The year is 1995. A youngster has just been enthralled by Neon Genesis Evangelion. What seemed to have started as a mere mecha-anime has turned into something you’ve never expected. The “Congratulations” scene is confusing, but it gives Shinji an ok ending. You discuss with your friends at school the next day on what that scene was. You want more.
The VCR rewinds.
The year is 1996. That kid and those same friends have just gotten back into the car after watching End of Evangelion. And you are bewildered. You got the action-based ending to NGE that you wanted, yes. But you also got something weirder. You and your friends debate on how Hideki Anno justified Shinji’s actions in the hospital. You also debate how to connect the rest of the film’s plot together as you try to pick out what on Earth was displayed during the film. You know it’s over, and now the debate between TV ending and movie ending will rage on.
You pick up your remote to wind back Prime Video a little bit.
The year is 2021. After seven long years, Khara has finally released the end to the Evangelion Rebuilds. You were tired of waiting to see how the weirdness and general shift in tone was. You demanded more out of this movie series after seeing that 1.0 and 2.0 was the same as the first 20 episodes of the show. And you got more. And it was something. Holy shit, Misato was acting and resembling Gendo. Shinji was, to put it mildly, a pussy for all of 3.0. You finally see that 3.0+1.0 has been released to Prime, and you watch it because you’ve been craving to finally see how this all ends out.
You wind forward. You wind back. But nothing makes sense.
What in God’s mind, you ask yourself, caused the writers to have Mari and Shinji be together at the end of this series? You waited 15 years from the first rebuild film to the last one, and between 3.0 and 4.0, you waited 7 years on your own trying to figure out and piece the logic on how “british girl with big tits” is with the character you’ve known since 1995.
You’re an OG fan of the series. You saw Asuka climb into Shinji’s bed in NGE. You saw the two together when the series finally reached their version of an ending. You cringed as Shinji strangled Asuka on the beach, and deep down, in the depths of your HP, you have fan art of the two together uploaded on your hard-drive.
And now, as the credits to 4.0 / Thrice Upon a Time roll, you wonder to yourself, what went wrong?
—
There is a bit of a pattern I’ve noticed in all of the media I’ve consumed over the years. If the fanbase as a ship/romantic partnership is picked out, the official media will inevitably have them split up or with other characters. Don’t believe me, let’s go through some notable examples.
I wasn’t alive for the release of Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows, but I’m sure that there were LOTS of fans deep down assuming that Harry and Hermione would find themselves married or deep in a relationship at the end of the book. Yes, the Half-Blood Prince did a bit of work between Ginny and Harry to kind of attempt to dispel that rumour, but it didn’t stop a lot of people from saying that Harry and Hermione would be together! When people inevitably got to the end of the book and the epilogue chapter, we learn that Ginny and Harry would inevitably get married, leaving Ron and Hermione to have kids. Not the ending that some wanted.
Star Wars is a common one. While it was hinted for a bit that Luke and Leia were connected, and that it wasn’t so subtly linked that Han Solo and Leia had feelings for each other, there were some that wanted Luke and Leia to be a couple and have kids (NOTE: it wasn’t confirmed that the two were siblings until the 2005 release of Revenge of the Sith). Another part of the fanbase disappointed.
If you thought those were bad, wait until you check out the greater Evangelion franchise as a whole.
Asuka, the girl that externalizes her trauma. Shinji, the boy who keeps his trauma to himself. Neither know how to cope. In 4.0, Asuka, who doesn’t really know how to talk to other people, attempts to forcefeed Shinji so he doesn’t die. It’s brute, it’s uncouth, and it’s one of the reasons many refer to her as “psycho bitch”. Despite this, and many other portions of Evangelion’s official media/shows/movies that clearly show that the two are only coexisting together because of proximity and a common goal. I’ve covered this in one of my earlier articles: because they’re so different, they make for incredibly compelling characters. Even then, it’s inevitable. Main guy character + main female character = you’ll inevitably have people putting them together. There are ENTIRE online communities dedicated to having the two together in a couple. ENTIRE communities with THOUSANDS of people. In 2026, FIVE YEARS after 4.0 told all of us to “shut up” and live with Mari and Shinji being the couple at the end of the film. It doesn’t help that Khara pushed out a LOT of still images of Asuka and Shinji marrying and having a kid during their 30th Anniversary film, but even then, most of the stuff out of that community borders on cope.
A lot of the criticism on the rebuilds, particularly the character of Mari, is fair. The rebuilds started off as a recap of NGE, but introduced us to the Brit in 2.0, with a brief segment where she is seen with NERV-Europe. It seems as the introduction of Mari was set to coincide with the Rebuilds turning from NGE recap to their own story. Because 3.0 was a “heel turn” for the franchise.
Suddenly, after Shinji starts the 3rd Impact with his Angel by eating the remains of an Angel, 2.0 ends. And when you boot up the TV to watch 3.0, you’re dropped into what seems a completely different world from NGE or the first two reboots.
Gone are the legendary bird chirping sounds that would fill the dead space within the movie. Gone is the futuristic but still somewhat grounded-in-reality feel of NGE. Instead, you’re thrown full force onto a ship. The Wunder, it’s called. The new bridge crew mixed in with Hyuga, Aoba, and Maya on a separate ship. Maya looks edgier, but you can still tell… it’s Maya.
The next scene pans to a lady with the shortest blonde hair. Dialogue slowly shoves in your face that she’s Ritsuko. Uh… ok. The camera pans again. It’s a lady with purple hair. And right away, without dialogue, you know it’s Misato. You cannot believe yourself. This is Misato. You scratch your eyes, thinking that this is a different character. But no, meet steampunk Misato. And she speaks like… Gendo.
Uh… ok. The rest of 3.0 was filled with a lot of shocks. Here’s Mari, oh wow she’s good at piloting an Evangelion. Asuka too… What the heck is she doing here? And Shinji, a PRISONER? And absolutely forbidden to pilot an Eva?
We slowly learn that a timeskip has happened, and we have Misato, runner of Wille, attempting to destroy NERV and to prevent the 3rd Impact from happening. Apart from this reveal, most of the plot is driven by Kaworu (oh yeah, Kaworu!) and his interactions with Shinji.
I had, when I watched this… questions.
Why?
Maybe a bit of shock took over. It is the weirdest, and in my opinion, the worst of all of Evangelion’s official content. The public sentiment to this one was bad. Misato, to many the “mommy” of the series, is suddenly a cyberpunk lady that barks like Gendo. Asuka is more of a psychopath, and here is Mari, with the movie relying on one line of dialogue from the previous movie to explain her backstory. If you missed that Mari was from NERV-Europe, you’re completely lost on why Mari is now fighting with Asuka to attempt Shinji from starting the third impact.
In the 9 years between 3.0 and 4.0’s release, we forgot about it, but in the back of fans' minds, I can assume that many remembered 3.0 as a “death” of the franchise. They’ve gone too far, they cried. Who the hell is this girl that’s getting a lot of screentime? Gendo has gotten 10 lines of dialogue in the entirety of 3.0.
When 4.0 came out, it was a bit better. But the movie was just as divisive as 3.0. Especially around the ending. To many who expected Shinji to end up with Rei or Asuka (seriously though, why do movies have to end with the guy getting with a girl? Can we kill this trope?) The ending was a slap in the face. A girl with the most lackadaisical development is suddenly the girl that is the one that takes Shinji into his new world. Not Asuka, the character that was carefully crafted over 25 years. Not Rei, the girl that even in the REBUILDS THEMSELVES, and who had the most connection to Shinji, got to date him at the end.
Oh yeah, about Rei.
Rei, the quiet one. The stoic, the emotionless vessel. It was really cool to finally see Rei get the development she deserved. Even if the prior media was a success, Rei was always criminally underdeveloped. The last Evangelion movie, while late, finally gave Rei a bit of development as a character. A bit of “soul”. She finally expresses to us what she desires, what she wants. She wants companionship, which after 25 years, is finally coming to roost. And then they kill her. Ok…
So if we can’t pair Shinji with Rei, they all cried, let's see what they do with Asuka… Shinji finally proves that is an incredibly altruistic person and sends Asuka to a world where she can finally grow up. Ok…
Lets be real, Kaworu and Shinji were never getting together, especially in a socially conservative culture like Japan.
So that leaves us with… Mari. The chronically underdeveloped, unfleshed character. More budget work went into animating her “jiggle physics” in 3.0 than her story. The entire plot point behind Mari’s character, if one was cynical, could be summarized by “woot woot tits” (a quote from a fan of mine in a sports Discord server).
Excuse me? You are giving the main character of your series, one that you’ve forced 25 years of personal investment onto, and you’ve ended his story with one of the weakest?
My younger self would have been incredibly pissed at this revelation if I watched this live when it came out in 2021. You didn’t make the logical choice. What budget problem happened? Why do you do this? But maturation is realizing that sometimes the best choice isn’t the obvious one.
—
Unless you’re Disney or Game of Thrones (at least it had somewhat of a fair excuse to why its ending was so poor) as of late, you’d consider it absolute suicide to make a character’s ending bad. People, especially over 25 years of investing into the same character, want to feel like the character’s payoff is a payoff for them. Why invest into a character when their conclusion is poor? Why invest into a character if they don’t give you reason to love/hate them?
It goes back to what I wrote on the main series (NGE). You need contrast to invest into a character. Invest into a collective, and you can’t possibly feel any connection toward the characters. It’s an issue that’s plagued a few war movies, particularly Black Hawk Down. The movie itself was fine, and the action and plot was fun. But I wasn’t able to connect with the characters as well as, let's say, Saving Private Ryan. BHD didn’t particularly do much to differentiate the characters. SPR did, however, and ensured that each soldier in the party had a different personality. We had the butch, we had the techy that didn’t really want to pick up the rifle. We had Miller, the team commander- steadfast and in tune, and we had Ryan himself, a bit guilty and reluctant to accept the help of the group that came to pick him up.
When we are able to tell that characters are different, we can invest into them. We can feel connected, we can feel their feelings, we can root for them. When the villains are given the same treatment, it allows us to hate them with a visceral passion.
The above reason is why I felt that Mari and Shinji being the ending, and not Shinji and Asuka is the perfect ending to the movie.
Based on what I believe was the end purpose to Shinji’s character, it was to give him some closure to his trauma. For 25 years, the official media showed us that he was running from himself. Running from pain, running toward praise, running away from expectations. He needed a character that would take him into the future, to “run toward” his future with open arms and a smile.
Asuka is not the person for that. She has, to put it simply, a lot of baggage.
A deadbeat father that simply does not care for you is enough trauma to last a child a normal lifetime. To see your mother afterwards hang herself dead from insanity is enough to break a child in half on the spot. Asuka, according to 4.0, finds her only purpose is to pilot the Evangelion. She has no normal childhood. She never cries, she never really socializes either. She doesn’t get the chance to grow up, which is the motive for sending Asuka to a universe where she is allowed to grow up and to be human.
Even if we ignored all of that, logically, Shinji and Asuka together makes little sense. Packing two teenagers together as a couple with that baggage is, frankly, a terrible idea. This is why Mari was the correct, albeit, controversial choice to bring Shinji into his new future.
Mari is different from all of the other characters, but not in a traumatic way. She’s a bit aloof, sings tunes in her head, and also refers to Shinji as a puppy. But most importantly, she’s a bit of an optimist, and she didn’t really get too mad other than a few occasions. This personality always seemed to me as a forward-looking personality.
So let it click.
Does it make more sense to end Shinji’s character with the character that will leave him anchored to the past? Or does it make more sense to end Shinji’s character with the character that will close his past and take him into the future?
—
Overall thoughts on the Rebuilds themselves though,
They aren’t perfect movies. 3.0 was a deeply flawed movie that is only held up by 4.0 being the perfect conclusion to the film. 1.0 and 2.0 can be described as carbon copies of the first three-quarters of NGE.
It would have been cool to see the time-skip between 2.0 and 3.0 fleshed out. Why did Misato leave NERV to form the organization that would cause NERV’s downfall? In 4.0, it was briefly mentioned a “revolt” that would eventually lead to WILLE’s formation. Evangelion fans aren’t dumb. The fanbase knows what happened in the first part of NGE; in fact, they’ve probably watched it thousands of times. The introduction to the rebuild should not have been two entire movies. It could have been one, and the rest used to build the story between NERV and WILLE and the final conflict at the advent of the Fourth and Additional Impacts.
For all its faults though… The ending was nice. Shinji, for all the crap he went through, got the ending he absolutely deserved.
This writer is deeply satisfied. And that’s all that matters.
Happy trails, Evangelion. Hopefully I see you again someday.
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