Also note that I'm going with the idea that "soul" is referring to the entirity of a person conciousness, not just some bizzaro mystical quantity. Just bear with me for now.
When OMF rolled around with his thread about Kyoko's "Death and Rebirth", as he put it, I did agree with him. But this quote here:
Reichu wrote:AchtungAffen wrote:I don't see why it is so imperative that Kyouko lost her soul.
Because soulless Evas swallow your soul! That's just what the C.E. does... you know?
Really got me thinking.
Now, I know the accepted position is that there's some sort of deficiet in NERVs cloning program, which results in any artifically produced life lacking a soul. But where did this come from? AFAIK, it's because the Contact Experiments have always resulted in the person carrying out the test have apparently had their soul sucked into the Eva, possibly through some sort of straw.
Now, Kyoko's CE has always been a bit of an anomaly- if you go with teh conventional "It took her soul!" explanation, you end up with an exception to the "No soul->No ATF->No physical form" rule, which requires all sorts of contrived explanations.
But! if we go with OMFs theory, we're stuck with trying to figure out why Kyoko's soul didn't get gobbled up by the Eva like what happened with Yui.
What I'm going to do is try to come up with a way solve this.
Firstly- let's assume that the Evas did have souls of their own- after all, I don't see why they shouldn't. They were grown articifically, but if we were to assume that all of NERV/Gehirns meddling in them came after they were more or less fully grown and didn't interfere with the early stages, I don't see why they should be any different from any other lifeform.
So. We now have an Eva, with it's own soul- but lets not forget how different Evas are from humans- their mind/conciousness/soul will be radically different from a humans. Since synchonisation seems to create some sort of direct link between the minds of the pilot and the Eva, some problems might arise. The pilot will find themselves linked on a very immediate level with a mind incredibly- inconceivably- different from their own.
I do not think that it would be too much of a stretch to say that a forced interaction of this sort will seriously fuck up a dudes mind, possibly- probably- driving them crazy.
So, this offers a nice little way to solve Kyoko's CE, Yui's CE and why the Evas needed a human soul in the first place.
The soul in the Evas by the time their actually being piloted by the Children is neither the original "Evasoul" nor the soul or whoever was put into it. Rather, I am suggesting that the method used by NERV is not a simple "Take that soul and stick it in there", but instead is a process that merges the original soul of the Eva with the soul of whoever is plonked into it.
Yui's- Well, we see throughout the series that the soul inside Shogouki is a bit, well, mental. We know that Yui actively wanted to join the Eva and give up her physical form, so this caused her to tangify during the CE, which, had she not be tangified, would have just drivin her crazy.
Kyoko- Well, like I explained before. The CE and contact with such an alien mind drove her batshit insane. Cue OMF's scenario.
So. Um. Yeah. Cue accusation of overanalysis and pointing out the obvious holes in my theory that I didn't notice.