Souls of the Mass Production Evas

[Shinoyami65]

But thats just poor writing if they are new people. It would be anti-climatic as hell especially when there is established souls kept somewhere. It makes far more sense to have it be the classmate's moms souls while ignoring the children having the dummy plug control them. Also there is no implication that it was random people and the mom souls are the closet we got to an established lead.

There is never any indication of which souls were used in the MPEs, so there is no real "established lead" in this case. The hypothesis simply grew out of an unused storyboard suggesting that Class-2A were the souls in the MPEs. Admittedly we do see evidence that Nerv has Class-2A's mothers' souls on ice, but there is no evidence that those specific souls were used.

Plus like I said, it would actually be more busy work to use those random people. Yui and Asuka's mom needed other people to mess their souls in the Eva(different ways of course). Why do all that work and effort to get random people souls in using plenty of technician and doctors when you have perfect spare parts that were made to be used in an Eva?

If you mean the Contact Experiment, the very concept of SEELE having Class-2A's mothers' souls suggests that they have other ways of acquiring souls that don't involve a complicated Contact Experiment (we have no indication that all the mothers underwent the Contact Experiment, only Yui and Kyoko are known to have used it). If they can take a soul from any dead person they could theoretically just raid a graveyard and ship the souls off to the MPE construction site.

I can kind of see where you're coming from with the idea of the mothers' souls being on ice and ready to implant, but we have no idea of whether it is easier to hold a Contact Experiment and bond a living person to an Eva or to use a dead person's soul. For all we know they might both involve long and complicated processes.

[UrsusArctos]

That doesn't make any sense. What people are gonna balk at putting a living person in the entry plug but won't bat an eye if it's a corpse? Gimme a break. The more you try to explain this the more absurd it sounds.

It's established that souls can be shifted from one place to another. Rather than letting the soul reside in the skeleton/corpse/mummy of someone's mommy, they could have shifted it out of the corpse and into another container or space after death. People who would gawk if they saw a rotting corpse being lowered into the core wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone threw a beaker full of LCL containing the mother's soul into the core.

[Monk Ed]

But thats just poor writing if they are new people. It would be anti-climatic as hell especially when there is established souls kept somewhere.

I don't see whatsoever how having the MPE souls be unknown random people is poor writing or anticlimactic. By this logic, it would be anticlimactic and poor writing for Misato not to have shot Kaji, because of all of the "implications".

Why can't some people in a work just be random, unknown people, who are unshown and unmentioned precisely because their identities are not important?

[Bagheera]

It's established that souls can be shifted from one place to another.

That hasn't been established, actually. It's a common assumption, particularly here, but all we know for sure is that cores can suck souls out of human bodies. We also know that souls don't leave the body after death, so it's easily possible Nerv just keeps bodies in cryofreeze and then puts them in contact with a core when they need to give it a soul. We don't see this happen onscreen, but it's more plausible than inventing tech that isn't in the show or assigning Nerv capabilities it hasn't demonstrated onscreen.

[UrsusArctos]

How else do you establish the creation of Rei 2 and Rei 3? Or the creation of Kaworu, for that matter? And if corpses or cryofrozen bodies were dumped into cores, it would raise quite a few eyebrows by your own admission - there would have to be a simpler way of doing it.

After Shinji's body dissolves, his soul is floating in the entry plug's LCL. It's possible for a soul to be stripped from a corpse and put into a vat of LCL for storage. The LCL with the soul in it could simply be taken from one place to another, or poured into a core. Problem solved.

[Bagheera]

How else do you establish the creation of Rei 2 and Rei 3?

Off-topic, but there are several ways. My personal favorite amounts to returning the soul to Lilith and then repeating the process that produced Rei I to get Rei II and Rei III. There's some support for this idea in second tier canon (souls returning to Lilith, I mean; see Kaji in the manga).

Or the creation of Kaworu, for that matter?

An accident, just like Rei. Adam exploded, was reduced to an embryo, his soul flew off somewhere and connected with an Adam-produced duplicate of the donor used in the CE. I have no idea how that'd work, but then again we have no idea how it worked for Rei either so I consider that a minor issue.

And if corpses or cryofrozen bodies were dumped into cores, it would raise quite a few eyebrows by your own admission - there would have to be a simpler way of doing it.

Note the context of said admission, though -- my point there was that corpses would be no less inconspicuous than living people. I wouldn't have a problem with the idea if the MPEs were produced in Japan, but it makes no sense to fly corpses around when living people are abundant and available and will work just as well.

For Unit 03? No problem whatsoever with a corpse. But it needn't be a corpse, really; they could just have the core make contact with the body, absorb its soul, and then keep the core on ice. Whichever.

After Shinji's body dissolves, his soul is floating in the entry plug's LCL.

No, that's wrong. His clothes are floating in the plug's LCL, and his dissociated molecules are as well (presumably), but his soul is nowhere to be seen. There's a good reason for that: it's stuck in the core of Unit 01, and it remains there until the latter spits it out a month later. I'm sure Nerv would love to be able to store souls in vats, but there's no evidence they know how to do that.

[Gurren12]

This is a very interesting topic. Though in my opinion at least the reason Kaworu is able to control Eva 2 is because he has Adams soul. And since the Eva's are basically soulless copies of Adam it stands to my theorie that if he managed to push out the human soul in the core then put his soul in the Eva would effectively become Adam. Just without a huge S2 engine. So therefore the mp Eva's must have souls for the soulless copies of Kaworu don't have the soul if Adam.

[SEELE-01]

Hi!
Here am I, past midnight with several backlogs in several things, but cooking up weird theories that just seemed too coincidental... Or ARE THEY!?
Ok, hear me out...

Given that:
One of the things stablished in NGE is the inherent need of a soul for producing an AT Field (Evas, humans, Seeds of Life and arguably, Angels).
All Evangelions need a soul, which optimally should belong to the designated pilot's mother (Eva 00 being the exception).
Souls can be recovered, captured and stored for significant amounts of time. Nothing says they can't be also transported to be implanted in a new host.
Souless entities can exist, albeit certain measures should be taken to keep it from collapsing while awaiting for a soul (e.g. the Reiquarium)

Late in the series it is stablished that SEELE was building the Mass Production Evas, and had been doing so for a long time.
While it is plausible they simply used one of the many souls they had in storage (i.e. Shinji's classmate's mothers), I think it is possible they had other plans:

Enter the souls of the Angels

Would it have been possible for SEELE to capture the souls of the defeated Angels and use them to complete the MP Evas?

They do say their original goal was for 12 units, but had to settle down to 9. But why was that? No time, no money?
How about, they missed the oportunity to capture the soul?
Being in the inmediate vicinity is not necesary, but it certainly helps. Also, some sort of ghost-busting equipment would have been readied to isolate and contain a soul. When I see an Angel list I notice that at most, only 9 of the Angels souls could have been readily salvaged:

Sachiel: walked slowly to Tokio-3, they had the time to set any equipment.
Shamshel: wriggled slowly.
Ramiel: floated slowly AND took it's sweet time to enter.
Gaghiel: lost in the middle of the sea.
Israfel: they had a freakin' week to set anything.
Sandalphon: finders keepers!
Matarael: had time.
Sahaquiel: didn't even know where it would land for sure. And setting anything up while coordinating 3 Evas seem like too much.
Ireul: an interesting case. Gendo actively denies it's existence. More on that below.
Leliel: the thing was floating over their head for quite some time.
Bardiel: surely they noticed it coming.
Zeruel: with all the destruction and mayhem, it is possible they missed the chance on this one.
Arael: Lost in space. Along with the Lance!
Armisael: no excuses here. Sure, they lost and Eva. And the city.
Tabris: Soul arguably went to Gendo's tumorous hand.

In total, it is possible they only managed to salvage 9 of the Angel souls. Maybe 12 was their original target, but had to settle for less after Ireul.
Why after Ireul? Because by this point SEELE starts to get suspicious of Gendo: he goes to great lenghts to dismiss the idea as nonsense.
What if one of Gendo's job was to get the souls for the MP Evas, get them ready and ship them to wherever SEELE were building the MP units. All the Angels were sure to attack in Gendo's proximity.
Gendo also knew the MP Evas would probably be used against him in the end, so why give SEELE the things they needed? He could fail once, or twice... Or five times. All with masterfully crafted excuses.
This brings me to the next point: the pilot of the MP Evas (or lack thereof).

Enter the Kaworu Dummy Plug.

Why creating an entirely different Dummy for these Evas?
I think there's more to the Dummy than Ritsuko's say that it "mimics thought patterns to trick the Eva into believing there's a pilot".
My theory: they used Kaworu Dummies because it was necessary to better communicate with the Angel souls.
It makes sense that a Lilith-based soul (Rei) be used to communicate with another Lilith-based soul (the Eva's core).
On that logic, why use an Adam-based soul to imitate a Lilith-based soul? We do see that direct communication between entities is complicated, blotchy at best, mind-shattering-traumatic at worst (Leliel, Arael and Armisael).
Isn't it better to use a Dummy based on Adam's literal soul to control a bunch of Evas with an Adam-based soul in them?
In short: SEELE used the souls of the defeated Angels to power the MP Evangelions and used another Adam-based soul (Kaworu) to create a Dummy plug that could communicate seamlessly with their Evas.

[Berserker]

Makes sense. It's obviously better than completely "unknown" status currently on the wiki. It's possible in the cases of those angels which died and had their body wholly or somewhat intact like Shamshel, Ramiel or even turned to liquid or goo like Leliel. But i highly doubt about Sachiel and Sandalphon as the former self destructed and vaporized into thin air. There was no remains of him/it left, while the latter dissolved into lava. In my speculation, they possibly can't extract soul without the original body, be it at any state. Unless their technology can, of course, simply "catch" souls from thin air like as you mentioned, ghostbusters. Then they can basically get any soul they want to implant in those MPs.

[Derantor]

Makes sense. It's obviously better than completely "unknown" status currently on the wiki.

The Wiki isn't primarily there for speculation, though. Matter of fact is that we do not know anything about the souls inside the MPEs for certain, so "Unknown" is simply stating the facts.

Merged duplicate topics together.

[Berserker]

In my defence, i never really gave this topic much thought. After watching EoE, i knew that there's no hard evidence on this. That time as last resort i checked the wiki to see if someone knows something, but it's unknown all along. And all this time, in result of not giving it any thought after that, i had the definitive answer as "unknown" in my brain. So today, after seeing the given theory, what i meant that it's obviously better and makes sense comparing what i've in my brain all this time regarding this. Sorry that came out so intricated.

[Kendrix]

Possible options:

a) A soul isn't strictly necessary, it only helps bridge the gap between the human and the EVA.This is why Asuka & Shinji have higher syncro rates than Rei, who doesn't have a mom.

b) alternatively, if souls are 100% needed, theymust have had the souls of the pilot candidates' mom's stockpiled. Hikari's mom, Kensuke's mom, Touji's mom etc. I think one booklet even has a line like "it was first planned to make the classmates pilot them but then the Kaworu Dummies were thought more reliable" (understatement of the century, I can't see Hikari wanting anything to do with eviscerating Asuka)

c) Souls weren't needed in this specific case because the Kaworu Dummies would share his power to control adam based EVAs like puppet - Kaworu said a soul is actually unhelpful for that, he could only control EVA 02 because the soul had "closed itself off" implying that Kyoko could have kicked him out if she wasn't... well, I'd guess she was probably upset about what happened to her daughter.
Yui could definitely veto the Rei dummy plug...

d) It's random nobodies SEELE disappeared off the street or willing fanatic SEELE staff

e) There was that one really evil theory based on that cut scene from EoE where we see Touji & Kensuke departing from the city. We're told the random classmates got shipped off to Germany. That's where SEELE has their base, so....
The reason there are only 9 MP EVAS is that our three friends resisted. There are three unmarked graves somewhere in a warehouse outside Hamburg.

[Berserker]

a) A soul isn't strictly necessary, it only helps bridge the gap between the human and the EVA.

And also generates A.T field. Soulless entity can't possibly generate A.T field, as stated by Kaworu. You need a soul for it. And if the question about evidence on MPs' usage of A.T field raises, the first and foremost answer is their A.T field based levitation.

c) Souls weren't needed in this specific case because the Kaworu Dummies would share his power to control adam based EVAs like puppet

Isn't dummy plug supposed to be a substitute of the pilot which have the biological data of Kaworu or Rei simply to impersonate the presence of a real pilot to make the resident soul believe it as real pilot while carrying on order given by NERV or SEELE? Of course they had other intention in making of it. But even if the Kaworu ones is slightly different and efficient in some ways, it's nothing but a substitute containing Kaworu's biological code to fool the resident soul. I don't think it has some extra power or capability in some way, or even a soul, which in case would've solved the problem. To me, it's just a disguising machine, which would carry out any order given to it.

[SEELE-01]

And also generates A.T field. Soulless entity can't possibly generate A.T field, as stated by Kaworu. You need a soul for it. And if the question about evidence on MPs' usage of A.T field raises, the first and foremost answer is their A.T field based levitation.

This.

Also, comes to my mind the idea that the MP Evas were supposed to fill an important role in 3I. Whether regular Production model Evas could fill this role is unknown, but either way, the MP do seem different from all other units.

As for gathering souls á la Ghostbusters, I'm assuming it is possible. All the cases of collected souls happended either via Contact Experiments of inmediately (or very shortly) after death.
As far as I know, it is generally accepted in the forum that in Eva, the soul does not appear to leave the body inmediately, which makes it necessary for soul-harvesting. The vital info we need is if Shinji's class were chosen as pilots before of after their mothers deaths.

On the other hand. What about the chamber of Guf? Ritsuko says the primary reason why they had to recourse to using human souls for the Evas was that the Chamber of Guf was empty and could not provide Evas with soul from there (also implying that under certain circumstances, the body is not necessary).
In this case, maybe they had to "trap" the Angel souls before they went to their own Gauf, as opening it would require an impact.

OF course, this is all crazy 2 am speculation... But speculation or not, this is now my headcanon

[ASW_Canuck]

I'd posted my own somewhat leaky theory in this thread.

[sithsauron]

For mom-child soul-pilot combos, I think exceptions can be made for souls that are fond of or linked to the pilot or if the Evangelion is used to the activation process then any pilot will do. I like the idea of Kaworu dummy plugs being able to control Evas without souls due to his and their Adam based nature. I also ponder if Seele members are being used as souls for the Mass Production Evas. Their tombstone forms could just be soulless Neuro Supercomputers ala Magi at some point, left behind to make sure Instrumentality completes.

Or the Mass Production Evas could have salvaged souls from the Angels

[ASW_Canuck]

The MP Evas definitely have souls within them, because in EoE Aoba specifically states that their AT fields are resonating with Eva-01's AT field. I think that the general consensus is that the dummy plugs don't have souls, because they're just a pre-recorded simulation of an actual person's mind that tricks the Eva into believing that it is synchronized with a real pilot.

Having the SEELE council members' souls (or at least part of them) in the cores of the MP Evas also means that they don't have to worry about how loyal their chosen minions really are when it's time to trigger Instrumentality.

I will classify my lieutenants in three categories: untrusted, trusted, and completely trusted. Promotion to the third category will be awarded posthumously.
--
Evil Overlord List, item #147

For mom-child soul-pilot combos, I think exceptions can be made for souls that are fond of or linked to the pilot or if the Evangelion is used to the activation process then any pilot will do. I like the idea of Kaworu dummy plugs being able to control Evas without souls due to his and their Adam based nature. I also ponder if Seele members are being used as souls for the Mass Production Evas. Their tombstone forms could just be soulless Neuro Supercomputers ala Magi at some point, left behind to make sure Instrumentality completes.

Or the Mass Production Evas could have salvaged souls from the Angels

[Berserker]

The MP Evas definitely have souls within them, because in EoE Aoba specifically states that their AT fields are resonating with Eva-01's AT field. I think that the general consensus is that the dummy plugs don't have souls, because they're just a pre-recorded simulation of an actual person's mind that tricks the Eva into believing that it is synchronized with a real pilot.

Exactly this. But I've to disagree with the part of "the MPs' soul being SEELE committee's". The committee members were alive, flesh and blood, before everyone started to dissolve into LCL. While the MPs were battling with Asuka, they were having meeting and beginning to start their ritual. We also watch with "details" of Keel being turned into LCL. I don't think they'd go so far to divide their souls just to implant them in their "loyal" Evas(There also lies the question whether they're capable of doing so). Even if they did, the result would've to have some effects on them, of which there's no such hints or anything. So yeah, not the souls of SEELE members, I think not.

[SEELE-01]

I like the idea of Kaworu dummy plugs being able to control Evas without souls due to his and their Adam based nature

Actually that was one of the main points of my theory: Kaworu, or a very good imitation of his soul, cold've been the cornestone required to use the angel souls.
The Evas cannot "not have a soul", as it is a prerequisite to function. Kaworu (real or Dummy) cannot control a "souless Eva". Real Kaworu controls Eva 02 because he used his angelic powers AND because he directly states that Kyoko's soul is hiding within the Eva. This implies that he does not actively supress the Eva's soul, and even if he could do that, a Kaworu Dummy Plug would have no way of doing so.

[dzzthink]

im glad they got rid of this concept of having souls in an eva for the

SPOILER: Show

rebuild movies. imagine finding a soul for all the new evas and marks. more robots and less souls with ptsd