Axx°N N. wrote:Man, this is so counter to pretty much every live reaction I've seen among those I've watched NTE with. Partly because, at last among my crowd, a lot of good will was exhausted by the gratuitous fanservice, and so no one was liable to find demeaning boob talk either mature or what one would say as friendly conversation, but more like just an unrealistically written wish-fulfillment convo.
My first reaction when I saw the ending was shock, and while watching I was really grasping for how it fit the themes of Evangelion as I understood them. I'm not sure I've made any progress, but I have softened my reaction and recognize the ending scene's intent as ambiguous.
But quite frankly, I don't think it stuck the landing of actually being functionally ambiguous. Many of my friends took the ending as just "Mari and Shinji are together now," and cared so little about the rest of Shin that they wrote it off and didn't think about it any further. It's wrong to judge an artwork based on its popular reception (or misconception), but there's so many elements at play that get in the way of an ambiguous read.
First of all, the very notion of the time-skip occuring is setting people up to make wild assumptions, or interpret the fact Shinji looks older as instructive in the sense of "Oh, I guess they just got together in the interim, the movie wants me to just accept that surprise. They're a couple now."
Second is that there's no confirmation Shinji isn't writing his friends off, and regardless the visual is that he leaves them behind without a word, hand-in-hand with just one of the girls into a weird metaphorical reality-change.
Third is it just goes so quickly.
I think people are missing the intended ambiguity to assume MariShin, but I blame them less than I blame Anno, because if he truly wanted to avoid this interpretation, there were many, many different possibilities with what to end on as a last image. Shinji holding hands and running off with someone is on the bottom of the list, methinks.
I think it might be Shin's version of the eternal "how gay is 24?" debate. There are plenty of good arguments to be made that Shinji and Mari aren't together, I don't even want them together,
but they just feel like they are.
Ironically my impressions were pretty much the exact opposite, I liked the fanservice precisely because it detracts a bit from the previous work
and I love ass. I watched the new theatrical editions hoping to see something new, something that we normally wouldn't have, and fanservice, for example, was one of those things. I must agree that several people, maybe even you and your crew included, felt like they were going to watch something more heavily based on the original series, like a lot of drama and depression and whatever, so the poor reaction can be explained by the twisted expectations. It's hard to blame someone for that though, since they explicitly wanted to do things differently but they also knew they could lose some appeal due to those changes. I for example while watching the first movie I wondered if that's how they'd do things because I expected rebuild to be more lighthearted, less serious and overall not a modern copy of the same we had years ago, so pretty much all the changes were welcomed by me - the 14 year gap kinda set me off at first but I eventually got along with it just fine.
Maybe that's why it was so easy for me to properly understand pretty much all of the points they wanted to convene that most people seemed to miss - like Kensuke not being romantically involved with Asuka and Mari and Shinji being nothing but friendly. I went in expecting something completely new, disregarding pretty much everything that got me into the series, like the psychological themes, conflict and ambiguous concepts. I went in to watch a bunch of extremely well made movies, and that's what I got - the only expectation I had for being evangelion was to be
good, not to be
evangelion as we knew it.
It's really unfortunate that so many people were incapable of seeing things that way and went in expecting pretty much more of the same in HD, leading to all those erroneous notions and thwarted expectations. Maybe the marketing should have focused more on lowering people's expectation to see nothing but a remastered version of evangelion but, considering the changes we had in the middle - let's not forget, quite a lot of people weren't fond of 3.0 - we can't really blame them for expecting people to see this as an almost completely new work.
Konja7 wrote:Honestly, I'm not forcing myself to see that scene as romantic flirting. I just see the scene and it conveys a romantic flirt to me.
If I'm not mistaken, the sound director said the music doesn't have romantic intent in that scene. However, he doesn't denied the interpretation of Mari and Shinji as a couple.
I think Ogata doesn't like the idea of the couple, but she doesn't make Shinji's voice in the Epilogue (and she is a little salty for that). I don't think the VA of Shinji in the Epilogue has said something.
Not necessarily you but a lot of people are jumping to conclusions - many due to bandwagon - and pretty much forcing themselves to interprete the scene the way they see other people interpreting. Also, it had nothing to do with music, it was about the
voice acting - how the voice actors are
instructed to act - and as I pointed out, he denied they were a couple but not the viability of them
eventually becoming a couple. As I said before, shipping them isn't wrong, claiming they are canonically a couple
is. Also, I must remind you
yet again, but Megumi Ogata is Hideaki Anno's confidante and she has a lot of influence in pretty much everything Shinji related - let's not forget he literally asked her for input towards what to do with him, ironically because Anno wasn't being capable of identifying himself with Shinji anymore and was more connected to Gendo of all people. She
never showed any sign of discomfort and her words are just what they are, that they aren't lovers and that's all there is to it. Picking someone else for half a dozen lines said by a grown up version of your character didn't make her despise the character she spent
25 years voice acting or her close friend that confides with her. Also worth pointing out that
the very same thing was said by Mari's VA, so according to your logic she also must've been salty lol
Konja7 wrote:Could you tell me who said one of the original ideas was to have them contact each other via smartphone? It would help me to look.
Unfortunately I don't remember but you could always ctrl + f it, but if I'm not mistaken - and I could very well be - it was Mayu Sakamoto, Mari's VA.