Joseki wrote:The worst offender however is Shinji and his ending. As a character Shinji was built on top a very simple characterization that actually had some unique traits. Shinji has self-esteern issues, he is vulnerable and he's afraid of suffering. He also has some very positive traits like genuinely caring about his affections, he is a very skilled "male housewife" and he's not afraid of talking about his feelings. Among other things, Shinji rejects the standards of classic shonen masculinity.
The ending of this movie annhilates this. Shinji's payoff is turning into Shinzo Abe's ideal Japanese man. He is a salary-man and paired with a "reward woman" with which he shared 3 single moments in hours of story prior to the ending, two of this moment being explicitely situations centered on Mari's breasts. This is so limiting to their actual relationship that the movie has to focus on Mari's breasts even during the epilogue, because the audience never actually saw them talk about each other of any topic that isn't Mari's "big chest" and Shinji's body odor. I don't know how intentional this is, but all we see of them interacting about stuff that isn't an immediate "mission objective" is purely sexual and instinctive in nature.
Ultimately the end goal for Shinji was spending time with a big breasted girl when he's not working the most socially-normative work immaginable like the most disposable harem-romcom epilogue.
It's cathartic to see a reaction like this because I've long been surprised there hasn't been more negative reception to the fact that, well ... this is where I get the urge to waffle, but I guess I'll just put it how I honestly see it: Thrice is Anno actively de-queering the franchise. It feels like an anachronism in itself, but the fan reaction is what surprises me more. I suppose the shipping angle, as usual, gets in the way of things and acts like a lightning rod; just like red girl, blue girl wars distract and detract from intelligent discussion, upset Kaworu fans were merely mad at the ship being sank purely in terms of their shipping wars, and it took the brunt of disappointment for what I feel should be a more subdued, nuanced appraisal of Thrice as an aggressively heteronormative product. The closest I've come to seeing my thoughts on the matter reflected were in EvaMonkey's vid with friends going in depth on Thrice, and hearing, for instance, the same trepidation over the station shot of Kaworu & Rei paired off. But of course, the person with trepidation was also queer.
I'm not being 100% serious here (or am I?), but on some level it's extremely hard, as a queer person, not to see Thrice's conclusion as retroactively making Rebuild (and Eva in its entirety) into a tale of reformed heterosexuality. And if it sounds bizarre, now you know how bizarre Thrice itself seems to me. It's impossible not to read some kind of "ah, what we once had" remorse into Shinji looking over to Kaworu & Rei on the station platform, the implication being that, well, that was impossible anyway because reasons, and the straight and narrow is the only option in the end because reasons. While I have no game in the shipping wars, I find the arguments Thrice offers for why Asuka and Kaworu are no-go to be somewhat unconvincing, not least of all because they're not very in-depth. And it's not like shipper grievances are completely without merit, because the very act of sideswiping these aspects of Shinji's character and replacing them with Mari has a detrimental effect that goes deeper than pairings as pairings.
And it gets mind-numbing, because you'll immediately be hit with, "no, the sound design guy said it's not romantic" or, "well, everything is ambiguous." Yet watching Thrice might be the least ambiguous viewing experience I've personally gone through in terms of its signals and its appraisals of certain modes of thought. It's more abstract than who was paired with who, it's the fact that queer elements once (and for decades) ambiguously existed within Eva as a core part of why it persists for a lot of people as an important narrative, and then Thrice makes pains to basically undo them all and replace them with patently unambiguous signals. After Thrice, the only reasonably deduced queer element is the implication that Maya is still a lesbian, although that aspect has been diminished by the fact that it's now expressed primarily through the outdated notion that lesbianism is more rooted in hating men than loving women, reversal of position in the film's climax aside.
Where it was once possible to identify with Shinji as a queer
aided by the fact that it was an ambiguous element and not concrete, allowing a broad range of people to relate to the narrative for complex, varying reasons, now there's no room to do so any more because the film overwhelmingly marries positive fulfilling assessments with stringent conformity. Not only that, it creates barricades to entry in terms of identificaton: not an outspoken dude with women's breast's foregrounded in mind? Not your protag! Even Kaworu, at the very end, is saddled in perpetuity with "but what about the shot with Rei?"
Rei herself is an interesting angle re: queer identification, not as a sexual label but the more general use of "not feeling like belonging to mainstream society," and it too seems like an under-explored subject. Her role in the film is probably the most obviously meta, because I always felt like she became a more-Rei-than-ever-Rei, and was assuming in-universe the cultural cache she's come to inhabit in real life among fans and those more distantly aware of the franchise. She's the wabi-sabi, at a distance from life character, and but then (much to an imagined audience's shock) in the village she's accepted despite her differences and perhaps in some ways even because of them as a source of appeal. Yet this acts as a catalyst for her to be directed and instructed toward conformity: she's to be married off, ideally, and she ends up embracing the role of female as conduit of life. And it's interesting because the latter is in fact a perfect circle of an arc for her character, given her lineage as birthed from, and yet the same as, the birth-mother to all of humanity. And yet ... that connection is actively ignored in the rest of Thrice's narrative, and so the actually important intention is to take Rei, a character who embodies feelings of estrangement (and who acts as a way for those watching to see that part of themselves reflected) and to shepherd her toward taking (or aspiring to take) a traditional role in mainstream society.
And is this in particular wrong? No, because if Anno's vision of Eva is heteronormative and traditionalist that's his prerogative. The claim isn't that Eva is queer, but that it had ambiguously queer elements, and that's not much of a leg to stand on regarding entitlements. But to me it's an objective, abject difference between the approach taken to prior and new material, and I feel like the discussion there is lacking, if not missing entirely.
