Neon Genesis Evangelion/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

 

* This page and quite a few others refer to humanity turning into something called Tang. None of the pages actually say what Tang is, and I don't believe the term used in the show at all, so is this some sort of [[All There in the Manual]] thing?

** Technically called LCL. They don't explicitly name it as such in the movie.

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_glossary#LCL

** As fans of the popular "disappearing wristwatch" [[Epileptic Trees|Epileptic Tree]] could tell you, Rei's presence in this scene could be used to argue that {{spoiler|1=the whole series, aside from the first few minutes of episode and the last few minutes of EoE, never happened in reality; Rei's there because she's come to turn Shinji into Tang, and what we see for the next 25 episodes is just the stuff going through Shinji's head as he experiences Instrumentality}}. See the WMG page for Eva for a more detailed explanation.

** This one is easy. Rei simply tried to travel back in time to prevent instrumentality and [[Eo E]]. She clearly fails.

** Once Rei merges with both Adam and Lillith, she becomes some sort of transcendent being, with apparitions of her appearing everywhere. Ritsuko and Misato even saw her ''before'' the merging, but both of them got tanged later... So perhaps the first time Shinji sees Rei might actually be the last time she sees him...

* If Gendo and SEELE both wanted the "constructive" Third Impact to occur, triggering Instrumentality, why didn't Gendo just give away Unit 01 to SEELE instead of resisting the assault on NERV HQ (which turned out to be pointless anyway)?

***** Hmm, maybe, or not, considering that the UN naval vessels in episode 8 look mainly like American ships with American crews, and include that distinctive signature feature of American naval power, a nuclear-powered supercarrier. But leaving that aside, what about China? They're only a few hundred miles away, they have a significant nuclear arsenal, and they don't like the Japanese one little bit on their best day.

****** More than appearing as US vessels, they 'are' US vessels. 'Over the Rainbow' is the original name for the USS Teddy Roosevelt, CVN-71.

**** Or, if not outright devastated, in support of Japan's plan. Remember, NERV is a branch (sort of) of the United Nations, and the Evas were built by more than one countries. And the other Magi were in various other countries. Anyone with the technical level to do something was following NERV's lead.

***** For varying values of "do something." The first nuclear weapons were constructed in 1945 in a nation where * transistors* didn't exist yet. That's my point.

****** Finally an easy question on this page, though why none of you just said this is rather beyond me. ''It's clearly stated in NGE that the N2 bomb is at least as strong as a Nuclear Bomb.''

******* What does that even mean in this context? And are we comparing it to a one-kiloton backpack nuke that a Special Forces team might use to wreck an enemy airfield, or are we comparing it to Tsar Bomba, weighing in at a claimed 100 megatons yield? That's six orders of magnitude here.

******* Several things: "N2" stands for "non-nuclear", which means it's an exotic but "clean" explosive. I can't think of anything that's simultaneously clean, high yielding but with a lousy mass/yield ratio, (The N2 mines we see are about the size of a car, but apparently have a 20kt yield) don't scale, and can be produced by a planetary civilization/in a gravity well. Antimatter is fairly clean, except for the high-energy photons produced during annihilation, but 20kt yield AM bombs would be ''tiny''. You could handwave it by saying that the containment machinery is most of the mine, but there's no plausible reason for it not to scale; and antimatter is hilariously expensive to produce. Evaporating neutronium would be pretty energetic, but harder to produce than antimatter, and prohibitively massive, on the order of thousands of ton of real, hard to transport, mass.

******* Also: There's more than a few nuclear superpowers out there. Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all have nukes, and the first two even have ICBMs. One of France's major industries is producing ''nuclear reactors'' for export. There isn't a single reason for any of these nations to fail to respond to an existential threat.

** The short answer, of course, is that the Angel's signal didn't go dead until ''after'' the Entry Plug was crushed, as stated in Episode 18.

*** Or maybe a pissed off Rei, which is what the Dummy Plug essentially is, would give Frank Castle a run for his money in terms of putting someone down for good.

 

* Why is everyone's first name written in katakana? Even perfectly Japanese ones, like Shinji.

* It's been a while since I saw the series, and I have only watched through it once so this was probably explained, but... What the heck happened with First Impact? I know Second Impact destroyed Antartica, and Third Impact did... whatever the hell happened at the end, but wouldn't there have to have been a first one to start all this shit? Or am I just being an idiot?

** First Impact was the one during the solar system's early days, where the broken-off material formed the moon. I think in NGE, this is when Adam and Lilith were dropped off or something.

** First Impact is actually a "Giant Impact" caused by an asteriod hitting Earth some 4 billion years ago. Second Impact is so named because it was the biggest since the First one. Canon, from the ''Red Cross Book''.

** According to the First Ancestor Race theory (seen [http://wiki.evageeks.org/Classified_Information_(Translation) here], and also filtered through [[Adeptus Evangelion]]), an ancient superpowerful race created Adam and Lilith (and perhaps others) to seed the galaxy with life. Adam came to Earth to prep it for the creation of Angelic life, while Lilith got knocked off course somehow and also ended up on Earth. Her "ship" collided with the planet, and the "command module" containing Lilith herself was lodged in the earth (eventually moved by tectonic shift to southern Japan). The remainder of her ship was stuck in orbit around Earth and became the moon. Then Lilith and Adam fought (since two different Seeds of Life aren't supposed to xenoform the same planet), Lilith's blood was spilled in the oceans (which became the Primordial Soup that gave rise to all life), and Adam was subdued by the Lance of Longinus (which was actually a sentient device created to subdue a Seed of Life if it got out of control).