Finished that Evangelion rewatch
Yeah turns out my spongy 14-year-old brain just didn't absorb a bunch of the latter third, lot about it that I'd just fully forgot. Got some thoughts but won't be discussing much of specific plot points.
Watched End of Evangelion as well, and found it kind of frustrating as a piece of media. I'm sure it's well explored but I really don't run in these circles so it's new to me. Back in t'day the received wisdom was to skip episodes 25 and 26, and watch End instead. That was the good ending, the one that actually makes sense.
And I don't know if I'm just better at reading media in my 30s than the typical audience 20 years ago, but I wholeheartedly don't think it's better. It's clearer, that's for sure. It just feels to me like it resents having to exist. It's a redo that heard the feedback from fans, saw their opinions, and felt the need to turn some opinions around. My core thought here is that in providing a more narratively satisfying conclusion, it's a less emotionally satisfying one.
You can sort of break End into two major components - the points it clarifies, and the events it introduces. Most of the latter events may have been known to the writers the first time round, but they don't really factor directly into the narrative - in 25+26 they're history, not narrative, and you frankly don't need to know the specific hows and whys - they happened.
The points it clarifies are things like "so what specifically is this Human Instrumentality Project, and what happened to everybody we saw in the original ending?" and to be honest? It was already fairly clear? The specifics were purposely kept obscure, but the broad strokes of it are communicated, and I think with a moderately close reading of 23-26 there isn't really anything crucial the viewer would be missing.
The stuff it adds has me conflicted. It mostly serves to clarify narratively who's good and who's bad, a role I find kind of facile. But it also gives significantly better closure to Rei and Asuka's emotional arcs, stuff that was sorely missing from the original. Again, I don't really intend to go into specifics with this, but other than those arcs most of what's added serves primarily to moralise on characters and remove any ambiguity about how we're meant to feel about them.
idk, I'd held onto that group opinion about 25+26, and was a bit taken aback by how much I liked them, which probably set me up to dislike End. I can totally see why you'd be underwhelmed by them, but nearly 30 years on that original ending feels extremely... idk, honest? Probably honest.
idk I'm not a writer.