Dominic wrote:I saw "Evengelion" about 15 years back. (Honey Bear is a huge fan. Our trips to conventions typically included time spent at a bootlegger table and him picking up the latest VHS. The guy doing the subbing was behind the show's release in Japan, but he managed to keep pace and catch up with the series, actually staying ahead of legitimate US releases.)
It's weird to think about watching Evangelion as it came out. On the level of reading Watchmen as it was being released in issues. So often we think of seminal works like this as being complete and always just being 'around', it's unusual to think about being there *as it was being released* and seeing it turn into this big thing.
The ending is a clusterfuck. I have seen both. But, I forget which I saw first and which is the right one. I do recall Honey Bear, myself and a few others being annoyed that the two official endings contradicted each other. We were initially unaware that one was a feckless over-write of the other, and much time was wasted on trying to reconcile the two. (We considered the possibility of a "lost" episode that the bootleggers had missed.)
The explanation I've always heard (and I believe this has some official capacity) is that the Movie ending shows the actual, physical act and ramifications of Instrumentality occurring, while the TV ending is just a manifestation of everything going through Shinji's head at the time.
Of course, the real explanation for the endings is that the project's budget had imploded so badly by the last two episodes that they were reduced to using cheap pen/pencil drawings and storyboards to try and put the ideas of what they were attempting to get across out there, and had to write it all off under the guise of 'Symbolism!' and so forth. Only after the runaway success of the series had effectively funded a movie were they able to fully animated what they wanted in the first place. So tl;dr the Movie ending trumps the TV one, if only because that's what it was supposed to be all along, uncompromised.
The only thing obvious about this is that the only people who are going to jump for it are the hard-core fanboys of either property. This is likely to be more on the TF side than the NGE side, given the nature of both properties and the fan-bases. But, there are likely to be some NGE fans who will "buy anything".
How familiar are you with what an out-of-control merchandising juggernaut Eva is in Japan? Because between the Asuka/Rei toilet-brush set and the crossover campaign with Schick razors, yes, NGE fans will buy *anything*.
If they try to give it any depth, they will be opening up exactly the philosophical and theological cans of worms that Takara would do better to avoid.
If I know my Japanese merchandising pushes, and I do, this is very likely to be some repainted exclusive figures and incomprehensible story pages published in magazines.
"Transformers v/s the Heavenly Host" "Tranformers: Apostation" I dunno. These names are fun to come up with.
"I mustn't transform and roll away... I mustn't transform and roll away... I mustn't transform and roll away... AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!"
Scioli's upcoming TF/Joe book is likely going to be branded as deconstruction.
I'll wait to see if they actually do that, but it would only prove that the forces behind it don't know the difference between 'deconstruction' and 'weird, edgy story'.