Sachi wrote:Exactly. They were about to give him some real answers, but then the plot comes and takes that away from him and the audience.
Personally, I find Mark.09's timing so perfect that I'm sure that somehow Gendo has a way of spying on the Wunder and was actually monitoring Shinji's briefing : it intervened just after Misato said that "Rei doesn't exist anymore" but before she had the time to explain what she mean by that(that she's trapped inside EVA-01 without any means of escape, and thus "doesn't exist" in our plane of existence anymore), so that when Rei Q starts to talk to him, Shinji will think that Misato is lying to him and has gone bonker.
I repeat myself : the timing is just too perfect to be a mere coincidence, especially coming from someone like Gendo.
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Sachi wrote:It is an interesting notion that Kaworu may have been manipulative of Shinji, but it's difficult to see how and why he would do so. Kaworu claims to want happiness for Shinji, and perhaps he knows better than Shinji what exactly this happiness entails, but this is what makes Kaworu kind of a lame character
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Well, first Kaworu omits to tell Shinji some very important pieces of information, like the fact he was the one who stopped N3I with his spear of Cassius, that the world wasn't immediately in the state we saw it in Q, that there is an organization called SEELE to which Gendo and Kaworu himself answers to(and that's an important information, they're the ones who started this whole HIP madness), through the movie he always talked about thwarting Gendo and NERV(which now are one and the same) but never SEELE, although they are the ones behind the plan to take the spears to start a proper HIP(again, he enver even revealed their existence to Shinji), that he never exactly explained to Shinji how the two spears were supposed to "repair the world" and why it was imperative that they have a Cassius
and a Longinus, which maybe would have made Shinji understand why their plan was screwed when the two spears in Lilith's Chamber are revealed to be Longinus, or how is it that Lilith's Chamber is the epicenter of Third Impact if Shinji's N3I was kilometers above in the Geofront, or what exactly happened with the Mark.06, Lilith and the spears. Oh yeah and the fact that there is a fucking Angel still alive inside the chamber!
I entertained the theory that actually Kaworu
wanted HIP to happen because in his mind that would be the way to bring to Shinji happiness, but he refused to tell him that by fear that he rejects it, so resigned himself to manipulate Shinji "for his own good" with omissions and half-truths.(never outright lies, because he would never be able to lie to his beloved Shinji-kun)
To prove my point : even with the two LoL, in the end Fuyutsuki said that "nearly everything went as SEELE desired", meaning that the LoC was never useful to their plan aside of a powerful weapon if things get sour. Since before the time skip they wanted to use the Mark.06(a single-pilot unit) to launch HIP, and since Q proved that they didn't needed the LoC for it, the logical conclusion is that in fact they only needs one LoL and an awakened Evangelion for HIP.
And Kaworu's plan did included a LoL, so maybe while the LoC would really had restored the planet, the LoL would had triggered HIP to evolve everyone into new beings with the FoL, and since he managed to repair the world, Shinji would be in a much more favorable states of mind to accept Instrumentality, especially since Kaworu told him the truth about repairing the world, and thus proved that he's trustworthy. Had he just started HIP without restoring the world, Shinji would had lost all trust in Kaworu and rejected Instrumentality. Remember that Shinji is notoriously very reluctant to give his trust to anyone, especially with a manipulative bastard like Gendo as a father and his mother figure and friends who seemingly turned their back on him for something he didn't know would happen when he tried to save Rei, he said it himself :
01:01:32 {Kaworu} That which was changed by Eva can be restored by Eva in turn.
01:11:45 {Shinji} You say that, but my father, Evas, Misato-san...
01:11:48 {Shinji} I can't believe in anyone, or anything!
Even before the time skip it was hard to gain his complete trust, and after the time skip it became nigh impossible without some very heavy mark of trust, like taking off the DSS Choker from Shinji on putting it on himself, thus shouldering the risk of dying if thnigs go wrong during their operation.
Last but not least, unlike in NGE, it seemed that Kaworu's death wasn't even necessary to SEELE's plans : when he noticed that the spears had morphed into two LoL, he said that they were tricked by Gendo, not SEELE(unlike in NGE when he explicitely said that SEELE tricked him into thinking that it was ADAM in Terminal Dogma, while it actually was Lilith), and when he was casted down as the 13th Angel, Mari said that there shouldn't be a 13th and again, that it was Gendo's schemes. If Kaworu isn't in the hit list of Angels, then he doesn't have any reason to betray SEELE, as long as their plan coincide(Shinji's happiness for Kaworu, HIP for SEELE), and they did... until the expedition with EVA-13.
Plus he never said that Instrumentality was a bad thing for mankind(unlike in NGE where he said that it was not the path for the Lilin), only what is it and that it was programmed since time immemorial(like it was mankind's destiny since its creation, and if by "time immemorial" he meant the FAR era, he might be right)
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I admit that this obsession with making Shinji happy makes him a rather flat character, if outright makes him more of a plot device than a character on his own right. I really hope that we'll learn more about his intentions in FINAL, because it's definitively not normal that the very first thing he says when literally being born in the Moon is that he's eager to meet again Shinji and make him happy. There is definitively something fishy here!