All Purpose Evangelion Fanfiction Thread

Depends on a couple of things.

1) How much does Rei herself know?

2) Does something come up that actually brings it to Rei's mind, causing Shinji to see it for himself as well and possibly "follow the rabbit".

There's at least one fanfic that starts from this very scenario happening, with the answer being "Yes" from the beginning.

And yes, Gendou isn't stupid and not only considers the possibility that Rei's knowledge of his plan is now in Shinji's head, he actually works to verify whether this has happened as well as the depth of the Psychic Link, and upon the result being "will put too much deviation into my plan", immediately takes action to resolve the problem — by which, I mean he he takes both teens to the Reiquarium, shoots Shinji dead (and kills Rei due to the depth of their Synchronization), and proceeds to "activate" the third Rei clone... only to be shocked when Rei's resurrection results in Shinji's own as well. He kills the two and tries again, gets the same result, and realizes that there's no way out of having Shinji in the know.

1. IIRC, she doesn't express any sort of surprise at Gendou's actions in EOE. That strongly indicates to me that she had already known what Gendou planned for her all along. Also, the whole Dummy Plug thing being exclusive to her alone among the pilots and a secret that she shouldn't share with anyone outside Gendou's very small inner circle wouldn't make sense to her at all without the context of her indisposable role in Gendou's Human Instrumentality scenario; it would make more sense for Gendou to inform her of that fact to ensure the reinforcement of her secrecy with understanding (and relying on indoctrination and brainwashing techniques to ensure her loyalty), than to keep her out of the loop and risk her loyalty being eroded over time by continued frustration with his apparent irrationality on this particular matter.

2. I think Amita was using "did a Drift" as an alternative for saying "did a dual synchronization that resulted in uncontrolled mental cross-transfer".

Edited by MarqFJA on May 17th 2020 at 4:38:37 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

...I remember having read that story a long time ago. Very, very long time ago. Like, 12 years ago or so.

Edited by amitakartok on May 17th 2020 at 4:02:49 PM

Considering that the last update was in 2009...you're not far off. I'm reading through it atm since it's been awhile that I've dipped my toes back into Eva fics.

[DATA LOST]

I'm thinking primarily in terms of what we saw of Drifting in Pacific Rim, and more specifically what I can remember from not having seen it in a few years. If Amita means differently, I'm always open to correction.

I know you were thinking in Pacific Rim terms; that's why I pointed out that you are probably interpreting the phrase too literally. And since Amita didn't bother to correct me in his previous post after mine, that's strong indication that I'm right on the money.

On a different note... Does anyone know of fanfics that have one or more of Rei's clones become actual characters in their own right rather than remain as soulless meat-puppets (Nobody Dies does it with the Ree), or give Asuka one or more twin sisters (never seen this before, though I have a concept to this effect that gives her a pair of younger twins with personalities based on Proposal!Asuka and Rebuild!Asuka)?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I proposed the twin sister thing for Asuka before, though it was less twin sister and more like a clone made for the explicit purpose of helping her sync with her Eva.

Got any more details on that?

On a different note, suppose that Asuka was a JoJo protagonist in a post-Stardust Crusaders JJBA-style story. What do you imagine her Stand's special ability would be like?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

The idea was that it's possible to substitute a contact experiment by using a clone secondary pilot to act as the interface between the primary pilot and the Eva. In this arrangement, Asuka is still the one who controls Unit 02, but her clone is what makes it possible.

While they seem to get along first, their relationship is not exactly problem-free, with the clone resenting the popular and confident Asuka getting all the credit and Asuka resenting being dependent on the quiet and introverted clone for piloting.

... I don't get it. What problem is having a living human as an "interface" supposed to solve?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Having to perform human sacrifice to make the Eva move.

Speaking of which... how complicated would it be for NERV to make Unit 02 work if Asuka and her sister would be conjoined twins? There's interference from two people being in the entry plug, even so since they can't wear a normal plugsuit.

Or would NERV just go 'fuck it' and drop Asuka from the program early on?

Edited by amitakartok on May 25th 2020 at 6:20:54 PM

Does the conjoined twin have a mind? A soul?

You gotta start somewhere.

For the NGE/JJBA crossover I came up with, Asuka's Stand - called Hot Blooded - is a "punch ghost" (like many protagonist Stands) with the power of tactile thermokinesis, allowing her to raise the temperature of anything she touches and even induce spontaneous combustion.

If Asuka's circumstances lead to enough difficulty in making her an effective (test?-)pilot, I honestly kind of expect that NERV would pretty much just give her the boot, pick out another kid from the Marduk Institute's report, and collect another mom soul to swap out for Kyoko's.

I actually managed to hit upon a perfect name for Asuka's Stand since my last post here: Mama Genesis, with a sub-Stand named Mama's Little Helper. That said, while tactile thermokinesis sounds intriguing, I can't really see it being the power of a JoJo protagonist; those tend to be either quite versatile or quite broken (at least by the time the power's full potential is realized).

You mean the Evas absorbing human souls like Yui and Kyouko? But... your proposal shouldn't even work in the first place and instead just resulted in one or both of the two sisters getting absorbed!

If Shinji and Asuka, being two different people, could actually make the Eva they're piloting hit unpercedentedly high synch levels for either of them, then conjoined twins should be able to do even better, given that their very state would have to force them to adapt and accept each other to live healthy for more than a handful of years (i.e. Asuka and her twin probably have had a lot of issues as children, but their early teens they should have reached a decent equilibrium).

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Not if they share the load.

... I don't believe that's how it works. You need a soul (or a fragment thereof, in Eva 00's case) inside the Eva for the whole system to work, else you'd be synching with nothing (Evas are essentially no different from corpses until they absorb a human soul). Even the Dummy Plug system doesn't appear to solve this issue, as there's no evidence that SEELE didn't simply shove random people's souls into the MP Evas (which have Kaworu-based Dummy Plugs).

Now granted, you could use your idea in a setting where the Evas explicitly work in a very different manner, just like how you have them work without souls in Strategic Cyborg Evangelion, but as far as the canon continuities goes, the idea is too contradictory with how the Evas are depicting to work to be plausible.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

That the SCE Evas work without souls is... kinda oversimplifying it a bit.

Kyoko came up with the idea of using AIs converted from digital signals into analog nerve impulses uploaded into the Eva's core as artificial soul substitutes close enough to the real deal to make the Eva work, but artificial souls lack the metaphysical quantum key encoded into them by a Seed of Life, which prevents them from manifesting and controlling AT-fields unless they acquire the missing part by way of fusing with an actual soul. And even if such a fusion occurs, the results are unpredictable: one case has the soul and AI fuse into a composite personality that identifies as its own individual rather than either of its originals, another case has the AI and the soul both maintaining their individuality and co-existing as split personalities.

Anyway. For the above, the idea was that if there are two pilots who are mentally in sync with each other, the Eva's "pull" on their souls is evenly divided to the point where it doesn't fully absorb either of them unless they catastrophically go out of sync with each other and the balance tips, resulting in one of them getting absorbed. On the other hand, even if they do get absorbed, NERV has the means to scrape them back out since neither wants to stay in the Eva like Yui did and Shinji nearly did and thus wouldn't resist the extraction.

The impression that I got from canon is that an Eva's "pull" on a human soul during excessively high synchronization (i.e. 400% and above, and that's with a soul already inside the Core) is so immense that it's impossible for any ordinary human to resist it, being akin to a human trying to resist being pulled by Earth's gravity while mid-air.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

...had a silly mental image today when my mind remembered Shinji and WH40k from years past: take the same idea (Shinji finding fictional material at a young age that profoundly alters his personality) but genderflip it and replace WH40k with Gunbuster.

Thus the tentative title: Shinji Aims For The Top! (exclamation mark included)

It wouldn't be an instant characterization change, but a gradual one. Shinji's initial personality is kept, it's only the progression that's altered.

Having not seen Gunbuster, I'd be interested to see that become something.

Edited by Willbyr on Jun 29th 2020 at 10:34:49 AM

Basically, imagine Shinji's personality being molded by this:

I'd also quote another scene, but I can't seem to find it anywhere on Youtube. It's basically Gunbuster's equivalent of Shinji's inner turmoil before and during the Zeruel battle: after Noriko's first battle ends with her coming back with zero kills and a dead love interest because she was too paralyzed by fear to save him, she's ordered to give her ride up to another pilot whose own ride was malfunctioning, her mentor figure seemingly writing her off as useless. And thus she was, sitting in the dorm room and sobbing about how much of a useless crybaby she is while the rest of her squad were getting butchered, including the pilot she gave her ride to...

...and at one point, she realizes that she may be a useless crybaby right now, but she'll always remain a useless crybaby and might as well be dead like her dad and love interest if all she's ever going to do is sit there and cry. So she gets up to do what she can and ends up kicking epic amounts of ass that saves the day. Her failures weren't from being useless, but from her not believing in her own potential: she kept putting herself down, which caused others to not believe in her either and drive her even further into a self-destructive spiral. Once she started believing in herself, that's when she turned into the Hot-Blooded badass girl who rightfully belongs in the mecha anime hall of fame.

And that is why Noriko would be the best role model for Shinji Ikari. Not because she's a badass, but because she started where he did and clawed her way up by confronting her inner demons and deciding that if she's gonna die either way, at least she'll make her own death have some meaning.

She won't wait for a miracle. She'll make that miracle happen.

Aren't stories like Noriko's the norm in Mecha? From what I've read, the unique thing about Shinji's situation is that instead of adapting to his situation and learning to do and be better (as Noriko and others have done), he instead remains the same by the end.

My mind has been stuck on this Dragon ShortZ-inspired story idea of mine the last couple of days; now it's expanded to include Mari sharing the collective role of Android #18 with Asuka and Rei, and after Asuka threatens the asshole waiter and Rei crumples a metal knife barehanded in mere seconds without a scratch, loud crunching noises draw everyone's attention to Mari chewing on something while the plate that was in front of her is suspiciously missing. Mari swallows, burps loudly, spits out a chunk of plate material that got caught between her teeth, and looks at everyone else and says "What? I was hungry and they're taking their sweet ass time with our order!"

... And in a completely separate scene happening an indefinite amount of time later, pure coincidence has Asuka happen upon a scrap of a very old missing person poster that has what looks like to be a barely pubescent version of her own face. The trail she follows then leads her to discovering that not only were she and her fellow two bio-augmented superwomen from the same town, Rei and Mari were orphans adopted by Asuka's mother. Not sure where to go from there: a heartwarming reunion between an old-aged Kyoko and her now Older Than They Look daughters, or a heartbreaking scene where the sisters discover that Kyoko died over a decade ago from both old age and grief, and there's barely anyone left in their old hometown who remembers them in the slightest.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 12th 2020 at 9:37:15 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Have you considered solving it like this?

No, not really. The Replacement Goldfish approach works for the SPARTAN-IIs because said supersoldiers are created by the UN government via abducting young children of their own citizens, which poses the big problem of raising suspicions (and thus drawing unwanted attention that could jeopardize the SPARTAN program's secrecy); replacing them with clones serves an actual in-universe purpose.

For Asuka, Rei and Mari in my scenario, however, they were abducted by a criminal paramilitary organization that doesn't need to worry about unwanted attention from the families of the abducted, because the abducted aren't kept anywhere near where they were taken and are instead shipped off to an isolated secret base; at best, they'd only bother using short-lived clones to keep the families distracted as they spirit away the children. Besides, you missed the part where I pointed out the trio being far Older Than They Look; they themselves don't even realize that, having only been "active" for a few years, and their memories of the past being practically a blank slate past the day of their activation save for a nightmarish patchwork of the torturous experimentation and augmentation they were forced through alongside nigh-incoherent flashes of what feels like happier times from before their kidnapping, when in reality it has been so many decades since they were abducted that they would've been elderly people themselves had they aged normally, and Kyouko is more or less almost a century old by the time of the reunion in the sub-scenario of her being still alive.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.