Yet another Contact Experiment

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LPeyrani
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Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby LPeyrani » Fri Aug 16, 2019 3:13 pm

Here I'm proposing a theory about another Contact Experiment that might have happened between the original Salvage Operation (which probably resulted in Rei's creation) and Naoko's death. The idea is that that time the soul hosted by Rei 1 (Lilith's soul) was absorbed by Unit 00; then, and from then on, that same unit was connected via Terminal Dogma to the tubs that kept together Rei's cloned bodies and that she needed to regularly visit, to both store her new memories and to "recharge" her AT field. That would be another reason for Rei 2 saying that the Eva is her "bond".
This idea is quite simple and would explain how Rei 1's soul got into Unit 00.
But there is a problem: we must assume that, after Unit 00 is destroyed, Lilith's soul somehow manages to get into Rei 3 in time for EoE. This woudn't be inconsistent if one accepted that Lilith's soul was shared amongst more individuals at the same time, but I seriously doubt that. The only way I can think of this to work is if, when Ritsuko crumbles all the Reis in the tubs, she does so by "downloading" Lilith's soul in Rei 3, cutting off the others. But downloading it wherefrom, since Unit 00 was annihilated?

Both Rei 1 and Rei 3 are rebels, while Rei 2 is passive. This is reasonable if we think that they both have Lilith's soul, while during the life of Rei 2 that soul was kept inside Unit 00. But how did Lilith's soul leave Unit 00 before it exploded, and how did it get back to Terminal Dogma, keeping the other Reis together (at least until Ritsuko pushed the button)?
Any idea about this, anybody? And what are your opinions regarding Lilith's soul being connected to all Reis through Terminal Dogma?
Thank you for your attention, let me know...

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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby SawItAtAge10 » Sat Aug 17, 2019 3:55 pm

Hmmm...Unit 00 being connected to the LCL vats does seem interesting, but I think there's an easier explanation. There's this idea in NGE regarding soul fragmentation.

One of the best pieces of evidence for this is in regard to Asuka's mom. She was perfectly normal prior to the CE for Unit 02. Afterwards, she was crazy and murderous towards herself and Asuka. And so, it's been suggested that Unit 02 initially took part of her soul ("Self as A Mother" as Naoko puts when desiring the Magi) and absorbed into the core. Then, after her death, the rest of her soul was salvaged into the Eva. This is a realization (her mother's presence within the Eva) Asuka comes to in EoE during her fight with the army/MPEs.

Point being, the same principle could be applied here as well. Sometime after the failed salvage operation the ultimately resulted in Rei they got Unit 00 up and running and ready for another CE, but between what happened with Yui and Kyoko, Nerv seems to have perfected the process somewhat or at least clued into what the core attracts when a CE occurs.

As such, it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that Lilth's soul went from Rei I's corpse and was reconstituted into Rei II only for the fragmentation to occur when she had a CE with Unit 00. And, the part that got sucked into the core was of Rei I's original "feisty" personality, hence the violence with the berserk mode...And for added fun, in the scene where she punches the Primbow box in ep. 14, the shot is initially from Unit 00's perspective and for the briefest of moments, it looked like Ritsuko had dark hair, meaning that Unit 00 could've mistaken her for Naoko. It's interesting too because Rei II is just standing idly by the window watching passively and it looks like she's the Eva's target, plus Misato wonders if Unit 00 was actually trying to kill her by the looks of things. I feel like tie bing there is just huge red herring, but it's one that still points the correct solution, just form the opposite way. Because of how it looks, people mistakingly thought Naoko's soul was in Uinit 00 back in the day.

Further, I think part of Unit 00's instability stems from the fact that she's suffering from body dysmorphia as well, in the sense that she's a fragment of Lilith that has now been forced into an Adam-based body.

Now as far was what Ritsuko does in ep. 23 following Unit 00's destruction...Well, it can be deduced that all of Lilith's soul revert back to Rei III when she was brought to life. That much is pretty clear. And again, her personality changes to being more willful and somewhat aggressive (her behavior towards Kaworu + her betrayal of Gendo in EoE). But if you look closely at the device that Ritsuko is using in the LCL Aquarium, the command reads "DESTRUDO RELEASE" Destrudo is Latin for death. It's a Freudian psychological construct that represents the part of human nature that bends towards self destruction or thought processes that are potentially negative.

In this sense, it does something with the LCL to tear the Rei clones apart. But it also has some sort of effect on Rei III as well (hence her disheveled zombie-like look and her arm falling off in ep. 24 and EoE).
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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby Reichu » Sat Aug 17, 2019 5:28 pm

The LCL is presumably what links the Rei clones to the big electronic brain where Rei's personality data is stored. We already know that Rei has a death wish; it's part of her personality and it would thus be digitized along with the rest. "Destrudo release" implies, thus, that upload!Rei's destrudo HAD been forcibly suppressed, but was finally allowed to express itself. Thus the Rei clones all spontaneously self-destructed. I'm not sure I would assume that Rei 3's later degeneration is an outcome of what Ritsuko did to the dummy plug plant. Rather, what happened at the dummy plug plant foreshadows and provides an indirect explanation for both Rei 3 and Lilith's later fates. Rei 3 was quite simply destroying herself, possibly due to her proximity to Lilith and the anticipation of finally "returning to nothing". Lilith too destroys herself when her work is done and Eva-01 ascends as her fully-powered-up successor.
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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby LPeyrani » Sun Aug 18, 2019 6:21 am

I have to admit that the soul fragmentation hypothesis is not to be excluded a priori, still I'm not sure it is a "simpler" assumption. In that case one must accept that Rei 1's soul was taken out of her after she died, that Rei 2 went through a Contact Experiment anyhow and that, at that point, her soul was split. On the other hand, if the Contact Experiment happened before Rei 1's death (that might well have been the reason of her being at Gehirn headquarters when Gendo introduces her to Naoko) and her whole soul was stored (either in Unit 00 or in the LCL) and regularly used to reinforce the activated Rei and her empty cloned bodies' AT fields, there are less passages and less stretched assumptions to be made.
Of course this is just my reasoning, I have no proof of what I'm writing.

I also kind of disagree with the part about Destrudo. "Destrudo" is a term used throughout the series with a specifical, technical meaning; the word is derived from Adler (Freud's disciple), but in NGE it stands for a measurable variable, because there they are talking Metaphysical Biology and not Psychoanalysis. More specifically, in NGE Destrudo corresponds to Anti-AT field. While we, living beings, also have Libido, our material part, our bodies -in the sense of our object component- carry with them Destrudo as an inheritance of the inorganic world that still is part of us. Then, Destrudo is not a high-level psychological force that depends on our personality, like a death-wish, but an irreducible legacy of our hybrid nature of living objects, that is always at work (and that can in turn affect our personality if our Libido is too low).
So I would propose that Ritsuko does not release the death-wish of Lilith's (or of Rei's), which was being forcibly suppressed; to me that's just the normal level of Destrudo of those bodies, which was counterbalanced by the action of a soul's AT field. When such action is cut short, only Destrudo remains, so that it is "released" and the bodies fall apart.

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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby Reichu » Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:09 am

Yes, I'm aware "destrudo" is an actual measurable thing in NGE. This does not in any way go against the ability to suppress and then release the destrudo of a digital personality. If anything, it would make much more sense of the claim!

I'm not going to pick apart your arguments because, in sum, they feel self-contradictory, and treat as mutually exclusive concepts that in absolutely no sense actually are. You're saying "I disagree and this isn't true!" on one hand, and then correcting me with stuff that I believe anyway! In other words, you are, in my opinion, creating arbitrary and meaningless conceptual divisions that have little to do what I actually think and don't contribute to the understanding of the show at all.
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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby LPeyrani » Sun Aug 18, 2019 8:46 pm

Sorry, maybe I articulated badly my point. The fact that Destrudo is a measurable variable was not meant to prove anything. I should have kept myself more synthetic. My reasoning there was that Destrudo acts from below the level of personality, and that I don't think that Rei has "more Destrudo" than another living body. And I might be wrong.

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Re: Yet another Contact Experiment

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Postby LPeyrani » Mon Aug 19, 2019 11:07 am

PS: I created this thread with one end, that is discussing the hypothesis of a Contact Experiment with Unit 00 before Naoko's death. The idea still seems to me simpler than what is actual consensus around this issue. The side-discussion about Destrudo came up along these lines but shouldn't take the attention away from the main topic.


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