[EVA] Evangelion 2.0 Complete Records Collection

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 3:57 PM, SSD <sailorstardust at evageeks.org> wrote:
> 2.0 and 1.0 are hitting the audience over the head with Oedipal angles,
> whether it's Gendo pushing Rei and Shinji together for his
> 3I/Instrumentality plans, Rei wanting to have Gendo and Shinji get along,
> Shinji realizing that Eva-01's scent reminds him of Rei AND Yui...
>
> And there's also the angle of Rei and Shinji are some sort of long lost
> siblings presented in 1.0. (For instance: the first hell-train has Yui and
> Gendo discussing names, then Rei saying "Ikari Rei. Ayanami Shinji. No,
> Ayanami Rei." when that deformed Rei appears.)
>
> Rei and Shinji's interactions with Yui in Eva-01 during 3.0 are bound to be
> interesting, I think.

Indeed. For some reason I thought NGE TV also had that 'Rei is
Shinji's name if he had been born female' thingy, but grepping through
my scripts I can't seem to find it; oh well.

But I don't know if *Oedipal* is the right word to use, exactly.

Remember that the CRC reveals a crew who thinks distinctly different
from us Westerners; Anno thinks it's clear that Mari and Kaji are
close (!), they think Mari has been useful (!!), it's fine that Shinji
so dominates the movie because you wouldn't want y'know Asuka to be
anything close to a main character (!!!), and Enokido thinks Asuka
jumping in bed out of nowhere is sufficient to show there's a
connection that Shinji would go berserk over (!!!!).

In fact, I suspect that once Numbers-kun has translated the whole
thing, one could probably go through the negative criticisms of 2.0 on
EGF and almost one by one match up the criticism to some lines in the
CRC where someone on the team sees the change as an improvement. (For
example, I remember people complaining again and again that Shinji had
too much of a focus and Anno sucks - well guys, I'm afraid he knew
that perfectly well and did that focus quite deliberately and regards
it as an improvement. Don't you just look forward to 3.0...?)

So, if we read in Oedipus, they may well not.

> One "type" is the girl who was a childhood friend, who has always been with you since you were born, and with whom there are no new or strange feelings. Rei is established to resemble a "mother" in some respects, and so she produces in young men a feeling of distance [from things?] as though they were still half in the womb. [1] Now, Asuka's particular type is that of the girl who comes from a foreign country. This also produces a very good feeling. Probably it is the male instinct to think, in some respects, that girls from another world are better than girls who are familiar and close to hand (laughs).

Or from a draft

> Conversation between Rei and Shinj. "You seemed like a mother."

Although I agree there is some ambiguity there:

> Tsurumaki: Right. There was a feeling that we wanted the difficulties to be, as far as possible, confined to "Break," because we wanted a situation where we would be able to try various things in the third part. So, after Rei's death in episode 23, Kaworu comes to Shinji; we attempted a structure similar to the TV series. But, in the end, Rei didn't die........
>
> --- Instead, it seemed that Shinji and Rei "got together."
>
> Tsurumaki: There is probably some other intention there, so I think you should check with Anno-san [about that]. However, because there was a feeling that Rei III had been poorly developed in the TV series, after Rei II died in "Break," we wanted to develop in detail the drama of Rei III in "Q."

Tsurumaki, by the way, warns us about trying to read too much into past scenes:

> --- There's one thing that mystified me. Despite the fact that the original scenario for the climax was different, in "Prelude" Gendou mentions something like a "love love strategy" intended to bring Rei and Shinji closer together. Why does that appear to be consistent [with "Break"]?
>
> Tsurumaki: Anno-san probably hasn't thought about that very deeply.
>
> --- Eh? That wasn't foreshadowing?
>
> Tsurumaki: We on the staff had a conversation about that dialogue from "Prelude," wondering if it was okay to have [Gendou] say that. Not to mention that I thought Rei II was going to die in "Break."
>
> --- Then why, despite that, was there a consistency?
>
> Tsurumaki: This is evidence that the story was developed, not with an "inductive" technique, but with a "deductive" one. "He already said it there, so we have no choice." It's something like a methodology where [the story] is adjusted, even forcibly, to be consistent with what has already been done.
>
> --- This is quite a shock (laughing)! Surely, immediately following "Prelude," there are people who grin and say of the "love love strategy," "This is a big change!" Surely it leaves a strong impression on everyone. As a result, they will surely think during "Break," "Ah, as I thought, those two were brought together!"
>
> Tsurumaki: The impression that Anno-san mainly wanted to convey was that Gendou and Fuyutsuki were devising a secret plot. Because Shinji happens to go to Rei's room just after that, that was what they discussed. When "secret plot" and "Shinji and Rei" were combined, it probably appeared something like "a strategy to bring together Shinji and Rei."

>From the deductive point of view, if you make Rei a *romantic*
interest in the same way as Asuka, you cause yourself problems
reconciling that with the already covered 'mother' aspect of Rei, and
you give yourself even more problems with figuring out what to do with
Asuka or Mari...

> (By the way, Gwern, gmail keeps popping up a message that your email address
> isn't verified, you might want to look into that.)

Dunno what that's about. I'm cool with Gmail as far as I know; I would
guess perhaps the ML server is doing something deprecated or old - Tom
probably doesn't update it very often.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net/otaku