Tangent about Impact events has been moved hereKonja7 wrote:I think Gendo saying this was a reference to Shinji rejecting Instrumentality in EoE. I know it's too meta, but they were in the anti-universe where charactes remember previous timelines.
I am with you right up until the last two words. If we look at the place the characters end up in EoE - specifically Gendo and Yui - it does not make any sense for NTE to happen at any point afterwards, since that would involve them (as past discussions of this point have shown Gendo has plausible deniability, but Yui is undisputable) going back to a mortal life that they detest and have spent most of their respective lives working at getting away from and elevating themselves into a being of higher order; NTE (or NGE for that matter if one were to reverse the supposed sequence of events, which works just as well by the commonly cited talking points) being a sequel would by necessity mean that Yui gave up on being what basically amounts to God, her lifelong ambition that she is shown to be extremely happy with having achieved, alongside taking with her everyone on Earth who was similarily despaired about their ATF-bearing existence.
This completely undermines the thematic point of EoE and multiple major character arcs.
Instead, I pose that what the characters are gaining insight into during Additional Impact are
other timelines; on top of the frequently cited metanarrative elements in the sequences, the freshly released cut content (which, as usual, ct for some reason or another, grain of salt, but even with that can still be used to inform general plans of the narrative in conjunction with evidence that did make it into the final product, which is the case here) was shown tearing through the actual script of the movie; that's about as clearly as you can show a sequence taking place in a space where its inhabitants are aware of their own fictionality.
Having established this, it is hardly a stretch to pose that the pieces of NGE canon we see during the sequence is meant to not signify temporal continuity, but rather metaspatial continuity; yes, they are remembering something that another version of themselves did, but it is not from the place of a distant ancestor, so much as that of a different self at the same/a comparable time; think of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
I can see why Gendo hired Misato to do the actual commanding. He tried it once and did an appalling job. ~ AWinters
Your point of view is horny, and biased. ~ glitz2hard
What about titty-ten? ~ Reichu
The movies function on their own terms. If people can't accept them on those terms, and keep expecting them to be NGE, then they probably should have realized a while ago that they weren't going to have a good time. ~ Words of wisdom courtesy of Reichu