Zusuchan wrote:Even if Shin has ungrounded the setting and made it pointless, it still can't reflect on NGE. NGE and EoE will remain as they once were and nothing NTE does can change them or make them lesser, even if it was a direct sequel.
I totally agree.
Zusuchan wrote:I think Shin's refusal to play by traditional narrative rules a la EoTV is potentially a pretty good choice, actually-it makes the fiction of the whole film even more clear and therefore manages to make a poetic case for growing up and maturing while still giving closure to its characters and narrative where it matters the most.
EoE already did that, though. I don't see how Shin gives closure to its established characters by introducing a new Deus Ex Machina character and then shorting them all on screentime. What it does with Shinji by making him more central seems like just a lightly alternate form of what was done twice before.
Personally, I find it a bit antithetical that the message is still 'growing up and moving on' given the rehashing element of the Rebuilds and that it's consumed Anno's output for more than 10 years. Perhaps it would have been more of a believable message had Anno moved onto new creations and said new things, instead of redundant entries whose real major differences are that there's more degrees of escapist spectacle action and gratuitous breast jiggling.
I think it's telling in his parting words in the Shin theater pamphlet that he mentions the surface elements--visuals, music, colors, etc., and that almost as an afterthought mentions his sensibilities and making the script "at least even a little interesting."
I don't think these movies can be separated from their motivation as money-making franchising and general audience draws. Compared to old Eva, I don't think they should be approached first and foremost as serious or poetic efforts.
roblucci01 wrote:Come on... Really? Let's be honest here, in NGE Seele's "scenario" literally NEVER made sense, period. First, they complain about Eva Unit-01 awakening. Then they complain about losing the lance. But it turned out Eva Unit-01 absorbing the S2 engine didn't hinder their scenario at all (if anything, it helped it), and losing the lance didn't matter either, because it could literally fly back to Earth at a moment's notice, anyway. They send Kaworu to initiate Third. But wait, he can die, it doesn't matter, Keel proclaims. Then in EoE they put in the order to have Shinji killed, until Misato saves him, and then miraculously, Seele has again adjusted their scenario for HIP to be compatible with Shinji, Unit-01, Lilith, and all the other moving parts. Their plan was never consistent.
In NGE we never learn what the "Dead Sea Scrolls" really had to say. Nor are the concepts of "Souls" and "Vessels" ever sufficiently explained. There was literally never a "First Ancestral Race" or anything about Lilith having a spear in NGE. The games retconned all this in and since then people ran with it. So many of the other conclusions we draw from NGE and EoE are based on inference and speculation as well. But in the 21st century, with the existence of things like fan wikis and communities, it's relatively easy for people to establish an artificial set of rules and science behind Eva. What I'm saying is, at the end of the day, the one with the final say is Anno, and arguably, maybe Sadamoto as well. If they want to introduce some crazy shit out of left field, that's their choice. It's their story. We can either be like "wow Eva sucks now", fanwank a new way of explaining it as we always did before, or simply accept the fact most Eva logic never made that much sense to begin with.
I would be the first to tell you that the cryptic lore is not the appeal of Eva. For me, it's always been its sense of intense emotion and its formal experimentation with its medium, the design philosophy and visual storytelling. But the thing is, with old NGE, if you wanted to focus on the lore, it was rewarding to track and felt like it added to the atmosphere if anything. When I did a rewatch recently, me and my viewing partner, who also took an interest to the lore purely as an added extra, felt like in our teasing-out that while we ran into places where information or clarity was withheld, there never felt like huge gaps in logic, not in terms of something not working with some effort on our part, and not in things seeming like they were being discarded without justification.
It's easy to form a perspective on the lore in a way that dovetails neatly into the experimental sequences and overall meaning. Seele is there from the start, and although they clearly turn into something different than their initial appearance, they do so with consistent rate & rhythm. The spear is introduced slowly, the way Angels, Evas, Lilith et all function is introduced at a good clip, Human Instrumentality is there since the opening credits, Rei's origins, the origin of Nerv, etc. all have their time. When everything goes down into surreal territory, the sequence of events leading to it track as real events that unfold, even if certain elements are inscrutable or the physics of the spears verges on the ridiculous. The overall nebulous armageddon of it all contributes to the feeling of a difficult and misunderstood world, even if you can't get a grasp of, say, the doors of Guf. Nonetheless, the idea of Human Instrumentality checks out as a hard sci-fi premise and Shinji's purely psychological journey that it affords also feels like a solid tracing of something from Point A to Point B. The series and what it presents itself as morphs over time, but it's a morph you can swallow and track.
Now we have NTE, where even before the phantasmagoria begins, the physics of the spears out of nowhere apparently functions under the whims of human emotion, Misato's ship is capable of transformation in the same 'just because' fashion of Unit-02 morphing into a cat. There's a third, new spear out of nowhere, there's a Book of Life that explains and doesn't explain Kaworu's loop, which I still struggle to see the meaning of, much like I struggle to understand what Mari's backstory adds, or what her having a true name adds.
In NGE, Seele at least has the benefit of being an obscure, mystic organization with religious eschatology beliefs and fealty to the arcane. But now all of that has been shouldered onto Gendo, and all he comes across as is some kind of plan-wizard whose plottings are never deterred. Nothing in NGE compares to the absurdity that he's contrived Rei and Kaworu's interactions with Shinji as a means to lead the plot to its goal, confident that their interactions will give the plan either exactly what it needs or in the worst case can easily be incorporated anyway. Even NGE Seele talk about compromises, backups and powerlessness on their part.
At the end of the day, these are just random elements that don't dovetail or fit in with everything else, or at the least have any sense of buildup to their inclusion. The old show set limitations and discarded them, but not to this kind of haphazard extent. Eva Units for instance once had to operate under the restricting principle that they needed connection to a power source--but thanks to the unending convenience of the timeskip, we can just say, 'well, they formulated a way to get around that.' Much like the Nemesis series, the gesture of 'well, in the intervening years, crazy new forms of tech occured,' it's just an unrestrained excuse to indulge in new designs and action sequence pyrotechnics.
roblucci01 wrote:I really don't understand what you mean here. Perhaps I'll need to read your other post to get more insight.
It's covered in my post, I didn't want to be redundant.
animation is easier than ever.
