Shinji loses? Is that what happened in the original fever dream ending? I swear, I watched it, I read about it, and I even rewatched it, and what is actually happening (as in any movie/show/production where the ‘mind’ is able to be tricked by illusions and such, but that’s a rant for somewhere else) never makes any sense even ‘in-universe.’ It just came out of nowhere, it seems. The directors seemed to think, “oh, throw some weird existential horror at the audience and then they’ll just eat up whatever the writers shit out.”