from the Broadcast Continuity, contradicting some of it in the process (example: SEELE explicitly telling Kaworu where to find Adam before he goes looking for it in the wrong place).

The Rebuilds avoid contradicting themselves by not trying to tie anything together in any meaningful way in the first place.


So, I guess the answer to this question depends on your definition of "make sense".

[ElMariachi]

There's a paradox with NGE and NTE in toward the lore: NGE had little to no "deep" lore about the mysteries behind the setting, sure we learn that Lilith is the progenitor of humanity (which collectively forms the "18th Angel", Lilin) and Adam the progenitors of the Angels who want to reach Lilith to destroy humanity, but we don't know why they want to do that, what is the spear of Longinus, what's the difference between Gendo and SEELE's plans or even what are Adam and Lilith. All the information came from supplemental material, namely the NGE2 videogame that explained everything about the spears, FAR, Seeds of Life and the different version of HIP.

OTOH in NTE, we get a huge loredump from Gendo explaining everything that was going on and will happen, with pretty visual included (even showing the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls for the first time in the franchise!)... and it raises even more questions: so the precursor race put Adam and Lilith on Earth on purpose for the Lilin to defeat the Angels and gain the "reward" to become new beings with a Fruit of Life while losing their Fruit of Knowledge (aka sentience), but what was their objective in doing that? And why chose such a convoluted way? Also what is the purpose of the Golgotha object they left behind before Gendo hijacks it? Why does the spears morph between two different forms, and what's the difference between them aside the shape? And if Lilith was the leader of the "Lilin" faction with SEELE as executors of her will, then how did they accepted to have her soul dumped into Rei to be molded and mistreated by Gendo, that should be the ultimate blasphemy for them?
And there's Kaworu: what is he in this new cosmology? Where does his loops and his moon coffins fit in all that? Who placed those coffins in the first place? If he wakes up in a new coffin each time he dies, that implies that he's in a loop restricted to the Rebuild universe, yet he remembers the NGE universe (and Gendo and Shinji too), but the NTE lore is in complete contradiction with the lore of NGE, so what's going on ?

[Archer]

There's a paradox with NGE and NTE in toward the lore: NGE had little to no "deep" lore about the mysteries behind the setting, sure we learn that Lilith is the progenitor of humanity (which collectively forms the "18th Angel", Lilin) and Adam the progenitors of the Angels who want to reach Lilith to destroy humanity, but we don't know why they want to do that, what is the spear of Longinus, what's the difference between Gendo and SEELE's plans or even what are Adam and Lilith. All the information came from supplemental material, namely the NGE2 videogame that explained everything about the spears, FAR, Seeds of Life and the different version of HIP.

I think an interesting unintended consequence of this is the fact that it’s a funny parallel to the real-world overanalysis of Evangelion. In-universe, all the characters treat the Dead Sea Scrolls as infallible holy prophesy, and give all of the characters involved names of religious/biblical significance. Yet, it’s revealed to the audience through supplemental material that they are unequivocally wrong: there is nothing religious or spiritual about the nature of the Angels, they’re not the messengers of God sent to punish humanity for its sins - they’re a fluke in a long-dead alien race’s interstellar reproductive system, which accidentally sent two eggs to the same planet. The supposed “Christian symbolism” isn’t just superfluous window-dressing in real life, it’s also superfluous window-dressing in-universe. I doubt it was intentional (or else it would’ve been revealed in the show instead of in supplementary material) but it can be read as a commentary on the human desire to try and find meaning in things we don’t understand, which can lead to us making connections where none exist in an effort to weave a more appealing, human-centric narrative.

[ElMariachi]

I think an interesting unintended consequence of this is the fact that it’s a funny parallel to the real-world overanalysis of Evangelion. In-universe, all the characters treat the Dead Sea Scrolls as infallible holy prophesy, and give all of the characters involved names of religious/biblical significance. Yet, it’s revealed to the audience through supplemental material that they are unequivocally wrong: there is nothing religious or spiritual about the nature of the Angels, they’re not the messengers of God sent to punish humanity for its sins - they’re a fluke in a long-dead alien race’s interstellar reproductive system, which accidentally sent two eggs to the same planet. The supposed “Christian symbolism” isn’t just superfluous window-dressing in real life, it’s also superfluous window-dressing in-universe.

Which is why Kaworu's scenario in the NGE2 videogame where one of the Seeds of Life contacts him absolutely cracks me up: after all the secret wars and global manipulations by secret mystical cabals using knowledge and technology from the gods, to have it all finish with one of the agents of said gods arriving to basically say "What the hell is going on here?! You're not supposed to have that! *takes away all the Evas and Angels* Now play nice and don't make me come back!", making everything Gendo and SEELE did for decades, if not centuries, null and void in one instant!

As for the Christian imagery, we actually get an explanation from Anno and his staff in interviews back from the days of Gainax: it was because they needed something to make their creation stand out next to all the other mecha shows, and Christian imagery was something cool and exotic. That's it, there's no deeper meaning.

[WDS]

All the information came from supplemental material, namely the NGE2 videogame

Video games aren't canon. Not even the parts that were made up by some guy after he interviewed Anno behind closed doors with no audio or videotapes rolling so we will never know what Anno actually told him. We have the series, we have EoE, we have statements made directly by Anno, and we have production materials (like the sketch showing which Committee members represent which countries). That's it as far as reliable sources of information go.