Neon Genesis Evangelion Forum

I explained most of this in my comments on episode 25:   this obviously wasn’t the intended ending, they simply ran out of money, End of Eva is the real, always planned ending.  

And again:   fans went so nuts waiting FIVE years for End of Eva to come out, that many actually tried to rationalize and convince themselves that “this stands on its own” when it was clearly just thrown together.   Or, they’d watch incomprehensible Hong Kong fansubs.

Think of this as the dream sequences from End of Eva, cut out and shown on their own, out of context.

WATCH THE DIRECTOR’S CUT EPISODES BEFORE YOU WATCH END OF EVA. 

The new Director’s Cut scenes were even part of “Death & ReBirth” which was released before End of Eva (but you shouldn’t watch Death & Rebirth now, just the DC episodes; many of your questions are specifically answered in them)

What is human instrumentality? What does it actually entail for the world?

Remember Kaworu’s revelation to Shinji:

You've got your own AT Field?"

"Yes, at least that is what you lilum call this thing. This is the light of my soul, a sacred territory in which no one may intrude. Aren't you lilum even aware yet that your so-called AT Field is merely that wall that encloses *every* mind that exists?!?!"

Basically, Kaworu revealed that everyone, both Angels *and* humans, have an AT Field.   Angels just have AT Fields that are so strong they can affect physical objects.   An AT Field for humans is what gives your mind and body shape, it’s the psychic field that holds life-forms together.  

What caused the Second Impact? Hell, what actually happened in the Second Impact?

4 billion years ago, a race of God-like Progenitor Aliens known as the “First Ancestral Race” seeded life throughout the galaxy (a ripoff of 2001: A Space Odyssey).   They did this by creating creatures called “Seeds of Life” and shooting them through space where they’d land on a planet and start up an ecosystem.   Seeds come in two kinds:   “Fruit of Knowledge” Seeds (like Adam) give rise to sentient life forms like humans.   “Fruit of Life” Seeds (like Lilith) gave raise to Godzilla-like monsters with superpowers, like the Angels.  

Angels come from Adam, humans from from Lilith.  

Earth was actually supposed to be an Angel planet.   *Purely by accident*, however, Lilith crash landed onto Earth 4 billion years ago.   After Adam got here but before Adam started spreading Angel Eggs.   This collision was so violent that it kicked up debris into space, creating Earth’s Moon.   This collision was later termed “First Impact” (it was NOT the impact that killed the dinosaurs, it was much older).

Adam makes Angels by budding off Angel Eggs.   Lilith is…complicated.   Remember in episode 20 when they say that LCL is similar in composition to the “primordial ooze”? A mix of nucleotides, carbohydrates, molecular building blocks of life.   That’s because it is *literally* the primordial ooze.   Also recall that throughout the series, Shinji mentions that LCL “smells like blood” and then in episode 15 etc. when we see Lilith, we see that LCL is literally Lilith’s blood.   The way Lilith’s life-cycle works is that she lands on a planet, bleeds out primordial ooze, and simple single-celled life evolves from it.   Which eventually evolves into fish, reptiles, mammals, ultimately “homo sapiens”.   We are the Children of Lilith, that’s why Kaworu calls humans “Lilim”.  

Because Lilith-type Seeds have the Fruit of Knowledge (sentience), and Angels have the Fruit of Life (superpowers), the First Ancestral Race had one cardinal rule:   2 of the different kinds of Seeds were NEVER supposed to land on the same planet.   If they did, they might merge, and with these united abilities they would become a Living God, rivaling the power of their own creators (Fruit of Life + Fruit of Knoweldge = Godhood).   “The Forbidden Union of Adam and Lilith”.

Its misleading to call Lilith “the Second Angel”, because she’s not really an Angel, but a Seed of Life, co-equal to but different from Adam.  

The problem is that the English dub of End of Eva infamously mistranslated the few crucial lines where Misato briefly explains this.   The mistake renders it as “Adam comes from Lilith like we do” which is simply wrong (as if we didn’t have enough problems already).   Actually the correct translation was “Angels come from Adam, humans come from Lilith, another being like Adam”

Oh, there’s a point in End of Eva when Misato explains all this in about THREE sentences, and she says “Angels are humans that rejected human form” – that’s actually a VERY poetic way of summarizing it; they didn’t really “reject” it, but she needed to explain this very fast.

Fearing that the Seeds would accidentally unite, the First Ancestral Race did create two countermeasures:

1 – The Lances of Longinus.  

2 – the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Every Seed gets a Lance.   The Lances are an awesomely powerful artifact of First Ancestral Race technology, capable of instantly piercing even the strongest AT Field.   Their technology is so advanced they could even be said to be “alive” in a certain sense, and have wills of their own.   The idea is that if a Seed is ever doing something it shouldn’t, a Lance of Longinus will pierce into it; doing so sends the Seed into a “dormant state”.

Lilith crashed into Earth and wasn’t supposed to be there.   Her Lance SHOULD have turned her off…but it was destroyed in the collision.   We never see it.   Trying to make the best of a bad situation, Adam’s Lance “turned off” Adam rather than let 2 active Seeds exist on the same planet (the Director’s Cut episodes have a blink-or-you’ll miss montage moment when we see Adam as they found it in Antarctica; impaled on its own Lance).   So we Lilim usurped Earth from the Angels.   They’re from here.  

Realizing even the Lances might not work (and they didn’t with Lilith), the FAR sent along one other countermeasure;   a detailed instructional manual on Seeds of Life, Angels, and Lances.   Reading something along the lines of “Hello:   if you are reading this, you are a Lilith-based lifeform that has evolved to the point of sentience to the level that you were able to decipher this manual; congratulations.   Unfortunately, this also means that an Adam-type Seed has landed on your planet.   This is bad.   This is how Lances work, so you can turn Adam off.   Oh and by the way, please don’t abuse the knowledge in this manual to try to become a Living God…”

The “Dead Sea Scrolls” in the Eva-verse are actually a manual written by aliens.   They have no religious meaning.   Problem was that the Illuminati-like power cabal “Seele” eventually found the manual, deciphered it, and realized they could abuse its knowledge to become living gods.  

They searched long, and eventually found the Antarctic GeoFront, where Adam landed on Earth.   They also found Lilith’s GeoFront in Japan.   As I said, the GeoFronts are actually massive travelling vessels that the Seeds were contained in, its why they’re perfectly circular; they’re 4 billion years old, though, so they got covered over with layers of sediment.   They weren’t always underground.

In 2000, they send the Katsuragi Expedition to “study” Adam, but really their goal was to *intentionally start Second Impact*.   There’s an entire new scene directly showing this in the Director’s Cut.  

Seele realized that they couldn’t simply merge Adam with Lilith:   they’re too powerful, they couldn’t control it.   So they had to “reduce Adam to a controllable form” in Second Impact.   The exact details of the experiment are not clear, but it involved manipulating Adam using the Lance of Longinus.   This woke up Adam, briefly, but within minutes made him explode, leaving behind an embryonic Adam which was easily controllable.   Seele knew this would happen; they killed off half the human race in Second Impact as collateral damage to achieve their goals.

***the director’s cuts also change this;   you can see what Adam was doing.   Basically….Second Impact was on a local level what Third Impact is on a global level.   Adam can make an “Anti-AT Field” that strips AT Fields….

The only downside was that even though Adam was only awake for a few minutes, it was enough time to lay/produce the Angel eggs; which were spread across the world in the Second Impact explosion.  
Instrumentality doesn’t work if any Angels are still alive.   

“Human Instrumentality Project” basically aims to merge Adam and Lilith into a Living God, and then amplify the power of that living god using the Mass Production Evangelions to “resonate” a massive Anti-AT Field which will strip all AT Fields, MERGING all minds and organisms across the planet, creating a hyper-being in which all souls and minds are merged.   Inside this new state of being, its like the Matrix:   its impossible to feel pain, it’s a dreamworld.   But without pain, there is no joy.

Rei? And, come on, is she clone of Yui or what?

Rei is a clone of Yui Ikari’s body.   But you can’t clone a soul.   And Yui Ikari’s soul is bonded to Eva-01.

I will spell this out now because there’s a scene in the Director’s Cut where Kaworu flat out states this:  

“Rei Ayanami” is a vessel for the soul of Lilith.   To keep Lilith controllable they stripped its soul and implanted it in a blank human body….this may also aid in the final Adam/Lilith merger (you’ll see).  

“Eva Unit-01” is the only Evangelion that was not a clone of Adam…but a clone of Lilith (that’s why it’s the “Test Type”).   And they bonded Yui Ikari’s soul to it; Evas are controlled by the pilot interfacing with the soul of his mother inside.   This is the hidden connection between Eva-01 and Rei, and why they always think its too dangerous to let Rei pilot Eva-01.   Its possibly also why Rei has crazy hallucinations inside of Eva-01 when they test her as a pilot in it in episode 14.

Rei’s entire character arc is realizing that she is not the sum of her parts:   she is NOT “Yui Ikari”, and she is NOT “Lilith”.   She’s this new person, “Rei”, created by her life experiences as a human schoolgirl.   All the little things build up.  

Just what was the deal with Kaworu? How was he supposed to be “just like”   Rei?

Just as Rei is a vessel for the soul of Lilith, Kaworu is a vessel for the soul of Adam.   He is both the first and final Angel.   He is also a clone, but of WHO was never revealed, and may indeed never have been meant to be a mystery at all (it could have just been a random person:   even *I* don’t know).   Yes, there’s a vat of Kaworu clones in one of the other Nerv bases.  

Kaworu is Seele’s version of what Rei is to Gendo and Nerv.   Nerv’s dummy plugs were based on Rei, Seele’s are going to be based on Kaworu.

Its not clear if Rei or Kaworu really “remember” being Lilith and Adam.   From Rei’s “introspection” in episode 26, we get the brief idea that flashes of Lilith hover in the background of Rei’s subconscious, but it never affects her actions or thoughts that much.  

Rei isn’t so much “a clone”, as she is “an alien”.   An alien soul implanted into a cloned human body.  

The Director’s Cut explain this.   The all-too-brief confrontation between Rei and Kaworu is expanded on.   He even says something to the effect of “so this is the form we’ve both taken now that we’re on this planet, eh?”

The difference, of course, is that Kaworu is already comfortable with who he is:   he knows he’s not Adam, he’s this new person.   Rei is sort of afraid to confront her Lilith-self because she fears she’ll stop being “Rei Ayanami”.   Kaworu is functionally what Rei is growing to be; not afraid that she’s just the sum of her parts.  

By the way:   a good way to find more to review and talk about in the Director’s Cuts is to comment on the voice actor changes:   the significant ones were Gendo, Aoba, Maya, and Kaworu.   Aoba and Maya were actually Vic Mignogna and Monica Rial, but they weren’t that great (then again, what do I expect of only 4 episodes that didn’t focus on those characters?).   Director’s Cut Gendo suffers from having only 4 episodes to grow into it, but he’s not too bad.

I seriously want you to devote time to reviewing Greg Ayres’ Director’s Cut Kaworu.   The man is obsessed with his role as DC Kaworu.  At all of his convention panels, he’ll even intro by saying “my favorite roles were Chrono and Kaworu!”

But Ayres was godawful as Kaworu.   He had no idea how to play the character.   He sounds like a youtube abridged video;   he sounds like his usual 8 year old voice to begin with, then he just hams up the whole thing, I mean really hammy, he just delivers EVERY line with a sexually suggestive undertone that was never there.   Oh he had fun playing it, but did it accurately meet what the role required?

but I digresss….

Just remember:   you were confused before by trying to fit every piece into one huge plan;   there are TWO, rival plans:   Seele’s plan and Gendo’s plan.  

Then of course, there’s the THIRD plan neither knew about:   Yui Ikari’s plan.  

Long story short, Yui Ikari figured out what Seele was trying to do, their master plan…and developed her own, COUNTER-plan, which the ENTIRE series has been following this entire time.   Eating the Angel’s S2 Organ in episode 19 was the climax of that; that was Yui’s “just as planned” moment.

By consuming an Angel’s S2 Organ, Eva-01 is now “complete” – it has no energy requirements anymore, it can function indefiniately and   independently.   This FORCES Seele to have to center Third Impact on Eva-01 because its just too powerful.  

The Mass Production Evas are needed, because you need A LOT of Evas to “resonate” with the Anti-AT Field coming from the Adam/Lilith Hybrid.

Gendo, meanwhile, just wants to get Yui back…by merging along with Rei into Adam and Lilith and then merging with Eva-01.  

Again:   everyone was working *for* the bad guys the whole time.

Yes, that’s one of my major strikes against the TV ending being the real ending:   they had put the plot thread in motion that “they’re making Mass Production Evas at the other Nerv bases now”

 
 What about all those mass-produced Evas? Weren’t they on their way out of the factory?
 

***the battle against the Mass Production Model Evangelions, Unit 05 through Unit 13 (there are nine of them) remains even 15 years later, one of the most legendary fights in all of anime.   THIS is what you were waiting for.

That’s why Seele wanted Dummy Plug technology:   the MP Evas use Dummy Plugs so they basically just have “autopilot” mode, they don’t need living pilots.

And ask yourself:   what usually stops an Eva fight?   When the Eva gets so badly damaged that they have to turn it off or the pilot would be killed from nerve damage.   Given that Mass Production Evas have no actual pilots, *they can fight until they’re hamburger*.   Cut off Eva-00’s arm, it sends Rei into shock, or immobilized Asuka.   Mass Production Evas can lose an arm, cut clean off, and it won’t even shrug.   It just keeps coming.   Think like the Deadites from Evil Dead.  

And did I mention that the MP Evas have their own S2 Organs, so they don’t need external power supply anymore but can function indefinitely?  (Eva-01 is “a living god” now because its based on *Lilith* and has an S2 Organ, merging Adam-tech with Lilith-tech; MP Evas are made from Adam, so no danger there).  

Or, that the Mass Production Evangelions *have wings and can fly?*

Or, that they’re completely eye-less (they presumably see using cameras on their bodies), with whale-shaped heads, big fleshy red lips, toothy grins, and salivate profusely?

The greatest Angel of all was forged by the hand of man!   The Mass Production Evangelions!

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