[EVA] final Asuka=rei/misato/asuka

[david mankins]

   Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 16:39:33 -0500
   From: Brendan Jamieson <bjamieson at mpdr0.chicago.il.ameritech.net>
   
   david mankins wrote:
   >The vehemence with which you all reject this theory is a bit
   >surprising to me.
   
   Because it's nonsensical... and that's really all there is to it. I
   heard it, I watched it - I rejected it. 

To a lot of people, a great deal in the closing chapters of Evangelion
were nonsensical... and that's really all there is to it.  They
watched it - they rejected it.  

Each of us may judge for ourselves what is sense and what is nonsense.
   
   >Oh, sure, the ambiguity of the lighting in the final scene alone isn't
   >much evidence (just enough to spark the idea)
   
   It's not even the lighting that sparked the idea - it's a bad image. In
   the actual scene here eyes are *not* brown.
   
The particular example you cite uses a bad image as evidence, true.

However, in my own experience it *was* the lighting.  My second
impression, re-veiwing _End of Eva_ was that the person on the beach
might be some sort of composite --- and eye color had nothing to do
with it.  The bandages echo Rei, the (apparent) black and red color of
Asuka's clothes seemed to echo Misato, the voice and hair are Asuka's,
but the attitude and behavior are that of a different Asuka...

   >That creature on the beach with Shinji could just be a composite he
   >created when he dragged himself out of the universal soup of
   >Complementation.
   
   Impossible. That would go against the entire point of the ending.

And the alleged point of the ending that this goes against is what,
exactly?  Does accepting that point not require us to accept a
possible contradiction of the TV ending?

I agree that Shinji creating a fantasy/composite Asuka would go
against Shinji's earlier rejection of the alternate-universe world
(and this, along with the symmetry I noted earlier is why I don't
accept the theory).

On the other had, as you point out, Shinji is an emotional wreck ---
what is the surreal landscape around him but an mirror of that
wreckage?  Who does he choose for his companion but the one person who
is significant to him whom he does not know to have been taken away by
death, or otherwise precluded to him (Rei being ``alive'', but subject
to an incest taboo).  

   Moreover, it assumes Shinji has some super ability when in truth at the
   end of the film he is little more than a boy - and an emotional wreck.

No more ``super ability'' than creating a fantasy alternate reality,
which we know to be an option available to him.  Nor no more ``super
ability'' than it would take to single-handedly alter the progress of
the Complementation project, which we are told is available to him. 

Asuka's presence on that beach is itself a bit non-sensical, and goes
against a good deal of what we've seen leading up to that point ---
her Eva was utterly destroyed before complementation began, and there
are strong indications that she was *eaten* by the mass-produced Evas.
Did it require a ``super ability'' for her (who was also an emotional
wreck), to pull herself into Shinji's reality at the end of Eva?