In academia, there is a Professor of English, Mrs. N—–, who has written about Eva. Interestingly, another Wikipedia editor objected to my use of her paper. The colloquy explains why she is such a poor source, and gives multiple examples of what I mean by dark side editing.

N—— barely understands the series and while she does seem to have watched the whole thing, she’s trying to shoehorn it into her own paper on existentialism. My point being, she focuses on all of the Christian and Gnostic symbolism, which Anno and other Gainax people have openly stated was just fluff they put in to look cool and not actually relevant to the plot. She point-blank says “they never reveal what the Angels are” (we here know the Red Cross Book ultimately said they’re from Adam as humans are from Lilith, etc.)

She didn’t understand that Rei is Lilith’s soul, so she misinterprets Rei’s interview in episodes 25 and 26 as being on a literal level.

She seems to think episodes 25 and 26 were seriously meant t be the ACTUAL finale, when they were not (though her analysis of them isn’t really affected by this).

Most of the time she’s just stating the obvious and things we knew already.

Worst of all….mid-paragraph she jumps from the Alternate Reality to the end. That is, she goes right from “he’s in this high school sex comedy happy version of his normally disturbing reality” to “I am me, I want to live in this world!”….ignoring that Shinji rejected the Alternate Reality even within episodes 25 and 26 itself. He goes through several mental shifts between the AR sequence and the final scene: she’s just conflating all of this together.

She mentions End of Evangelion in literally one sentence, in order to instantly disregard it as “just Anno’s revenge on the fans who didn’t like the TV ending and more of a parody of what they were expecting; using over the top violence” etc. She utterly disregarded End of Eva; we now know that End of Eva was more or less the originally intended ending (cell animation and scripts obviously in existence long before, Evangelion Proposal’s ending while different from EoE is more like it than the TV ending, etc.)

In short, she simply proved my long held theory: The Evangelion TV ending was high-grade pornography for philosophy majors, who then took it and championed it as the “real ending” and dismissed End of Eva as trash. In reality, Evangelion is a psychodrama (she does admit that it has very well developed psychoanalysis) and End of Evangelion faithfully delivers the full message….the TV ending is basically “we don’t have enough money to make the movie….let’s take the Third Impact scenes and show them out of context as TV episodes

She doesn’t seem to grasp that “the world of Edenic bliss” offered by Instrumentality is explicitly presented as a BAD thing; there’s no pain but also no joy, and ultimately Shinji chooses to live in a world of flawed human beings because of their inherent “realness”, which is superior to any fantasy-world he can come up with, no matter how nice.

I think these are the words of a woman so shocked by the violence in End of Eva that she wrote it off instantly as “a parody” (LITERALLY one sentence) and utterly disregarded it. (for that matter, her works cited says she was using ADV’s “Perfect” collection DVDs and thus she never saw the Director’s Cut episodes.

13 years on, people have to let go of the “the TV ending is the only ending! And End of Eva was an insult! “ ideology, and embrace that End of Eva was indeed the originally intended, “real ending”, and the TV ending is an ‘’essential supplement’’ to End of Eva, essentially an extended version of the Third Impact scenes.

She focuses so much on “wow, there’s a million possible realities to choose from!”….ignoring the series’ ultimate message that basically yeah, Shinji can choose a million different audio tracks to play on his SDAT player and then crawl inside that world, just as otaku crawl into anime. But it’s all fake; there are millions of fantasy worlds, yes…but only one real world.

In conclusion, N—–’s article says nothing particularly new or original about the series or in-depth. She ignores End of Eva, literally mentioning it in once sentence, in order to disregard it. Now, even if you are an ardent supporter of the TV ending and hate the movie ending…..she doesn’t even grasp the TV ending that well. She randomly skips from the “Alternate Reality” scene to Shinji saying “I deserve to be here!” etc., mixing up events even from within the final episodes themselves. That said, she misses the entire point of Evangelion (which was made more clear in End of Eva) : yes, there are a million possible fantasy-world realities, but they’re not “real” at all; they’re just fantasy. What made the “Real World” have value was its real-ness. Just as Neo in The Matrix preferred the harsh reality of the Real World (and Cypher couldn’t handle it), Shinji realizes that the flawed real world is more valuable than any fantasy world, simply because of its “realness”. (This would seem to be a rejection of existentialism, actually). That’s why he rejects Instrumentality at the end. The Point is that I doubt that any of the N—– article is usable as a source for anything –Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici (talk) 07:33, 2009-01-22 (UTC)