Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

Discussion of the new series of Evangelion movies ( "Evangelion Shin Gekijōban", meaning "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition"). The final instalment made its debut in Japan on March 8, 2021.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Arcadia's legacy » Wed Jul 10, 2019 2:52 am

So, what i'm getting out of this is that NTE is some kind of weird cosmic love story between Luvah and Lilith?
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 10, 2019 3:44 am

View Original PostArcadia's legacy wrote:So, what i'm getting out of this is that NTE is some kind of weird cosmic love story between Luvah and Lilith?

:lol: Yeah, I guess that's one way to look at it. There certainly is an element of this that's a ridiculous love triangle between Luvah/Shinji, Urthona/Kaworu, and Lilith/Rei. I'm not entirely sure where Anno is ultimately going with it, since the basic interplay between Shinji and Rei was pretty wholesome -- it just turned nasty in the greater context of Shinji running away from others and placing all of his hope and desire into one single person. Luvah abandoning the other three parts of Adam to pursue the Forbidden Fruit for him(?)self, and triggering a world-scale cataclysm in the process, is mirrored in a sense with Shinji's own actions in both 2.0 and 3.0, where in both cases he runs away from his preexisting bonds, fixates upon Rei and the need to "have" her (i.e., he cannot let go), and entrusts himself completely to a selfish and destructive path. Hopefully all of this results in Shinji taking a good look deep inside himself and finding a sort of inner peace, whatever the ultimate fate of "his" Rei happens to be.

And hopefully that will be something that Rei gets to decide for herself. Rei, being the incarnation of a being that has a "covenant" with her children, has in her own ways been tied down to a predetermined destiny, only this time it's implicitly one that Lilith herself helped decide. This could end up being sort of like Rei's scenario in Eva2, where she not only has to rebel against the man who has manipulated her for her entire life, but also reject the designs of her previous self. This could get quite interesting. :devil:

As weird as all of the reincarnation stuff is, all of us can probably relate to the idea of gradually changing into a new person, but still struggling to escape all the fetters of our old self. On a meta level, the existence of these very movies is a testament to that idea -- it's probably a safe guess that part of the reason the project began was because it was a reliable way to get the incipient Studio Khara (a clean break with Studio Gainax) on its feet, and they also let Anno and the other returning staff revisit and reflect upon this thing that has loomed over them for so long.
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby robersora » Wed Jul 10, 2019 9:30 am

Wow, that's quite the analysis! Great Job, Reichu!
Now I'm asking myself, did they really plan it that way and purposefully obfuscated it (or; if one observes how cryptically Anno communicates in general), or did all of this emerge from the sheer density of information provided. (like some scientists argue intelligence emerges from a certain level of complexity)
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Arcadia's legacy » Wed Jul 10, 2019 11:16 am

One question that now comes to mind after this supposed revelation, just what the hell are those coffins supposed to be on the Moon?
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 10, 2019 12:54 pm

View Original Postrobersora wrote:Now I'm asking myself, did they really plan it that way and purposefully obfuscated it (or; if one observes how cryptically Anno communicates in general), or did all of this emerge from the sheer density of information provided. (like some scientists argue intelligence emerges from a certain level of complexity)

I mean, that's up for you to decide. All I did here, ultimately, was apply the lessons from my years of studying NGE to the new work. The way the movies are put together, in terms of the "puzzle" aspect, is much the same as Eva has always been. Due to the nature of the medium, though, they rely more heavily on purely visual storytelling and forcing the audience to make inferences. I think the sheer density of logical connections that start forming once a particular approach is taken is more a testament to this being the correct approach than anything else. Such incredibly specific allusions to Blakeian mythology, for example, would be incredibly unlikely to happen just by themselves; whereas Eva intentionally referencing a work of mysticism is just "business as usual".

Arcadia's legacy wrote:One question that now comes to mind after this supposed revelation, just what the hell are those coffins supposed to be on the Moon?

Funny enough, someone else asked me why that wasn't covered. The main reason is that I don't currently think they're too relevant to the central Adam(s)-Lilith/Children mystery, and they fall under the greater enigmas of NTE metaphysics. Let me explain...

The coffins have resisted explanation because, let's face it, there's basically nothing to go on. We've seen all these attempts to line up the number of open coffins with one thing or another, but matching numbers isn't good evidence for anything on its own; it needs to be backed up with other observations. The coffins are a dead end, in many respects. If they're going to be explained by something, or used to explain something, it needs to be something that has itself resisted explanation through more easily-worked clues.

So, on that basis... here's the lead I'm currently following.

SPOILER: Show
Image


It occurred to me that the DMYSYS symbol kind of resembled a coffin. A very stylized one, but the imagery is there. There's a person laying in a casket, apparently screaming, with the casket lid being placed over them to suggest that they're being shut in there alive. If we look at the DMYSYS itself more carefully, we can see that the "head unit" is made of core technology. The animated core texture is very prominent, too; the DMYSYS is quite alive. We know from Yui's experiment that living organisms can be absorbed into core. The members of Seele, further, existed within monoliths that used core tech (the texture is visible in close-ups in the first two films; in Q, their monoliths have deteriorated somehow and the texture is different from normal); Gendo says that they 'changed the form of their souls', and when their monoliths are turned off, a cross-sectional brain scan becomes visible.

Now, adding onto this, one other thing that we're told about the DMYSYS is that it comes from "Golgotha Base". Golgotha is, of course, the place where Jesus was crucified. Since we are told nothing else about the place, the only possibly useful information is the connection to "sacrificing God incarnate". NTE has no shortage of God Incarnates, but there is one who is associated more with Jesus than the others -- and has the coffin association on top of that. I'm referring, naturally, to Kaworu.

So, my best guess for what's going on with the coffins is that they did, indeed, contain extra Kaworu bodies, but these have been sacrificed in the creation of dummy systems (and, perhaps, its mysterious successor technologies as well). But this, of course, opens up yet more questions about why a body alone would seemingly be enough to make a dummy system functional. (To compare, the NGE dummy system(s) utilized bodies as wetware, but a digitized personality -- an "artificial soul" -- was also essential.) And at the moment, I'm not sure if it's possible to fully resolve these sorts of questions, since certain aspects of NTE's metaphysics have changed on a very fundamental level from what we were used to in NGE.

For example, the whole piloting dilemma. A resident soul used to be absolutely required for Evas to work; now, the only Eva that we can confidently say has its own soul at all is Eva-01. The other Evas have "something" inside them -- Eva-00's initial berserk incident; Mari is only able to defeat the 3rd Angel because she concedes partial control of Eva-05 to the Eva itself, and this is why Eva-05's mouth opens (it's going semi-berserk); Mari thanks the Eva afterward for its good work / sacrifice; Mari tells Eva-02 that she will share in its suffering when Beast Mode is activated; Eva-13 frequently seems to act independently of both its pilots; etc. -- but we have no idea what. Eva-13 brutally murders any lingering hope that the old paradigm has survived in any way, since it doesn't have an A.T. Field. There is simply no precedent for this, and it shows that, whatever is in the core of the Evas, it no longer needs to be a soul. So then what the hell is in there? We can't even take for granted, necessarily, the link between soul and ATF, as that could have been completely reworked as well!

Rei Q makes things weird on the piloting side, since Kaworu tells us that, effectively, she doesn't have a soul in her body (it's "somewhere else"). Things get all the messier when any attempt is made to figure out exactly what that thing she's piloting actually is. Mk.9 shatters the paradigm with as much carefree abandon as Eva-13, if not more.

I don't know if we even have enough information right now to do this, but I think the next big step here is going to be figuring out what's actually going on in NTE on the whole soul, core, LCL, etc., front. Figuring out exactly how the interplay between Lilith and Rei now works (another thing I've been working on) is another major problem that could yield a lot of answers. Once progress is made there, a lot of currently inexplicable things should start to slot into place. It's all a matter of "cracking the code".
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Melkor » Wed Jul 10, 2019 5:40 pm

View Original PostReichu wrote:The coffins have resisted explanation because, let's face it, there's basically nothing to go on. We've seen all these attempts to line up the number of open coffins with one thing or another, but matching numbers isn't good evidence for anything on its own; it needs to be backed up with other observations. The coffins are a dead end, in many respects. If they're going to be explained by something, or used to explain something, it needs to be something that has itself resisted explanation through more easily-worked clues.


I think the coffins might actually have something to do with the Angels. What if the Angels in the Rebuild movies are actually sent to Earth by Seele? After Second Impact, Seele might have gone around and collected all of the scattered Angel embryos, putting them in stasis until they would need them for their plans. Whenever the need arose, Seele would one of the coffins and release an embryo onto Earth, where it would then grow into its full Angel form, which Nerv would then have to fight. Seele intentionally sending the Angels to Earth could all be part of some scenario they are trying to reenact, like from the Dead Sea Scrolls maybe.

The number of coffins surrounding Kaworu matches up too. If you look closely, when Kaworu wakes up from his coffin at the end of 1.0, there were four coffins to the left of his that were already open. Not counting Lilith, that's the exact number of Angels that have been on Earth so far, being the Third (locked away in Bethany Base), Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Angels. To the right of Kaworu's coffin are four unopened coffins, foreshadowing the next four Angels that will appear in 2.0, being the Seventh, Eight, Ninth, and Tenth Angels. Seele probably didn't intend to let Kaworu out until much later, but for some reason had to bunch up their plans and let him out earlier than anticipated.
Last edited by Melkor on Wed Jul 10, 2019 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 10, 2019 6:20 pm

The Angels-Coffin thing is a pretty old idea, and I never found it especially convincing. It's what I was talking about earlier when I referred to 'numbers-based solutions'. It tries to fit a square peg through a round hole. Seele are simply never (AFAIK) indicated to have that kind of relationship with the Angels, nor that level of control and power over them.

The Third Angel is really all you need to kill the idea. Tunniel is treated as a precious resource and is studied to the bone (literally). It needs to be sealed up inside a giant egg structure that is filled with sealing pillars (implicitly a form of ancient Seele tech) and guarded by an Eva. Seele shamelessly emblazon both the Angel itself and the inside of the base with their symbol, as if they are proud of having captured this one Angel, extracted all possible information from it, and imprisoned it with the power of the Fruit of Knowledge. But even after it has been vivisected to a skeletal state and its nervous system mutilated with technology, it still cannot, ultimately, be contained. (Sure, Kaji is probably kind of to blame for that, but any Angel containment system that doesn't take good ol' Lilin meddling into account simply isn't good enough.) Do you really think a little coffin with a shroud over it is going to hold an Angel? And even if it could, why would the Third Angel be given such a special treatment if the same could be done to any of the Angels, at any time? And if for whatever reason Seele decided only one of them could be studied, why release it into the wild from their custody, just so it could be collected from the permafrost later? Why do we even need to be told that the first post-Lilith Angel found was in a disabled state that allowed it to be discovered and captured if none of that information actually makes any meaningful difference? And Seele need to do everything through Nerv anyway; just tell Nerv "here's this thing; grow it and study it", don't tell them to release it just so they can find it again later! This is Eva, not The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

"...part of some scenario they are trying to reenact, like from the Dead Sea Scrolls maybe" -- Seele are both implicitly and explicitly the ones writing the scenario now. They're ancient beings responsible for elevating humanity to a civilized state. There are no "secret" Dead Sea Scrolls anymore, just the Dead Sea Scrolls along with their "apocrypha". The implication here is that Seele themselves wrote the originals some time in the past, and the "apocrypha" are revisions and amendments they have subsequently made. They don't have to blindly follow some scripture they found out of religious zealotry. They make the rules now, and when they need to change things they will. In any case, these alterations to the setting provide an effective safeguard against Seele doing stuff for no reason other than "the scrolls told us to".

Now, all that said: I've been wrong before, and I'm happy to change my mind if I see a reason to. (For instance, some of the main ideas advocated in this thread were once things I resisted. Very, very fiercely, in some cases...) The DMYSYS lead is one I intend to explore to completion, however, as part of a deeper inquiry into the changed metaphysics. Whether it will go anywhere remains to be seen, but I like to at least make the attempt and see what happens. :emogendo:
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby MuscleRobo » Thu Jul 11, 2019 8:37 am

Sorry if what I was saying wasn't making myself clear but I'm just trying to say it's a bit crazy that a 1:1 Ultraman reference would be this lore and story important. Most of the 1:1 Ultraman references in the past have been more visual, Gendo talking to Shinji in the holding cell is a recreation of Dan Moriboshi talking to Alien Metron, The way Tokyo 3 falls underground and raises above is a recreation of "The Vanishing City" from Ultra Seven. Let it be known these are literal 1:1 recreations this isn't a sort of reimagining like Zeruel and Zetton but exact copies. Hell, you can click a random Ultra Seven episode and I guarantee you'll find something Anno repackaged stylistically into Evangelion I know it because the last two episodes I just named were ones I randomly watched just a day ago. Off the top of my head, Showdown at 140 Degrees below zero has a mysterious alien race who sent a kaiju to Antartica that when it crashed caused Earth's Ice Age. From a Planet with Love is about a group of aliens who are draining children's blood because of the effects of nuclear fallout on their own planet but the scenes of them talking on their spaceship are practically a 1:1 visually to early Seele conversations. The hanger for the robot Ultra Seven in Dan vs Seven is just the Evangelion hanger, 1:1. I'm not calling Anno a hack fraud but I'm saying he clearly took stylistic inspiration from the Ultra Series, especially the episodes directed by Akio Jissoji. There were no souls trapped in a robot or instrumentality project like events though so what does it matter that visually they are very similar but to 1:1 base your creator gods on the Ultramen? To make Ultra Seven's color timer being on his forehead an important plot point? I think literally every visual tick of the Adams is made to make them look like Ultramen and to work backwards from that would start to make me curious. It's not unheard of I suppose because Eva 2.22's climax fight against Zeruel is based off the Heisei era Ultraman Nexus series finale from 2004! I don't think this is a cute trivia point like the others but an explicit reference.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby cyharding » Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:21 pm

@MuscleRobo: Here is an article that just came out a couple of days ago that goes into this subject a bit more.
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby UrsusArctos » Sat Jul 13, 2019 11:56 pm

Good to see you back in full analytical form, Reicchan. :asuka_thumbsup:
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby NemesorPrime » Sun Jul 14, 2019 8:24 pm

This is a wonderful theory and I'm registering just to say so. Also, to comment on one thing...

I’ve already compared Adam to a sort of Edenic ideal to which Kaworu wants to return. In which case, the intrusion of Lilith’s soul would be akin to a serpent in the garden. And, in accordance with that metaphor, Lilith holds the Fruit of Knowledge. Her core would be in and of itself a Forbidden Fruit to Adam.

What caused Adam to “fall”, and split into four, was that part of Adam went for the temptation. A being split out of Adam — becoming, in turn, a metaphorical “Eve” — to eat of Lilith’s Fruit… take her core into itself. That was “Luvah”, the Adams that would become Eva-01 and Shinji. The three-eyed Adams with two cores. As we’ve established, Shinji/Luvah was the glue holding Adam together, so once Luvah rejected the unity, it fell apart. Urizen (Asuka) and Tharmas (Mari) departed, leaving Urthona (Kaworu) behind as the final soul of Adam.


There's this new shot in the Rebuilds that I've always wondered about, and I think it plays right into this theory. When Shinji has slammed Zereul against the catapult, there's an extremely quick shot where Unit 01 wraps a leg around the Angel in a manner that, to me, always felt strangely sexual. Especially with Zereul taking that more feminine form. Feels like that plays into this reading about temptation and such. Especially if the Evangelions are more linked with the pilots than with, say, Yui - who doesn't really seem to exist in Unit 01 in any form like she did in the original series.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Melkor » Mon Jul 22, 2019 8:29 pm

This is a lot of info to take in, and I hope I understood it all correctly, but I've got a question Reichu. How do you think the Wunder factors into all this? Mark.09 was referred to as a "vessel of the Adams", and when it tried to take over the Wunder, Ritsuko referred to it as the "Wunder's original master". What do you think she meant by "Wunder's original master"? Is it possible that the Wunder was actually constructed, at least partially, from one of the four Adams? Its construction could have involved taking part of an Adam's body (or more likely Willie stole part of its body) and incorporating it into the Wunder as the primary power source, while the leftover part of its body that remained was somehow salvaged by Seele and given a new body in the form of Mark.09. I wouldn't be surprised if there turns out to be half an Adam hooked up to some power cables somewhere inside the Wunder. The bottom side of the Wunder resembling an open rib cage could also be a visual queue hinting at how an Adam was mutilated in order to construct it. In a way, the remnant of the Adam inside Mark.09 was trying to reunite with the rest of its body inside the Wunder.

The Wunder + Mark.09 being an Adam might throw off your theory a bit, but it could still fit if we have it take Unit-01's place as an Adam. Even though it fits with the visual motif, there is a potential problem when it comes to Unit-01 being one of the four Adams. If we are to assume that Impacts work the same way in the Rebuilds as they did in the original series, then for an Impact to be initiated it must involve both an Adam component and a Lilith component. Based on the preview for 3.0 + 1.0, Final Impact is very clearly going to occur in some form, so how is it going to be initiated if Lilith was destroyed in 3.0? The only way it would be possible is if Unit-01 is actually a clone of Lilith like it was in the original series, and it is used as the Lilith component for initiating Final Impact. The fact that Gendo did not seem the least bit worried by the loss of Lilith at the end of 3.0 seems to hint at this being a possibility, because he knows there is a clone of Lilith they can still use in the form of Unit-01. If we were to remove Unit-01 from the equation, then the four Adams would actually be Mark.0.6, Mark.09 + Wunder, Unit-13, and the Key of Nebuchadnezzar. Which of the Zoa's would the Wunder + Mark.09 Adam be then? Luvah perhaps? Thematically, it would fit. Unit-01, the Eva most closely associated with Luvah's human vessel Shinji, as well as the clone of Lilith, who Luvah loves, just so happens to be part of the Wunder now as the secondary power source that allows it to fly. In a weird and twisted way, Luvah and Lilith are both technically together now, which is what they always wanted.

Building on your theory a bit, I've thought of an additional possibility regarding one of the Adams, this one about Unit-13. What if Unit-13 is actually two Adams fused together? This would explain why it needs a double entry system to operate, (and why it also has an extra set of arms), because it is actually two different Adams in one body. How did this happen? Shortly after the single Adam-like entity split into the four Adams during Second Impact, the resulting explosion might have caused two of the Adams to forcibly merge back together into one, creating the Adam that would later become Unit-13. One of the Adams that fused to become Unit-13 was Urthona, while the other was Urizen. Urthona's fusion with Urizen into Unit-13 was not completely perfect though, and a small remnant of Urthona's former Adam body was left behind in the form of the Key of Nebuchadnezzar. Alternately, if Unit-01 is indeed an Adam and Unit-13 is not a fusion of two Adams, then the first theory about the Wunder being an Adam could still hold true if the Key of Nebuchadnezzar is instead actually a separate fifth element that was created during Second Impact, one that might be the key to fusing the four Adams back into one. This would then make the four Adams Unit-01, Mark.06, Mark.09 + Wunder, and Unit-13.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:49 am

I actually have a post about Mark.09 in the works that will hopefully elucidate where it fits into everything. Thanks for reminding me to finish it; all this new stuff has been quite a distraction. :sweat:

Regarding Eva-13, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of its 4-eyed, 4-armed state. The four eyes aren't reflected in the image of the Adams (whereas Eva-01's three eyes are), suggesting they aren't an original trait, and leaving it open that the extra arms could have been similarly added (though this can't be confirmed or denied from the Adams image, since none of them have defined limbs). I'm skeptical about Urthona and Urizen fusing together into a single being at Second Impact, though at the moment this is mostly because I have an idea in the works for the basic logic behind Kaworu's otherwise inexplicable "Fall" which relies entirely on Urthona and Urizen retaining their respective "Adamic" and "Satanic" purity from the time of the split... (Another post I was meaning to get around to, whoops!)

The Wunder is a little difficult to make sense of right now, but we do know that Gendo and Fuyutsuki were last seen on a very similar-looking bridge. The inverted pyramid actually being a flying ship is a suggestion that's been around for a while, and it seems corroborated by additional observations, like Nerv HQ having a device exactly like Wunder's power core. If true, then we have a flying ship associated with both Adam and Lilith respectively. It gets even better upon consideration that the pyramid was originally housed within the Geofront, inside the Black Moon.

If Wunder and the pyramid are counterparts, we would expect Wunder to originate from inside a White Moon of some sort. This could end up being the identity of the strange planetoid beyond the Gates of Guf. The White Moon may have been "lost" to an Impact like in NGE, but rather than getting blown up, it was lodged inside another dimensional space. Impacts DO open giant dimensional rifts now, so maybe the odds of Adam's Moon getting stuck in one are more likely than we think...

I'm guessing we'll learn more about the ships and the Moon(s) in Shin, but meantime I'll work on getting that post up and addressing your other questions!
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby JohnBooty » Tue Jul 23, 2019 11:04 am

View Original PostMuscleRobo wrote:Sorry if what I was saying wasn't making myself clear but I'm just trying to say it's a bit crazy that a 1:1 Ultraman reference would be this lore and story important.

Your observations and Reichu's theories are completely compatible.

The simplest explanation (not necessarily the correct one, but I'd go with it until proven otherwise) is that Anno borrowed the visual symbols as a starting point... and then built the NTE lore around them.

A lot of artists like to take existing lore or an existing trope and use it as a beginning scaffold or skeleton for their own work.

An obvious example would be George Lucas taking ideas from The Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Hidden Fortress, The Dam Busters, and other sources... and then fleshing out a story/setting that was very groundbreaking at the time. R2D2 and C3PO are "lore and story important" *and* they are in some ways close to a 1:1 copy of two characters from The Hidden Fortress. The Vader/Luke dynamic is similarly borrowed and is, of course, rather important.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Melkor » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:55 pm

View Original PostReichu wrote:Regarding Eva-13, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of its 4-eyed, 4-armed state. The four eyes aren't reflected in the image of the Adams (whereas Eva-01's three eyes are), suggesting they aren't an original trait, and leaving it open that the extra arms could have been similarly added (though this can't be confirmed or denied from the Adams image, since none of them have defined limbs). I'm skeptical about Urthona and Urizen fusing together into a single being at Second Impact, though at the moment this is mostly because I have an idea in the works for the basic logic behind Kaworu's otherwise inexplicable "Fall" which relies entirely on Urthona and Urizen retaining their respective "Adamic" and "Satanic" purity from the time of the split... (Another post I was meaning to get around to, whoops!)


Unit-13 being a fusion of two Adams could possibly explain why Unit-03 grew an extra pair of arms when it became possessed while Asuka was piloting it. With Unit-03, it's a similar circumstance. Two Adam-like beings, Asuka (who has Urizen's soul), and the Ninth Angel, are forcibly merged together inside the same body (Unit-03). When a fusion like this occurs, a struggle is inevitable. The dominant soul that wins the struggle is the one who gains full possession of the body, and the one that loses has their soul ejected from it. This could have been what happened when the two Adams fused together to make Unit-13. Urizen won the struggle for control over their new fused body, and so Urthona lost his body and was ejected from Unit-13 in the form of the Key of Nebuchadnezzar.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Tue Jul 23, 2019 10:41 pm

@NemesorPrime: It's great that you've joined us, and I'm honored I was the impetus! :blush:

Looking at the shot you brought up, it certainly is sensual, and I'll have to rewatch the entire sequence with all these new ideas in mind. I do remember thinking, way back when, that the sexual side of things was weirdly underplayed. In the NTE version of events, the potential to play with it is so much more "obvious", what with the Angel growing a woman-like body and Eva-01 effectively violating the Angel so that Shinji can retrieve Rei. The part when the giant core-Rei fuses into Eva-01 feels like the most sexually charged thing in there. If you look at production materials, they were considering some much more blatant possibilities all around, but ended up dialing it down. I wonder why.

The climactic scene in episode 19 was, in contrast, a very brutal and to-the-point allegory for (among possibly other things) rape revenge and the triumph of the female spirit. There's something refreshingly straightforward about that whole sequence...

Onward and upward! In my last post, I said,

I'm skeptical about Urthona and Urizen fusing together into a single being at Second Impact, though at the moment this is mostly because I have an idea in the works for the basic logic behind Kaworu's otherwise inexplicable "Fall" which relies entirely on Urthona and Urizen retaining their respective "Adamic" and "Satanic" purity from the time of the split...


So here, I’ll attempt to explain the whole “Kaworu’s Fall” thing, along with related issues. The explanation is not complete by any means — this is all a work in progress and will continue to be so for some time. However, before I stumbled across this framework, there was just… nothing, aside from bafflement. That entire part of Q was complete abject nonsense. But now? No longer the case.

The Principle of Equivalent Exchange, or, How to Make a Trashy Eva Comply with God’s Very Demanding Specifications

During Part C of Q, in the direct lead-up to Fourth Impact, we are presented with a most unusual and convoluted sequence of events. Wille’s attempts to stop Eva-13 in Central Dogma have failed. Eva-02 is down, and Eva-08’s anti-ATF ammo is ineffective. Shinji has been emotionally riled up from the heat of battle, and now he approaches the Spears driven into Lilith’s corpse with singleminded purpose, paying no heed to the fact that Kaworu has suddenly, inexplicably, fallen ill, nor to his friend’s entreaty that he stop what he’s doing before it’s too late. Just as we were previously warned, Shinji’s state of mind is enough to initiate the Eva’s Awakening process, and, through unclear means, Kaworu is denied access to Eva-13’s controls as well.

The Spears are pulled; Lilith explodes into LCL; the 12th Angel is liberated and wraps itself around Eva-13, ultimately "enwombing" it. Now Shinji, too, loses access to the Eva’s controls. (Suspiciously, at or around the same time, the Seele program takes over Mark.9. I'll come back to this another time.) Eva-13 starts transforming physically. Kaworu, still clearly unwell, realizes that he has “undergone a Fall” from 1st Angel to 13th. “So, the beginning and the end are one and the same. Well played, King of the Lilin. Shinji-kun's father...” Mari says that a Thirteenth Angel shouldn’t exist, and remarks, “So this is what Gendo-kun was after!”

At this point, we get Gendo’s speech to Seele, where he presents himself as someone who will soon see Seele’s plans to fruition (which is an obvious lie, and confirmed as such later). For our purposes, one part of his speech is particularly interesting…

GENDO:
I shall carry out your cherished Human Instrumentality Project,
as well as the deicide that you were resigned to.


Once all of Seele are dead, we’re shown Eva-13 devouring the 12th Angel and pseudo-evolving beyond the point that Eva-01 had at the end of 2.0.

So, we have Eva-13’s transcendental Awakening contrasted against Kaworu’s complete, blood-soaked Fall. Also note: Evangelion 13, 13th Angel. These things are connected.

What could this “deicide” (literally “god-killing”) be referring to? Lilith is already dead, so it’s not talking about her. And Seele had previously discussed their plans in terms of Lilith’s resurrection, besides, which implies her death may be a necessary step along the way. No, they were merely “resigned” to this deicide.

FUYUTSUKI:
What a mess.
This is almost exactly what Seele wanted.

GENDO:
Perhaps, but we neutralized
Seele's Boy and awakened Unit 13.

They’ve called Kaworu “Seele’s Boy” insistently throughout the movie, and Kaworu was established as Seele's ally from his very first appearance. So the takeaway here is that the “god” who was killed was Kaworu, and Seele were in fact complicit in this. It wasn’t their preferred outcome, but they saw no other option.

Now, why would this be? Let’s pull out our handy dandy Zoa chart, shall we?

Image

I imposed our favorite gods on top of it this time for the hell of it. (Here’s the unaltered original.) Pay special attention to Kaworu and Eva-13. Kaworu, as Urthona, is in the top sphere, which is all “Adam” and untouched by “Satan” influence. Alternatively, Eva-13 is Urizen, in the bottom sphere, which is all “Satan” and untouched by “Adam”.

This sounds silly, since Eva-13 is an “Adams”, right? How can it not have any “Adam” in it? At this point, it bears remembering that we ARE dealing with “Adams” and not “Zoas”, and “Adam” rather than “Albion” — there ARE differences, however useful the similarities are. So the trick here is to determine what these two opposing properties, “Adam/Satan”, actually mean in the context of NTE. Even just the sliver of an idea of their significance will do for now. Assuming, of course, that they exist in the films at all.

Does any of the “Kaworu falls, Eva-13 rises” stuff make actual sense if this image is consulted? Well… Kaworu/Urthona’s starting position is at the top. Eva-13/Urizen’s starting position is at the bottom. Through Gendo’s bizarre machinations, Kaworu falls from 1st to 13th, and Eva-13 awakens. In other words, the one on the top falls, and the one on the bottom rises -- they trade places, effectively. It's not merely a matter of reassigning an ordinal here, either -- both of these entities undergo some sort of (meta)physical transformation. Kaworu actually gets physically ill, right before Eva-13 starts to go through the throes of Awakening (with the first step being the shift to red in the eyes and eye stripe). What in the world is happening?

While I don’t understand the exact mechanism that allows Gendo to MAKE it happen, or why Kaworu would start to show up as a '13th Angel that shouldn't exist' on scanners, the overall gist of things is apparent enough. Kaworu possesses some purity of quality that Eva-13 lacks, and this is somehow drained out of him to enable Eva-13 to ascend. A sort of alchemical transfer of… essence, for lack of better term. (Possibly relevant in some way, even if only as a thematic tie-in: the Key of Nebuchadnezzar, which represents both Kaworu's original body and Gendo's complete dominion over Urthona, incorporates a syringe... a tool that is used to transfer contents from one place to another.) This sacrificial aspect was clearly planned, and a matter of open conspiracy between Gendo/Fuyutsuki and Seele. I’m slightly less clear on why this “draining” inevitably results in Kaworu’s death (as implied by "deicide"), but that’s something that can be worked out in time.

Now, the big question might be, “why”? Why do they need to do this? What do they gain?

At this point, let’s track back to Eva 2.0:

KIEL:
The true Evangelion… The one we dream of.
Its birth and the resurrection of Lilith will seal the pact.
The required rites must be carried out before that.
All we do, we do for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.

GENDO:     
I am well aware.
Everything shall proceed according to Seele's scenario.

GENDO:     
The true Evangelion...
All currently active units, Unit 01 included,
are merely there to clear the path for its completion.
     
FUYUTSUKI:
And is that the Mark.06?
They want to create a real god, not just false ones?

GENDO:     
Right. We must expedite the awakening of Unit 01.


Exactly what this “True Evangelion” business is all about is quite mysterious, since Mark.06 kinda got dropped in between installments. It's gone, dead, extinct. The 12th Angel ate it from the inside and now it's pining for the fjords. However, despite this setback, Seele acted in 3.0 as if that’s all it was: a setback. They regrouped, and they expected things to still happen as they intended.

First, why would they want to use Mark.06 specifically? Look again at where it falls here:

SPOILER: Show
Image


It has a neutral placement. Equal parts “Adam” and “Satan”. This suggests that said balance is precisely what Seele desire in their True Evangelion. Now, this of course raises any number of questions as to why they wouldn’t just use Luvah, since, well, that’s neutral, and isn’t it already (part-)Lilith? Luvah is quite a unique case, though, since the original Blake version did not undergo a forbidden fusion with Lilith, so can we even say for sure that it’s balanced in the same way Tharmas is? Furthermore, the fact that Luvah was already fused with Lilith at Second Impact might be the very reason why Seele cannot rely on it to complete their goals. That is, the stage involving Luvah was already completed; Luvah is “spent”, and now the next alchemical union must occur.

Seele also seemed, originally, to want Kaworu to be part of their plans, without “deicide” also being a feature. Perhaps Tharmas being already balanced would allow Kaworu to uplift it past the “Satan” influence to full “Adam” status without requiring him to be sacrificed outright. It’s all rather unclear.

However, through some nebulous chain of events where it’s impossible to know the exact order in full, Kaworu was taken off Mark.06 and it was made “autonomous” instead. It was ultimately send down to Central Dogma, and it somehow ended up merged with Lilith and eventually impaled through the core on one of the spears. When the spears are removed, we discover that the 12th Angel is not only inside Mark.06, but it has devoured the Eva completely, and, well... that’s that for Mark.06.

Resisting the temptation to dive into the intricacies of Third Impact here, and sticking as close to the original point as possible: My instinct was always to read this “autonomous” thing as a major upgrade, but I suppose that doesn’t necessarily need to be true. Maybe it could have been a relatively simple change made under pressure. In which case, the reason for doing it would be the exact same reason Mark.06 was sent down to Central Dogma that time: to wrangle with the Angelic Third Impact in progress, with the full expectation that it might not succeed. Putting Mark.06 on robo-pilot probably wasn’t ideal, but it at least meant that Seele didn’t have to also sacrifice Kaworu at the time.

But after all those years of regrouping and coming up with a new way to make their plans work, it turned out that sacrificing Kaworu was the only way forward for Seele. Mark.06’s replacement became Evangelion 13, an Adams who was “full-Satan” and in no way ideal. It was not inherently usable as the one who would become the True Evangelion; it had to be made usable through a deliberately planned ritual.

A ritual that had this result, or something similar to it:

Image

------

EDIT: Later in the thread, Krikenemp points out something I somehow managed to completely miss ( -o-; ) : that the double-halo Eva-13 manifests upon going Radiant Giant very suspiciously resembles Urthona's sphere:

SPOILER: Show
Image


This ties in beautifully with my second diagram showing the projected results of Gendo's Operation Metaphysical Vampirism, wherein, logically, Eva-13 would occupy Kaworu's old spot, and vice versa.

-----

So, back to your suggestions, Melkor: I’m hesitant to resort to anything as extreme as Urizen being fused with Urthona at Second Impact simply to explain the extra body parts. Eva-13 having four arms is a relatively minor issue that could be explained through alternate means. Trying to explain Seele’s motivations and everything that’s happening in the lead-in to Fourth Impact — that’s big stuff, and it takes priority. If Urizen was "contaminated' with Urthona at Second Impact, then the entire framework I just laid out here is unusable, with no apparent substitution in sight; for any post-Second Impact interactions, absolutely no useful information could be gleaned from the fact that Urizen and Urthona are opposites. If this framework is worth abandoning, I would prefer it be for the right set of reasons.

Of course, if there is a harmonious way to tie Eva-13’s extra limbs into, say, what happened to Eva-03, or into some specifics regarding double entry functionality, I’m all for it. It just might take a little time for my brain to work its way there, is all. I’ll keep the stuff you said in mind, for sure.

I’ll deal with Mark.09 next time.
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Melkor » Wed Jul 24, 2019 3:30 am

Alright, so crossing out the Unit-13 being a fusion theory, my two current theories regarding the identities of four Adams is that they're either Mark.06, Mark.09 + Wunder, Unit-13, and the Key of Nebuchadnezzar OR Unit-01, Mark.06, Mark.09 + Wunder, and Unit-13, with the Key of Nebuchadnezzar being a separate fifth element. I think I'm leaning more towards the latter option now, but I have a new theory that could tie both the Mark.09 + Wunder Adam and the Key of Nebuchadnezzar to Urthona. Alright, new theory: the Mark.09 + Wunder Adam was actually Urthona's original body, or at least part of it. The Adam that would eventually become Mark.09 and the Wunder was originally kept at Bethany Base, where it was dissected and studied extensively, being striped down to the bone in a similar manner to the Third Angel. Kaworu being Seele's child, and Bethany Base base being a Seele controlled installation, it makes sense that Seele might have kept his original Adam body there, and extracted the Key of Nebuchadnezzar from it. Kaji would eventually smuggle the Key of Nebuchadnezzar out of Bethany Base in 2.0, while the leftover parts of Urthona's body would later be harvested by Seele and used to create the Wunder (which Willie would eventually steal) and Mark.09.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 24, 2019 8:05 am

Why are you trying to squeeze Mk.9 and Wunder into the Adams ranks, out of curiosity? Why can't they be separate elements which are Adams-related but not Adams themselves? Mk.9 is specifically identified with its own unique phrase -- Adams' Vessel -- in a film where Mari has no qualms about simply saying Eva-13 is an Adams, full stop. And Wunder is simply an unknown at the moment, being an all-new element with no basis, but as I previously mentioned it looks like Lilith has an equivalent vehicle. This makes it much simpler to assume, on a tentative basis, that in NTE a smaller craft is paired with each of the Moons. (The "AAA" in Wunder also stands for "Autonomous Assault Ark", which isn't foreboding or anything, no siree...)

The White Moon is yet to be confirmed, of course, but we have that bizarre planetoid beyond the Guf Gates at 4I to account for. Since Impacts now involve giant rips in spacetime, the White Moon could have been originally lost beyond the Gates at Second Impact, perhaps when Urthona exploded. Wunder would have already been removed from the White Moon at that point, of course.

In any case, the real intent of this thread is to tie together the Adams and the Children in a specific way, and not to merely slot the Adams themselves into Zoa placements. If there's a compelling reason to alter the framework I've provided, I'm listening. As I've said, I have a way to incorporate Mk.9 into things, which will be coming next.
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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Lore » Wed Jul 24, 2019 11:11 am

This is an incredible write up, to say the least. Very well done.

Quick question: couldn't this entire theory still fit into the idea of a timeloop starting with EoE? The one that has been hinted at and theorized for ages?

I think it could fit into the timeloop just fine, imo. The part that would make it fit is the idea that the initial event (EoE's third impact) turned Shinji and Asuka into Adams. Then when time looped or the cycle restarted (perhaps even immediately after the final EoE scene, with the scene being a "transition" world of sorts between the loop being triggered), Shinji and Asuka were now included at the Second Impact Redo as Adams (along with Kaworu, with Rei still being Lillith and away from this Second Impact.), reincarnating back into human forms afterwards.

Following this train of thought, Mari's sheer lack of explanation/development in the story could be a sign pointing towards this idea. She could be the fourth Adam, created during a timeloop that we haven't seen! The characters all mostly seem to know her and don't question her existence, but we, the viewer, have no clue who she is or why she's suddenly here now. This could be the series' way to hint that her intro and development happened; it was just on a loop that we haven't seen. She's now inherently part of the world and story, we were just left out of that loop (likely among countless loops). Her inclusion is meant to make us question just how much we haven't been shown, to create a sense of unease and unfamiliarity.

What do you think? Your theory works whether there's a loop post-EoE or just a Rebuild-only loop that doesn't include EoE, but I like to think EoE started it.

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Re: Adams, Children, and the Nature of the Cycle

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Postby Reichu » Wed Jul 24, 2019 11:49 am

@Lore: Glad you like it!

As far as I can tell, the movies have a very deep implied timeframe. We've gotten a couple of hints about this already, with Seele being transformed from a contemporary apocalypse cult to a collection of seven ancient beings who seem to serve Lilith directly. We learned at the beginning of Shin that the pillar technology was not human in origin, which could mean "whatever Seele are", or something even deeper. There is similar-looking tech with a "red on black" visual motif occurring throughout the films, and presumably it all has the same mysterious origin. There is the entirely different-looking Black Moon -- which is now a 30km-tall mechanical goblet -- as well, along with the prospect that, as I mentioned last time, Adam and Lilith are again parallel, each with their own Moon and now their own "Ark". That would leave open the whole question of where THEY originally came from.

I personally don't think loop theories are even a little necessary, and I won't be entertaining them unless something changes dramatically in Shin. The whole reason those theories started in the first place was in an attempt to explain a handful of observations from the films (red seas, blood on moon, white outline, Kaworu's weird dialogue, etc.), without any real attempt made by fans to work with the new film lore. I've watched the theories shift over the years, God of the Gaps style, as it became clear that many of those things were actually the result of NTE's Second Impact, and didn't have anything to do with some previous timeline at all. Now, with Kaworu's bizarre dialogue -- the final stronghold of loop theory -- 100% explainable by diving into the films' version of Second Impact, there's really nothing left other than a resort to "well, why not?". Of course, those coffins haven't been explained to my satisfaction, but given the huge success of a traditional analytical approach, I think it's all just a matter of time.

That's all just my own modus operandi, though. As hard-nosed as I am, deep down I do believe that freely personalized interpretations are critically important to the experience of art. So if you get more out of the movies by viewing them as a grand mythological cycle that springs from the end of NGE, by all means! :D
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