IrkenEvangelion wrote:I'm happy they cut that Asuka scene... God I'm getting shivers and pains up my back from looking at it. I would've probably turned it off if they included that.
EDIT: Specifically this one. Warning, not pretty...
Jesus. How utterly unpleasant. It seems even a name change and a tangent in personality can't save you from a director who wants your hands and face to get impaled really, really badly.
Does add more than a little credence to the theory that the creepy face at the end of the plug is supposed to be Asuka herself - it would be a replacement for the unsavory content of this scene, an ugly mirror of Asuka.
While I don't doubt that this would have been a visually striking and visceral sequence - and a rather interesting parallel to the way Shinji rips his own face off corediving in Zeruel - I have to say they probably made the right call switching it out for glowy blue Angel jizz. It's annoying enough that they again passed up the opportunity to have the audience, like Shinji, ignorant of who exactly is inside Unit 03; but the more you focus on the pilot in there the more Shinji comes off like a dick in that scene for refusing to even try to save them. NGE wisely left Touji entirely black-boxed; I seem to recall he doesn't actually appear until we see him getting dragged out of the plug. Rebuild aggravates the situation by distracting us with the plight of Asuka; it doesn't help that they then go on to make ReShinji act far more dickishly than the original about the matter, but I digress. My point is, the less of the pilot's suffering we witness, the more we feel for Shinji.