>>3921902after thinking about it for a few days, it's also REALLY bothering me how most of the main characters end up with someone without any development of their relationships.
Like little girl Asuka says "I want a headpat" and Kensuke appears, and suddenly they're an item, despite basically never interacting previously in the series.
Mari has basically zero interactions with Shinji except falling boob first on his face in 2.0, and then going Ara Ara in literally one scene in 3.0+1.0, and then we just timeskip to Shinji being a young man, and they're in a relationship.
Kaworu and Rei are suddenly implied to be interested in each other at the train station, despite saying like 5 words to each other in the series.
None of these relationships are earned at all. Which is INSANE considering we had 3 movies that could have built up Shinji and Mari, which you'd kind of expect for the main character and his love interest.
And what's really the kicker is that it's implied Shinji is rewriting the universe from the Anti-Universe; as if he's the one pairing these characters up.
And then he gets told at least 3 times in the movie that "he's grown up" and "is mature" - as if it's Anno telling himself how mature he is, while pairing up his characters in the most immature way possible, giving zero attention to their relationships.
And to top it all off, he wrote a pretty compelling and interesting adult relationship with Misato and Kaji (at least their relationship was compelling in the show) ... so did he forget how to write this stuff?
Maybe it's not Anno's fault, and some outside demands were placed on the movie to force everyone to awkwardly pair up.
But like genuinely what the hell Anno, what happened here?
