[MANGA] [NGE] New Manga Stage Thread

[child of Lilith]

Welcome back, symbv. It's been awhile.

[CJD]

I'm with coL. I know you probably just came back to post your reaction but it's always nice to see you and read your stuff, especially when it involves Asuka. A toast to your interpretation of the ending, as my immediate thoughts were similar when I read spoilers.

[pwhodges]

False/altered memories, yes. Time reset, no.

It's more than just memories, though, because the seasons have returned - so presumably 2I didn't happen either; the MPE, the cross, and Shinji's residual memories are just leakages from a parallel reality, placed there more for us than for the story itself. Anyway, there's no simple single definition of reset.

[soul.assassin]

Welcome back.

[R334]

Last Stage raw is out, btw. You want it, pm me. (reminder: I don't upload stuff on /a/ or elsewhere)

SPOILER: Show

[URL=http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/8571/ogx7004.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9273/ogx7005.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/9829/ogx7006.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/9828/ogx7007.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/7448/ogx7036.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/699/ogx7041.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/7082/ogx7045.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/640/ogx7049.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/491/ogx7051.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/8194/ogx7052.jpg][/URL]

[Blue Monday]

Having sat on it (LOL) for most of the day and after seeing the raw, I'm feeling this is a 5/10...

Okay, so a reset/redo ending; an asinine narrative device on the same level as "it was all a dream" or "the ending is the same as the beginning"*. Not only is it pedestrian storytelling, it throws away, as noted by many others here already, all the major thematic messages of the NGE anime, EOE and the New Theatrical Edition instalments. Also rendering many points in the manga's story itself completely meaningless. Kaworu's last request and Yui and Rei's farewell spiels are the most blatant that come to mind. And what of the development and lessons learned by our beloved cast?
Nup.

All this will do is poison the discussions of other Eva iterations.[/spoiler]

Yep, and that annoys the hell out of me. Nothing but fuel for crazy tinfoil hat Sequel Theorists who are unable to discern properly between the different iterations.

I think he understood, he just didn't care and wanted to do his own thing instead. Kinda misses all sorts of points in the process IMO, but to each his own.

Pretty much. And that's what it's always going to boil down to, I think.

This is far from a happy ending, if you ask me. This is frustrating. It's as if Sadamoto threw everything that was being taught away; Instead of living with what has happened, and letting himself learning from the past, Shinji ran away from his former reality, and created a new one so he didn't have to deal with the fact that life is shitty. He wiped his slate clean, which beats the point of Evangelion: Learning to accept what you are given.

Agreed. I've even had some people say "Hey, the kids deserve this kind of life after what they've been through". But again, that misses the point. You don't get things in life because you deserve them. You get them by working for it, trying to live with the cards you've been dealt. And how can this "clean slate" be appreciated if none of the players remember what they went through beforehand anyway?
It's just... Ugh.

I can't help but feel a more understated finish would've been far more appropriate. I mean, even at it's darkest times the manga is never really as emotionally scatching as EOE. Maybe if it were on the same level as Q, the ending we got would've been more right. But seeing how things seemed to be getting spun more optimistically (For example, some of the diversions of the last few chapters: Yui and Rei being there to watch over humanity, so on and so forth), then we get a do-over ending anyway - It's unfortunately stupefying is what it is**.

Anyway, regarding the illustrations; it's beautiful. Some of Sadamoto's best work on the entire project I believe. Imagine what could've been if an actual writer been given the reins and Sadamoto just focused on art duties. But lamenting over what could've been is stupid, and I'm actually still pretty stoked with the series overall - Never having treated it as a definitive take on the story, I've always just enjoyed it as a comic-book adaptation minus a lot of the substance and technical prowess of NGE/EOE. But I do know people who hold the manga as their favourite version, so it has been interesting getting their thoughts on the matter.

Having said all that, I do give it marks for being different. And for the people that have always wanted this kind of ending, we can now just point them in the direction and see them off with a pat on the back.

That GIF I posted earlier really captures how I feel about all this, haha. Agonising, confusing, hilarious yet rejoicing all at the same time.

Cheers, Sada!


"Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live. After all, you are alive, so you will always have the chance to be happy. As long as the Sun, the Earth and the Moon exist, everything will be alright."

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*I really don't want to write the premise of entirely, as a good story always usually comes down to how it is executed. I just can't think of any examples where the reset trope actually works well.

**My own take, a thought that came to me today, would be the ending we got minus the memory loss (and everything that would entail), but also have it composed non-linearly with a Last B-esque OMF beach sequence.

[symbv]

Agreed. I've even had some people say "Hey, the kids deserve this kind of life after what they've been through". But again, that misses the point. You don't get things in life because you deserve them. You get them by working for it, trying to live with the cards you've been dealt. And how can this "clean slate" be appreciated if none of the players remember what they went through beforehand anyway?

I don't think that misses the point. Yeah, you can always argue there are contradictions, cruelty, unreasonableness or harshness in life, and even your saying that "you get this in life by working for it" can easily turn out to be untrue in real life, but why do we have stories that show us characters who get an ending that the readers think they deserve?? Does it mean that thinking that they deserve that ending automatically precludes the opinion that they have somehow worked for it, even though not directly? As for "not remembering", the Misato's pedant shows that the memory is not entirely gone, but the fact is if all the memory is retained, it will just be traumatic to the people. Living in a reconstructed world while retaining all the memory of your past is more like cruelty and torture. My thinking is that people are changed as a result of their experience with Intrumentality etc but the changes are internalized and subtle, so it does not require explicit memory of the people and events (which in my opinion is all for the better). And this is why Shinji is quite a bit different from the Shinji before Instrumentality (and one can argue Asuka is a bit different too). And this is why we can appreciate this new world. ;-)

[SimplyMason0]

TIME DIDN'T RESET. Fuck, people, I know you read the spoilers, at least act like you paid attention! See that MPE? That tells you time didn't reset. False/altered memories, yes. Time reset, no.

I got confused over other theories and misinformation. I'm sorry. However quite frankly, that makes zero sense which was why I thought the time stuff was true. I assume that the MP Eva was just scenery before time resets.

Did Toji and the others really die?
What happened to the Evas and stuff related to it? Did it just vanish?
Will Keel strike again?
How come Shinji, Asuka and Kensuke are the only ones to get their minds wiped?

I know that Eva is well known for WTF endings but they have a certain meaning to it. Here it just feels shallow and convoluted because the plot gets in the way.

The time thing makes much more sense if that were the case.

[Kendrix]

How about this:
What we are seeing here are the *REINCARNATIONS* of them, as Yui implied.

Which is why the MP-EVAs are referred to as "relics", it's been a long time and civilization has just been rebuilt to it's pre-impact level.

They're still not telling us what happened after the beach scene, assuming some pendant of it took place, but it was kinda implied that seasons were restored with the whole symbolic snow thing.

Also, I don't see why everyone is in a frenzy to call this an LAS ending. Kensuke is there, too, isn't he?
Manga!Asuka and Manga!Shinji were never interested in each other that way - it just shows Reincarnation!Shinji meeting some ppl from his past life by chance.

[InstrumentalityOne]

Done with the script

Expect a scanlation to pop up somewhere later today

Also, welcome back symbv

[Mr. Tines]

Did Toji and the others really die?
What happened to the Evas and stuff related to it? Did it just vanish?
Will Keel strike again?
How come Shinji, Asuka and Kensuke are the only ones to get their minds wiped?

Not stated; we see one of the harpies; unlikely; we don't see any other named characters, but the harpy sighting suggests that everyone got reset.

While the last panel is perfectly fine as it is as a conclusion, the rest of the stage is a trainwreck and no way to get there. And it would have taken so little to fix it up -- acknowledging the aftermath of the angel attack as something that ended the post-2I malaise, and "Asuka? I got another letter from her last week from Germany." (with accompanying frames of her writing it).

[Blue Monday]

*REINCARNATIONS*

Reincarnations but with a Shinji that just so happens to also have Misato's pendant in his possession?
Nah~

Also, I don't see why everyone is in a frenzy to call this an LAS ending. Kensuke is there, too, isn't he?

My sentiments exactly, and I tend to ship Soryu and Shinji in NGE too, if one can call it that.

In fact I don't know what to think of people so readily accepting of this pill just cause they see it as an LAS finish. It needs to be thought of in a greater context, surely.

...why do we have stories that show us characters who get an ending that the readers think they deserve??

Irrelevant because other examples most likely don't employ a magical Ctrl+Z. But that does touch on an interesting tangent that occurred to me earlier; the wants/needs and just desserts of the characters in-setting versus that of the reader/audience's expectations.

Also Shinji's look in this stage reminds of a fan art piece by MC:

SPOILER: Show

Avatar cut that I've been thinking about for a little while now:

[Bagheera]

Symbv: You're a credit to the fandom, and your LAS instincts are obviously in top form. Glad to see you haven't given up on us forever!

It's more than just memories, though, because the seasons have returned - so presumably 2I didn't happen either; the MPE, the cross, and Shinji's residual memories are just leakages from a parallel reality, placed there more for us than for the story itself. Anyway, there's no simple single definition of reset.

That I can't explain. 2I still had to have happened, as we wouldn't have gotten to the MPE series otherwise, but the reason Japan lost its seasons to begin with lay in the fact that Adam's S2 blew up and took Antarctica with it. How to offset that without some other physical event re-aligning Earth's axis somehow, I dunno.

Or perhaps the seasons haven't returned? Maybe what we're seeing is an impact winter, and the world is in a frigid state throughout? That would be consistent with the scenes we've seen, but it doesn't seem to be Sada's intent. So I dunno.

[InstrumentalityOne]

Done w/ cleaning the pages

Also, just so you guys know, Asuka didn't win anything.

SPOILER: Show

Existing in a world where Rei doesn't exist hardly constitutes as winning, right?

edit:Turns out there already scans available :/
bleh.

NVM those are just photo raws

[Fireball]

In memory, I'm going to build a Rei out of snow this winter.

[ElMariachi]

Symbv: That I can't explain. 2I still had to have happened, as we wouldn't have gotten to the MPE series otherwise, but the reason Japan lost its seasons to begin with lay in the fact that Adam's S2 blew up and took Antarctica with it. How to offset that without some other physical event re-aligning Earth's axis somehow, I dunno.

Earth's axis being perturbed was part of the covert story to explain the season changes, it was supposed to happen as a consequence of the asteroid that crashed on the Antarctic.
True reason why the seasons got blocked in summer(in Japan at least) is a combination of the Antartic ice melting and ADAM's terraforming of Earth, which as been stopped when his S² engine overloaded(be it because he was in a poor state or because of the bindings the humans put on him)

Or perhaps the seasons haven't returned? Maybe what we're seeing is an impact winter, and the world is in a frigid state throughout? That would be consistent with the scenes we've seen, but it doesn't seem to be Sada's intent. So I dunno.

So 3I changed Earth from perpetual summer to perpetual winter, hard to call that an improvement!
Besides the archaeologists can't explain anything about the MP-EVA relics, even though their torso retain the distinctive shape of an Evangelion chest armor, that means that Evangelions never existed in that alternate time, and the EVA were created from the data collected from ADAM and as a response for the incoming of the Angels. So that mean that in this alternate time, 2I never happened, but what we don't know is if ADAM and Lilith are back in their respective Moons or if they were erased from existence.(same thing for the Moons themselves)

[TMBounty_Hunter]

SPOILER: Show

[URL=http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/8571/ogx7004.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9273/ogx7005.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/9829/ogx7006.jpg][/URL] [URL=http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/9828/ogx7007.jpg][/URL]

Anyone planning on translating this interview?

[Bagheera]

True reason why the seasons got blocked in summer(in Japan at least) is a combination of the Antartic ice melting and ADAM's terraforming of Earth, which as been stopped when his S² engine overloaded(be it because he was in a poor state or because of the bindings the humans put on him)

No, that wouldn't change Earth's seasonality. True reason is explosion that took out Antarctica; the source of that explosion was the coverup, not the fact that it happened or was responsible for the changes in Earth's climate.

Besides the archaeologists can't explain anything about the MP-EVA relics, even though their torso retain the distinctive shape of an Evangelion chest armor, that means that Evangelions never existed in that alternate time, and the EVA were created from the data collected from ADAM and as a response for the incoming of the Angels. So that mean that in this alternate time, 2I never happened, but what we don't know is if ADAM and Lilith are back in their respective Moons or if they were erased from existence.(same thing for the Moons themselves)

Dude, it's not an alternate timeline. Evas existed, everything we saw in the manga happened. People lost their memories of the events, that's it. It's not a reset.

[ElMariachi]

No, that wouldn't change Earth's seasonality. True reason is explosion that took out Antarctica; the source of that explosion was the coverup, not the fact that it happened or was responsible for the changes in Earth's climate.

That's just what I said, except that ADAM must have done something too, as just the melting of Antarctica would have changed the seasons, not blocked Earth into just one.

Dude, it's not an alternate timeline. Evas existed, everything we saw in the manga happened. People lost their memories of the events, that's it. It's not a reset.

I keep using the wrong term sorry, I should say "altered world". And we're not evn sure that the events of the manga happened and that it was just everyone's memories that got altered, as if that was the case, then people should be wondering why there is suddenly three Ashino lakes instead of one, or why most of the cities are in ruins and had traces of having been underwater for more than a decade.
In the last chapter Shinji, Asuka and Kensuke are in Tokyo, which after 2I was an half immersed and radioactive ruin, it's impossible that it instantaneously got back to being a fully functional city without some time fuckery involved.

[Bagheera]

That's just what I said, except that ADAM must have done something too, as just the melting of Antarctica would have changed the seasons, not blocked Earth into just one.

Well, of course he did something. He blew up!

I keep using the wrong term sorry, I should say "altered world". And we're not evn sure that the events of the manga happened and that it was just everyone's memories that got altered, as if that was the case, then people should be wondering why there is suddenly three Ashino lakes instead of one, or why most of the cities are in ruins and had traces of having been underwater for more than a decade.

We know the events of the manga happened because of the MPE. That's why it's there.

In the last chapter Shinji, Asuka and Kensuke are in Tokyo, which after 2I was an half immersed and radioactive ruin, it's impossible that it instantaneously got back to being a fully functional city without some time fuckery involved.

Or, not knowing anything about what happened after 2I, they just call Tokyo-2 Tokyo. Why would they call it anything else? Don't jump to time fuckery unless we're specifically told it's in play.