Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Discussion of the new series of Evangelion movies ( "Evangelion Shin Gekijōban", meaning "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition"). The final instalment made its debut in Japan on March 8, 2021.

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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Reichu » Tue Feb 13, 2018 2:48 pm

View Original PostCybermat47 wrote:In NGE, I’m pretty sure that it was possible (though perhaps not ideal) to clone Evas - after all, the Evas themselves are clones of Adam (or Lilith in 01’s case).


I think what Juan meant was: "Unless they either ditched the idea of having a human 'soul' in the Evas or made it possible to clone one [a soul] as well."

View Original Postanonymaus wrote:As for the thread's question, the Failures of Infinity are probably as dead as Lilith herself

The script refers to them [edit: the Failures, not Lilith] as being 活動停止した, which means "torpid" or "in suspended animation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpor
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby anonymaus » Tue Feb 13, 2018 3:06 pm

Kaworu only says that Lilith is dead, or the Mark.09-Lilith body specifically anyway (he calls it a corpse.) That doesn't necessarily mean it's always going to be the case.
For narrative reasons they pretty much had to have Kaworu say that. It makes it more surprising when she gets reanimated. She will almost certainly be reanimated. The entire state of NERV HQ, Mark.09-Lilith and the Failures included, is like a big chess board frozen in play. There's no reason to show it this way if it won't come into play later.

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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Reichu » Tue Feb 13, 2018 3:14 pm

When I said "them", I meant the FoIs. (Was repeating a point I made at the beginning of the thread, just with the actual term fished from the script this time.)
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby anonymaus » Tue Feb 13, 2018 3:17 pm

Yeah but I'm saying that the state of the Failures is linked to the state of Lilith. That was the point I made in the quoted post

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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Reichu » Wed Feb 14, 2018 9:54 am

Lilith's body and head exploded into LCL, while the failures are just fine. What link?

anonymaus wrote:By the way, the question of who decapitated Mark.06-Lilith is unclear

At risk of stating the obvious: the Mark.06-Lilith fusion we see becomes possible precisely because Lilith got decapitated, which makes Mark.06 the only real suspect for Lilith's beheading available to us at this time.
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby anonymaus » Wed Feb 14, 2018 1:18 pm

View Original PostReichu wrote:Lilith's body and head exploded into LCL, while the failures are just fine. What link?


Do you really not see how there's a link between decapitated Lilith and decapitated Failures reaching toward Lilith's head? If you read my post on page 1 it will possibly make more sense

At risk of stating the obvious: the Mark.06-Lilith fusion we see becomes possible precisely because Lilith got decapitated, which makes Mark.06 the only real suspect for Lilith's beheading available to us at this time


I doubt beheading Lilith was a prerequisite, we see many other attempts by angels to meld with Lilith throughout Evangelion and they never have to cut off her head first. The fact that Mark.06 emerges vaguely from the head area of Lilith doesn't necessarily mean that's where he jumped in. In NGE when Rei melds with the mass production evas, her head emerges from theirs. It seems a very Anno-esque piece of cinematography to have the invading Mark.06 emerge from the stump of Lilith's neck.

The Failures were clearly the goal of SEELE and the twelfth angel/Mark.06 and I doubt having them be headless was part of the plan. For the failures to be missing a head from what appears to be a link to the decapitated Mark.06-Lilith, that most likely means that the decapitation was a deliberate attempt to halt the process of the Failures' creation/mobilization.

And in general, assuming that Mark.06 decapitated Lilith because it was the only hostile party we're aware of in our limited knowledge of that fight is a sort of simplistic view. There were likely many, many people involved in that fight, and I'm sure the drama was distributed across them.

I think the likeliest culprits for the decapitation, in descending order, are:
- a now retired Ayanami clone that defied its orders
- Touji (where else would he have died?)
- Kaworu (but why ? in 3.0 he apparently wants people 'remade in the image of the fruit of life', which is what was happening with the Failures - why would he try to stop it back in the original attempt? and why did SEELE automate mark.06 instead of simply have him pilot it? would seem to imply they didn't trust him)
- Asuka

Also, the question of why Mark.06 seems to be stabbing itself is unclear. Would seem to imply warring souls within the Mark.06-Lilith body. Maybe Lilith somehow found her way in there after the events of 2.0. Also, two spears, one in Mark.06 and one in Lilith. Some of what happened is still confusing.

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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby AdamMalkovitch » Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:11 pm

Wait, when Rei releases the 12th Angel, she does so by cutting of Mk. 06's head, right? Not to mention, Mari headshots Mk. 09 during her escape with Shinji, and Kaworu's head just straight up gets esploded. How does this factor into the rest of the decapitation imagery in Q?
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Arcadia's legacy » Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:18 pm

Come to think of it, why is there so much decapitation imagery in Q?
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby AdamMalkovitch » Thu Feb 15, 2018 3:05 pm

View Original PostArcadia's legacy wrote:Come to think of it, why is there so much decapitation imagery in Q?

I was thinking about this, and while trying to find the symbolic meaning behind decapitation, I came upon this article, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/htm ... -2029.html
TL;DR, the most common symbolism that decapitation has is the removal of someone's thoughts, the obliteration of their personality. In chopping off a head and letting it drop into a sea of gigantic skulls, or one's head simply exploding and ceasing to exist, the thoughts, ideas, personalities, are all gone. Public beheadings were initially done as a show of what would happen to those who disobeyed, and that kind of use of decapitation continues today with a certain notorious terrorist group.
If this IS what Anno wanted to portray, I highly doubt Kaworu will descend from the heavens in 1.0+3.0, projecting an immensely powerful AT Field to protect his waifu Shinji-chan from his evil daddy.
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Reichu » Thu Feb 15, 2018 5:07 pm

Could be tied into the speculation about Kaworu returning not so much as Kaworu but as the soul of Eva-13. So even though Kaworu tells Shinji that they'll meet again, all of the cryptic talk about how people's memes outlast them could effectively mean, "This is the last time you'll see me as I am now, so it's up to you to remember."

Then again, Kaworu saying they'll meet again seems to broadly defy everything he says before that about what happens when one's soul 'disappears', so I dunno lol. Would check Kanemitsu's translation, but my BD isn't here.
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby anonymaus » Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:14 pm

Kaworu saying they'll meet again is surely just another one of his cryptic timeline-related lines. Given the timing of the line, right after he realizes he was duped and there won't be any "healing this world" after all, he probably assumes there will be a reset, and that he'll see Shinji in the new world. That tonally fits the way he said it. He said the line to Shinji with the emotional pitch of a final goodbye, yet the content of what he was saying indicated a fated reunion. From Shinji's perspective it was a final goodbye because Shinji doesn't retain knowledge through timelines in the way Kaworu seems to.
It's worth noting that Kaworu didn't seem upset about Gendo's treachery, he seemed to accept it. "So that's what you're planning, Lilin!"

I took Gendo's line at the end of 3.0 about "amending the Dead Sea Scrolls" to mean he doesn't plan on healing this world at all, he wants to perform preventative medicine on the next one. The Dead Sea Scrolls seem to basically be a rough formula for a timeline. Gendo looks to be planning on going off the rails. From a cinematically meta standpoint it is hard to imagine 4.0 will end in that red, dead-looking world also. That ending had some appeal in EoE because it was fresh on our eyes, our first time seeing the ruined world was in that final scene. I don't think it would be as visually palatable after two movies set in it. So I'm pretty confident there will be some green and blue in the final scene of 4.0.

Anyway, it's curious that Kaworu seems to remember some of the events of the past timeline(s) yet he falls for the same trick, a Gendo switcharoo. He even seemed to think Gendo was on SEELE's side. I wonder if Kaworu didn't really remember the events of the past timeline and instead got limited knowledge of it some other way, like through the Scrolls. But his opinion toward Shinji seems much more familiar, from the very start, than if Shinji was merely someone he had read about.

This is the only thing that seems plotholey rather than under-investigated to me, in all of Rebuild. The fact that Kaworu seems cognizant of the past timeline(s?) yet makes the same mistakes as last time.

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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby AdamMalkovitch » Fri Feb 16, 2018 10:16 am

View Original Postanonymaus wrote:Anyway, it's curious that Kaworu seems to remember some of the events of the past timeline(s) yet he falls for the same trick, a Gendo switcharoo. He even seemed to think Gendo was on SEELE's side. I wonder if Kaworu didn't really remember the events of the past timeline and instead got limited knowledge of it some other way, like through the Scrolls. But his opinion toward Shinji seems much more familiar, from the very start, than if Shinji was merely someone he had read about.

This brings up something I've thought about briefly before- what if Neon Genesis is the final time loop? Shinji accepting that pain is a part of life and deciding to live anyway breaks the loop. That's why Kaworu doesn't know as much as much as he would had NGE happened. If he had already experienced the events of Neon Genesis, there's no way he'd trust Gendo at all. In Neon Genesis, he was misinformed on which seed was held in Central Dogma (or is it Terminal Dogma?), but you never see him interact with Gendo. Perhaps he thinks that by reuniting Adam's soul with Adam's body, that will somehow break the loop, but when he gets down there and sees that it's Lilith's body, his Angel instincts take over, he'll be drawn to Lilith and cause Third Impact had Shinji not killed him.
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby kuribo-04 » Fri Feb 16, 2018 10:59 am

Nothing indicates that the events Kaworu references are the events of Neon Genesis.
They might have happened in the same timeline even.

(What I mean by this is that they could have met as kids or something, who knows what the last film throws at us. I also mostly see Kaworu's comments as something meta, referencing that NGE exists.)
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Arcadia's legacy » Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:05 am

I agree. Kaworu's words, while cryptic, are not enough to confirm either a NGE connection, nor a time loop. At best, we can only speculate what he's referring to rather than simply jumping to conclusions
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Re: Are the Failures of Infinity alive?

Postby Reichu » Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:56 am

If the thread has nowhere to go but wildly off-topic, I'm going to assume that the original question has been answered and that we're done.
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