Rei's soul(s)

[LPeyrani]

So Rei II would be different from her iterations (more passive) because of the existence of the 00, keeping part (or all) of Lilith's soul?

[SawItAtAge10]

Sort of yes. In way you could say that Rei II is kind of "broken" in that her soul has been fragmented and siphoned off between herself and Unit 00.

[UrsusArctos]

Before Contact Experiment with Eva-01 by Yui, Yui made a wedding card with an angel with blue hair. Perhaps Yui, during Contact Experiment, materialized the idea of her daughter like that, and that's why Rei was 'born' that way.

I always thought of the blue-haired angel being what Yui saw herself as, as a sort of personal fantasy from childhood or something else. But Yui thinking of her daughter with blue hair works too.

@LPeyrani : yes, that's more or less what it appears to be.

By the way, all of Yui's soul is in Eva-01, that's confirmed. Rei I probably had 100% of Lilith's soul, Rei II and Eva-00 split the soul (in whatever proportion) and Rei III appears to have the whole of it again (maybe).

[TraxXavier]

I wanted to start a new thread for this, but this one's clearly on-topic so I guess I'm stuck following the rules.

Anyway, current thoughts: I really, really hate this soul recycling business. The only mention we have of it in official material at any level of canonicity is the CI blurb referring to Kaworu's "birth", and AFAICT we have no reason to believe that's anything but a singular event. There's no mention of recovering the souls of the dead, no mechanism apparent for doing it, and no indication it was done with anyone else. It's just a bit of fanon liberally applied to explain things like Kyoko's soul, Unit 03 and the MPEs, and Rei. But there's nothing, absolutely nothing to it. Making matters worse is the fact that every salvage operation we've seen in the actual show has been a dismal failure -- Nerv couldn't recover Yui after her CE, they couldn't restore Kyoko after her CE, and they couldn't get Shinji back after he was absorbed in ep. 19 (he came back of his own accord, after a month of failure on Ritsuko's part). All of this, and we're supposed to believe these people can just pluck Rei's soul out of the aether (or her charred remains) and implant it in a new body? Please.

My personal hypotheses is that in this context a sole needs not just any body to be transferred into bu the brain needs to have compatible neural engrams, something that for Rei is being achieved by synchronizing her current body's neural engrams with the spares bodies neural engrams every few days or weeks, idk. what interval is recommended.

So for her its easy to be transferred around.