Was Lilith a second thought (a later addition, or retcon if you want) by series' creators? The series as you know has a 'tone' shift after episode 16, where Anno, already depressed but unaware of the fact, was reading and researching psychology books to use for his characters but also ended up acknowledging his own depression, which even heightened and all of this reflected on the second part of his series (expecially notorious with the last 2 episodes). I also know the first 6 episodes were made altogether (with the exception of 4 being made after 5), so they constitute the first coherent, initial ''Block'' of the series. My question is if Lilith was included on a second thought (a later addition, or retcon if you want) by series' creators, created somewhere around episode 20.
It is true that the ''angels'' of the second come (2015) are made to start from the *Third* angel - Sachiel - an so on (implying that beyond Adam, the first angel, the creators always considered the presence a ''second angel'').
But mostly, my doubts come from episode 15, when Kaji and even Misato who herself saw the first Angel mistook Lilith for Adam. I don't see how could Kaji not know about Adam if he himself brought it to Gendo's hands, it's strange he mistook it(her?). Even somewhat later in the series some of the characters refer the giant in Terminal Dogma as Adam.
ops ignore the first line, it's a repetition I forgot to delete.
Andrew Cook
Wasn't Adam called "The first human" at some point?
Mason Turner
Er maybe yes (altough it is technically false as it is Lilith who is the seed that spawned mankind) even if I can't recall when precisely if so. Most likely a callback to Nadia, or the Bible, as well.
Angel Lewis
Eva is weird, it never really clarifies what it means by human - the Evangelions are called artificial hunans despite having no similarities beyond body structure.
Nor does it clear up what other animals on the planet are in regards to Lilith - did Lilith literally create human beings, or did evolution on Earth still occur in Evangelion and its just coincidence that Lilith and Adam share similar body types? Do other animals have souls, do they get tanged - do plants and bacteria have souls, etc.
Jayden Turner
An interview with Anno, which seems to be referring to an earlier draft of NGE, refers to Adam as "another father there, Adam, who governs the overall course of events". This seems to be describing the final role of Lilith.
It is possible that mid-production they swapped Adam's and Lilith's roles, or separated the two.
David Bailey
Also now that I think of it, IF Lilith was a retcon, humanity could have been the second angel since the start. Remember that the ''second angel'' was something that only SEELE and Nerv knew about, as also the creators implied when they made Japan defense ministry mistake Matarael for the 8th angel, while being the 9th (as Nerv right adress it).
Jaxson Reyes
The Proposal Document does indeed not mention Lilith, Adam was one of the 28 Apostles(Angles) and he was found under the Dead Sea, hence the documents retried being the Dead Sea Scrolls, Second Impact seemingly vaporized Adam and the Dead Sea Region, leaving only 27 Apostles to attack Humanity. All EVA are made from Adam, Unit-01 included.
The rest of NGE is pretty much there apart from the existence of SEELE which came during rewriting, The First Ancestral Race being both explicit and coming from Earth in the distant past. The final battle being 12 Apostles coming from the moon to vaporize North America (may have been revised into the 9 Mass-Production EVAs) and the final battle taking place in "The Ruins of Aqza" which nobody really knows anything about because it changed so much during production.
Ultimately the series was supposed to have a uplifting ending, so imagine EoE action but the TV acceptance ending.
What the fuck is the spear of longinus and why does it hold any importance
Ethan Collins
Is that thing alive?
Jordan Jones
It is the fail safe for the Seeds of Life to prevent activation if something goes wrong.
Lilith's should have activated when the Black Moon arrived on Earth which was Adam's target. But the Black Moon impacted(1st Impact) in what would end up being the GeoFront while the White Moon was in the continental shelf that would be Antarctica.
Since Lilth's Spear wasn't functioning and Lilth was spreading life ans souls, Adam's Spear activated and Adam was suspended in hibernation until the expedition pulled it out, Triggering 2nd Impact.
Angel Gutierrez
Sasuga speedwatcher.
Colton Young
>I don't see how could Kaji not know about Adam if he himself brought it to Gendo's hands
Kaji is figuring all of this out through his triple-agent work and does not have all of the facts aligned, and could have been given deliberate misinformation. He may believe they grew that thing from the Adam embryo he gave Gendo.
Benjamin Parker
They call the first angel we see in the show the third angel. So obviously two angels before it was already considered
Ethan Wright
>(altough it is technically false as it is Lilith who is the seed that spawned mankind) No. Lilith spawned Lilin. Adam and Lilith, and their spawn the Angels and the Lilin, are all humans.
Xavier Howard
>and the final battle taking place in "The Ruins of Aqza" which nobody really knows anything about because it changed so much during production. We don't know nothing about it, though. We know that the parts of the soundtrack which were labelled for "Arka" were repurposed and used during several of the scenes which take place inside the mind (such as "separation anxiety" and "depression")
Lucas Gray
see The way they presented it doesn't seem Kaji was wrong. There's even a flashback associating what Misato is seeing with the Giant of Light she saw years before. Maybe I am wrong, but I had this feeling.
I saw evangelion years ago and I'm rewatching it now with the new Netflix subs and japanese dub. I have this doubt this time. Checking archive I saw also other anons are of this opinions (which I have never heard before myself).
Ayden Bennett
>The way they presented it doesn't seem Kaji was wrong.
Key word seem. It’s a red herring. Even Kaworu (who IS Adam) thinks it’s Adam’s body until he’s right up on it. Lilith being in the Geofront is just Angel bait, and Tokyo-3 is the trap for systematically exterminating them all. There was never any danger of a Third Impact caused by the Angels (which would wipe out humanity, not merge them into one soul like the Lilith Impact), even if Nerv just let them all walk right into Terminal Dogma. Everything went according to plan until Rei betrayed Gendo in EoE.
Andrew Clark
I still find it thematic that for a genera where giant monsters menacing humanity are common, it is the mecha-building organisation which are the cause of everything over petty immortality.
Robert Thomas
A few questions: 1)if lilith WAS indeed Adam, kaearu having a contact with him would have started third impact right? 2)So if one of Adam's offspring (while Kawaru wasn't technically) reached Lilith, nothing would have happened? 3)In contradiction with former question, NGE2 states that (some of) Angels were actually after Lilith, not Adam [A], to reset all life, implying a third impact WOULD HAVE INDEED happened had Adam's offspring reached Adam 4) If [A] is false and they were all after (what they mistook for) Adam, how come Garghiel? He knew about Adam on the fleet.
Josiah Ross
>had Adam's offspring reached Adam Meant lilith of course
Nathaniel Bailey
Genre*
But yes, SEELE/NERV started everything because they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, that told them about Adam, Lilith, their locations, the subsequent Angels being awoken, and the path to Godhood (power of the First Ancestral Race)
Brody Lopez
My biggest question is:
Why Kaworu mistake Lilith for Adam if Seele tell him Adam is in gendo body?
Kevin Ross
Lilith was included because humanity is the last angel and that would have been a fucking stupid final boss.
Easton Baker
that scene was added in the director's cut for whatever reason
Benjamin Davis
>1)if lilith WAS indeed Adam, kaearu having a contact with him would have started third impact right? Kaworu*. Yes. It would have activated an impact to destroy all Lilith-originated life (humanity). >2)So if one of Adam's offspring (while Kawaru wasn't technically) reached Lilith, nothing would have happened? Yes >3)In contradiction with former question, NGE2 states that (some of) Angels were actually after Lilith, not Adam [A], to reset all life, implying a third impact WOULD HAVE INDEED happened had Adam's offspring reached Adam Sauce plz >4) If [A] is false and they were all after (what they mistook for) Adam, how come Garghiel? He knew about Adam on the fleet. Angels seem to have an instinctual sense of where either of the two progenitor beings are located. Gaghiel happened to be an aquatic Angel, and one of the two progenitor beings happened to be at sea.
Ethan Ramirez
So if Kaji didn't flee with Adam the third impact could have happened right then and there?
Ian Perez
>Sauce plz He said NGE2, so you should know that means the Classified Information. It's mentioned a couple times; here's one section as translated by evageeks >Two Seeds of Life are not needed on one planet, and, therefore, one of them is excluded. As recorded in the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, Adam-based life took part in a contest of survival, putting the stakes on their own existence. Some of them were trying to access Lilith and reset all life, some of them had nothing in mind, and some were trying to recover their progenitor Adam. The Angels — Adam-based life — became active under their respective tactics for survival and success.
Aiden Lewis
No. Its only ever referred to as the first Angel.
Justin Peterson
Lillith literally comprised Unit-1 core and boimass. The idea was there from the start of the show.
Eva isn't as deep as you nerds make it out to be. Anno just used words he thought sounded neat and went with it.
Jace James
It prevented lillith from reforming
Chase Diaz
Kaji is a basically a quadruple agent so he calls Lillith Adam because its only Gendo, Fuyutsuku, SEELE, and him who know Adam is actually an embryo. Anyone else who knows anything about Instrumentality thinks the big creature in Terminal Dogma is Adam at this point, even Kaworu. Maybe you could form an argument for retcon but I think most of it is Gendo and SEELE giving out false information, especially so that the 2 humans with god souls they need to control don't get too much info.
I can’t say for sure from what I know. Adam had been reduced to an embryonic state by a Lance of Longinus to stop Second Impact, so he may not have had the “worldwide Anti-AT field” powers he would have had in his original state, which would be him coming fresh out of a FAR seed. After reverting Adam to an embryo, there very well may have been no danger at all of an Angel-caused Third Impact, and the rest of the plan was just about killing them all so they couldn’t stop Human ascension to Godhood. The entire phenomenon of the Angels trying to contact Adam is actually an abnormal happenstance, occurring only because of SEELE’s intervention that ended their hibernation. Adam-based life once ruled over Earth but was sent into eternal sleep when another FAR seed (Lilith’s black moon) happened to crash into the same planet.
Michael Mitchell
The supplemental lore is the shallow end of Eva. There’s a reason why so little of it was explained in the actual series: religious ancient aliens wasn’t the point.
Benjamin Kelly
yes. After the spear is removed it starts growing
Samuel Kelly
>The supplemental lore is the shallow end of Eva. There’s a reason why so little of it was explained in the actual series: religious ancient aliens wasn’t the point. i agree with you but hey, you have to have some respect for getting the ball rolling on more than two decades of shitposting and counting.
Kevin Taylor
Yeah I just didn’t feel like digging through evageeks to find specifically that quote so thanks. That’s interesting. I’ve always thought of the Angels as animalistic and acting on instinct, even Kaworu until he chooses to die.
Now I’m wondering if Shinji could have just not killed Kaworu and let him live with the humans like Rei. But Rei was Lilith derivative so Kaworu may have needed another Adam lifeform to continue existing.
Luis Bell
>Now I’m wondering if Shinji could have just not killed Kaworu and let him live with the humans like Rei Anno actually confirms Shinji didn't have to kill Kaworu in an interview. And it's required to convince Kaworu not to die to get a good ending in NGE2 because SEELE can't start instrumentality if Kaworu is still alive.
Blake Long
It's worth mentioning that that it's one of the more questionable parts of the CI. 01 was Lilith derived and able to act as a substitute for human-instigated instrumentality, so if angels did need lilith they presumably could've used 01 instead; and it also may be to reconcile with the scenarios in NGE2 rather than the show.
Oliver Parker
Yeah the claims of strict canonicity of absolutely everything in the video game’s Classified Info seems like a marketing ploy from the developer more than anything.
This game is like the Twin Peaks books.
Jayden Morgan
>Anno actually confirms Shinji didn't have to kill Kaworu in an interview
I’m having a hard time finding this anywhere if you could sauce me up boss
Grayson Phillips
Like 90% of any Anno quote about Kaworu is from the '96 JUNE interview
>Anno: I wonder why people are saying that, “You can’t run away!” is a theme.
>Interviewer: What?! …Well, if you put it like that. *laughs* Well, then Shinji-kun isn’t always limited to being right, is he?
>Anno: That’s true. Why does everyone assume that what the protagonist says and does is right, I wonder?
>Interviewer: Huh. The protagonist did say, “It would have been okay to run away.”
>Anno: Yeah. That’s the theme. It’s okay to run away.
>Interviewer: Then you mean to say that he could have gotten by without killing Nagisa-kun?
>Anno: The people who empathized were fine just doing that. The people who’d been saying that they mustn’t run away were the ones who ran and were blamed, that was also okay.
>But there’s also a part of me that wants to say, “Don’t set your heart on believing that that’s right!” If everyone asked me whether the things that I’m doing are right, I’d tell them that that’s just not the case! There’s even a line in episodes 25 and 26 that goes, “If you want to run away, then it’s okay to run away.” Well it means that, by running away, there are things that you gain and things that you lose, after all. It’s always one or the other as long as humans are living.
I found that exact post on evageeks but his answer was so unclear I figured you were referring to something else. He doesn’t respond directly to the plot related question and just continues with what he was talking about before it.
Zachary Jones
Its clearly a biblically symbolic connection.
Just like Biblical Eve was taken out of Biblical Adam, the Evas, through the acts of humans, were taken from Adam.
SEELE was upset that those who took from the Tree of Knowledge, had also taken from the Tree of Life (eaten an S2 engine).
Lincoln Richardson
>"The Ruins of Aqza" which nobody really knows anything about It's Aruka, the ruins are under the lab and the mystery of it was supposed to be a late-game reveal made from there. It's a previous civilization's subterranean fortress city with a nature preserve inside that Nerv built over with their version of the Geofront. Not that weird when you aren't trying to translate "Ark" to sound more exotic.
Between ancient prehuman races, giant humanoids called Adam and other subtle traits, I feel that NGE was originally just Nadia: Fighting Depression through Mecha
Luke Perez
This baffles me more than anything else in from Eva lore and I want a solid explanation. If the director’s cut is made for additional character building or filling gaps in the plot, why add a line that totally rips open a new one for a pivotal event in conclusion of the series?
