SaltyJoe wrote:Did you watch the movie without subs? Cause that's absolutely not what happens.
She jumps into bed with him, shifts to a first-name basis with him, insults him a few times, tells him the truth about literally the most important thing in her life (why she pilots), expresses interest in knowing why he pilots, insults him when he disappoints her by revealing that he pilots for his dad.
It's not an actual confession, no, but there's definitely something there. Let me remind you that this is right after the scene where Shikinami whines about how lonely she is and how she always wanted to be alone,
up til now. Honestly, the most obvious interpretation of the scene to me is that Shinji making the destruction of Sahaquiel possible got her all hot and bothered. Considering the way she phrases her lonely whinings, it seems like she's just talking about maybe making a few friends, until she gets up in the middle of the night, goes next door and jumps into bed with Shinji.
Yeah, that's definitely an innocent kind of loneliness. Why does she tell him about why she pilots? Why is she so insistent that he tell her why he pilots? Why does she get more bitter and hurtful than usual when he tells her that he doesn't pilot for himself? She's blatantly interested in him, and my complaint is that it doesn't really make sense for her to be.
Soryu's feelings for Shinji were built over weeks, even months, of having to put up with his constant presence at her home, his implicit resemblance to Kaji, his abilities in battle, his general apathy about everything (which she interpreted as playing hard to get). Shikinami's only reason to like Shinji is that he made it possible for her take out Sahaquiel - but so did Rei, and you don't see Shikinami waltzing over to hop in bed with her ass in the middle of the night. Shinji's no longer apathetic by the second movie - certainly less so than he was in the corresponding series episodes, anyway. Since she doesn't think too much of Kaji anymore, there's no reason for her to appreciate whatever mysterious aspect of Shinji that reminded Soryu of Kaji - whatever it is that makes both Soryu and Misato associate the two of them (in Misato's case, it extends to her father as well, but I don't know that we know what aspect of character links Kaji, Shinji, and Dr. Katsuragi specifically; maybe they all kind of look alike?)
And now, with the vanishment of her crush on Kaji, Asuka's character feels pretty much gutted. What does she have left? She's a tsundere with diminishing-returns combat abilities. Big fucking deal. Nothing to separate her from the ten thousand other tsundere love interests of the last fifteen years and before. Everything that once gave me interest in the character of Asuka - such as her actually having a character - is pretty much gone.
SaltyJoe wrote:No, it doesn't. In Gendo's plan, the Dummy Sytem would work just as good. Yui screws him over, but if that didn't happen, Shinji wouldn't even be neccessary.
Then what was the whole point of the "Yes, now we will push them closer together
that way we will sell more doujinshi" spiel? I don't think Gendou hoped to rely on Shinji for Third Impact, but in NGE, it wasn't in his plans at all. Shinji had literally nothing to do with Gendou's plan for Third Impact in NGE, all he had to do was keep Gendou, Lilith and Unit 01 from getting annihilated. In Rebuild, it's apparently his grand Plan B, maybe even his Plan A if he'd wound up having to do 3I before the dummy plug started working. You'd think he'd put a little effort into his Plan B becoming someone somewhat less like himself, more pliable, more loyal, maybe?
SaltyJoe wrote:Also, to be fair on Rebuild, in the original series, up till about Epsiode 21 (Nerv/Ritsuko/Gendo+Yui infodump) we had almost zero backstory on anything apart from Misato and Shinji himself.
Very true. Rebuild is equally poor at spacing out its backstory. I'm glad to see there's at least one way they could be faithful to NGE.
SaltyJoe wrote:Plus, why should the
differences between characterizations be addressed if Rebuild is a different continuity?
Because the audience is the same as that of NGE, mostly, and so they have expectations as to what they will find in something officially labeled as an Evangelion anime movie.
If you were watching a play called
Prince Hamlet (please don't assume I'm putting Eva on a par with Shakespeare or whatever, illustrative purposes only), even if you saw that it was not by Shakespeare and was rather a retelling of the Hamlet story, you would expect it to be about a guy called Hamlet, and odds are you would also expect it to be about his struggles with whether or not to kill his king and uncle, who Hamlet suspects of treacherously murdering his father and marrying his mother. If it did not contain these things, you would expect it to be explained why not, why there are differences. It would be stupid to have someone walk up to Hamlet and say, "I thought you were supposed to be torn with indecision over whether to kill Claudius or not," but you would still have to address the discrepancy, or people would wonder why you advertised the play as a retake of
Hamlet if you were just planning to do something fundamentally other than the plot and characters commonly recognized as
Hamlet.
I'm not saying that 3.0 should feature Shinji saying to Asuka, "So, what happened to you being an ironic mirror/inversion of, and thus a character foil for, myself, having come from surprisingly similar circumstances yet resulted in a personality that is, at least outwardly, the complete opposite of mine?" What I am saying is that there should be a given reason why Shikinami, hell, why
anything is different, or I'll wonder why they advertised Rebuild as a retake of Evangelion if they were just planning to do something other than Evangelion.
I think I'm pretty much done posting in this thread, I've said pretty much everything I can say without resorting to just saying "Rebuild sucks because I don't like it."
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