L-Barrier & Coreification

[Reichu]

This is probably me thinking too hard, but shouldn't the air around the awakened Eva 13 have been turning to core if contact is enough for it to spread?

The L-Barrier phenomenon and the need for environmental suits might imply that core-contamination does something to adjacent gases, but whatever this is, it's not visible to the human eye. Between the end of 3.0 and the beginning of 3.0+1.0, we have sufficient confirmation of that.

Your question does make me wonder how Eva-01 managed to, apparently, turn the entire interior of "tesseract" to core, though... What was inside that thing?

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

So, like, is Earth itself being turned specifically into a Vessel for Adam? Mark.09 is a Vessel for Adam, and that whole thing is basically a shape-shifting core, and we see the Earth also turning entirely into core while also changing shape. (It’s growing teeth and it looks like it already grew a giant eyeball, so...)

Is Gendo going to place one of the Adams (all of the Adams?) into Earth? (Or however that works?) If so, I wonder what he would be trying to accomplish with that.

[BlueBasilisk]

Your question does make me wonder how Eva-01 managed to, apparently, turn the entire interior of "tesseract" to core, though... What was inside that thing?

Filled with Bakelite, maybe? Unit 01 is encased in a block of something.

[kuribo-04]

The whole "people turning into little Evas that merge into bigger Evas" thing doesn't seem like it reached very far. The most well-developed FoIs are at the epicenter of Third Impact; the Tokyo-3 outskirts have things that are recognizably armored Evas but pretty deformed; and Until You Come To Me shows that further out still, they're semi-transparent beings with no armor and visible skeletons. That's all within walking distance of Tokyo-3.

In that case, people at Tokyo-3 (or the ones closest to Central Dogma) evolved, and people elsewhere had to flee due to the contamintaed air.
I wonder where the settlements will be, if they exist. Maybe all at sea, like Misato's fleet used to be.

Is Gendo going to place one of the Adams (all of the Adams?) into Earth? (Or however that works?) If so, I wonder what he would be trying to accomplish with that.

Tengen Toppa Evangelion.

[ArvisTaljik]

Tengen Toppa Evangelion.

"Smash the barrier at the top of the world, because there's another one above it!"

[Heaven Piercing Man]

It's looking more like the Anti-Spirals, though.

[Reichu]

So, like, is Earth itself being turned specifically into a Vessel for Adam?

The term is specifically "Adams' Vessel". While nobody knows what it means, I don't think the most straightforward deduction should be overlooked -- more here. (In addition to what's mentioned there, the only other time I've seen utsuwa (vessel) used in the context of NTE was the entry plug being called "the vessel of a soul" in Explanation of 1.01.)

The more likely explanation, to me, is that the Earth's surface is meant to function as a collective core for the life that formerly lived there. Thus we might already have a mechanism for what the L Barrier (or L Containment Field) actually is: it's a gigantic ATF being generated by all of these souls. An ATF of sufficient strength would be antithetical to the existence of other beings; sort of like EoE's AATF, all other egos would simply crumble before its power. If (and I do mean "if") any of this is right, then it might help explain other features like "barrier density" and core-ification categories; it could be a simple matter of how populous a particular area had been.

Though all that said, it's hard to get a good feel for what the exact end game here is. There's some possibility that it's all part of a long-term plan to "purify" Earth of the "original sin" (more here). However, while the start of Shin gives us some further insight into what Gendo and Fuyutsuki's goals might be, it doesn't necessarily explain all of the weird post-Third Impact effects we've seen -- which, like the insanity in EoE, could be a result of multiple plans attempting to gain a foothold at once. For instance, how do you reconcile the formation of giant body parts with the creation of the Failures of Infinity? One suggests the core-converted surface is being used to create some sort of colossal humanoid abomination; the other suggests the surface has been turned into a "nursery" for evolving humans into Eva-like collective beings. So which one is it? Who is responsible for what? This isn't even taking the transformation of the Moon -- the real elephant in the room -- into consideration...