Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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aw11348
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Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby aw11348 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 11:07 pm

Something I'm a little confused about is Seele's motivations for deliberately instigating the Second Impact.

Evageeks says "Seele intentionally initiated Second Impact, knowing what would happen, because the damage would be more limited than that caused by a fully awakened Adam (the destruction of all Lilith-based life down to the bacterial level). Thus they used the Spear of Longinus to reduce Adam to a controllable, embryonic state -- knowing that this would result in a cataclysm which would cost billions of lives. Reducing Adam to an embryonic state made it more easy to conceal and protect it from the Angels, whom Seele knew from the Dead Sea Scrolls, would be appearing in about fifteen years."

I was under the impression that the reason Adam's children began waking back up during the series is that comatose Adam was messed with by the Katsuragi expedition scientists 15 years prior. However, Evageeks implies that the "angels" would have woken up in 15 years regardless (for some reason), and Seele triggered the Second Impact to reduce Adam to a more manageable state. Evageeks also implies that, had Seele not triggered the Second Impact, Adam would've eventually emerged from his Lance-of-Longinus-imposed stasis on his own and fucked humanity. Is this assumed to be true? Why would Adam's children, presumably sent into some sort of automatic hibernation by the First Impact (Lilith's arrival on Earth), randomly be prophesied to awake in 2015 without input from Adam? If it's not true, why DID Seele cause the Second Impact??? Simply to make Adam more manageable for Instrumentality??

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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby Reichu » Mon Jul 22, 2019 11:38 pm

Is this the Second Impact article? It should probably separate "things actually stated in the show" or "things stated in supplemental sources" (with all being referenced appropriately) from "deductions we're forced to make" to avoid problems like this. I'd like to say I'll fix it immediately but there's way too much stuff to do. :sweat:

Anyway, it sounds like the article is referencing this needlessly convoluted bit of exposition from EoE:

Misato:
They plan to initiate Third Impact - not with Angels, but by using the Eva series.
The Second Impact, 15 years ago, was something that humans devised.
But that was in order to minimize the damage, by reverting Adam all the way to an egg before the other Angels would awaken.


Which, yeah, does not even start to answer the question of why they would initiate the very problem they're supposedly attempting to prevent. The Angels waking up 15 years later is BECAUSE the expedition bad-touched Adam, making her wake up, making her release souls for the Angels from her Chamber of Guf. Seele's goals need to be extrapolated quite a bit further from what Misato says before anything starts to make sense at all. And even then, Seele are never going to play fair with the audience, because at the end of the day any stupid crap they do can be "because the scrolls told us to".
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aw11348
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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby aw11348 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:49 am

Thanks for the response.
Which, yeah, does not even start to answer the question of why they would initiate the very problem they're supposedly attempting to prevent.

This is EXACTLY what I was confused about specifically. Seele apparently needs to get Adam into a manageable state so that they can hide it from the Angels. So they agitate Adam and trigger the Second Impact, causing the Angels to stir in the first place.

I suppose an explanation for Seele purposely engineering the Second Impact could be this -- What does Seele want above all else: Instrumentality. Perhaps to trigger Instrumentality (presumably by joining Lilith and Adam in some way) they would NEED to wake Adam (and therefore his children) up no matter what. So to reduce the hassle they trick the Katsuragi scientists into waking him and subsequently into reducing him to an embryo that Seele can use for Instrumentality and also use to conveniently clone him to create the Eva (which they will use both to fight the resulting Angels and to act as substitutes to Adam when the time to trigger Instrumentality comes, just as Unit 01 was a substitute for Lilith). I have no idea if that makes sense but at least it's something.

Alternatively, was waking Adam with the contact experiment potentially a complete accident? (I know it is stated that Gendo very conveniently got his ass off the South Pole a day before the experiment, implying that he and therefore Seele knew full well what would happen as a result, but let's disregard that). That way, Misato's line about "minimizing the damage" by "reverting Adam back to an egg before the other Angels awaken" makes more sense -- freeing Adam and giving the Angels back their souls was an accident, and after that, to minimize damage, they purposely caused Adam to go boom knowing that it would probably kill billions, but it was better than having him destroy humanity then and there and it allowed them to at least get their hands on Adam's resulting "egg"/embryo and prepare for the Angels to come and get him. ...I don't know.... :???:

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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby StrokeMeGoat » Wed Jul 24, 2019 9:35 am

From what I understand, the Angels would've awoken in 2015 whether or not Second Impact occurred. The Dead Sea Scrolls seemed to indicate as much. Based off the information found in the scrolls, SEELE decided the best way to limit the potential damage was to initiate Second Impact themselves and to prevent Adam from fully awakening after doing that. In doing so, they were able to reduce Adam to the size of an embryo, as well as transplant its soul into a Lilin human being (Kaworu).

The point of doing this was to reduce the risk of the Angels ever making contact with Adam and initiating a full scale impact once they've awoken. The SEELE directed Second Impact was a necessary step in accomplishing this.

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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 24, 2019 10:56 am

View Original PostStrokeMeGoat wrote:From what I understand, the Angels would've awoken in 2015 whether or not Second Impact occurred. The Dead Sea Scrolls seemed to indicate as much. Based off the information found in the scrolls

As far as I recall, nothing like this is ever said anywhere. The nearest statement is this:

FUYUTSUKI:
The Secret Dead Sea Scrolls that Seele possesses...
If things happen as it is written in those scrolls,
the Third Impact will happen in another decade or so without fail.


Seele's "prophecies" were always the self-fulfilling kind. (We've seen them undergo revision whenever things don't quite go the way Seele want.) Adam had been asleep for billions of years, impaled on the Spear. She only woke up is because Seele send a bunch of people down there to yank the Spear out and perform some weird experiment, with the results of creating the 17th Angel, triggering Second Impact, and giving souls to Angels 3~16.
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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby GuiBiancarelli » Thu Jul 25, 2019 6:27 am

View Original PostReichu wrote:Adam had been asleep for billions of years, impaled on the Spear. She only woke up is because Seele send a bunch of people down there to yank the Spear out and perform some weird experiment, with the results of creating the 17th Angel, triggering Second Impact, and giving souls to Angels 3~16.


Seconded! It may be my interpretation here, but it was implied that Adam gave the Angels souls when he opened his Guf on the 2nd Impact, leading to the anime's events.
I might be reading too much into it, but seemed to me that Seele needed to mess with Adam and his progeny to get the FoL/S2, in order to have the means to create Anti-AT Fields and be able to release mankind's souls for the HIP. Does that makes sense?

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Re: Would the angels have awoken and attacked regardless of the Katsuragi expedition disturbing Adam 15 years prior?

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Postby Bhorium » Fri Jul 26, 2019 8:46 am

I think, thematically speaking, that the idea that mankind (well, Seele) could have chosen to just leave slumbering giants lie, but decided to open Pandora's Box any way in their hubris, fits very well with the series.
Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another.


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