This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Lale: About Neon Genesis Evangelion, I saw End of Evangelion, and I still don't get how a sea of orange goo is a happier form rather than the worst-case scenario. Didn't Shinji turn the world back from permanently becoming that sea of LCL, which was SEELE's, or at least his father's, aim? How is that the better choice?
Looney Toons: I think you misread what I wrote. The sea of goo is the worst-case scenario -- the Alternate Universe sequence with Asuka the childhood friend and Rei the vivacious new girl in town is the "happier" alternative.
Lale: How did Instrumentality give him the power to make that real?
(random passer-by): oy. It's been ten years and the fans are still debating what it all meant. My take on it all, which is worth what you paid for it, is:
The orange goo thing was going to happen one way or another, whether he took any part in it or not. SEELE was doing the Red Earth Ceremony with the Mass Production series, Gendou couldn't stop it but wanted to hijack it and control it using Rei and Unit-0 to create a new world (for varying values of the word "new," possibly only a false dream world in which nonetheless he could find Yui again). Only Rei turned against him at the end and went to ask Shinji what she should do instead. The only choice Shinji seemed to have was: should Rei make the orange-goo thing permanent, and reduce all of humanity to dreaming disassociated cells forever? or should she allow people to chooose to leave the false dream world and pull themselves together, reassemble their bodies from the individual cells in the orange goo sea, and live as distinct individual humans again?
I have always, incidentally, wondered what the appeal was here. Okay, Gendo Ikari was psychotic, there's no following his thought processes, really. Okay, Fuyutsuki was equally obsessed with Yui and willing to follow Gendo's lead, if unenthusiastically. But for the rest? We don't know enough about SEELE to understand anyone's motivation. Hideaki Anno? Japan is culturally influenced by Buddhism, and there are some Hindu ideas that were carried by Buddhism into the rest of Asia.
Maybe the idea for him has some root in the Hindu idea of the Wheel of Karma, the idea of evolution having gone as far forward as it can go, and resetting everyone and everything back to a primordial ocean of single-celled organisms, to start again. Now, I agree, this is scientifically, biologically, diet-Coke-squirting-out-of-your-nose, train-wreck, what-choo-talkin-bout-Willis ridiculous, but stay with me here, we're talking about religion and philosophy, not science. Evolution is shift in allele frequency over time in a breeding population, and it is both natural and unstoppable. Right? Right. But maybe--and I am just guessing here, I'm American by birth, and was not raised in any Eastern religion, I like to think I read widely but I'm still just guessing--that at the bitter tag end of the 20th Century, with millenial craziness starting to pop up in a big way in the more benighted parts of the Western world, and in the newspapers worldwide, then maybe to someone like Hideaki Anno, it would have seemed appropriate, or at least appropriate enough to tell a story about it, a story about the End of the World. A story about the End of Days, complete with lots of creepy imagery borrowed from the Book of Revelations, interwoven with a Buddhist-Hindu subtext about the end of an age and the beginning of an age, perhaps also influenced by the ongoing Weekly Article of DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM in the Japanese press about Japan's shrinking birth rate and shrinking population, about ecological disasters real, potential, or strictly imaginary, about the Indians and the Pakistanis and the North Koreans all rattling nuclear sabers in places where Japan would be guaranteed to get vast amounts of strontium-90-flavored fallout when and if the respective politicians lost their heads and made one too many threats they couldn't back down from, about a possible new Cold War between China and the US (and all those big Chinese coastal cities with big bullseyes on them, and Japan directly downwind of any possible mushroom clouds), of what might have seemed to a person of a certain cast of mind an unceasing drumbeat of impending doom, which might engender a certain understandable desire to tell a story about a great wheel turning all the way around back to the beginning again.
I'm guessing. I'm only guessing. Whether anything I'm saying here makes any sense at all I leave for you gentle folk to decide. And it still leaves open the question of why, in the story, a great many intelligent, educated people who had everything to lose collaborated so eagerly with people who they knew damn well wanted to turn everyone into orange goo. Perhaps it is my Western perspective that makes me unable to see it. We Americans are used to thinking optimistically about the future, thinking in terms of Progress and Science and the chrome-plated steering wheel of The Future being in our sweaty little hands.
Or maybe Hideaki Anno is just nuts.
Lale: "The only choice Shinji seemed to have was: should Rei make the orange-goo thing permanent, and reduce all of humanity to dreaming disassociated cells forever? or should she allow people to chooose to leave the false dream world and pull themselves together, reassemble their bodies from the individual cells in the orange goo sea, and live as distinct individual humans again?"
That's always been my take on it, too. And between the two choices, I think the latter, living as individuals again, was the better choice. I didn't think the Elseworld where Asuka was his best friend and Rei was normal and stuff was a choice, just one of those What If? scenes (like, What If? Evangelion was your typical, cliche romanctic anime?). In short, I don't think this is a subversion; Shinji does not choose the worst-case scenario, just reality.
(random passer-by): That scene specifically? I always took it as meaning that Shinji was for a time orange goo himself, and that world, plus the live-action footage shot with Kotono Mitsuishi and Yuko Miyamura as office ladies complaining about their boyfriends, were what he hallucinated until he reassembled himself to appear on the beach with Asuka.
Morgan Wick: What is it that makes stuck-up critics think "Mind Screw = brilliant!"? I think that's why critics liked the Sopranos finale - in fact that's probably why we got the Sopranos finale we got in the first place.
Dr Dedman: Because asking questions is almost always more interesting than giving out answers. Unless you have some great answers (and even then, some won't like it). Or you phrase your questions really poorly. Critics have heard to many answers, thus they prefer neat questions.
