Neon Genesis: Evangelion and Existentialism

Sharing the (very) rough draft of my first script to debut my new channel with the Foundation for Economic Education.

Jan 20, 2024

Character Analysis: Shinji Ikari | Confessions of an Overage otaku — image source

After reading the attached script, what do you think about the name “Animated Ethics” for the channel? Let me know in the comments!

“Shinji, get in the robot!”

Neon Genesis: Evangelion, the single-season 1995 hit anime written by Hideaki Anno, is one of the most popular of the mecha genre and one of the most popular cartoons of all time—bar none. It has made an estimated $16.6 billion in pachinko sales, merchandise, and home entertainment (cite).

The show’s even inspired Evangelion-themed bullet trains[1] , an entire water park in Kyoto[2] , and, most recently, the official portrait of the commanding officer Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Fleet Air Wing 21[3] .

That’s a mouthful!

Clearly, the cultural and economic impact of Neon Genesis: Evangelion cannot be overstated. But, why?

Imagine American admirals posing as Shia LeBouf from Transformers—debatably another mecha media hit. Not only is this unthinkable but, if it did happen, it would regarded as absurd. So, what makes Evangelion different?

Why does this mecha anime from the nineties have so much staying power, at home in Japan and across the world? To be sure, the action sequences, soundtrack, and hand drawn animation tell part of the story. I mean, who doesn’t love A Cruel Angel’s Thesis[4] , Can You Give Me One Last Kiss[5] , and, last but not least in my lineup, Kom Süsser Todd[6] ?

If Evangelion’s estimated $5.6 million in music royalties are any barometer, more than a handful!

Though, perhaps not everyone has to admit they’ve cried to each tune multiple times. . .

Anyway! Moving right along to the point:

Hideaki Anno’s mecha masterpiece has, and continues to have, such a profound impact on its viewers because of the gripping plot, sympathetic character, and broadly existentialist philosophy. At bottom, we all identify as its protagonist, Shinji Ikari, to one extent or another.

So, who is this sniveling, struggling, Eva-wielding 14-year-old?

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I encourage you to (binge-)watch this enthralling show and its original accompanying conclusion, End of Evangelion, once—twice, even—before continuing this video. While I enjoy the subsequent Rebuild movies, they are not going to be included in this analysis—Neon Genesis: Evangelion is rich, subtle, and complex enough without the inclusion of the latest installments.

If you’re still listening, I’m going to assume you’re already a die-hard Evangelion fan or you’ve done yourself a favor and become a newly-minted one. Or maybe you didn’t take my admonition to heart; that’s also acceptable.

Time to vacuum seal our plug suits, breathe in some viscous LCL, and get our syn rates harmonized. It’s time for the first episode of The Animated Ethicist. I’m your host and resident weeb, Jack Nicastro.

Evangelion starts with Tokyo-3 under attack by an Angel: a nigh-indestructible supernatural creature intent on merging with Lilith, which will trigger the Third Impact: a cataclysmic event to purge the world of the remaining humans who survived the Second Impact (hence Tokyo-3 instead of Tokyo-3 or plain old Tokyo).

The origin of the angels, their motivations, and, frankly, much of the plot of Neon Genesis: Evangelion is opaque, convoluted, and, consequently, endlessly intriguing—it’s no wonder I’ve been able to watch the show three times and still haven’t tired of it.

Perhaps the audience is more insightful than me and understood everything from the jump on the first watch-through.

This is entirely possible and I look forward to being educated in the comments.

Nevertheless, I think I have a decent enough handle on the plot, its characters, their motivations, and relationships therebetween to divine just why this show is so damn impactful.

For the record, that pun was so intended.

The governments of the world and their standard-to-nuclear munitions and materiel are no match for these galactic-celestial invaders; the only match for the Angels are NERV’s Eva Units, which are Angels themselves—a kind of fire-fighting-fire situation—and their pilots. NERV is commanded by Gendo Ikari[7] , father of Shinji Ikari.

But Gendo isn’t really trying to stop the Angels from triggering the Third Impact; he wants to manipulate the Evas and Angels so that the Third Impact comes about in such a manner that he’s reunited with his wife, Shinji’s late mom, Yui Ikari.

SEELE, a shadowy cabal surreptitiously in charge of the world’s governments and the United Nations (World Economic Forum, anybody?), also wants to trigger the Third Impact. But they want to do so in a way so as to achieve god-like status over what remains of humanity.

The Angels themselves want to reunite with Lillith, resurrect Adam, their progenitor,[8] [9] and annihilate humanity to render earth hospitable to them.

So, you know, it’s all pretty simple. Straight-forward, really.

The Evas are also offspring of the first Angel, Adam, or, in Eva-01’s case, of Lillith, the second Angel. The Evas are able to be controlled by the Children—Rei, Asuka, Shinji (as well as Toji and Kowaru)—by submerging them in LCL (Lillith’s Blood) and inserting them into the nervous systems of the Evas via entry plugs.

Yeah, I know. Please suspend your technological disbelief while I make my way toward the philosophy.

The LCL and entry plugs work to merge the consciousnesses of the Children and the Eva Units in the same way all human consciousnesses are merged into one simple aggregate during the Gendo-orchestrated Third Impact, as detailed in End of Evangelion. LCL helps to dissolve the AT Fields—another sci-fi–spiritual plot device—that grant humans their individuality.

Told you there’d be spoilers!

If the plot details seem arcane and indecipherable, I’m in the same boat.

Nonetheless, as one watches Evangelion for the first, second, or eleventh time, the moral the story is much simpler than the intergovernmental subterfuge, Book-of-Revelations-style apocalypse, and psycho-cyber science fiction: the struggle for connection between necessarily separate beings who are simultaneously drawn to and repelled from each other by nature[10] .

The sisyphean endeavor of establishing connection, be it familial, fraternal, platonic, or romantic, pervades Neon Genesis: Evangelion.

For starters, the Angels long to be reunited with their father, Adam, even at the expense of all human life. Gendo pursues Human Instrumentality to reunite with his belovéd wife, as does Kozo Fuyutsuki, mentor of, and secretly in love with, Yui. SEELE also seeks Instrumentality, but for different (though analogous) ends: the annihilation of individuals into one collective in order to prevent strife, war, and suffering. Unlike other 20th century authoritarian regimes, at least SEELE recognizes that the only way around these negative aspects of the human condition is to destroy humanity.

On a less dramatic scale and more profound level, the show’s protagonists all long for meaningful relationships. Shinji longs for the love and care of his father—having effectively lost both parents following his mother’s death; Rei wants to be recognized and treated as a full-fledged person, i.e., someone with a unique soul and will, instead of a mere clone of Yui; Asuka, like Shinji, lacks parents and longs for a father-figure; Misato wants her romantic love for Kaji, who’s infatuated with Ritsuko, to be rekindled and reciprocated; and Ritsuko’s amorous relationships are too spicy and incestuous to warrant comment—an entire video of Freudian analysis would be required to unpack her relationship with Gendo Ikari, whom her mom also loved.

Digression aside, we find a perennial internal conflict at the core of Evangelion’s meta-plot—the Human Instrumentality Project—and sundry subplots; we need the very thing that harms us the most: other people.

The show’s creators acknowledge as much explicitly, titling the fourth episode “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” in a not-so-subtle nod to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, like Shinji in this namesake episode and throughout most of the show, regards existence as primarily characterized by intense suffering, which is occasionally punctuated by fleeting moments of joy that are wholly inadequate to justify existence.

Schopenhauer analogized man’s desire for interpersonal connection to the struggle for warmth faced by hedgehogs.

As Ritsuko says, “Hedgehogs have a hard time sharing warmth with other hedgehogs. The closer they get, the more they hurt each other with their quills. People are also like that. I think some part of Shinji is afraid to take that risk because he’s afraid of being hurt.”

If people really are like hedgehogs, and our choice set consists of freezing or stabbing each other, so to speak, how can we resist Schopenhauerian pessimism?

In universe, how is Shinji supposed to resist the super-collectivism of Gendo and SEELE?

I’m underqualified to provide a clear-cut answer to such a monumental question. Luckily for me, and unluckily for you, so is everyone else!

The path Shinji ultimately elects is not to evade human nature and the nature of the world, but to accept it as a condition of existence, which can and must be psychologically borne to experience the all-motivating experience of love.

By Evangelion’s own lights, true love—like that shared by Gendo and Yui—is enough to drive a normal man—a father—to damn the world and everyone it it—including his only begotten son—to disintegration in the hope that some ambiguous part of his essence can intermingle with a similarly nebulous part of his dead wife in a unified soup of humanity.

If that’s not moving, I don’t know what is.

To combat the Evas, Shinji has to forge friendships with Rei, Asuka, Toji, Kowaru, and Misato—to name a few—all of whom are mortally injured, torn apart, two crushed by his own hand (both Toji and Kowaru), or shot to death. All of these fates weigh heavily on Shinji, who threatens to quit piloting the Eva and, until the very end, does so reluctantly at best. Even in the very end, Shinji refuses to pilot Eva-01 while NERV is under siege by SEELE and Asuke is under attack from SEELE’s mass-production Evas.

Finally, Misato succeeds in motivating Shinji to “get in the robot” with a token of affection and the promise of more. Sadly, by the time Shinji and Eva-01 emerge from the Geofront, Eva-02 and Asuka have been mangled beyond recognition.

Many complicated Chekhov’s guns and MacGuffins later, and the Third Impact is under way: Shinmji is offered the choice to destroy individuality, and therewith, all forms of suffering.

Horrified by the carnage wrought at and above NERV HQ, Shinji opts for Human Instrumentality.

But, luckily, that’s not where the story ends.[11]

What remains of Shinji’s soul is not content with this resolution to the Hedgehog’s Dilemma; he and Asuka choose to reincarnate from the human soup and embrace the joy and suffering, i.e., individuality, that awaits them. Far from a naîve ending, the final shot of End of Evangelion shows Shinji strangling Asuka, crying, and after loosening his group, Asuka calls him “disgusting.”

The hedgehogs have returned; they’re back to the cycle of poking and evading, hurting and longing, loving and leaving each other. Living.

Evangelion’s conclusion is a clear-eyed acceptance of the immutable terms of human existence[12] ; to live as a person qua person, you need the sympathy of others. Yet, taking a note from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, there is no one we relate to more than our own selves—we aren’t cognitively equipped for such a task. Therefore, we are necessarily prevented from absolute connection, empathy, brotherhood, and union with even those we love most.

Unsurprisingly, those ideologies that believe man to be infinitely malleable and try to remake him in the image of a nall-knowing, all-empathizing creature invariable produce the same outcome: death, destruction, and untold suffering of the very people whom they’re ostensible trying to help.

Hideaki Anno;s nineties masterpiece shows us that to deny people their individuality, porcupine spikes and all, is to deny them their very existence.

I don’t know about you, but I think Alfred tennyson put it best when he said, “Tis better top have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Better to have lived and suffered—lived—than to have never lived at all.

Those are my musings. What do you think? Were Gendo and SEELE right to pursue the Human Instrumentality PRoject? Are we better off non-existing as soul-soup? Did I totally mischaracterize the plot and need to watch Evangelion for a fourth time?

Let me know! I look forward to reading your thoughts below.

Citations:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/13/national/popular-evangelion-bullet-train-makes-final-run/

https://www.siliconera.com/neon-genesis-evangelion-water-park-opens-in-kyoto/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/zsql9i/get_in_the_fucking_helicopter_shinji_official/

Existentialism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Eva Synchronization: https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/Synchronization

LCL: https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/LCL

Shinji introduced (first episode):