12th Angel, Rei, Lilith

[trq]

Hello.
Well, I don't know if it was already discussed, but there's few things i noticed.

First, some issues that may be involved here:
1) Where's Rei 2
2) What is 12th Angel and how it got into Mk6
3) Why Lilith's head looks like Rei\Yui

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So, in 2.0 Rei was devoured by Zeruel and somehow ended up in its core:


Note, that Rei also says something like "now this is the only place I can live in". Is she talking about core?

Now, we see giant naked red Rei, that red substance definitely reminds angels'\evas' core material.
Giant red Rei merges with Eva-01 core.



Now, in Q we can see 12th Angel, which was sealed in Mark 6 and known to be purely core thing, transforms into giant Rei head.



Again, big red Rei made of core.

Ok, what does it all mean?

Could it be that:

1) Red core-ish Rei (or part of her) was transplanted into Mk.6 (is this what Kaworu was referring when he said Mk.6 was turned into autonomous state?)
2) Then somehow became 12th Angel, or was merged with\infected by 12th Angel and
3) Made contact with Lilith and this is how Rei image ended up in Lilith.

Or somehow she just broke free from Unit-01 and became an angel.
Or 12th was a different thing, but it took control over Mk.6, which had core Rei as part of control system, as said above.

Also, notice how all those FOI-evas are red.

Fuyutsuki's word about Rei being inside Eva 01 can be explained like that:
1) He's lying
2) Rei was split into two parts or something
3) He's talking about her soul, and red corelike body was used in some different way

Just wanted to share my thoughts.

[Xiel]

2) Rei was split into two parts or something.

Eva 00 still goes berserk on its own in the movies, right? Fuyutsuki only specified that the Rei Shinji knows is in Eva 01. Rei 2 is still called Rei 2 by Anno and Khara staff and Rei 3 was a thing in the original plan before Enokido proposed the rescue.

I wager Rei 1 soul is responsible for the giant Rei, otherwise it would be impossible for Lilith to take that form on her own. Meanwhile, Mark 06 looked like it was containing and stopping Lilith and the Angel in the movie. Tentative Name Rei had to decapitate Mark 06 to release the angel.

[Shinoyami65]

Or it could be Rei 3 who fused with Lilith or the 12th Angel to make the giant Rei heads. That brings up an interesting question- since the 12th Angel never actually fused with Lilith, how come both the 12th and Lilith have taken Rei's form? Maybe there was more than one Rei running around (like in the ANIMA spinoff) and one got sucked into the 12th while the other fused with Lilith. And after all the mess settled down, ReiQ was produced.

I don't think Rei I had anything to do with this, though, since the location of her soul was never specified. If you assume it's like NGE and her soul was in Eva-00, well, Eva-00 was eaten by Zeruel and its core was absorbed into Eva-01. Eva-00 does got beserk once in 1.0, though the reason for that is ambiguous.

[Xiel]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Reis in Anima are remote controlled by teh Rei. They are like extensions of her.

I don't think Rei I had anything to do with this, though, since the location of her soul was never specified. If you assume it's like NGE and her soul was in Eva-00, well, Eva-00 was eaten by Zeruel and its core was absorbed into Eva-01.

We only see Rei 2 there with Shinji, though. If he hadn't retrieved Rei 2 before she became 3, then she would have acted differently. We do see a Rei soul roaming around in 3.33. Rei 1 soul could have been released after Zeruel's demise. How couldn't Rei have nothing to do with Lilith when it seem like is the only way for Lilith to move and look like Rei at all? This sounds super-fishy:

This Rei is a different Rei, so I voiced her as being indifferent. When I asked Anno-san "What's going on in the scene with the multiplying Reis?" he gave me a clear answer which I can't disclose here, but Director Tsurumaki and other staff were super shocked. Later on, they said, "Thank you. We were able to understand a lot thanks to listening to that recording session." Their comment made me think, "Anno-san's craftsmanship is really something." That's what I found most impressive about the whole thing. (laughs)

Whether the reason for 00 to go berserker or not, Rei 2 is still the second in Rebuild and 3 was scheduled to exist if Enokido hadn't changed the original scenario, it may imply Anno had to think what to do with Rei 1 now the fusion was unavailable to her.

[Reichu]

since the 12th Angel never actually fused with Lilith

Are you sure about that? It seemed to be interacting with Lilith's liquid remains.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The 12th Angel must have merged with the lower half of Lilith anyway when it was connected to it. Maybe this is what triggered actual Third Impact?

[Xiel]

The 12th Angel must have merged with the lower half of Lilith anyway when it was connected to it. Maybe this is what triggered actual Third Impact?

Or perhaps it was Lilith/12th Angel messing up with Eva 01's Cassius Pause Button. Look at Lilith's corpse position closely and ask yourselves: Where else would they have placed good old shougoki for security purposes after 2.22 ending before it was sent to space spear-less with new Nerv Logo? That's right, the answer would be Dogma: Where else would be safer? After good old Mark 06 stopped imprisoning them (RIP), they immediately went for Eva 13 to mess with, like a moth to a flame, giggling in delight. Look: Shinji's eyes do this funny thing while they are trying to cuddle 13.

After all, the Impact catalyst was still Shinji (denying this it's quite obtuse with the lessons pushed for him to learn with the movie and wilfully ignoring how the Impact stops when Shinji is removed from the Eva) who was merged with Eva 01 when the Third took place and the epicentre was Dogma. Which wouldn't have happened if Shinji hadn't done his GIVE ME BACK Ayanami stunt in 2.22. Kaworu only delayed the inevitable. As did Mark 06. Off with their heads as reward for trying to prevent a disaster.

In this scenario, Gendo allowing this to take place (and deliberately sabotaging the security so the angel would reach Lilith with Misato, a witness nothing happened with the merging as proof she was played like a fool and had her facilating the Eva-Adams?- Impact while defending a futile cause) would be a very firm ground for Misato, who was lied at and used, to break from Nerv to attempt to destroy it. Her enemies are no longer the angels: it's Gendo. I'm making an hypothesis here of a potentially natural course of events.

[Shinoyami65]

Are you sure about that? It seemed to be interacting with Lilith's liquid remains.

I meant before the timeskip; in my stupidity I had forgotten about the 12th absorbing Lilith's remains after being released.

But the 12th couldn't have fused with Lilith's lower half before the timskip, being trapped in the Mark.06 and Speared and all.

Another mystifying thing about this all is that Lilith was somehow freed from the Spear of Longinus by some other being so she could go on her rampage, not sure how that happened.

[andreh]

I'm the only one to think that the 12th Angel is only the metallic lint?
I think Rei face was just a reaction to Lilith and the fact that he was only turned a core due to the fact that he was doing what all the angels wanted (returning to Adam, in case, EVA13) ie, all the angels who met Adam could become a core also (this would be a characteristic common to all the angels)


Off: maybe the angel merged with Mark06 because he discovered that the giant in the underground was Lilith and not Adam?

[BlueBasilisk]

This and Gendo's utter lack of concern regarding Unit 01 have been bugging me for quite a while. I've got a crackpot theory:

We have the Lilith/Yui (I'm assuming it's Yui based on the volume of hair) and RedRei/12th Angel fetus thing occurring in short order. Now, to my knowledge, the only times the Angels take on the shape of someone else, even in the movie editions, is when they're actually in contact with that person, i.e. ZeruRei, Bardiel/Asuka. We even had that suspiciously similar Giant Red Rei from Zeruel.

But there's no Yui or Rei in that mix, just Lilith, 12 and Eva mk 6. And if Lilith has Yui's head and not Rei's, why would she take that shape when Yui's in Eva 01?

What little we see of Unit 01 in 3.0 shows that it's been rearmored, is no longer speared (implied to have been removed some time in the past; Kaworu thinks Cassius is in Doma, remember), and generally no longer in Impact Mode. In 3.0, they're very careful not to show it above the chest, and when we last saw it in 2.22, it had two cores.

All of this plus the NeoNerv logo on the Tesseract suggests it was in Nerv's possession for quite some time before being shot into space. I'm wondering if they somehow extracted Shinji from Unit 01's core or filtered him into the secondary core and removed the one containing Yui and Rei completely.

That would explain some of Eva 01's odd behavior in 3.0: It awakens when Asuka calls for Shinji and uses a power it only had during Shinji's freakout, but then it just doesn't work when Wille tries that deep sync test on him later. But Eva 13 accepted Shinji just fine, so the problem seems to be the Eva, not him. Maybe it was just running off Shinji himself. Once Wille filtered him out, there would be nothing in the Eva to synchronize with, leaving it braindead, essentially. Wille had no desire to use it as anything other than a battery, so they never tested it with their pilots.

It's farfetched, but Gendo could have swapped Unit 01's core with Mk 06's when the latter was being refitted as an autonomous Unit, hence the appearance of Rei and/or Yui in that mess Lilith became. Unit 01's core holds both of them, and Mk 06 is really the only common element between the two Angels.

Doing that would fit Gendo's desire to remove Kaworu and his Eva from Seele's hands. He could keep Waifu and Waifu Jr. safe in Lilith's neck in Dogma, still go through with the pretense of doing something about Unit 01, get rid of Seele's boy and his little robot, and further the Plan.

This assumes the 12th Angel absorbed Eva 06's body like Zeruel did Unit 00's. Rei and Yui go into the huge core Angel. Zeruel established they could probably be recovered from this. And where did the 12th Angel go? Into the powerful, suspiciously Unit 01 looking Eva 13, which is still in Gendo's control if he bothers to recover it.

Edit: fixed some typos

[Reichu]

Lilith's head is specified in the script as being a "Rei" head. Sorry.

[BlueBasilisk]

Lilith's head is specified in the script as being a "Rei" head. Sorry.

Ah well. I did say it was crackpot

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Lilith's head is specified in the script as being a "Rei" head. Sorry.

But Gendo does refer to the Head as "Yui".

I'm actually intrigued by a lot of the suggestions here. What if cores and souls really have been switched around in ways that do not mesh in our expectations? That act explicitly against them.

Yui no longer being in Eva-01 would explain Shinji's mysterious 0% synch rate, though Fuyutsuki's later comment about here being "Eva-01's control system" would be put in doubt. Still, it's interesting to really consider where breaking accepted rules can take us. What if Rei isn't in Lilith, and never was. What if Rei is the 12th angel, or in Mark.06's core?

I feel we need to think outside the box like this if we're ever to make sense of Rebuild's world.

[Reichu]

But Gendo does refer to the Head as "Yui".

Sometimes characters address people who are not there. Fuyutsuki addresses Yui after the shogi game, for example.

[Dancougar82]

Another thing that one must remember when speculating about the characters is that aside from what has been revealed in the movies thus far, there is no indication that anything that happened to the TV versions of them happened with the movie versions of them. So until otherwise revealed, one cannot say that there was a Rei 1 who was murdered in the movie chronology. Because the first two movies retcon the majority of what happened in the TV series. And from 3.33 on, events are no longer anything like what happened before. So unless in the last movie they decide to fill in the huge gap in Rei's backstory, it may never be answered. This especially true when one considers how in one movie they have to wrap it all up adequately. Individual plot elements would ultimately have only so much on screen time to be resolved unless they are all inextricably tied together.
--Dancougar82

[LightDragonman]

Man, does FINAL have a lot to explain.

[robersora]

Q, bringing Anno's "people have to figure things out themselves and mustn't wait to be fed answers" to whole new levels. But we know, in reality he just wants to make a shitload of money from exclusive interviews.

But that's why I kinda like the loop-theory. So we can take everything from NGE in account, but don't need to. I just hope it will stay heavily alluded and not stated.

[LightDragonman]

I'll be honest. At times it feels like Anno is just throwing whatever he can at the story and see what makes us go crazy.

Does he even plan on giving some sort of justification and meaning behind all the things he's doing? Or is this him just trolling the fanbase?

[UrsusArctos]

The 12th Angel must have merged with the lower half of Lilith anyway when it was connected to it. Maybe this is what triggered actual Third Impact?

But no one makes any mention of the 12th Angel when talking about Shinji's involvement in Third Impact. My guess is that Kaworu merely put the impact into suspended animation when he threw the Spear of Cassius at Eva-01.

The 12th Angel comes along and finds a battered, wrecked Nerv, breaks into Dogma and starts to fuse with Lilith, starting the "frozen" 3I again. So while the Third Impact in question is the one started by Shinji and with EVa-01 as the trigger, the 12th Angel starts to hijack it. The end result is that Lilith starts to grow, and "Failures of infinity" start to pop up. Lilith's head is popped off and the 12th Angel bursts out, with the end result that the entire lot of Eva-01 clones being created lose their heads and start to grow the 12th Angel's appendages in their place.

Then Eva-06 sacrifices itself and seals off the 12th Angel inside its body and Lilith's corpse, which shuts down 3I, but all the damage is done, a whole lot of people are wiped out, the Moon has gotten itself a new paint job and has been dragged down, the entire area has turned to core. Shinji is still blamed for starting the mess, even though an Angel "thawed" the impact at the crucial moment.

[Bagheera]

Yui no longer being in Eva-01 would explain Shinji's mysterious 0% synch rate, though Fuyutsuki's later comment about here being "Eva-01's control system" would be put in doubt. Still, it's interesting to really consider where breaking accepted rules can take us. What if Rei isn't in Lilith, and never was. What if Rei is the 12th angel, or in Mark.06's core?

We've speculated in the past (well, I have) about the notion that the Eva's control system might be separate from the core. In the ENT series the cores seem to contain pilot data, nothing more. So if Yui is in Unit 01, and Rei was in the second core, and that core was removed as BlueBasilisk suggested, that would tie up a lot of loose ends.

But ISTR that Fuyu specifically said Rei II was in Unit 01, which might shoot the theory in the foot. I still like the idea enough to play around with it a bit, though.