>>3227930From /a/, but it was a good post:
>But perhaps the biggest change between the anime and manga isn’t found in the plot or lore but in the way the story is told. In the anime we are only ever able to see into one person’s head: Shinji—and seemingly only at the moments when he’s on the edge of personal crisis. The manga, however, gives us much more access to not only Shinji’s thoughts but also the other main characters.>Sometimes it’s just a simple random thought bubble, but in the cases of Rei and Kaworu, they each have several scenes where we are privy to all their thoughts. Especially in the case of Rei, this changes the whole way of viewing her personality when you can concretely know her thoughts, motivations, and memories. She goes from being a mysterious, inscrutable, and sometimes even sinister human/angel hybrid into something much more mundane: a lonely, empty (physically) teenage girl.>The problem with being so immersed in everything Evangelion is that little by little, it all bleeds together. It’s easy to assume what happens in one telling of the story happens in all iterations of the story. But the Evangelion manga has many cuts as well as additions—and not just in the number of angels.>Much of the relationship between Asuka and Shinji is absent. While she comes to befriend him, the vast majority of scenes that build their love-hate romance are gone.>Thus, it is the relationship between Shinji and Rei that becomes the focal point of the manga. Rei's death and the climax of the End of Evangelion are far more emotionally gripping than in the anime. In the end, it becomes not so much a story about a young man trying to deal with the emotional complexities of life (though that theme is still present) and instead becomes the story of a young woman quite literally giving the world to the boy she loves. 