#While the ones that got many notes from bigger fandoms lose relevance immediately

[perplexingly]

My account is truly ancient, and I've drawn for so many fandoms and some of the over decade old drawings are still in circulation, and just by experiencing how fandoms interact with them I have gained knowledge I don't know what to do about,,,

[fiercynn]

okay. i am someone who is actually very interested in maintaining intergenerational connections in fandom and being friends with and in community with fans younger than me, including teenagers. i was a teen in fandom who had many, many positive friendships with adults in fandom – including people i'm still friends with years later. i also, as an adult now in my thirties, feel lucky enough to be friends with fans much younger than me, including a few teens, and i honestly would love to be friends with more teens and younger fans. these are the reasons why i care about this topic.

and i think there’s a tendency to immediately come to posts like this with some defensiveness and reactiveness, because of the way these kinds of conversations have been super fraught before. but fostering intergenerational community in fandom is going to require us to pause sometimes and be generous in our readings of what people are saying or asking for. and, frankly, while i think that should come from all sides, i think there is a responsibility on us adults to play a bigger part in actively creating spaces that younger fans want to be in, because we are, you know, adults.

so i want to use this to try and take a step back and actually look at what op was saying, carefully, and then look at the way other adults have responded to it. if you’re interested in these goals too, please read my whole post before reacting!

here's the my first question i have when seeing posts like this: is there a legitimate concern or point here? and i think there is.

that legitimate concern is: “teenagers don’t always know when they are talking to adults on the internet, and that can cause problems, so they would like to know when that is happening.”

note that op:

did not say that adults and teens shouldn’t interact online

did not say that teens don’t want to talk to adults at all

did not offer any specific reasons why they think that teens might want to know that they are talking to adults online

did not name what they think are the problems that can arise

so let's start by talking about that legitimate concern.

firstly, kids in general have access to fewer and fewer spaces where they can interact with each other without being under the eye of adults. in many countries, including the u.s., kids and teens are losing those spaces offline – there are fewer public places where kids can hang out, for free, without being subjected to anti-loitering laws or age-based curfews (by which i mean state-imposed curfews, not ones imposed by parents or guardians). and this is a recent development – this wasn’t true, at least in the u.s., for those of us who got to be kids pre-2000s.

the internet landscape has also drastically changed in this regard. @saathi1013 talks a lot about opt-in vs. opt-out digital architecture, which i find very relevant here. essentially, early internet spaces were "opt-in" for the kind of content you saw and the people you interacted with - you had to seek out mailing lists, or forums, or blogs, or livejournal communities, etc etc and join them intentionally. if you were a teen, you obviously still did not always know whether you were interacting with adults – either if they didn’t share that information, or if they were lying – but you had far more tools to set your boundaries intentionally. for instance, when i was a teen on livejournal, i had adults in fandom following me, but i also could selectively lock my posts, and even custom-lock them so that, say, only my friends from school could see a specific post. i also rarely had to see posts from people that i didn’t know or hadn’t actively sought out, unless i had specifically opted into to following a community or listserv where i didn’t know everyone.

now, we are in a majority "opt-out" world where most social media apps want you to see as much content as possible, and you have to set boundaries with increasingly fewer tools to do so. we don’t even have the option to set accounts to private on many sites, let alone custom-lock individual posts. blocking and muting tools are paltry and do not work well on many sites. that's not the fault of the teens.

so teens not only have a harder time simply finding ways to intentionally interact with other teens, but they are also in an internet landscape where they increasingly do not know who they are talking to. now i want to remind folks that that this has, technically, always been true: there have always been adults who don’t want to share much about their age online, and of course malicious actors who may lie about it.

but in our current internet landscape, that’s not all that teens might have to worry about. they might be drawn into interactions with adults that happen entirely by accident, on both sides. how many times have people gotten outraged about an opinion they’ve seen online, that has been shared onto their feeds, and then gone to op’s page and realized oh this is a fourteen-year-old? yeah. this is not an unheard-of issue.

so. why might teens want to know that they are interacting with adults online?

they might just want to interact with other teens specifically. like. did you always want to hang out with adults when you were a teen? i feel silly even trying to list out reasons why this might be the case! they also might be okay with hanging out with adults, but simply want to know that those people are adults. the friendships that i had with adults when i was a teen in fandom involved both of us knowing that. it's hard for me to imagine that those friendships would have grown as strong as they did if we hadn't known.

also – and please don’t write me off immediately here – there is also the undeniable fact that teens can be harmed by adults. like. it is not a conservative or fascist position to be worried about the harms that teens can face from adults online!

and those, again, can be intentional or unintentional from the adults’ end of things, including smaller harms that can still be super impactful for teens. but we simply cannot take the idea that teens can be hurt by adults – including the potential for sexual harassment and abuse by those adults – as an inherently fascist position.

it is, in fact, the exact opposite, since fascists and conservatives work to uphold rape culture, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy, all of which allow sexual harassment and abuse of young people to thrive unchallenged. conservatives and fascists generally bring up harm to teens as a talking point when it is useful for their rhetoric, not as a true concern, which is why many of them will be fine with child marriage and abuse by spouses even as they spew homophobic and transphobic rhetoric about queer and trans people being groomers.

again, the problem of malicious actors does exist, so even if all adults without bad intentions shared their ages online, teens would still be at risk. but the risk might be lower from those unintentional harms, like potentially being dogpiled for having a bad opinion. or even vice versa: a teen could accidentally flirt with an adult online because they didn’t know their age, leading to discomfort for both of them!

okay, so we’ve established some reasons why the underlying concern op was raising is legitimate. now let’s look at the way that others have responded in the reblogs.

the instinctive reaction that many people seem to have is to assume that op is coming to this from a conservative/fascist rhetoric and intent. i sort of understand where this is coming from: op’s use of the word “lured” seems to imply that they think adults are intentionally trying to hide their ages to draw teens in, and “insidious” could be referring to something like “queer and trans adults are inherently groomers” rhetoric. op also said they think it's "weird" when people over 20 don't put list their ages. and like i said, conversations about adults and teens interacting can be really fraught, so i understand why people would jump to this conclusion and be upset by it.

but – without knowing anything else about op other than what they’ve posted – there is actually nothing to indicate that this is what they meant with their post. the “luring” could be referring to things like teens getting caught up in discussions that get them dogpiled for their opinions. the “insidious” problems could be any of the ones i've listed above. them saying people are "weird" for not listing ages could just be because they believe the underlying concern they've named is legitimate, and they are not aware of the reasons why people might not want to follow it, since op doesn't actually say why they think it's weird.

i want to note, too, that op is not forcing anyone to do anything. op is not even advocating for policies on these platforms that would require adults to put their ages in their bios! op is literally asking for people to do this. they even said please! i guess you could decide that op saying that they think it is "weird" if people don't do this is op putting pressure on us, but let's be clear, op's still not forcing anything, they are just stating their opinion.

and yet, people in the reblogs are accusing op of:

thinking that “everyone over 20 is inherently predatory and creepy towards children”

being a “fed”

“coerc[ing]” people into giving up their privacy on social media

encouraging people to “ignore[e their] own privacy boundaries and discomfort”

“think-of-the-children fearmongering”

thinking that adults who don’t list their ages are pedophiles

“telling people if you don’t do what I tell you, you might be a threat to the safety of our community”

being similar to u.s. president george w. "dubya" bush, a republican, conservative, and in my opinion pretty evil person

saying that adults and younger people shouldn’t interact in fandom spaces

saying that adults and younger people interacting in fandom spaces in itself leads to insidious things

having a “conservative agenda”

“destroying the links between generations”

“do[ing] the masters’ work”

i didn’t even go into the tags or check for other reblogs besides the ones i see here. but let’s be clear. i don’t know what op thinks, obviously, or what they have done or said outside of this post. but in this post, they didn’t do or say any of the things that people just accused them of.

now. there are legitimate concerns that people name in the reblogs as well! one is that listing your age in your bio may not be safe or feel safe even for adults, because it is sharing more of yourself on the internet. another is the fact that truly malicious actors will of course be able to get around what op is asking for.

so with all that in mind, here is how i wish people had responded to op’s post.

firstly, by not immediately assuming that it is a conservative psyop; or that op, by making a request, is trying to impose something on people that they don’t want to do; or that fulfilling the request will destroy intergenerational connections.

secondly, by acknowledging that there is a legitimate concern in op’s post, and that it is in the interest of people who want intergenerational fandom community to try and address that concern.

thirdly, by pointing out legitimate concerns for why op’s proposed solution might not work for everyone, while also acknowledging that it is still not an inherently bad request – there are people who do feel comfortable sharing their ages online, and just because it won’t catch the intentionally malicious actors doesn’t mean it couldn’t be useful for a lot of the unintentional issues and potential harms that i mentioned above.

and fourthly, by proposing alternate solutions that could still get at the legitimate concern op raised, while also being more comfortable for people who don’t like op’s specific request. just a couple ideas off the top of my head: people could put “adult” in their bios without listing their actual ages. people could write and pin a post about their approach to intergenerational connections in fandom - for instance, something like “i am an adult but welcome friendships with people younger than me", or, "i choose not to share my age online but i welcome interactions with people of any age", etc etc, so that teens could then choose whether or not to engage with them. i'm sure there are other ideas that we could all brainstorm together.

finally, i want to name some potential impacts of the way people have reacted to this post.

now, imagine that op is actually everything that people have accused them of – that they are conservative, that their intentions are bad, that they want to impose their request on everyone. that would suck, obviously. but it wouldn’t actually change my reaction to this post.

because the fact that people immediately turned on their post and jumped to these conclusions without any evidence means that a teen who sees this – or anyone else, frankly! – could very well have the reaction, “wow. these adults immediately dismissed a legitimate concern and decided that it was a conservative psyop without any evidence. they could do the same if i raise this concern.”

i’m going to assume good intentions for everyone who has reblogged this, and assume that everyone here genuinely wants to foster and improve connections between teens and adults in fandom and to protect both teens and adults from harm.

but this is not the way to do it. this is not the way to show teens that we respect them and their boundaries, that we care about their wellbeing, and that we would be good friends to them if they chose to connect with us. and if we truly care about intergenerational fannish community, we need to show them that, and live up to it.

@ my fellow adults who use tumblr a lot:

can you PLEASE put your age in your about/sidebar and make sure it’s accessible on mobile. imo if you’re an adult esp 20+ it’s a little weird that you wouldn’t have your age readily available on your blog. if you’re reading this now and you don’t have your age listed, please rectify that. i feel like teenagers get lured into talking to adults in fandom/lgbt spaces that they may not have intentionally sought out because they think they’re talking to other teenagers, and this can lead to a lot of other – much more insidious –problems

[cateringisalie]

9 years later and we have at last got a new Eva film and the end of the Rebuild project.

Much was made at the start of Rebuild of the desire to introduce Eva to a new audience. 1.0 more or less leant into its original goal and restaged episodes 1 to 6 of the TV series with a bigger budget, CGI, some more blunt and early reveals and a few weird alterations for the existing fan base. The Angel numbering was off; everyone knows Lilith is stuck in the basement, Seele just default to their monoliths. Kaworu is actively introduced at the tail-end rather than alluded to in the opening titles. As an intro, its fine (though most would agree the equivalent stage of the TV series isn’t really a struggle to cope with either), though a few stylistic and environmental changes lead many to conclude this was a direct sequel to End of Evangelion. 2.0 seemed content to build off of the intro but steer away from the relevant section of episodes – roughly 8 to 17. Recognisable moments like the falling Angel, the corrupted Unit 03 and the ribbon angel and Unit 01’s impossible reactivation share the screen with altered relationship dynamics. Now we get Mari one of the few wholly new characters who gets to open the second film in a wildly dramatic fashion. The key of Nebuchadnezzar (which does at least re-enter proceedings in the final film, but I am even shakier on what it is or used for – even fandom seem to have struggle to explain this as anything other than a blunt drop-in replacement for the Adam embryo in the TV series). And come the end its time for Third Impact already, Shinji altering the world around him to rescue Rei from the depths of an Angel. Kaworu uses an unfamiliar spear to incapacitate Shinji and the preview hints at a story further from the rails than ever. 3.0 is as promised more or less completely divorced from anything Eva had done before. Just not the off-the rails version 2.0 advertised. Some will be quick to note that none of the Rebuild previews have entirely accurately advertised their subsequent instalment; 1.0’s features at least one key scene that never happened (Mistao slapping Ristuko in a seeming allusion to the Sea of Dirac Angel) while even the sequences of animation that did make it look nothing alike. Which is fair, but even then 2.0’s bears absolutely no resemblance to 3.0 and even 3.0’s very strange preview doesn’t really jibe with 3.0+1.0 ultimately. 3.0 is post-post-apocalypse and with a whole 14 years just evaporated between films. There’s a distinct last third of Nadia feel to it. About the only part similar to a former incarnation is Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship which while not even roughly mapping to episode 24 serves the same function; to make Shinji distraught before the climax of this story. But 3.0 is also the point where that initial premise of the series slams headlong into the drift from familiar territory. Where the film is a quantum leap away from the mystery terms and slow reveals. The oddities and confusions pile up given the glimpsed state of the world, the strange gridded moon, the sea of Eva corpses, the strange state of Lilith in the depths of Nerv. An awful lot happened while Shinji was (for reasons no one has explained or seems to care about except me) IN SPACE and the film only ever alludes to the sequence of events occurring between these two films in the broadest of strokes. Which if done a certain way can be compelling though I did not find it to be the case here in the slightest. It’s a huge struggle to build up even a vague idea of what went down and that’s with heavy deferral back to the TV series again. If you’re new, none of this means much of anything. Even mixed media doesn’t help. The reveal there was a limited run manga of events prior to 3.0 had a potential for answers, but upon reading a synopsis... Nope. Helps not even a tiny amount. Also this mixed media attitude is never to be encouraged. So, I didn’t like film 3 much at all. Film 4 does little to not be based on where it left off. Which is a small mercy that it doesn’t effectively toss everything out again and skip further ahead in time. And 3.0+1.0 does at least make use of some of what 2.0 revealed and setup in the spirit of trying to get this into something cohesive. It fails, but it tried. Maybe the points it touches on were the intended direction of the films. Maybe Anno changed his mind on this one. It’s not like Rebuild’s failure to cohere should be a surprise – the title of the film is simply confusing in sequence. Titled neither 4.0 nor 4.44, instead we have the pretty inexplicable 3.0+1.0 which is just annoying to type. Even thematically this doesn’t feel right given its more like 2.0 mushed into 3.0 but I suppose that’s technically film 5 so... Unless, 1.0 here is supposed to mean the original TV series or EoE, which... End of Evangelion figures unexpectedly largely in the film. Could be that its meant to infer some collection of the Eva cast (the original pilots + Mari? The Ikari family + Mari? The pilots from 1.0 (Shinji and Rei) plus the pilots from 3.0 (Asuka and Mari)?). The other part of course, is that the three prior films had titles in the form of [Thing](Not)]Thing]. 3.0+1.0 decides to dispense with this entirely and instead is titled “Thrice Upon a Time”. Nothing like confusing matters (and instead media library ordering) by not only giving the film a title that puts it before the 3rd film (since prior to this cinema releases are .0 and the home media (excepting the first release of 1.0) are triple digits of their instalment number) but also has another reference to three within it. It might be some kind of holy trinity allusion, some play on Third Impact, or an acknowledgement that this is theoretically the third version of events surrounding the end of the world (if you take TV series as 1, EoE as 2, and Rebuild as 3). Also potentially a literary reference about cyclical time and messages from the future which is all well and good and fits into a whole other essay about how Rebuild and FFVII Remake are operating on the same basis and making many of the same mistakes by both trying to be fan-service for the new fans and draw in new ones and do the big fan-moments similarly but diverge wildly off in others. Good start! The final film starts with bombast as per 2 and 3 (and thus focused on Mari) though the setup and point of the action is possibly more confused and less explicable (which is saying something given 3.0 opened with retrieving Unit 01 from space. No, I will continue to complain about not getting this. Yes it was very exciting but why was Unit 01 in space? In a strange crucifix coffin. Anyone at all?) – and only vaguely connected to anything resembling the plot. At least 2.0 and 3.0 had some immediate and long term stakes with a cover for Kaji stealing something and bringing Shinji into the plot. This film opens with a scrounge for spare parts in a red Paris that the tertiary cast make no longer red while Mari fights off a massed horde of Evas while battleships are puppeteered from orbit. It’s all terrible cool and everything, but given at no point do we even begin to understand what is going on or what the stakes even are. Which is a problem with the latter half of the sequence. 2.0 might have started with an Eva vs Angel fight but while there was ambiguity over the situation it at least seemed to lead into the eventual plot. Here we’re getting Eva spare parts for later and a whole dose of new terminology the film has no interest in explaining. Which is par for the course for prior Eva incarnations but again, I feel there was more explanation setting the weirdness up. Here we are reduced to keywords that sound important. The film proper opens with our familiar trio of Eva pilots winding up at a village with their old classmates (which of course, to follow the proliferations of 3 all the way down and also match to Tokyo-3, is in fact, Village 3. The far future sequel to Resident Evil 8 presumably). Who are necessarily now 14 years older than them. Asuka is naked (in a sequence to contrast to 1.0 and 2.0) or in her underwear for far too much of this sequence (and just as creepy as 2.0 got with this) as Shinji struggles in the aftermath of Kaworu’s death, Ayanami (critically not the Rei of 2.0) learns about life (and visits a library with – I’m not kidding – a poster for Sugar Sugar Rune on display. I like to think not many in the audience caught this slightly odd reference). 30 minutes of the film are taken up with Rei being happy and contented with her life while Shinji slowly recovers and re-enters polite society (sulks, throws up at the sight of the DSS collar, is insulted and force-fed). There’s a good case for this section just being an unnecessary time filler, though you don’t need to fill time in a film that is 2 ½ hours. But if it was cut down, perhaps it would have the same strange feeling as 1.0 had where the aftermath of Shinji’s second Angel fight lead was mostly skipped and left that part of 1.0 feeling strangely hasty and actively (and badly) abridged. Maybe that’s just my familiarity with the source material again. There’s still an edge of weirdness in the air on the film hits the 45 minute mark; even prior to this gigantic sections of the land are missing, and some things just float around now (apparently because). Past this mark is where weirdness creeps in; the barriers keeping the village from suffering the fate of Paris – the structures a curious match to the Cocytus facility at the start of 2.0. There are headless Eva copies who roam the landscape. An indicator on Ayanami’s suit runs down. Shinji is advised to talk to his father before he loses the opportunity forever. This one made me laugh, and even Asuka comments that given who Shinji’s father is and what he’s done don’t really make this plausible (or sensible). Ayanami concludes her pastoral life and this stage of the film by transforming back to her original white plug-suit; her AT Field then dissipates and she bursts in a familiar spill of LCL. For such a previously central character, Rei or Ayanami or Lilith will have exceptionally little bearing on the remainder of the film. The plot now kicks in properly as Gendo decides enough is enough and he’s going to be doing some world ending. Our Eva pilots are ready but not the same; we have Asuka, Mari and Shinji. And standing orders for Shinji to be shot if he tries to pilot anything (but given we’re at the end of the world and basically the original plan fails to stop Nerv bringing about the end of the world, that people still try to shoot him is... a little weird and an almost pointless resolution of factors the quaternary cast brought up in 3.0). The entire rest of the film is even more impenetrable and confusing than Kaworu’s sweeping explanations of what happened between films 2 and 3. If 3.0 fumbled the ball on being newcomer friendly 3.0+1.0 actively doesn’t care. Not that familiarity with series helps since so much new terminology is thrown at the audience. The entire cast – literally the entire cast – are not only caught up on but also understand the varying levels of psychological, biological and religious nonsense that Eva has formerly wielded as something almost coherent. You, as audience member, are not privy to a fraction of this understanding and thus left to flail for the remainder of the film making what you can of the maddening breadcrumb trail of exclamations and partial explanations. Shinji is no help here and infuriatingly asks barely a single question about what is going on (thankfully he does prompt Gendo to explain a few things – presumably where even the staff had gotten lost on what was supposedly going on). For existing fans, you might get a sense of it by application of known quantities from the previous incarnations (I pity newcomers struggling to make sense of this). What the Lance of Cassius is a thing introduced abruptly into the series – and contrasted with the Lance of Longinus you can muddle through to get some idea of what was going on. 3.0+1.0 however, decides that even that grip on its story is too much and adds a bunch more unnamed spears. Some of them formed from Lilith. This is a thing of some import apparently, though ultimately is effectively buzzword name-checking. We know who Lilith is in context from both 1.0 and the TV series but how that relates to spear formation is beyond me. And then there’s the part where one of the flying ships (there were four made according to Seele’s plan. Seele, the former sinister puppet-masters, who died in film 3, and if the flying ships were their idea or this stated at all, I had totally forgotten it in the last 9 years (checking wikia seems to indicate no one else knew this either so I feel vindicated). Seele feel an artefact of the old Eva Anno has no time for – EoE had what equated to three groups vying for control of the process of human instrumentality. Seele are adhering to a prophecy of sorts, Gendo is trying to subvert that process for his own ends, and Misato is trying to stop it. In terms of economical story-telling, the distinction between Seele and Gendo’s goals in causing Third Impact are so slim as to be basically zero (few critical differences though), I suspect Seele were deemed unnecessary and shuffled out of proceedings hastily despite their continued name-checking at this late stage) is turned into another spear because if all the spears are used up, the end of the world can’t be averted. You will have to forgive me for failing to notice how and where most of these spears (save three) wound up or what most of that means or why or how or anything. But we have a budget to squander and why not channel the Gurren Lagann energy for action one last time? And there is some action, this presumably part of what a good section of the audience have waited for with baited breath, that thing the TV series so rapidly lost interest in; that EoE staged for narrative cruelty. Smashy giant robot action time! So we get billions of Eva enemies for Asuka and Mari to cut through without problem. They explode and fall away despite exhaustively overwhelming numbers. There is a palpable lack of threat here. A few hitches but nothing the pilots can’t cope with. It’s just empty fan-service, a boast about how much can be rendered into a single frame. We get Asuka, unable to stab critically important Unit 13 (looking distinctly Unit 01-like just with four arms), and then hooking into an odd leftover thread from 2.0. Her accident in the activation test of Unit 03 has left her with a part of herself now more correctly classified as an Angel. And like 2.0 for surprise value, her Eva has special Angel blood injectors to again overcharge her Eva (which seems to be a thing in the latter three films – turn the Eva safety off and go beserk. As if Unit 01 didn’t do that all on its own in the first and second film). And this too fails. But this too is just another moment of important and pretention. Where the audience is meant to gasp at Eva/Angel hybridisation (not that the dividing line between Angles and Evas is ever completely clear (not least Unit 03)), at Asuka revealing herself to be part Angel (as if Kaworu and Rei weren’t established examples). So her Eva bloated and animalistic is... just another moment. We saw this in 2.0 with Mari releasing her limiters. We saw it in 3.0 in almost the same way. The distinction isn’t meaningfully different to the last few times the Evas were let off the leash and became more brutal. And just like the prior times this escalation of Eva body horror, ferocity, blood and over-indulged violence doesn’t actually help the situation. Asuka fails in her task as the Unit 13 counter-attacks. She’s saved by getting pulled out of reality moments before her end. Of course this being narrative, this being Eva; Gendo, the architect of this situation, is three steps ahead. Misato’s flying ship is badly and perhaps critically damaged so Gendo can retrieve the limbless body of Unit 01 formerly powering the flying ship. Shooting Gendo doesn’t work thanks to the key of Nebuchadnezzar (which did... Uh. Something? Kaji noted it as the lost number kept as a spare in 2.0 which implied Angel or Eva or... No I don’t know nor can I make sense of what it’s done to Gendo. Wikia informs me that while it’s never seen on-screen past the one time, its case is in some shots of 3.0. How amazing) and he leaves. And thus, of course, Shinji must get in the f-ing robot once more. But we’re back to the confident, more certain Shinji who 2.0 birthed as we enter the last (but still very long) final stage of the film – and restage End of Evangelion. Curious of course; EoE by turns can feel like a legitimate replacement for the final two TV series episodes or a bleakly, darkly, disturbing and flippant retort to the low-budget metaphysic version of the TV apocalypse. EoE to some has been not so much the intended ending (though buying a complete set of the old Eva in Japan will always net you the 26 original TV episodes, the four amended episodes and EoE), but more a poisoned chalice for the people who wanted a less introspective version of the end of the world and the process of human instrumentality. Anno was free to do what he wanted and veer off the tracks here – he can’t get away from the end of the world – this is integral to Eva’s base concept. 2.0’s glimpse of Second and the starts of Third Impact depict a process completely unfamiliar from the TV series’s version (reading Wikia explains some of 2.0’s imagery but is still bewildering with reference to 3.0+1.0’s reveals). In Rebuild, the end of the world is staged in the space below the strange aftermath of Second Impact, in an anti-universe where humans cannot venture. And yet, we are still clearly revisiting End of Evangelion. Not exactly the same, but a lot of imagery (the symbols in the sky, the gigantic form of Lilith at multiple points, the crucifix explosions across Earth’s surface) – to say nothing of some actual sections of animation – are taken straight from the 1997 film. Those moments and images were haunting and disturbing (the more overtly sexualised imagery has been completely removed). Clearly no matter what was said at the time or in the interim, EoE is in fact how the ending must play out; this is, or has become, what happens externally and internally when these characters attempt to force a next stage of evolution. The End of Evangelion will always be the end. ...just not quite the same. Not least it is missing most of the infamous moments (Shinji in Asuka’s hospital room is notably completely absent). There’s no moment where Shinji strangles Asuka, Komm Susser Tod is missing entire (in favour of something similar sounding but in Japanese), the live-action sequences of the empty cinema or the world without Evas aren’t utilised (though some live action footage is included), Rei betraying Gendo and beginning Third Impact outside his control etc. It's actively absurd to type this, but Lilith – Lilith! – has less character here. Which is so astonishingly absurd given the only depiction of Lilith we get is effectively Rei/Rei was Lilith the entire time, but those introspective sequences hinting at something more involved with Rei or the points Lilith does talk directly to Shinji are gone too. This shouldn’t be a surprise – we are after all missing a Rei character at the climax. Mostly. 3.0+1.0 almost expects you to remember the last time you saw Eva end the world and contrast it to this new version. The EoE imagery, the footage of Lilith descending from the crucifix, the looming figure of Lilith rising as humanity ends. Even something like the sequence of the backsides of cels running backward is reused – this footage also cribbed from EoE and played out on a wall between two characters. The animation breaks down into scratchy storyboards and later degenerates from finished footage down to outlines, animatics, and storyboard. The end of the world is this time around is more heavily meta. Both EoE and the TV episodes “staged” the process of Instrumentality (or parts of it) for Shinji. It occurs in filming spaces and on sets, there’s lighting equipment and dolls as stand-ins. The strange artificiality of pulling back the curtain on the TV or film production, or else the effect of  setting the camera back further than you should for filming a theatrical experience. But even that’s a false layer given a true pull-back would be to people in front of computers or previously drawing key-frames. Here the staging is more blunt still. It begins with an Eva vs Eva fight between Gendo and Shinji in the anti-universe where their brains make sense of the impossible space with artificially staged areas of familiar locations. A fight in a city has a huge sheet as a backdrop and carboard buildings the Evas kick around. They fight in front of Nerv headquarters and in Misato’s kitchen. A blow knocks over a section of scenery and sprawls Shinji in the studio space surrounding the set. A crossroads of sort where Shinji will move on from Gendo to meet with Rei, Kaworu and Asuka. The major difference to EoE is that the end here is much more concerned with Gendo; we dive into his psyche and his past. His isolation and desire for it. This feels extremely confessional for Anno all things considered given Gendo was always previously kept at arm’s length. This feels revealing about the man behind it all, a reflection of the director. He has admitted during production that at his stage of life he is far closer to Gendo than Shinji – I think this is barely obfuscated here. The flashback is more about understanding Gendo and how Yui changed him than anything about Evas or the end of the world. Gendo’s motivation is revealed to be the same as always; this is how he gets to be with Yui again. Odd details catch as this past plays out. And is that Mari in his memories? Mari, who Fuyustuki calls Mary Iscariot upon meeting her and has prepared something for her. Which feels much more like religious buzz words; there’s an obvious implication coached in that selection of a name, but how it actually relates to the story or the circumstances is really unclear. Nor am I clear on what Fuyutsuki prepared. He explodes into LCL like last time too. The process is so close to EoE but the mood is lighter and the reasoning behind the cast a little different. Asuka is part of a clone series – same as Rei. Just without the physical signifiers that Kaworu and Rei exhibit and the prior short-hand for clones in this universe (as noted, their design is intended to invoke lab rats). Nice consistency there. The beach ending from EoE is re-done under a blue sky; Asuka is saved thanks to Shinji and Mari working in concert. Kaworu’s beach meeting with Shinji is restaged, the newer, confident Shinji discussing the circular system that delivers Kaworu into his place at the end of the world. So Eva has happened before, meta-wise or time-wise or dimensionally. Take it as you will, no interpretation is more valid than another. Only that Kaworu remembers them all. It’s happened before and it’s expected to happen again. But Shinji’s different now, so the end of the world is different. Now it’s time to move on; Kaworu is left with Kaji to tend the earth assured the cycle of Eva productions is at an end – both have been dead all this time. Anno’s attitude to his seeming forever association with this one franchise his and his desire to set it down and move on? EoE finished in space; 3.0+1.0 finishes beneath the Antarctic. The idea of Unit 01 living forever as a testament to humanity is no factor at all Shinji intending (and his parents possibly driving) the final riddance of the Evas from reality – none can be allowed to remain. But now, the film takes an odd turn, and as with EoE, there’s the coda. In EoE this was the beach scene. For Rebuild: The sun shines, the sky is blue. An adult Shinji sits in a train station and meets with Mari. She’s older too now; the pair share a kiss and run from the station hand in hand. So. Uh. Yeah. That happened. There’s Kaworu and Rei seemingly alive and well as adults. And Asuka of course. But Shinji winds up with Mari. Mari who knew everything the whole time and might somehow have been part of Gendo’s group at university and known Yui and no, we are not getting any insight into those peculiarities! (or more plausibly it could be Mari’s mother who looks near identical to Mari but... What are we meant to take from this, really?). Mari who met Shinji in a handful of brief moments and has never spent any actual time with him. Mari won the love-triangle! But this is not some simple alternate reality, a different better take world where the cast existed in something resembling our reality; Shinji still wears the exploding DSS collar given to him before rejoining the giant robot fray. Mari effortlessly removes it from his neck. The film ends with a live-action sequence – this is reportedly Anno’s hometown. The world without Evas; we passed the relevant date while 3.0+1.0 was stalled. Shinji made it to 2014, or more plausibly past it in a world without Second Impact. And he’s happy, well-adjusted, and... Not really recognisable as Shinji. Shinji now exists in the present, not the future as he had for so long in pop-culture. But he’s in a different 2021; a world without the pandemic. And that was Rebuild; a project intended as a new introduction to Evangelion that blatantly had its entire core conceit revised at least twice (the 4th film delayed because of Shin Godzilla and then a struggle to write at all) that increasingly and confusingly leant more and more on its famed initial incarnation even as it veered increasingly and erratically away from the familiar sequences. I liked 3.0+1.0 more than 3.0, but can’t help but still bemoan whatever 3.0 was going to be when 2.0 happened. The alternate other sequence. And despite it all, despite the allusions to a repetition of Eva and of this being the break in the chain, even those working on and involved with the film see even this as a definitive end. Even Anno’s not convinced that’s the last word. Eva will come back all over again; naturally – there’s money to be made here, and what’s yet another alternate take to add to the TV series, the manga, the games, the other manga, EoE, Rebuild and so on. Kaworu apparently is indeed doomed to revisit this forever alongside everyone else and also remember that for once he was gifted a true end. An impossible conclusion for modern pop-culture it feels.