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I just started watching Evangelion on Netflix and the series explained that pilots' lungs become filled with LCL when in the entry plug of an Eva Unit, allowing them to breath and sync with their units.

However, it never shows or explained why they don't need to pump the LCL back out of their lungs upon exiting a unit. Is it just implied? Do their bodies absorb the LCL through their lungs? Is it assumed they just cough it up? Is there an explanation that I am missing?

Please Note: I haven't finished watching all of Neon Genesis Evangelion, so if this is a major spoiler please warn me via comments and/or use Spoiler Markup.

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    How LCL is removed from the pilots' lungs is never shown or explained during the series, not sure of the manga. Interesting question, though; not something I ever really thought about after watching the series multiple times.
    – cteski
    Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 18:27

2 Answers 2

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I think maybe LCL is absorbed into the body going by what happens during Third Impact. to quote the wiki (spoiler because it is end of the original anime series stuff)

LCL shares similar properties with the hypothetical "primordial ooze" from which life on Earth first evolved. This is because non-Angel life on Earth actually originally evolved from the LCL spread by Lilith when she landed on Earth. During Third Impact, Lilith's Anti A.T. Field causes the A.T. Fields of human beings and all other Lilith-based life to collapse, reverting their bodies to puddles of LCL.

Source: LCL (6th paragraph)

in real life the human body can absorb water after it enters the body and in the first X-Men we see

Senator Kelly's body de-molecularizes into water due to the unnatural mutation Magneto caused breaking down Kelly's cellular structure

so in a sense one could think of LCL like Water in that

out bodies are made up from it but unlike water we do not require to consume LCL to live as everyone on the planet was effected by Third Impact, not just Eva Pilots and we can assume that everyone outside of NERV would have zero contact with LCL

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There has been some discussion of what happens to the LCL pumped into pilots on the EvaGeeks forum; I found threads from 2009 and 2014. (Needless to say, these contain spoilers for the series.)

It appears that there has never been an actual explanation for this. However, after reading another thread on LCL, I can make some guesses.

In the thread, the user Tetsuo connects LCL to amniotic fluid. This connection follows naturally from how the Eva Units contain the souls of pilots' mothers. With this in mind, the question of what happens to the LCL after a pilot leaves the entry plug is somewhat equivalent to asking what happens to the amniotic fluid in which newborns were immersed in the womb.

I still don't have an exact answer, but this should be a good starting point. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with child development, and I don't remember the details of the entry plug mechanism well enough to discuss how it connects to the womb, so I can't go into much more detail.

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