Must have got you mixed up with something Stryker said. Sorry about that. I still don't find her appearance creepy in any way though.
She has a kitchen there, so her food is presumably put away. Most people don't have food laying about, after all. Also, given the amount of time she spends at NERV HQ it's entirely possible she rarely, if ever eats at home.
That's all possible, sure. I just know that the only time we have any indication of Rei eating is her ordering garlic Ramen. Aside from that she might just subside on IV nutrients or something... Hell, maybe she absorbs nutrients from bathing in LCL? Who knows?
I know it isn't technically applicable, but Rebuild might suggest this was the case in the original and it was just never spelled out.
(note that Lilith bleeds quite a bit; if we're saying she's supposed to be made of PWM because she's like Lilith infertility is not a great example in support of the argument.)
True, which is why I suspect the hyperfertility theory is probably the strongest one if only for symbolic reasons.
Regardless, as you say there are several options apart from "she must be made of PWM!"
Thinking about it a bit more, I suspect the answer is something to do with her swimming in the destrudo-bombed clone tank earlier. Her falling apart in a slower but similar way as the others makes some sort of sense and means Ritsuko's "I killed Rei" was nearly factual.
.So, what, our progenitors were PWM but over the course of time became normal carbon-based life? That's more of a stretch than the alternative. And I'll note that Ritsuko never says anything about the Evas being PWM. If they're clones of Adam and they're not PWM why would Adam be different?
Why not? ATFs and PWM are basically sci-fi magic bullshit so anything is possible with the stuff. We know for a fact they can be interchanged since 01 steals parts from angels and turns them into working arms on several occasions, including repairing the presumably non-PWM armor in ep1.
At the point in the story where that comes up Ritsuko is very much still keeping secrets, so the evas having this composition as well wouldn't be a surprising omission.
The clones in the tank could just as easily have been created after the fact (using the same process that created all the other Evas), and the legs aren't specifically Rei any more than anyone else.
Lilith doesn't have those crazy little bits in the shots of her still merged with 01, so it had to have happened afterwards.
Lilith is the progenitor of humanity; I'd expect weirdness like that even if Rei had nothing to do with it.
...wait, so you're dividing Lilith and Rei up in your mind now too? Only a few more steps and we'll be in agreement.
The first, though I'm not sure how that's relevant.
I'm just trying to look at another in-show example of a being that can be split up, wondering how all this might relate to the question of how we decide whether a being is one or two. The fact that the two halves of Israfel are not physically identical yet act as one is something I find rather interesting... it could go either way for me.
Same thing with the twins question, really. Where does this new soul come from? When is it acquired? Does it split with the twin zygote or do two souls need to be there to start with? If it comes from the mother, does that mean that ultimately all of humanity really is just one person in multiple bodies?
This may not be directly related to figuring out Rei, but the mechanics of souls is clearly a core of the discussion here and looking at other cases of soul division, creation or even combination might help illuminate her specific case by extension. Not that I expect we'll solve any of this of course, but just because it's interesting and any theory about all this stuff should have some level of consistency.