Hi everyone. I was watching once again TUAT and there is something that Is habimg me head-scratching.

When original Shikinami transforms Asuka into this blue matter and takes her away, we later understand that she was absorbed into Evangelion 13's cockpit.

But before that happened, Gendoh infodumps us about killing all the angel's, includimg the 9th angel that was inside Asuka.

Then we see Evangelion 13 chomping Unit 02's cockpit and we can see a cross of light, meaning the angel was effectively killed.

So my questions is... Does original Shikinami only took away Asuka with her and only left the 9th angel inside Unit 02 or am I missing something?

Because for me It is implied that Asuka was inside Evangelion 13's cockpit when Shinji rescued her. Meaning original Shikinami took Asuka with her and left the angel inside Unit 02's cockpit to be dealed with.

Any thoughts?

Good question. For reference, here are the frames from that sequence, as compiled in the Original Asuka thread:


It's not apparent to me that anything besides the plugsuit and the activated DSS choker are left behind in the entry plug. However, it occurs to me now that the DSS choker exploded in response to something, so you could argue that Asuka was taken but the 9th Angel was left behind on that basis.

I never really thought about it, but I guess it does make sense.

Another possible interpretation is that when she “summons” the Angel it actually leaves her body and takes over Unit 2 instead, so by the time “original Asuka” gets to her they have already been separated. After all taking over an Eva is kinda the 9th Angel’s entire thing.

The 9th is heavily implied to be made up of the rest of the Shikinami series, so what's likely happening there is not anything being split, as much as being reunited into a whole

Blockio wrote:The 9th is heavily implied to be made up of the rest of the Shikinami series,

Gah, reminds me I still need to count crosses in the 3+1 entry plug scene.

Blockio wrote:The 9th is heavily implied to be made up of the rest of the Shikinami series

Since when? This is the first time I'm hearing about this. What's the logic and evidence behind this theory?

Blockio wrote:
The 9th is heavily implied to be made up of the rest of the Shikinami series, so what's likely happening there is not anything being split, as much as being reunited into a whole

I don't think that's the case, given that we see Evangelion 13 crunch the cockpit followed by a rainbow and moments before that Gendoh stated that his plans included getting rid of every angel left.

So following that premise, I think original Shikinami only took Asuka, meanwhile the 9th angel stayed powering Unit 02, like @Archer suggested.

Melkor wrote:

Blockio#936853 wrote:The 9th is heavily implied to be made up of the rest of the Shikinami series

Since when? This is the first time I'm hearing about this. What's the logic and evidence behind this theory?

I swear there's a topic about this! I tried to find it back in March with no luck:

nerv bae wrote:

Axx°N N. wrote:Missed the discussion on crosses in 2.0 relating to clones, so this was an interesting read.

I wish I could find the original discussion of the purple crosses. I don't think it's in any of the threads I linked above, but I'm pretty sure I ran across it here on EGF and not elsewhere on the internet. If anyone knows where this discussion is, please post the link.

I don't recall the entire logic of it, but the evidence has got to include the children's laughter that accompanies the crosses' appearance in both 2.0 and 3+1, as well as the unsettling child's face that appears in 2.0.

Edit:

I just remembered that during my recent rewatch of NGE, I heard the same children's laughter during episode 22 when the 15th angel invades Asuka's mind; I put up relevant screencaps over here. Significantly, the mob Asuka is wading through in the episode 22 screencap appear to be copies of her. So, we could treat this as a metatextual clue from NGE about the laughing crosses in NTE -- they are also copies of her (and they are a facet of the 9th angel, ergo the 9th angel is made up of the rest of the Shikinami series).

@nerv bae angels are not man-made (At least the official angels accounted for in the Dead Sea Scrolls), they already exist within our own reality; so I don't believe the 9th angel was made from the rest of Shikinamis, but more like in the line that it was reflecting the nature of the Shikinamis to Asuka herself.

Maybe the giggling crosses are intended for us to feel the creep factor in that scene, even a meta reference of the angel attack in episode 22', but nothing so far-fetched as the angel being a fusion of all previous Shikinamis.

I'd have to dig to get the full rundown, but the short of it is that the two sequences not only use not just similar visual and audio effects, but effectively the same, as well as a cut storyboard for Ha, where Asuka's face peels off to serve as the face of the angel talking to her, as well as a lot of blink and you miss it-type scenes during Asuka's backstory and on various tech panels. There is not one single piece of conclusive evidence, but the mass of smaller hints in the screenwriting leave fairly little conclusions other than it being engineered by Seele.

AsukaShikinami10 wrote:@nerv bae angels are not man-made (At least the official angels accounted for in the Dead Sea Scrolls), they already exist within our own reality; so I don't believe the 9th angel was made from the rest of Shikinamis, but more like in the line that it was reflecting the nature of the Shikinamis to Asuka herself.

Maybe the giggling crosses are intended for us to feel the creep factor in that scene, even a meta reference of the angel attack in episode 22', but nothing so far-fetched as the angel being a fusion of all previous Shikinamis.

You are conflating NGE and NTE here; the exact content of the DSS in NTE is never specified, and there have been experiments on weaponizing angels as early as the third; also lest not we forget the entire thing that are the Adams' vessels and Guardian of Guf-class, which are all very clearly angelic in nature, and explicitly confirmed to be manmade in at least a large part

Yeah, I remember they have been trying to weaponize angels since the third one. But I m not pretty sure the 9th one was one of them, given that we see Eva 03 getting in contact with the suspicious cloud when being transported (even if it was revealed to Seele in the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, I don't think they secretly messed with the angel in front of Nerv USA without them noticing).

Even Ritsuko analized Asuka and came to the conclusion that she was not physically affected by the angel (which later on Anno & co. changed because of reasons) even though we saw in the frame-by-frame that indeed the angel latched onto Asuka.

But even if they changed that I don't remember seeing in NTE someone salvage souls to use them as fundamental parts of weaponized Evas/Angels.

And once again when Evangelion 13 reaches for Unit 02's entry plug nd the inside of it turns into blue, Asuka only aknowledges the original Shikinami but there's no mention of other Shikinami types by her.

AsukaShikinami10 wrote:Even Ritsuko analized Asuka and came to the conclusion that she was not physically affected by the angel (which later on Anno & co. changed because of reasons) even though we saw in the frame-by-frame that indeed the angel latched onto Asuka.

That could theoretically be a subtle hint toward the 9th Angel consisting of the other Asukas.
After all, if the 9th Angel shares Asuka’s DNA, there WOULD be no detectable signs of foreign infection.

AsukaShikinami10 wrote:Yeah, I remember they have been trying to weaponize angels since the third one. But I m not pretty sure the 9th one was one of them, given that we see Eva 03 getting in contact with the suspicious cloud when being transported (even if it was revealed to Seele in the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, I don't think they secretly messed with the angel in front of Nerv USA without them noticing).

For clarity, in NGE Unit-03 flies through the clouds after some pilot weather dialogue and arrives in Japan several hours late.


But in NTE it flies over the clouds without weather dialogue and there is no mention of a delay and after delays sufficient to push back its testing to the "worst day possible".


My understanding of this is that in NGE, Unit-03 acquired the 13th angel in the clouds during transit to Japan, while in NTE the 9th angel was acquired a different way (such as via Asuka).

Edited to correct my mis-statement about NTE delay. In my opinion, NGE's hours-delay feels like delay during the flight while NTE's day-delay feels more like delay before the flight. So we can still point to the differences in these delays for clues to the 9th angel origin.

nerv bae wrote:For clarity, in NGE Unit-03 flies through the clouds after some pilot weather dialogue and arrives in Japan several hours late.

SPOILER: Show

But in NTE it flies over the clouds without weather dialogue and there is no mention of a delay.

SPOILER: Show

My understanding of this is that in NGE, Unit-03 acquired the 13th angel in the clouds during transit to Japan, while in NTE the 9th angel was acquired a different way (such as via Asuka).

There's still the ominous lighting in the distance though... who knows.

But I wouldn't be surprised if in NTE Seele somehow put the 9th inside Eva-03...

DantesInferno wrote:There's still the ominous lighting in the distance though... who knows.

But I wouldn't be surprised if in NTE Seele somehow put the 9th inside Eva-03...

There's a deleted scene in 2.0 of a secret reunion of the SEELE monolith that confirmed that they knew that Unit-03 was infected, and even wanted a pilot's infection to happen to analyze the data and continue their research on interaction between human and Angel (that was interrupted by the destruction of the Third Angel and all the base where it was held)
We don't know if that point is still canon, but even without it, it's strongly implied that SEELE knew that there was something with Unit 03, hence Gendo's reticence to immediately add it to NERV's roster and put another of his Evas on ice. (plus the very ominous lightning when 03 is transported)

Although if Bardiel was really made from the rest of the Shikinami line (or at least they were used to feed it), the question is: what's the narrative purpose? Something as big as Asuka's "sisters" being used against her (implying that she was the intended target of Bardiel all along) and now fused within her should had warranted at least a mention from someone, or be more used as part of her own character arc.
I wonder (assuming this theory is right) if this was a build-up to a plot point that ended up abandoned when Anno changed his plans for 3.0?

So I take that Asuka was supposed to be the vessel for Bardiel, like how Rei is the vessel of Lilith and Kaworu of Adam?

C.T.1290 wrote:So I take that Asuka was supposed to be the vessel for Bardiel, like how Rei is the vessel of Lilith and Kaworu of Adam?

No, I think what Gendo means is that both Shikinami and Ayanami series are meant as vessels to carry a sacrificial angel into an Eva to awaken it.

Rei did this at the end of 2.0: The core of the 10th angel, which had assimilated Rei, after collapsing regroups in the form of a giant red Rei; as soon as this Rei is absorbed into Eva-01, its awakening ramps up a huge deal, and the ground above Nerv HQ is blown away as Eva-01 raches it's "final form".

Then, in 3.0, we see the 12th angel turning into a giant, deformed Rei head before "reverting to embryo" and being delivered to Eva-13 and turning it into radiant giant (awakening). I think this suggests that, at some point during the timeskip (perhaps A3I), the 12th angel must have absorbed a Rei clone we don't know anything about (there's 3 clones between Rei-2 "Pokanami" and Rei-6 "Kuronami", namely Reis 3, 4 and 5), and this of course was all planned by Gendo.

And of course, in 3.0+1.0 Asuka is used to deliver the remant 9th Angel to Eva-13 and (re-)start 4th impact.

There is no reason to assume that it was original shikinami that split Asuka from the angel as that would imply eva 13 has a soul,which it doesn't and it doesn't even have an AT field.My explanation to how the angel was split is that Eva 13 split and then sacrificed the angel for awakening and causing an impact as this is EXACTLY what Eva 01 does to Zeruel and EVEN Gendoh states both shikinami and Ayanami series were created for this purpose,But i have to say,the sequence between and Rei and Asuka are similar,both get pulled out from their "Predicament" by someone else,which just seems like classic eva metaphors.

Except that 13 does have a soul and an ATF in Shin.

Blockio wrote:Except that 13 does have a soul and an ATF in Shin.

Eva-13 doesn't have an ATF in 3.0+1.0. It's mentioned that the ATF protecting Eva-13 is from Eva-02 (it's mentioned Eva-02 fears Eva-13).

This is one of the reasons why I theorize Original Shikinami was inside Eva-02.