Hey everyone! Newbie here -- loved Evangelion since I painstakingly watched it bootleg VHS by bootleg VHS back in the 9th grade -- and then waiting FOREVER for the bootleg VCD I had to order from ebay (as the DVD release was at least a year off, and after the EoTV ending who could wait that long?)

Been browsing the boards -- all spoiler free of course -- I seriously cannot WAIT to 1.) Watch a fansubbed Camrip of 3.0 2.)Then later on watch a high quality fansubbed dvd rip of 3.0 3.) See it in theaters once it FINALLY hits the states and 4.) Buy the 3.33 dvd.

Learning a lot of stuff. What a great community!

Pardon the rambling introduction. ANYWAY, I couldn't find a discussion on this in any old topics (although I might just suck at using the "search" function) but I was wondering about the souls of the Mass Production Eva units.

I was reading about scenes from the original End of Evangelion script that had been removed/didn't make it into the movie -- and was horrified by the scene in which Kensuke and Toji say goodbye -- telling Shinji that they and the other classmates were being flown out to Germany.

Am I correct in assuming that the insinuation is that Shinji's friends and classmates (the other potential pilots) were sent to Germany, and killed ala Yui -- so that their souls would be absorbed into the Mass Production Units?

Cause I find that genuinely horrifying -- and a super bummer. Though definitely a cool twist.

My question is -- IS this the insinuation? And if so -- besides Toji, Kensuke, Hikari -- who else's souls would have been used for the OTHER Mass Production Units? And finally, even though the scene insinuating it didn't make it past storyboards, could it still possibly be considered canon?

No, that's not meant to be insinuated, but an interesting thought nonetheless. Residents are simply moving away because Tokyo-03 got legitimately blown to shit when Unit-00' self-destructed to destroy Armisael. Most of it is nothing but a huge make-shift lake after that incident.

Don't know why they are going to Germany specifically, but it's important to note that the MPEs were all built at different places - Production of specific units being done at other Nerv facilities, all over the world. It's mentioned in the series by Misato or Hyuga, I believe.

I really wish this scene was left in though. Just would've gone to set the tone even more before that other scene and the title screen (Or was is supposed to go after the hospital part?).

Oh, welcome to EGF too, azriel55!

I just assumed that the MP Evas had no souls in the traditional sense. But thinking about it again, they would need souls to be able to generate A.T. Fields, right? Seele and the various Nerv branches around the world probably just used the souls of eligible candidates that they had on hand.

Nerv work place fatal "incidents" world-wide for the financial year ending 2015; 9.

;)

Without pilots, the need for a compatible soul for said pilots becomes eliminated; any soul will do. How hard is it to find some poor soul for a contact experiment when you have Seele's resources? Given that these are mass produced, neither unique to each other nor usually recognized as anything other than the collective they make up, I'd assume the souls are likewise faceless and unimportant. The point is the Massed Produced Evangelions are new, unmanned, equipped with an S2 engine, and they can fucking fly.

They show a plug being loaded into one of them with the name "Kaworu" written on the side. I assumed it was a Kaworu dummy plug.

It's quite possible that the souls are all either from young mothers or from the pilot candidates in Shinji's class. Class 2A is a class full of pilot candidates, whose souls Seele must have in storage.

@ JoeD80 - Yes, that's almost certainly true. Kaworu Dummy Plugs.

Judging from Asuka's battle against the mass product series, I would say whoever the souls came from, none of those people had any solid fighting experience lol

I was expecting that Seele would be the pilots, but I'm not sure if there's a correlation between number of mass production units and members of Seele. Also, they are conversing with each other shortly before the unit were deployed, so it doesn't seem like they were in the evas, although, clearly, there's communication systems for speaking eva pilot to eva pilot. My reasoning for thinking Seele would be the evas is because of Yui's example and all their talk of evas being the ark for human souls post-hip or something like that. But those moments don't seem like enough to imply that Seele members in the mass production units, although it would be pretty cool if that's who Asuka was ripping apart.

Am I correct in assuming that the insinuation is that Shinji's friends and classmates (the other potential pilots) were sent to Germany, and killed ala Yui -- so that their souls would be absorbed into the Mass Production Units?

If that's the case, it would be tragically hilarious if Toji's soul was used for this MPE.



Oh, and welcome to EGF, azriel55.

pioneer wrote:Judging from Asuka's battle against the mass product series, I would say whoever the souls came from, none of those people had any solid fighting experience lol

Heh. Just to be sure - The dummy plugs are piloting/doing the fighting, not the souls residing within the cores. A lot of people I've read reckon the MPEs don't put up that much of a fight initially because they're only toying with Asuka, knowing she only has a couple minutes of power remaining in Unit-02. Which definitely goes along with those sickly grins...

GetOvaDaBridge wrote:If that's the case, it would be tragically hilarious if Toji's soul was used for this MPE.

SPOILER: Show

I see what you did there.

Actually, I always thought that the MPEs fought in a very soulless way. Almost like bloodthirsty zombies. They don't care if an arm gets cut off, or a torso gets impaled. They'll just get back up and keep going.

The delicious irony of the MPEs is that there is all this talk of Evas bordering on "monsters" throughout the series, and then, when taken to their natural conclusion (MPE series), they truly become monsters. The borderline between angel and Eva is truly erased, and man (creator of Eva) becomes the very monster he is trying to fight.

Apropos of nothing, I've always wondered what sort of dummy plugs / souls are in the MPEs, and I guess I'm not doing my part to answer that question. :) If NERV had Rei clones in its dummy plugs, does that mean the MPEs have Kaworu clones? As for the souls -- if there are any -- I would imagine that SEELE / other NERV-like divisions have just been doing all the same stuff Gendo has been doing, but in parallel.

user-02 wrote:does that mean the MPEs have Kaworu clones?

The MPE dummy plugs have Kaworu written on them.

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Hmm - why has that quote not worked? And why have all the "quote" links in other posts on this page vanished (I'm using Opera)?

If you follow the theory that NERV had the mothers of Shinji's entire class in storage, they may have used these - in any case, since they were using Kaworu-dummyplugs, the soul inside is probably irrellevant as long as the EVA itself is Adam-based.

Souls may not even be necessary in that case.
But even if they are, I don't think we ever got any hints as to who could be inside.

As for Touji & co being shipped elsewhere, well, if they're in Europe, they're nowhere near Japan/ NERV HQ.
The last thing SEELE wants Gendo to have when they go seize his base is backup pilots.

Wow! Thanks for all the great answers!

Also, this made me LOL.

GetOvaDaBridge wrote:If that's the case, it would be tragically hilarious if Toji's soul was used for this MPE.

SPOILER: Show

Oh, and welcome to EGF, azriel55.

ESPECIALLY considering that THAT's probably the MPE that hits Asuka with the lance. Toji's and Asuka's final argument! (Assuming that the Lance didn't move on its own, which is a possibility I've seen discussed at length on other threads.)

I don't think Dummy Plugs remove the need for a soul -- but I guess any old Soul will work. Also -- when Kaoru controlled a unit made from Adam (all of them except Unit 01) he would sort of just shove the soul aside -- I wonder if his dummy plugs do something similar? It's really interesting.

Also, this brings up another thing that I'm SURE is discussed elsewhere -- in Eva, does Soul = Mind? The Evas seem bestial -- when Unit 1 goes berserk/lets the Eva take over, that does NOT seem like Yui -- just like an animal with Yui's maternal protectiveness of Shinji.

Also, don't they make a point to have Rei back up her memories? Because memories can't be stored in just a soul.

So, from this discussion, I think the likely conclusions are either

1.) Like what Kendrix said -- that the other pilots are moved to Europe so that Gendo won't use them as backup when/if the JDF successfully kill Shinji/Asuka/Rei in the event of an actual attack on Nerv.

2.) Seele DID use the pilots souls in the MPE, though there wasn't enough time to show it, since it's so wonderfully horrifying that why WOULDN'T Anno do that?

Of course, there's always 3.) the possibility that since that scene was removed because the ORIGINAL intention was to have it be that Shinji's friends/classmates were made into these monsters -- but Anno decided against it because there were more MPE than Shinji had friends, and that means the other souls would come from elsewhere, which would mean that using the pilots' souls was suddenly overly complicated/would be convoluted to explain.

But since when has he steered away from Convoluted?

Thanks again for all the great answers/discussion!

azriel55 wrote:Also, this brings up another thing that I'm SURE is discussed elsewhere

Someone just started a new discussion for this.

But since when has he steered away from Convoluted?

Well, simply being "wacky and/or convoluted" doesn't mean it's going to survive to the final draft. Plenty of perfectly wacky stuff ended up on the cutting room floor. That's how the creative process works.

Stuff split out of another thread, refers to this post.

Monk Ed wrote:And even as frequently as the CI is cited, most evidence is still drawn from the show itself. The CI seems most often used in debates either A) over truly unnecessary (yet entertaining) minutiae, or B) with people who question what seems obvious to everyone else -- see arguments that pop up when Chuckman says that Evas don't actually need souls to function.

Totally OT, but I've come to realize he has a point when it comes to the MPEs. Kaworu's thing is that he can control any Adam-based Eva without a soul, right? The only reason he could take control of Unit 02 was because its soul was hiding. So if the MPE dummy systems are based on Kaworu, it makes sense that they'd be able to control the Evas sans souls. In fact, one could even argue that that's the only way they'd be able to control them.

That said, his insistence on extending that claim to Unit 03 and Unit 04 is still utterly bogus.

Bagheera wrote:
That said, his insistence on extending that claim to Unit 03 and Unit 04 is still utterly bogus.

Why? The only difference between them and the MPEs is that they look different. Unit 01 is the only one that's fundamentally different from the others. 03 and 04 were built outside the Tokyo-3 branch, which is logically the only one focused on building a Lilith (that, is Rei) based dummy system (which would require a soul, since Rei presumably can't just take over an Adam-based Eva at will the way Kaworu can; putting a Lilin based soul in an Adamic Eva is a way to cheat so Rei can pilot it. While she has no innate connection to the flesh of Adam, she's everybody's mommy)

I'm not the one extending a claim, everyone else is assuming that because 01, 02 and maybe 00 have their own soul, all the others must as well, even if that assumption depends on Nerv having some kind of soul collection, transference and storage system that's never mentioned and never comes up, or that Nerv found a bunch of kids born in 2000-2001 and shoved their mothers into a headless Eva wired up to a spare core (which would come from where, exactly?) or something.

The resident soul thing also assumes that Nerv/Seele have a level of control and understanding of the Evas that's far beyond what they appear to have on-screen.

Chuckman wrote:Why? The only difference between them and the MPEs is that they look different.

No, that's wrong. The difference is that they're controlled by a system derived from a being who can explicitly control soulless Evas. As such it makes sense that the MPEs might follow that pattern. since Unit 03 was controlled by a human pilot it makes sense that it'd follow the same pattern seen in other Evas controlled by human pilots -- i.e., that the pilot would have to sync with the soul of the Eva, which is specifically identified as the pilot's mother.

That said, even with the MPEs there's still the question of why they speared themselves before 3I. If they have souls they have a reason to do that, but otherwise it's kind of pointless.

Unit 01 is the only one that's fundamentally different from the others. 03 and 04 were built outside the Tokyo-3 branch, which is logically the only one focused on building a Lilith (that, is Rei) based dummy system

Which is irrelevant given the existence of Unit 00 and Unit 02. If these units have souls it stands to reason the same would hold for any unit piloted by a human being.

I'm not the one extending a claim, everyone else is assuming that because 01, 02 and maybe 00 have their own soul, all the others must as well, even if that assumption depends on Nerv having some kind of soul collection, transference and storage system that's never mentioned and never comes up, or that Nerv found a bunch of kids born in 2000-2001 and shoved their mothers into a headless Eva wired up to a spare core (which would come from where, exactly?) or something.

It's not a stretch to assume they did the same thing with Unit 03 that they know worked with Units 01 and 02. There is no need for soul collection, transference, or storage; all they need is a cadaver and they're good to go. And we do know that the kids in Class 2-A were all missing mothers (which was confirmed in every case we saw).

The resident soul thing also assumes that Nerv/Seele have a level of control and understanding of the Evas that's far beyond what they appear to have on-screen.

Nope. As I said, all they have to do is stick a body in the entry plug and repeat what Yui and Kyoko did. There's nothing to it beyond that. It's true that Eva fans have read way more into this than they ought, but even so between Sadamoto's explicit statement, what we're shown onscreen, the CI, and what we know of Unit 01 and Unit 02 there is no reason to think Unit 03 was soulless.

I granted you the point with the MPEs. Take it as a win and let it go.

With one exception, the Evas are all clones of Adam with different armor on. Saying the MPEs are fundamentally different because of their dummy plugs is like saying a Ford is fundamentally different from a Chevy because they use different keys.

So they have all of Class 2-A's moms dead bodies in deep freeze somewhere? Come on. How would a dead body even synch?

If 03 and 04 have souls, they came from somewhere, which implies that at some point a living human being got in an entry plug and interface with them and had their soul ripped our, or Nerv has a machine, which no one has ever mentioned and never comes up, that can duplicate that process so the souls can be kept.

It's ridiculous.

Not the most ridiculous thing that has appeared in the franchise, though, to be fair...

Assuming there is a difference in the MPEs versus the 'regular' series (Units-00 through 04), one could argue that maybe these things are 'soulless.' Working on the assumption that all Evas require souls, the only Evas we've seen this applied to are the main Evas. MPEs, however, seem to have characteristics that make them more advanced or significantly different from the mainline Evas. Perhaps they took some 'volunteers' and used their souls to fuel these things (it's not above Seele to do that). Is it possible, however, that the MPEs have 'fabricated' souls, or something along those lines? Something we haven't seen in the show, but would explain their 'pre-programmed' roles that they played in Third Impact?