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Fanfic / Dazed and Confused

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"There was no hope."
— opening line

Not to be confused with the Richard Linklater movie about the last day of the 1975-6 school year.

Dazed and Confused is a Neon Genesis Evangelion Peggy Sue fanfic whose central premise is that, while Shinji gets sent back in time, everyone is acting different...almost as though they were sent back in time as well...

What starts out as a standard "Shinji Ikari goes back in time to fix everything" fic quickly becomes something else entirely when Shinji realizes that everyone, friends, coworkers, Angels seems to have also come back in time to make their own changes and create their ideal future. Time travel just got hard...

It can be found in Spacebattles.com (thread 1 and thread 2) and in the SufficientVelocity forums.


Tropes:

  • A God Am I: Shinji in Rei's timeline. He rescued Rei from an Angel that absorbed her soul, but the result was Third Impact
  • Alternate Universe: Hoo boy...
    • Shinji's timeline is presumably canon, seeing as he has yet to state anything to the contrary.
    • Rei's timeline was surprisingly tame. Gendo raised her as a semi-regular child, the Angel battles weren't too rough, and she enjoyed a love triangle with Asuka and Shinji before winning Shinji's heart.
    • In comparison, Asuka's timeline was not. The Angel battles were shockingly worse and could only be defeated by Unit One's beast mode. Once Shinji decided not to return from Unit One after Zeruel, things spiraled down from there. Rei used up all her clones trying to help, all of the other children died, Seele had to come out to help (to no avail), and finally, Asuka failed and Third Impact was initiated on the Angel's terms.
    • Ritsuko is implied to come from a timeline where more Lovecraftian abominations run amok, a la Aeon Natum Engel/Aeon Entelechy Evangelion or Children of an Elder God.
  • A Rare Sentence: The words "terrifying efficiency" and "ice cream" are only to be mentioned in the same sentence when Rei is about.
  • Ax-Crazy: Asuka. What does she do to a younger version of herself while being Mind Raped by Arael? Strangle her to death.
  • Battle in the Center of the Mind: Both Rei and Asuka against Arael.
  • Break the Haughty: Deconstructed. Asuka went through this in her origin timeline and her emotional and psychological scars got way worse because it. She bitterly says only because she is real good and is not afraid of telling it, people are always dying for seeing her defeated, humiliated and crushed.
  • Demonic Possession: Arael comes much earlier, and possesses Rei and Unit 00. Rei is able to break free with Shinji's help.
  • Flock of Wolves: The various time travelers take great pains to hide their nature from each other.
  • Foreshadowing: Earlier in chapter 4, Shiro Tokita shows that Jet Alone can actually project an AT Field, which should be impossible since it's a man-made machine without a soul. Unless, someone decided to spray Ireul onto it to give it that ability.
  • Heroic BSoD: Shinji and Asuka's life after Third Impact is described like this, with the two living through and enduring enormous existential angst.
  • In Spite of a Nail: one thing that all the alternate timelines had in common: Shinji was always an Eva Pilot.
  • Naked First Impression: Again Shinji meets Rei in the nude.
  • Mind Rape: This time it's not just Asuka who gets hit by Arael's mind rape beam, but Rei, and much of Nerv by Arael-Rei.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Shinji went back expecting everyone to behave as they had the first time around. They don't. Misato knows her way around NERV's base, Gendo is NICE to him, and Rei winks at Shinji when he sees her (that last one almost sends him into a HeroicBSOD). Suffice to say, his plans for trying to fix the past were quickly derailed.
    • Later turns out that he's not the only one experiencing this; in fact, some people (like Asuka) are alarmed at HIS behavior. A Shinji Ikari who's eager to make friends and be socially active? DOES NOT COMPUTE. (doesn't help that he's still crap at talking to people)
    • And EVERYONE is weirded-out by Rei.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome: In any other Peggy Sue fic, Shinji would have been The Ace. In this Fic He's barely able to keep up. Rei routienly pulls off mind-blowing tricks with her Eva and AT-Field that even the Angels (in the orginal series, at least) weren't capable of, While Asuka is just plain Nuts
  • Peggy Sue: Deconstructed by being turned up to eleven. While Shinji came back, so did everyone else, just not from the same universe. As such, most of the conventions of the Peggy Sue fanfic are quickly or immediately broken. Shinji's plan, in typical Evangelion fashion, comes crashing down on top of him.
  • Serial Escalation: Having come back as well, the angels decide to play this card.
    • Sachiel forgoes duking it out with Shinji and just explodes in his face.
    • Shamshel upgrades itself from lightly armored GlassCannon to gigantic LightningBruiser.
    • ...then Ramiel out does itself by using it's transformation powers to their fullest extent, easily predicting Nerv's particle cannon, manages to nearly kill Rei again, and still irradiates big sections of Tokyo 3 as a by product.
    • Iruel then decides to jump ahead of the schedule, hijacks the Jet Alone, and turns it into it's own super weapon.
    • Gaghiel then shows up to fight Asuka, and is sorely defeated, but not for lack of trying.
    • Israfel simply takes it's original plan and plugs the holes in it: three forms, moving out of synch. Spectacularly though, it does worse; it doesn't even need to be hit by a N2 mine, the Eva's just kill it.
    • Arael shows up, hijacks Rei like Zeruel, mind rapes Asuka again, then mind rapes everyone else, and is finally squashed like a bug by Asuka.
    • The last attack then prompts Gendo and Nerv to escalate their own arsenal, calling unit's three and four out of America before their completion, and commissioning the prototype Eva as unit five.
  • Troll: Lorenz Keel. No, really.
  • Ugly Cute: Hikari steals some DNA from Lilith in order to make a new "dog," Puppiel the Second. It has 2 heads, red and white fur with random blue stripes, visible musculature, and creepily intelligent eyes.

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