^
Where would have the souls gone though?

Do souls turn into LCL too? Maybe if they do that's why the sea is red? Maybe they went into the white or black moon? Maybe the "Adams" absorbed them?

Jinroh wrote:If it was open all that time, maybe it could explain why it's empty. Also it could suggest the crosses around the sphere are manmade devices of some kind; maybe a sealing mechanism of some sort?

The comment about the Chamber being empty was in NGE, in NTE there isn't any indication that the Chamber is a place to stock souls, or even if it's empty or not.

As for the crosses, you're talking about the four crosses in the center of the 2I vortex, the crosses scattered through Tokyo-3's landscape in Q, or the apparent equidistant row of crosses in the horizon, still in Q?

If it's the first, then they appeared at the same time than the vortex (see the very beginning of the 2I flash-back), so it's more probable that it's a by-product of the the four ADAMs.
I it's the second, it looks like randomly placed crosses to make the place even weirder, although it ends up as the less weird feature of the landscape, between the core-eroded landscape, giant teeth canyon and iris and everything about the Moon!
If it's the third, I recall a theory that these crosses seemingly forming a row could mark the limits of the core-ified territory, and that beyond it the landscape is still normal (although the blood-red world seen during Operation US tends to invalidate that theory, but if the whole planet was turned to core material, then how could WILLE even had their equipment?) Although no idea of these crosses are "natural" of if they are manmade.

Now back to your previous post :

Jinroh wrote:But isn't the door still open at the south pole? Do all of them lead to the same chamber?

I just realized that if the theory that Gendo and Fuyu flied through the Door of Guf with their HQ and are now hided inside the Chamber, then the Antarctica DoG better be still open, because that's the only way to go to the Chamber of Guf and directly attack Gendo, since Shinji can't synchronize with EVA-01 anymore and thus can't open a DoG with it.
That or they'll have to wait that Gendo make the first move, and that never ended well for the good guys.

I don't know if this has been said, but I really can't read this whole thread right now. xD
My idea: The key to Instrumentality is turning everything on the planet into one giant core (red is my favourite color, this would make me happy). Anno made some comments saying it seems like the cores have worlds in them, right? Clearly they are something more. The Evas have also been shown to have the ability to corify stuff, so during an Impact an Eva could probably corify everything.
Seriously this is going to end like...Daicon II was it? Someone on this forum made the discovery. A Gainax animation that had a red Earth going back to normal.

Hiya, obvious question is obvious!
I was just re-watching 2.22, and I'm wondering what it is I missed. I was under the assumption that the impacts were caused by the angels reaching Adam. How is it that Shinji and Rei were able to cause it? Is this just a new addition to the lore made by 2.22??? Thanks for reading!

We don't know because Anno blue balled us by keeping Shinji in the dark about everything.

A.T. Fields.

it was partially explained and partially implied but nothing concrete yet.
but then you have to question how Shinji has ever awakened unit-01, it just sort of happened when Shinji was at a very low point in EoE too.

^
Also, there were so many factors at play at that moment: Shinji and Rei, the fact EVA-01 has a resident soul, that it's implied that it's different from the others (maybe made from Lilith like in NGE), and we don't know which of those factors were relevant, or if it was a combination of all of them.

It might had something to do with Rei, if she carries Lilith's soul like in NGE, maybe Yui's soul inhabiting EVA-01 didn't influenced anything, maybe Shinji was here to push EVA-01 in pseudo-evolved mode and start the chain of actions that would lead to its awakening and N3I, but since we saw his eyes becoming glowing red maybe he is or has something else that makes him different from the others normal pilots such as Asuka and Mari...

And as Ray said, Q kept us on the complete dark about it, with the only source of info Kaworu pretending that somehow in the few minutes it lasted Shinji turned the whole landscape into something straight out of Lovecraft's nightmares.

I figured that it was because Unit 01 was pretty much identical to Lilith, so when it came into contact with the Angels core whilst searching for Rei, it initiated an impact just like it would if an Angel were to reach Lilith. Ideally this wouldn't happen as Unit 01 is contained, but since it had broken free of all it's restraints being in that kind of contact with an Angels core initiated the impact.

That's the way I saw it anyway. Makes sense to me.

See this discussion: http://forum.evageeks.org/thread/13461/Impact-Mechanics/

contains probably everything there is to speculate on

Cool stuff. Thanks for the great answers guys!

I've merged the "How did Shinji and Rei cause third impact" thread with "Impact Mechanics" so any new questions/discussion can be carried on in here.

BADA-BUMP.

I'm going to follow up on BlueBasilisk's post in the FoI thread over here in the Impacts Mechanics thread, since attempting to address his questions led me into much more generalized territory. Just as a warning, this post is going to be huge. It will also certainly regurgitate a lot of what's already been said before, but I feel that methodically going over everything after a significant period away can be quite useful.

Let's begin...

BlueBasilisk wrote:[Eva-01 is] a monkey wrench for any theory about the FoI. It feels like we have one Eva that doesn't fit the evidence. Lilith turning into Rei and the FoI taking on the form of Unit 01 all imply that it was somehow active in the proceedings

While I think Eva-01's involvement in 3I is a given, I'm not so sure it's necessary for explaining why Lilith initially starts off taking Rei's form. In some of the earlier (-est?) conversations about NTE's 3I, there was the suggestion that a previous (and now quite dead) Rei clone was responsible. Let me sketch out a possible scenario that will also eventually dovetail into your questions, “if [Eva-01] was [involved], why was Mark.06 present in the condition that it's in? And if Unit 01 wasn't around or doing anything, why the dopplegangers?”...

The 12th Angel attacks. The available Evas are deployed to handle it, including a Rei clone-piloted Eva-07. (This brings to mind that shirt by Radio Eva that shows Eva-07 having a black color. The current Rei has a black plugsuit... Could it be a hold-over?) Eva-07 is invaded, Armisael-style, by the Angel; similarly to the 10th Angel incident, the pilot is absorbed, and the Eva used as a means to access Central Dogma. (You'd think Nerv would have fixed that loophole, but the Angel did get down there, sooooo...) The infected Eva-07 pulls out the Spear of Longinus from Lilith and fuses with her. The Angel-influenced Lilith then drops off the cross and promptly takes Rei's form. The remaining Evas along with the JSSDF start to have it out with Lilith, but their efforts aren't very effective.

Mark.06, being Seele's special task-master, may have been kept on hold for a real emergency. Well, this is it. 06 is sent in to take care of business. It decapitates Lilith and implants itself into the neck stub in an attempt to wrest control of the situation. One of two things could happen here:

(A) The Angel requires containment, so Mark.06 does precisely that, inverting its ATF and absorbing every last bit of Angel essence into its own body.
(B) The Angel recognizes Mark.06 as an Adam, and so commutes into 06's body so it can make contact and have 06 act upon its will just as it's already done with Lilith.

Come to think of it, it's quite possible that (B) could have happened first, and a variation upon (A) happen afterward.

Anyway, this provides immediate explanation for two things:

(1) Why 06 remains absurdly huge even after being released from Lilith — it's been bloated by the Angel's biomass. (Why the absorption made the Eva expand perfectly, as opposed to just making its core turn into a groteque tumor... I dunno.)
(2) Why Lilith, as she continues to expand, stops looking like Rei — the Rei-influence has been contained, so Lilith's form reverts to normal. (Why does the head continue to look like Rei's, despite being, as demonstrated near the onset of 4I, metaphysically linked to the body? I dunno, lol.)

So we're at the point where Mark.06 loses control of the situation. Knowing Gendo, this was probably keikaku doori, and gives him an excuse to unleash Eva-01 — since, really, could things get any worse? :p We know that the Spear of Cassius that Eva-01 was impaled on gets put in use to stop Third Impact, so this is last possible opportunity in the timeline for Eva-01 to be un-impaled. And she's not sent into orbit until Neo-Nerv is formed (since their logo is on her prison), something that's strongly intimated to happen in the aftermath of 3I. So everything checks out. Whether by a surviving Eva, or by automated means, Eva-01 is liberated, and she starts to take action.

At this point, things get... very fuzzy. We have ALL of these observations to take into account:

- The skulls in Central Dogma. They're actually piled BENEATH Lilith's cross. This doesn't really make sense, does it? How could they have been created BEFORE Lilith awakened? A possibility is that they were formed after the fact as a result of the LCL in the chamber taking form as the skulls. A connection between the skulls and the FoIs is heavily implied, but we'll get to that.

- The outskirts of Nerv HQ have been converted to core, but Nerv HQ itself remains untouched. There's also the giant iris (with Neo-HQ emerging from the cross-shaped rend in the “pupil”) and massive jaw canyon to account for.

- Nerv HQ underwent a physical transformation: old headquarters subsiding into an inverted pyramid; central shaft everting into the sky; etc.

- Lilith's head has been separated from her body, located all the way in the first Command Center surrounded by FoIs. (Assuming the Command Center is now in the inverted pyramid, and the length of the everted shaft is an accurate representation of how far separated the regular Nerv facilities have always been from Central Dogma, this is… quite a long way for a giant disembodied head to travel.)

- The Moon!

• Its orbital trajectory has changed: its both (seemingly) much closer and no longer tidally locked.
• It has either developed its own atmosphere or parasitized atmosphere off of Earth.
• Its surface is covered in a grid implying that the whole thing started to undergo conversion to core.
• There are also some gigantic “blood” splatters that were apparently not there before. (Need to check if the part of the Moon we see corresponds or not to the lunar surface seen in previous two movies. May have already been done and I just forgot.)

- Failures of Infinity, headless Evas made entirely of core.

• Those at the 3I epicenter (i.e., within Nerv HQ itself) are perfectly formed and in the shape of Eva-01. (The ones in the Command Center are decidedly less than full Eva size. Do we know for sure if the ones in the shaft are bigger?)
• Those further out (in Old Hakone?) seem to be coming out of the core-converted surface. They are covered in armor, which is shaped not perfectly (it's not in the "image" of Eva-01 or anyone else) but in a random and deformed manner. Their morphology exhibits a combination of (A) crystalline structures similar to Eva-13's shoulder appendages, and (B) noodly bundles similar to Lilith's abdominal viscera and also where three of her limbs terminate in stubs. (Brings Mark.09's tendrils to mind, as well, but to a lesser extent.) They are variable in size, and many are frozen in the process of glomming together into bigger entities. (This was apparently a very frenzied activity up until it was abruptly stopped, as some of the FoIs are frozen MID-JUMP.)
• BlueBasilisk draws attention to a third category here, so far shown only in khara's short films. These lack armor, and some are transparent with opaque skeletons. Otherwise, they are very similar to the second grouping, complete with the “hurry, jump into a pile and get bigger” behavior.

I'm still pretty sure that piecing all of this together before the last film is out is impossible, but trying to make headway can be a masochistic form of enjoyment, so let's see what can be done...

To provide additional follow-up on BB's post, let's focus on the FoIs for now. What further things can be said on the matter?

- The camera focuses on them while Kaworu tells Shinji about human instrumentality. Specifically (gonna use the old github translation):

Shinji:
What is this...?

Kaworu:
The outcome of Third Impact, which came to pass while you were merged with Eva-01.

Shinji:
But this is...
What happened to everyone in the city?

Kaworu:
Mass extinction is not unusual on this planet.
Rather, it is the aspect that drives evolution.
Because life is fundamentally something that adjusts to the world and changes itself.
However, Lilin do not change themselves, but the world.
So they brought the rite of artificial evolution unto themselves.
Old life is offered in sacrifice, so that new beings blessed with the Fruit of Life may be created.
All this is due to the death instinct that's been programmed since time immemorial.
Nerv call it the Human Instrumentality Project.

- When Kaworu describes the ones in the shaft to Shinji, he uses a phrase that's been translated as “those who failed to achieve Infinity”. (We, of course, abbreviate this to the Engrishy “failures of infinity” just so that we have something to call the damned things.)

Assuming Kaworu is not completely full of shit (he well could be, but we don't have much to go on here, so best to not throw information away out unless it absolutely doesn't add up), the film seems to be making the implication that the FoIs are the by-products of failed Human Instrumentality. As the Fruit of Life confers infinite life and infinite energy, it's reasonable to think that “failed to achieve Infinity” just means “failed to acquire the Fruit of Life”.

So a potential mechanism for what's going on might be:

1) The fusion of Lilith and Mark.06!Adam, coupled with the 12th Angel's will to transform the world, triggers HIP.
2) The earth itself is turned into a birthing medium of pure core. This effect begins directly outside Nerv HQ and gradually spreads. (Nerv HQ itself is unaffected due to an “eye of the storm” effect? This has also been suggested for why those at Near 3I's Ground Zero were spared immediate destruction.)
2) The humans trapped within this landscape are transformed into mini-Evas.
3) The mini-Evas “emerge from the womb” (phase out of the ground).
4) They start to glom together in order to create beings of larger size.

It's possible that NGE's HIP concept hasn't been completely abandoned, just reappropriated: individual souls gain a physical form of pure core — 'the spirit made material' — and are immediately compelled to combine with similar beings. They thereby bring about a localized “Instrumentality of souls” as they fuse together into increasingly large, more spiritually perfect beings.

Perhaps the perfectly formed FoIs in Nerv HQ are the end result of a sufficient number of fusions? That is, the FoIs start out both physically and spiritually imperfect, because at first they each represent a single person. It's only after a certain number of people have been merged together that they achieve physical perfection, as a reflection of their localized soul-complementation.

Well, okay. Not TOTAL perfection. Their souls do not yet possess the Fruit of Life, an omission perhaps reflected in the glaring lack of a cranium. It's hard to be perfect when you don't have a head. And every single FoI is missing this anatomically critical feature. They seem to be CREATED that way. However, there is a gigantic pile of skulls in Lilith's chamber (see above my suggestion for how they got there)... This, along with Lilith's own decapitation, implies a very strong link between the FoIs and Lilith. But what could it be?

During 3I, Lilith is not merely herself, but — bringing to mind EoE — a composite being. She is Lilith, 06!Adam, and 12th Angel. Since her chamber is described as the 3I epicenter, it can probably be assumed that this composite being is the original impetus behind 3I. It's the force that is causing both the landscape to transform and people to turn into mini-Evas that then spontaneously seek out Instrumentality.

We see, from the FoIs clustered around Lilith's head, that they are attracted to her in some fashion. This may also explain the FoIs plugging up the main shaft. As indicated in BB's FoI post, the FoIs get increasingly less developed the further away from the epicenter they are, so logically the inverse applies: those closest to Lilith reach “near-perfect” state first. In an attempt to become perfect — achieve Infinity — they must, perhaps, contact Lilith themselves. Are the skulls more than just bone? Do they — or did they, perhaps — contain the Fruit of Life? This might be hypothetically possible, if they were created from the chamber's LCL after Lilith became a composite being with (presumably) access to the Fruit of Life. Hence, once a failure reaches the chamber and claims a head for itself, it becomes complete both physically and spiritually.

That they're just skulls, rather than complete heads, actually makes some sense to me, after seeing the FoIs in the early stages of formation. That is, their bones are visible within the core-flesh. It's easy for me to imagine one of the failures placing a skull on its neck stub, and its core-flesh extending over the skull, molding first into a naked head and then a helmeted one.

However, we know that the Failures, well, failed, so what went wrong in their mission? Well, Eva-01 had to intervene at some point. Did she, maybe, crash the 3I party, in an inversion of what Lilith did in EoE?

Eva-01, having been the last one the Spear of Cassius was in, seems like a likely candidate for skewing Lilith and Mark.06. She just had to go down to Dogma with the Spear that was pulled out of her, grab the other Spear that was removed from Lilith, and then use both of them to put mega-Lilith under wraps. But she had to get to Dogma, first. If the whole shaft was swarming with FoIs clamoring to get to Lilith, the easiest way to get through would have been to exercise some influence over the failures.

EoE — which I don't feel bad referencing again, since 3.0 is rife with callbacks to it — offers a solution, by way of Lilith's “fusion” with the MP Evas. In EoE, we see that GNR basically takes over the harpies by resonating her ATF with theirs, and it grotesquely results in them acquiring physical properties of both Lilith (white putty-flesh) and Rei (her face, mostly). So, in parallel to this, Eva-01 might have “absorbed” the FoIs, at least the ones that were inside Nerv HQ. This resulted in them taking on her form (meaning they might have looked like Mark.06 beforehand; we may never know) and becoming compliant little minions.

Eva-01 may have first stalled the FoIs from their intent of completing themselves, and then had them let her down into Central Dogma. She then speared Lilith and Mark.06. For whatever reason, she wanted to get Lilith's head away from the body, so she passed it up to the FoIs in the shaft and they worked together — a writhing, squirming mass of red, like ants bringing a gigantic morsel back to the nest — to carry the head up, up, and away. At last, a cluster of them broke off and carried the head to its final resting place in the command center. (It's possible that the head is transported away before Lilith is skewered; the pose she's frozen in is somewhat suggestive of blindly groping for a head that's being taken somewhere above her.)

Once Eva-01 had done what she needed to do, she had all of the FoIs power down (I recall the script describing them as being in suspended animation), and then she herself followed suit. It's not like Nerv would've been able to get her into that orbital prison without her express cooperation, at this point...

This still leaves a number of points unaddressed, but my brain needs to recharge. I'll see what the rest of you have to say. (Expect some moderate clean-up to this post later on, since I bet it's pretty messy right now BUT I DON'T CARE I JUST WANT TO SHARE RIGHT NOW!!!)

P.S. If my speculah about Eva-01 imposing her control over the FoIs is true, then this, along with the script saying they're just lying dormant, yields some pretty insane possibilities for the final movie. Namely, Eva-01 becoming free of the Wunder and commanding her army of red against Gendo's Mass Production units. And then fighting one-on-one with Eva-13 to bring the epic back to the personal.

I really, really like this chain of events. It very neatly addresses all the headaches I had about how, when and why Eva Mark.06 became the 12th Angel. A Rei clone makes the most sense. I think I was assuming that Rei II was the unique carrier of Lilith's soul when she's probably just another Ayanami. She's special because she's the one we know. Damn you, leftover NGE lore!

That loophole is a really glaring flaw in Nerv's defenses. The Angels shouldn't even know about the self-destruct yet the last four have all commandeered an Eva through various means. Maybe they need an Eva or an Adam to set off an Angel Impact? Zeruel taking in Unit 00 and Rei doesn't trigger one, but Unit 01 does. Same with the 12th Angel. Fused with Mark.06? Nothing. Bathing in Lilith's blood? Turns into a bloated fetus. But that gets eaten and the fireworks begin.

Holding Mark.06 in reserve does make sense. It's way more powerful than the vanilla Evangelion but if it's going to be used as the True Eva, there's no reason to needlessly endanger it when there are expendable units around to do the grunt work. Just its presence at Nerv would send the message that Seele holds the better hand.

Was it still bloated and huge after it reappeared from Lilith? It does look bigger than Mark.09 when it gets decapitated, but I thought that was dramatic perspective at play.

Lilith's head also stops growing once it's removed from her body. Guess the transformation doesn't work across the head-to-body link like the collapse does?

Unit 01 being sent into battle as the absolute final resort is exactly what I had in mind when I said this in the previous post:

BlueBasilisk wrote:For a while I kicked around the idea that Unit 01 had briefly awakened after the Spear of Cassius was removed like it did with the Mark.04B, but Wille never mentions that either. Since the possibility is never raised and the only awakenings alluded to are the two we see ourselves, I feel like this theory can be safely discarded for now.

This being the key inspiration of course. Since it was re-armored at some point, it must have been kept around on Earth for at least a little while and that would explain why the cage is red with core or bakelite or whatever that red substance is. I don't think it was rust, was it?

-There are at least a few pools of LCL left in the chamber while the mountains of skulls are there, but after Lilith's body explodes, they disappear. The mountains are much taller than the Evas but the pool Lilith creates is only ankle deep on them. Where did all the skulls go?

-I've been thinking about the inverted pyramid. Could that be a ship, maybe even Seele's ship, that was buried under Nerv HQ all this time? It can fly, it has a bridge, Seele's kill switches are in there and an inverted triangle is a big part of their logo. Things go belly up for Mark.06 and the ship takes off to get clear of the blast zone, carrying Nerv HQ up with it and ripping the main shaft up out of the ground. It may have been flying or levitating all along since it's still airborne after Unit 13 rips the "pole" apart.

-The moon's also moving really fast. It travels a significant distance before the camera pans away from it. I think it would be worth comparing the moon before Third Impact to the weird moon after. There's a much longer cut of the moon in the music video that just came out so it might be possible to find the familiar face now. And didn't one of the storyboards for that scene indicate some kind of altar on the moon?

-The FoI in the main shaft are pretty close to normal Eva size:
And something's cut right through them.

-Kaworu does say that the purpose of the HIP ritual is to sacrifice old life which has the Fruit of Knowledge to give birth to new life which has the Fruit of Life. That matches up with what Ritsuko says in the previous movie about the cost of Unit 01's ascension being the life that came before it, Seele's talk about purifying the souls of the Lilin, and a scene in the beginning of 1.0 where Gendo says the Angels exist only to destroy those with the FoK. And the FoI attempting to merge with each other body and soul is basically the same thing that happened to Units 01 and 13, isn't it? Lesser beings merging into a single greater being. Iirc Unit 13 even has a moebius pattern behind the pilot seats while Shinji and Kaworu are working in harmony. Do you think there's a connection there?

-Unit 01 should be capable of wielding both Spears herself if they do require two souls like Kaworu said. And this might explain something else I was wondering about. When Unit 01 is powering the Wunder, it has the same halo that she does, but in the double nested pattern that's only seen in Unit 13. If Unit 01 reawakened and claimed both Spears, maybe they allowed her to briefly reach the higher awakened form Unit 13 had, thus the core erosion powers and double halo. It never did anything with them, but 13 was able to ragdoll hundreds of the FoI through the air like dandelion fluff.

-The FoIs do seem like they simply stopped in their tracks as opposed to dying (i.e. the jumping/throwing ones) or shutting down like an Eva does. They usually slump over when that happens.

That was a lot to mull over. I admit the kaiju fan in me is really hoping for a cataclysmic battle between two armies of Evas.

Crazy thought, what if Many worlds interpretation of the Multiverse is valid within Instrumentality and that those things are Unit 1's? Like what if beings who aren't real attempted to come into reality but were incomplete due to technically not existing in the first place?

I was thinking too, what's up with all those skulls? Are they all Reis? Have they been capturing Reis and killing them? Is that connected to the Confidental movie? Are they implying that they've been capturing Quantum Rei's? Is that even possible?

I asked this in the previous thread but who intended for Humanity to become red core beings? What's the motivation for it? Does it Grant immortality or what?

ChaddyManPrime wrote:I was thinking too, what's up with all those skulls? Are they all Reis? Have they been capturing Reis and killing them? Is that connected to the Confidental movie? Are they implying that they've been capturing Quantum Rei's? Is that even possible?

If you're talking about the launch site for 4I being littered with skulls, the skulls are actually Eva-sized(remember when Unit 13 was moving towards Lilith to remove the spears, it was crushing them under it's steps), so I doubt they can be Reis.[/quote]

ChaddyManPrime wrote:I asked this in the previous thread but who intended for Humanity to become red core beings? What's the motivation for it? Does it Grant immortality or what?

Sounds to me like it was Shinji's wish during 2I, brought to fruition through Yui, involving some incomplete Eva magic. He wanted to save Rei. There was some sort of ritual setup through Gendo and SEELE. Unit 01 took this order from Shinji and made it happen at a larger scale, like when it cut out the core of the opposing angel in the shape of Rei, but didn't realize what was happening in the background, the next events, or anything. Shinji woke up from a corrupted vision of him just aiming to save Rei.

Yui seems to have much less, if not no control over Unit-01 in the films as seen in 1.0 where she doesn't lift her arm, so i doubt she has anything to do with 3I. As for the FoI, The fact that the they're in the Dogma, are traveling upwards, and appear to be phasing through the buildings around them instead of destroying them suggests their origin lies in the Dogma instead of being people turned Eva
Also Those darker patches covering the inverted pyramid, could those be evidence of the structure turning to core?

I don't think they're Eva sized, unless there either really small or Unit 13 is just really big. I was also thinking about all those Rei skulls we saw too.

So the creation of the Red Core beings is just an accident? That doesn't make sense to me, we would have seen them start popping up before Kaworu threw the spear. I think whatever Unit 06 did created them.

I think either Yui's been asleep the entire time or isn't even present in the Adam.

All stuff regarding the Failures of Infinity should continue in the current active thread: thread/14401/Failures-of-Infinity-Dont-lose-your-head/

Sachi: Well, if someone is responding directly to the FoI stuff in my mega-post, replying here would make a bit more sense. That said......

Is BB the only one who actually read my post? Both Chaddy and Legacy, at least, are asking questions or making points that I did address, sometimes in detail. When the posts that follow one's own feel like they belong BEFORE rather than AFTER it... well, it's a frustrating way to carry out a conversation.

BlueBasilisk: I'm glad you approve! At least at this moment, I feel like a lot of the pieces have slotted together in a pretty organic way, and we might actually have a sound framework for addressing the remaining mysteries. Until 3+1 comes out and exposes our hard work as the house of cards it just might be. Oh, woe to be an Eva nerd.

I need to pull a bunch of stuff out of my backups so I can analyze the film more easily, at which point I'll endeavor to reply thoroughly. (BTW, anyone who has the Funi BD subtitles in text format... could you PM me a link? Pretty please?? I own the disc, I just don't have a BDD.)