i’ve been getting a lot of messages about ogata/”episode 1 takes place on june 22nd” and how it lines up (or doesn’t) with the week by week breakdown. under the assumption that episode 1 takes place on june 22nd, i attempted to replicate the timeline using the dates we are explicitly given in the show and… it doesn’t add up. basically: there’s no way june 22nd works as episode 1 if you refer to the few dates and times listed in the show. let me explain why!

ok, so we have a good amount of in-canon dates to work with to verify “june 22th” – namely september 11th (israfel’s defeat), and operation yashima, which takes place on a full moon. we know that 22 days after rei is injured during unit 00′s berserk, episode 5 begins. so let’s say that shinji arrives at tokyo-3 on june 22nd – this necessitates that episode 5 would have to occur around june 11th per ritsuko’s statements in episode 2. but that can’t be right, because june 11th is waning crescent, not a full moon. by extension, we know operation yashima must occur at the end of july, i.e midnight of the 31/august 1, to make everything fit in narratively sound order.

we also have september 11th, the day of israfel’s defeat. i’ve worked backwards from that day, again under the assumption that episode 1 begins on june 22, and it also doesn’t fit, per hikari’s comments about rei’s school absences and a whole host of other very small and itemized details that i wouldn’t list out here for brevity’s sake.

ogata mentioned that she got this june 22nd date from someone else, who supposedly got it from a supplemental non-official magazine. i invite anyone to try their hand at this and see if it makes sense, because i couldn’t get everything to work in a way that doesn’t blatantly contradict canon dates. and at very least, i’m very confident that everything from september 11/ onward is accurate, or as accurate you can reasonably get with a series like evangelion.