#neon genesis evangelion report

[very-grownup]

Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion

As we all know, 2020 is most notable for being the year in which I watched Hideaki Anno's 1996 television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is now time for the most important and definitive takeaway from the series.

Yes, at last, the official ranking of the Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion based on how aesthetically delightful I find them.

NUMBER 1 SACHIEL

The first, the best, the cutest, the standard of pure delight to which no others could reach. Sachiel's comfortingly bipedal with grabby looking fingers that are not unreasonably long and that like to hold the Dick and Jane red bouncing ball close to its chest. It has a little face with a plague mask vibe to it that also looks like it belongs in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Later, Sachiel turns out to have TWO adorable little faces which enhances the feeling of a nest of little barn owls peering at you from the dark comfort of a giant mechanical alien monster torso.

PROS: Adorable little face, times two! CONS: Self-destructs and does a lot of damage to civic infrastructure and humanity, I guess.

NUMBER 2 GAGHIEL

How can you not love Gaghiel? It's an underwater buddy that looks like someone smashed a manta ray into a plesiosaur and borrowed the mouth design of a cartoon Venus flytrap. Like a lot of oceanic creatures, you know it's not nearly as cute as its big toothy smile would lead you to believe but it looks so happy and frolicsome that you permit aesthetics to overwrite common sense. Just leave Gaghiel in the ocean having fun and fighting sharks or whatever Gaghiel wants to do. There's a lot of ocean and there's definitely room for Gaghiel!

PROS: Mouth can fit so many hotdogs! CONS: Did eat those two entire submarines like they were hotdogs.

NUMBER 3 MATARAEL

Matarel's a sneaky little black UFO covered in illuminati eyes with comically long spider legs that go high above its funny little eye-spangled head/body. There's something incredibly charming about a big supposed to be scary thing with great long legs that look like they have the thickness of spaghetti. You find yourself asking "Buddy, how can you skip leg day when you have so many legs?" but also finding that disregard for bodily care endearing.

PROS: Reminds me of an eyeball spider from space in an old episode of Johnny Quest. Love thinking about the non-racist parts of Johnny Quest! CONS: Matarel does ooze orange acid from its true eye. That's not something I love seeing or thinking about.

NUMBER 4 LELIEL

Leliel! Get a feeling so complicated about Leliel! Leliel is a delightful sphere of black and white geometric patterns evoking Escher drawings. You could put Leliel on display in a classy home, maybe as a centrepiece in your beautiful dining room table and it wouldn't look out of place aside from it being a towering giant alien thing that would crush you and your table and your house and your neighbourhood. Leliel is the black-tie evening wear of Angels. Unfortunately, classy giant alien monster isn't as delightful as adorable giant alien monster. Also, it turns out Leliel is actually the shadow cast by the tasteful Escherphere, not the Escherphere itself. Be your true self next time, Leliel!

PROS: Goes with everything. CONS: A poseur.

NUMBER 5 SAHAQUIEL

Sahaquiel is the most '90s of the Angels. Sahaquiel looks like a toy advertised on Saturday morning television to compete with bop-it and the latest attempts to get devil sticks and hula hoops to catch on with a new, impressionable, plastic-garbage loving age group. It's orange with a giant eye and is all long and flat with hands that look like those sticky grabby hands you'd get out of a capsule toy machine in the grocery store and then lose behind the couch by the end of the day. Sahaquiel isn't cute the way the top three are and definitely isn't classy the way Leliel is, but you have to respect the hustle and how Sahaquiel is trying its own thing. Be your quirky but endearing self, Sahaquiel!

PROS: You could easily make your own Sahaquiel out of playdough. CONS: Actual Sahaquiel is made up of bombs and drops pieces of itself onto the ground below and that's a lot to deal with and maybe you'd rather buy a bop-it after all.

NUMBER 6 SHAMSHEL

Shamshel has a lot going on. There's an eggplant vibe to Shamshel but also a vaginal look to its head that is a bit disconcerting. I've never seen it, does the Vagina Monologues take into account a vagina that's 80m tall and has laser whips for arms? Does the Vagina Monologues take Neon Genesis Evangelion into account at all? Folks, I'm going to be honest: Shamshel is a bit upsetting to look at but then I think about how its name is Shamshel and I find that so delightful to murmur in my mind that it supersedes how I don't really like looking at the eggplant vagina.

PROS: Shamshel. Sham-shel. Shaaaaamshel. CONS: Its physical existence.

NUMBER 7 TABRIS

Have you ever encountered something where you don't really have a problem with something as it is but you have a problem with how it complicates everything around it? Like maybe you're very proud of a collection of physical media but circumstances have caused you to have one entry in the middle of the series that doesn't match up with the things that come before and after, so you're putting them on a shelf and you want to be able to appreciate them from a display perspective but also this is about storing your stuff and whenever you look at it that one book or DVD or game sticks out like a sore thumb from its fellows and you resent it for how it has disrupted the peaceful and aesthetically pleasing ordering of your library. It hasn't done anything, maybe you even quite like it, but damn does it make organizing complicated. That's Tabris.

PROS: Akira Ishida. CONS: It's an Angel that's just a teenage boy. Mr. Anno why did you not consider how difficult this would make my ranking?

NUMBER 8 SANDALPHON

Oh Sandalphon. What am I going to do with you Sandalphon? You're trying so hard with this flatworm-frog hybrid thing. I feel like you should rank higher! Sandalphon's got a muppety vibe to it, like Kermit the Frog goes body horror. Or maybe H.R. Giger got to design a Pokémon. There's a lot of cilia going on with Sandalphon's extremities? Also, a cilia-surrounded underneath sucking mouth hole? Those are the sort of things that really cancel out googly eyes. Sorry Sandalphon. You're a baby. It's not your fault.

PROS: More Angels need googly eyes. CONS: Cilia. All the cilia. Keep that shit in your ears and around the edges of prokaryotes or wherever that shit goes.

NUMBER 9 RAMIEL

Ramiel's just a prism. Ramiel's just a floating prism. If Ramiel was some kind of spaceship or satellite, you'd say cool, that's a pretty distinctive design you have going on there Ramiel, a little alien but with a simplicity that makes it uncanny. But as an Angel, Ramiel feels like it was the Angel made when ... God? had a hangover after designing a more complicated Angel and just couldn't be fucked when it was time to make Ramiel.

PROS: No upsetting qualities. CONS: No interesting qualities.

NUMBER 10 ISRAFEL

I know this is going to sound harsh, but: Israfel is just bootleg Sachiel. A little bit of a pallet shift. Not quite as detailed. A little face but not as cute as Sachiel's little face. There's two of it, sort of, but two of a knockoff doesn't make it less of a knockoff. Instead, it really underscores how mass-produced and unoriginal Israfel is.

PROS: Makes me think of Sachiel. CONS: Very much not Sachiel.

NUMBER 11 IREUL

Ireul is the microscopic nanotech hacker Angel. Small is cute but after a certain point, small becomes more upsetting than big. You don't really see Ireul, you just see what Ireul does which is using rust nanolasers on computers? The most neutral of Angels.

PROS: None. CONS: None.

NUMBER 12 ZERUEL

Zeruel is the big boy Angel. Not cute but very cool in an '80s boys' toys kind of way, Zeruel looks like you could unfold chunks of its limbs and turn Zeruel into a blocky spaceship or truck. Again, that's cool, but that's not so much my thing. I liked the Transformers that were dinosaurs and the zords in Power Rangers (which could be dinosaurs). Basically, Zeruel would rank higher if it looked more like a dinosaur.

PROS: It does look like some of those blocky cute bug Pokémon. CONS: Not a dinosaur.

NUMBER 13 BARDIEL

Bardiel is the Angel that is the Eva built in America, so Bardiel looks like the other Evas, but with an evil colour palette (purple, but really dark purple). As this important document is ranking the Angels and not the Evas, some might be reading this without the knowledge that I find the design of the Evas deeply upsetting. I do not like them. I do not like looking at them. I do not like looking at Bardiel.

PROS: Is not the worst or more upsetting Angel to look at. CONS: Bardiel? More like BADiel. Because all of its qualities are bad and if you remove the 'r' from Bardiel the first syllable is 'bad' which is what Bardiel is. Bad. Badiel.

NUMBER 14 ARAEL

I keep looking at images for Arael and double-checking that they are, in fact, the Angel from the show and not some shitty MS Paint knock-off. Arael is a collection of white scribbles with what might be an eye at the centre or might just be an orb that two of the small scribbles are carrying around. Arael's a spray paint stencil someone got bored with halfway through their first can.

PROS: I can see ways Arael could have been cool. CONS: I'm not angry, just disappointed.

NUMBER 15 ARMISAEL

This motherfucker is literally just a giant ring of floating Xs. Ohhhhhh noooooo a fourth grader's drawn on finger tattoo is coming for us, helllllllllp. Fucking Claire's looking threat to humanity.

PROS: Easy to draw. CONS: There are too many non-threatening things to compare it to and choosing which to use is irritating. Do kids today even draw shit on their hands and arms and pretend they're tattoos? Would alien hula-hoop have been a better choice? Does Claire's still exist and do they still sell NeoPets merch?

NUMBER 16 LILITH

This is the real unlovable freak level. Lilith is only saved from the bottom by virtue of the extremely over-the-top Christian imagery. An awful, giant, bloated top half of a corpse nailed to a giant red cross, Lilith oozes orange goo. You look at Lilith and know Lilith has skin and that skin has elasticity and it pulls and undulates with the horrors Lilith contains. Lilith is constantly trying to regenerate, I think, via spawning a bunch of teeny tiny human legs, making the end of its torso look like Dr. Moreau's second place science fair project. Lilith has a cratered purple mask-like disc for a face with one giant triangle and seven eyes. The purple triangle can horrify conservative Christian reactionaries who want to go beyond Teletubbies, the eyes on the triangle can get Illuminati lovers horny, and the asymmetry of the eyes exists to piss me off.

PROS: It's important for the baby goth weebs to have something to latch onto. CONS: It's an undulating mass of flesh with horrible little human legs and it oozes orange goo and I hate it and do not want to look at it anymore.

NUMBER 17 ADAM

So there's two forms of Adam and one's just a light energy giant robot shaped thing that's boring and we're not going to talk about it because I forgot the fucking thing existed until just now. I'm basing this ranking on the embryonic Adam. Some might say this is unfair, would I judge a beauty pageant based on ultrasound images? Consider, instead: wouldn't that be rad? Maybe I'm the visionary the pageant industry needs.

Adam is a disgusting handful of veiny purple jizz with a single red eyeball and lives in Gendo Ikari's palm. The preceding sentence is like a MadLibs where every blank was qualified with 'terrible'. Choose which part of that description you hate the most!

PROS: No. CONS: Gendo Ikari.

#neon genesis evangelion #important analysis #neon genesis evangelion report

[sparrowwings-trash-backyard]

Me when I'm in a worst birthday gift competition and my opponent is Hirohiko Araki

#jojos bizarre adventure #stone ocean #the jojolands #weather report jojo #dragona joestar #neon genesis evangelion

[the-notorius-bhg]

Crossover from Questor Magazine :

Unit 01 vs. Wing Zero Custom

#gundam wing #gundam #new mobile report gundam wing #wing zero custom #wing zero #shinji ikari #unit 01 #neon genesis evangelion #scan #mecha #crossover #yoshiyuki sadamoto

[comfortfoodcontent]

#comfort food gifs #misato katsuragi news report #video games #ps3 #playstation 3 #evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #anime

[tigertaurus22]

A scene from Chapter 13: Reporting In

"So what is it you want, Kaworu? We wouldn't be having this conversation if there wasn't something in it for you. You won’t offer your silence for free, right?”

Kaworu had to think about his response.

‘What am I going to do? Should I give a cryptic request just in case, or should I trust that she won't switch alliances again and toss caution to the wind for old times sake? I promised Su I’d make sure-’

"Come on Rui, I don't have all day."

Mari said playfully, tapping the handle on her rapier in the rhythm of a ticking clock. 

#megaman zx #au #breath of the wild #legend of zelda #crossover #megaman zxa #Mari Makinami #kaworu nagisa #neon genesis evangelion #biometal model e #biometal model c #Elpizo #copy x #chapter 13 #reporting in #prismatic kingdom

[triviallytrue]

trivially true you are screenshotted and posted on Twitter, which is screenshotyed and posted on Instagram. which I now screenshot and ask to tumblr

I looked up the tweet and it has over 12k likes and 308k views. Jesus.

Media properties it's been compared to:

Neon Genesis Evangelion

His Dark Materials

UNSONG

Number of people who seem to very sincerely think I was being genuine and not making a joke: 4

Anyway thank you to fembot and humiliatemydick420 for the reposts and thank you for reporting back

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (February 18-24, 2024)

Godzilla Rivals: Mothra vs. M.O.G.U.E.R.A. begins with a standout fight between Mothra and Ebirah. From there, however, the Queen of the Monsters spends most of the story on the sidelines, with a brawl involving Mechagodzilla, Garuda, Jet Jaguar, and M.O.G.U.E.R.A. over the fate of her egg taking center stage. A mech fight on that scale is unusual for a Godzilla comic, and despite the misleading title, it's a decent issue. Writer Johnny Parker II sat down for a lengthy interview with Kevin Derendorf and Raf Enshohma this week; I haven't had time to listen to the whole thing, but I do know he talks about his valiant efforts to put Medical Jet Jaguar from Godzilla Island in the comic.

Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong #5 also released this week. Afraid it didn't leave much of an impression on me; the book is juggling a lot of narrative threads now, and I don't see how it wraps them all up satisfactorily with just two issues left. I would've liked to see a more focused cast (and not just because it takes forever to list all the DC characters on Wikizilla each issue, haha). They also finally mention Monarch in this issue, which only makes the absence of the Monsterverse's human characters more conspicious.

Between Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, March was already going to be a great month at the movies for giant monster fans, but they'll now be joined by an anime classic: The End of Evangelion. GKIDS is bringing it to North American theaters on March 17 and 20 (a Sunday and a Wednesday, respectively). All showings will be in Japanese with English subtitles. This is not, as some reporting has suggested, the first time the film has ever played in the region—I found a Facebook event page for a 2019 screening in Omaha, for instance—but it is certainly the first major release. Be forewarned that if you haven't seen Neon Genesis Evangelion, you'll be confused out of your mind, as the film serves as an alternate ending for the final two episodes. But you've got time to get caught up.

Like many a Godzilla movie before it, Godzilla x Kong is leaking like a sieve, with a number of alleged screenshots of the Titans now making the rounds online. I normally wouldn't mention such things in this column, but they show a couple of characters who haven't been officially confirmed to be in the movie yet. So here's a warning to be on your guard if you're spoiler-shy.

#kaiju week in review #godzilla rivals #justice league vs. godzilla vs. kong #the end of evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #godzilla x kong the new empire #kaiju #godzilla

[mrmillipede]

WELCOM 2 MILLIPEDE WORLD!!!!

YO YO YO!!! IM MR MILLIPEDE!!! IM A FLIPPIN MINOR BRO!!! I USW HE/HIM AND IM AN INTP!!! I HAVE CRAZY AUTISM SWAG AND IM A BEAR GAY TRANSBRO, AND I LOVE MAKIN FRIENDS AND BEIN SILLY!!!!!!

WHAT YOU WILL FIND IN MY BLOG!!!!!

usually, I post JJBA!!! my blog is centred around JJBA and mostly Stardust Crusaders!!! I do post from other Jojo parts too!! It’s also of note that I may post random thoughts or ideas because I like to be silly!!!

i will post other stuff I like!!! Things like SAW, MLP, Homestuck and Neon Genesis Evangelion may come up on my blog too!! ALSO!!!! I STATE THIS CONTINUOUSLY…..I am a MINOR!!!! please do not interact w me if ur a freaky deaky weirdo that ISNT COOL!!!!

sometimes, i post horror-related stuff and gore!! I DONT use tws because they aren’t effective in my eyes, and if u don’t like any of that stuff, just don’t interact w my blog :3 i also have very different headcanons that usually go against the canon character and their design, and if you don’t like that you can ALSO get off my blog :D

BIG FAT NO’S!!!!!

i do Not really believe in dni’s because they are ineffective, but I’ll state right here what will get you blocked :3

FIRST AND FOREMOST…you will be instantly blocked if ur an nsfw/kink/smutfic blog. I am totally serious about this and I do NOT want those sorts of blogs to interact with me at all. This includes reblogging my stuff to an nsfw blog even if the tags are innocent.

SECONDLY….proshippers, comshippers and step-incest supporters will get an instant block. these ships are actually disgusting and I mean it when I say I do not want your vile blog interacting with mine. Do not even like my posts, but I can’t enforce that cuz I’m not your dad.

THIRDLY…..terfs and homo/transphobes will also get an instant block. my blog is a safe space for me, mutuals and people who enjoy what I post, and if you want to say nasty shit, I’ll block and also report you. as a queer and trans guy, i will absolutely not tolerate that kinda shit and any stupid asks will be deleted.

ANYWAY!!! PLS HAVE TONS OF FUN AND BE SILLY AS ALL SIN ON MY BLOG BRO!!!! STAY JOYOUS AND RADICAL!!!!

#intro post #stuff about meeeee :3 #yea! here’s my new blog introoooo :p

[richea]

Character Biography: Primula Rosso

The following information has been pulled from the Tales Channel official site's page on Tales of Fandom Vol. 1. Typed below is a transcript of its English translated entry on Primula.

Story synopsis

"Craymel Detective: The Keele Zeibel Affair" In this Tales of Eternia spin-off, Keele is arrested on suspicion of leaking Mintche University's exam questions. Primula, who leads the school's detective club and has unilaterally drafted her classmate Keele as a member, opens an investigation to clear his name. But having already earned a reputation as a bumbling investigator, Primula has a tough road ahead.

Primula Rosso

A deeply inquisitive scholar, Primula majors in Aurora Artes at Mintche University. She's love detective novels since she was a child, and has established an unofficial detective club at the university, with herself as its self-declared president.

The following information has been pulled from the official Bandai Namco site page on Tales of Fandom Vol. 1. The site is in Japanese.

A character introduced in Fandom. She's a girl brimming with curiosity who is currently studying at Mintche University. She works as a "detective" in the school (in actuality, she's a handyman). She gets wrapped up in an incident with Keele in the Faceventure story...

Name: Primula Rosso (プリムラ・ロッソ) CV: Miki Nagasawa Character designer: Daigo Okumura Gender: Female Height: 159cm Weight: 45kg Hometown: Inferia City Occupation: Scholar at Mintche University Social standing: Commoner. Her family runs a business in the capital and they're fairly well off. Family: Father, mother and four younger brothers. She's the eldest daughter. Personality:

For the most part she's well intended

She's cheerful and doesn't have a bad side

She's brimming with curiosity

She's prone to simplistic thinking

She's quite the dreamer

She has (surprisingly) good grades. She excels at courses requiring memorization skills

She's decently athletic

She loves to cook, to the point that she makes her own lunches every morning before school She excels at eggbear dishes and has the skills to make just about anything. She doesn't have any disliked food

Hobby: Reading mystery novels Future dream: Operate a detective agency (in collaboration with Keele) Current goal: Promote the detective club to the university officials Treasured things: A book she bought with her childhood savings called "Introduction to Becoming a Great Detective". She's read it to the point she can recite it from heart Other things: After an incident revolving leaked examination questions, she became good friends with Lunaria Barnes of the newspaper club. They went out to a cafe they had heard about and enjoy their student life together to the fullest. Lunaria is from Chambard, and her future dream is to become a newspaper reporter and make the Barnes family the richest in all of Inferia.

Primula's character design

Okumura-san's comment:

During early conceptions, I had considered removing Primula's "detective antenna" (the cowlicks) but I ended up leaving them for the sake of their capabilities in expressing emotion. They can form into heart shapes and stars, and if she's feeling so strongly, she can even form them to replicate Keele's face. Quite fanciful, isn't she. *There's not scene in the game where this happens.

"A slightly long interview"

Miki Nagasawa

[PROFILE]

Agency: Atomic Monkey Birthday: July 11th Notable works: Maya Ibuki (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Maki Izumi (Kidou Senkan Nadesico), etc.

Interviewer: Namco's Tanaka-san

The interview took place in the studio where "Craymel Detective: The Keele Zeibel Incident," which is the story Primula appears in, was recorded.

Tanaka-san, who is a publicity clerk, awaited recordings to be finished in order to request an interview with actress Miki Nagasawa. You can probably feel how nervous Tanaka-san was when talking in front of a lady as beautiful as her...

Interview, start!

Tanaka: Nagasawa-san, were you n-nervous at your first time voicing for the Tales series? (*person who is nervous himself) Nagasawa: Let me think. It's a well-known series, so the pressure was definitely on... Tanaka: Is that to say you knew about the series prior? Nagasawa: Yes, I hadn't actually played the games myself, but I'd seen it in commercials and popularity rankings. I'd heard of it plenty. Tanaka: Thank you. (*a bit relieved) Nagasawa: I was really happy when I heard I got the job, given it's such a great series. I wouldn't say I was stressed, but having a role that was alongside the most famous character Keele-kun was a bit nerve wracking. Tanaka: Keele is quite popular, isn't he! Hahaha! (*proud laughter) Nagasawa: Yes! Primula is the character that Keele-kun lovers can project onto the most. I did my best to portray Primula's emotions and how she loves the things she loves even if it isn't reciprocated. Tanaka: I see! The development staff actually chose to create Primula because they believed fans would feel closer to Keele by controlling a character who interacts with Keele closely rather than controlling Keele himself. That said, what is it about Primula that you want the players to pay close attention to? Nagasawa: Let's see, I would say the fact that Primula has a robust imagination... (laughs) There's this one scene that's really funny... So enjoy it! (laughs) It's the part where me and Hoshi-kun (Keele's actor) talk over each other! Tanaka: Oh man, overhearing the recording to that was an absolute blast! I laughed so hard. (*during recording, Tanaka-san burst out laughing to the point the other staff glared daggers into him to stop) Nagasawa: Hahaha, thank you. (laughs) There's also a scene where Primula lies when going around investigating all the rooms trying to find hints, and I tried to make that bit more lively too. (laughs) That was a lot of fun. Tanaka: You sure had a lot of fun voicing her, huh? That's great! (laughs) Could you give a message to the fans who are all eagerly awaiting the release of the game? Nagasawa: Of course. I'm very proud to have been casted for such a wonderful game. I did my best to voice Primula, to be worthy of the love all of the fans who love the Tales series and Keele-kun have. I hope you can all play the game and feel your love for Keele-kun reflected properly in it. Primula doesn't profess her love or anything, but I did my best in voicing her more romantic dialogue, so I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on my efforts in that regard. Tanaka: Hearing how passionately you voiced her for the sake of all the fans and Primula herself has me emotional! (*teary eyed) I could really feel that passion as I listened to your recording. Everyone, you better pay good attention to her work! (*doing his job as a PR clerk) To close things, could you talk a bit about your future work plans? Nagasawa: It's a while from now, but in March of 2002, I'll be producing my own public appearance. Tanaka: That's incredible! Nagasawa: This is actually my second time... (laughs) Tanaka: Ahahaha... (sweat) Have you decided on a location? Nagasawa: Yes! On March 22nd to the 24th of 2002, I'll be on stage at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre in Ikebukuro, so please come watch me! Tanaka: I'll be there for sure! Nagasawa: Be my guest. (laughs) Tanaka: Thank you so much for today! I'll definitely see your performance! Nagasawa: Thank you as well.

Comment from Tanaka:

During the recording, I kept thinking to myself how incredible Nagasawa-san was. When I interviewed her, it felt so obvious to me how much she understood both her character as well as the series as a whole. And she had so much fun with it to boot! I'm so moved! I witnessed most of the recording, and all of the other voice actors involved in this game seem to really hold a lot of love for the Tales series and had such a blast recording for it. This game will be such a joy to all the fans, so please try it for yourself. Phew! Talking to pretty people sure is nerve-wracking!

#seines translation #tales of eternia #tales of fandom #tales of fandom vol 1 #primula rosso

[duhragonball]

Neon Genesis Evangelion 13

I was looking forward to this, because it was a Ritsuko episode, but it kind of falls flat. At least she's nice to look at.

Let's get this part out of the way. The Eva pilot kids are participating in some weird experiment where they have to sit in simulations of their Eva units and they gotta be butt-ass naked the entire time. Ritsuko says some bullshit about how they're trying to eliminate any interference in their bodies' connection to the user-interface. So they had to get super-clean and I guess even wearing the plugsuits would introduce unknown variables to the experiment.

I mean, the real reason is to do another gag where the kids are made to feel uncomfortable for the audience's amusement. It's also to write them out of the story, because they'll spend the whole episode stuck inside their entry plugs, unable to leave because of an evacuation order and their nudity.

However, the experiment has to be aborted when some sort of unknown corrosion occurs and contaminants enter the purified water that the Eva simulators are soaking in. All efforts to remove the contamination fail, and when Ritsuko tries to burn it off the simulators, its protected by an AT field, which means...

It's an Angel. I'm not clear on whether it's been inside the NERV base for a long time, and it's only now just making its move, or whether it just got here. But check this out first.

While Admiral Clownshoes gets the report from Ritsuko, Gendo Ikari just rises up from the floor like Cody Rhodes on his magic stage elevator.

Except it looks like his lower body has been cropped off. I think he's supposed to be sitting at a desk that's rising up with him, but it's the same color as the wall, so it looks really, really bad.

Gendo immediately orders that the Evas should be launched. The real ones, not the simulators. His staff point out that they'll need the Evas to defeat the Angel that's infiltrated their base, but Gendo is worried that the Evas might be compromised by the contamination. At least this way, if they lose the base, the Evas will be safe outside.

As for the pilots, they were already ejected from the simulators when the crisis began. Here, let me skip to the end real quick.

Those are their entry plugs, which are just... floating in a lake for some reason? The kids spend the rest of the episode here. I guess they could climb out and swim to shore, but...

... they're nude, and also they have no idea what's going on, or that their Evas are also outside the base. I guess in theory they could mount up and fight the Angel as usual, but this isn't your typical Angel.

It's more like a microbial infection, or an algal bloom. Somehow, it's evolving, becoming hardier and more powerful as it makes its way through the base. Briefly, the gang notice that it might have an aversion to the ozone they use to sterilize the water, so they pump more ozone into try to kill it. That works... for a little while, until the Angel suddenly recovers and flourishes in the ozone-rich environment. It adapted to its new conditions.

I think when it made contact with Rei's Eva simulator, it learned... computers? I don't know a more sophisticated way to say that. Anyway, once that happened, the Angel started moving through NERV's... computer... stuff. Eventually it got into the MAGI.

All right, let's talk about the MAGI. These are a trio of supercomputers that run all of Tokyo-3. In particular, the MAGI function as the main OS for the NERV base, but they also serve as the de facto municipal government of the city. They have elections and human officials, but that's just a dog and pony show. The real decisions are made by AI.

When the Angel infects one of the three MAGI, Melchior, it attempts to trigger a self-destruct command, but the other two MAGI overrule it. So the Angel infects a second MAGI, Belshazzar, and Ritsuko manages to halt its advance by... well, I don't actually know how she does it.

This gives them two hours to figure out how to deal with this. Misato proposes destroying the MAGI before it's too late, but Ritsuko objects, since that would mean destroying their entire base. I don't know if she means that literally or metaphorically. I mean, the Angel is trying to destroy the base literally, so it sounds like Misato's plan would just be giving the Angel what it wants.

The problem is that the Angel keeps evolving to cope with any threat, so if they can't destroy the MAGI, then the only other alternative is to accelerate its evolution until it reaches a dead end. Uh, okay?

Eventually, the Angel might "choose to co-exist with the MAGI system", if its only alternative is to stagnate and die. I feel like we're making a lot of assumptions about what the Angel is and what its motivations are.

I just assumed these things are sentient life forms, an their attacks on NERV were deliberate acts against an enemy. This particular Angel infiltrated their base and immediately went into the heart of their operation--the computer that controls everything-- and tried to activate a self-destruct mechanism. It's not trying to communicate, and it's not an emergent consciousness. It seems to know exactly what's its doing, and it's trying to kill them, just like the last several Angels that made a beeline for this base.

My point here is that I don't think it has a strong survival instinct beyond completing its mission. Given the choice between co-existing with the MAGI and mutually assured destruction, I think the Angel would choose the latter. But maybe I've been misreading these things all along.

Ritsuko's proposal is to reprogram the third MAGI, Casper to... I don't even know. She's going to do something to it. Then they'll allow the Angel to contaminate that MAGI as well, and whichever one is faster will win. If the Angel can take control of all three MAGI, it can trigger the self-destruct, so unless Casper wins, they all die.

So Ritsuko crawls inside of Casper's... uh... computer junk, to make the necessary changes to its program. Inside, they find a bunch of handwritten developer notes, which supposedly will help them reprogram this thing even faster. Wouldn't these notes have been more helpful on the outside of the computer? I get that they were going for a particular visual here, but I'm really having a hard time keeping up.

While Ritsuko works, Misato asks her about the MAGI, which... okay, this is a huge pet peeve of mine, where I'm trying to fix some complicated piece of equipment, and someone tries to make idle conversation while I need to concentrate on what I'm doing. And this is a hundred times worse than that, because Ritsuko's on the clock, and when the clock runs out, they all die.

But Ritsuko plays along, so either she's just that good at multi-tasking, or she's too polite to object. Anyway, her mother was the one who invented the MAGI technology, and she imprinted her own personality into its systems. Ritsuko says her mom set them up to represent three aspects of her personality: Scientists, mother, and woman. Ritsuko always respected her mother as a scientist, and she could never relate to her as a mother, but she hated her as a woman. Okay?

Basically, Ritsuko didn't like her mom much, but she feels a special connection with the MAGI anyway, because they carry her mother's personality and legacy. It's a lot like the deal with Misato and her dad, or Shinji with his dad. Is this a theme, or did the writers just only have the one idea?

It's a good thing Ritsuko is so hot, or this episode would be a total mess. She does whatever she does, and it works, but with less than a second to spare. The Angel is... gone? They don't really get into that, but it doesn't explode like all the others, and the contamination is eliminated, so I don't know what exactly happened to it. Maybe it really is co-existing with the MAGI system.

Oh, wow, I'm out of episode. This was the pits.

A huge chunk of this one was just technobabble, which works pretty well on a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation, but not on an anime like this, which relies on flashy visuals instead of live actors. The problem is fairly simple: An Angel got in their base and tried to hack the supercomputer. But the solution is utter gobbledygook. I have no idea what they did to fix it, or even whether the Angel was alive or dead afterward.

I'm reminded a lot of the TNG episode "Final Mission". It's about Wesley Crusher's last day on the Enterprise before he goes to Starfleet Academy, and he, Captain Picard, and a dirtbag shuttle pilot get marooned on a desert planet. Picard is injured and the pilot gets killed, so it's up to Wesley to save Picard from some weird energy sentry that's preventing them from getting fresh water. Wesley figures it out, but the climax of the episode is just him tapping buttons on his tricorder until the sentry finally just... goes away.

It's a real letdown, because the rest of the episode was really good. The problem is that normally when they solve a problem on Star Trek, you have one of the crew explain the solution to the others, and they mull it over and eventually agree to a plan. But in "Final Mission", Wesley's got no one to talk to. Picard's unconscious and Dirgo's dead, and the Enterprise hasn't found them yet. So he's stuck in the unfortunate position of having to come up with this clever solution with his tricorder, but never getting the chance to tell anyone how he did it.

A good counterexample to this is "The Enemy", where Geordi La Forge is marooned on a planet with a hostile Romulan, and they have to work together to track a homing beacon to escape. It's much more effective, because it's two characters in a collaboration, so they have to explain what they're doing. Geordi has a tricorder and his VISOR, but the planet's environment has messed up his brain to where he can't use the VISOR, and his tricorder isn't sensitive to the beacon. So the Romulan suggests he connect them together. Good idea, but Geordi can't do it because he can't see, so the Romulan does it while Geordi talks him through the procedure.

That's not what we get in NGE 13. The Angel contaminates the base, and you have a lot of panicky dialogue and characters giving status updates and issuing orders, but none of it means anything.

"Reroute the main server into the backup neurohub!" "Disengage Pipe #6!" "It's entered the Matthew vinculum! Heading for Mark, now Luke! Isolate the John vinculum, quickly!" "Execute protocols A, F, and 37." "Shut off the frammistat and bring the Longius Introspection online." "But sir...!" "To hell with the safety checks, there's no time!"

You can kind of get away with this stuff, but there has to be a balance. Technobabble is for aesthetic purposes, to establish that it's science fiction. At some point you gotta come up for air and fill in your audience on the stakes. Let them know what the problem is and what obstacles the characters need to overcome to fix it. Otherwise you're just showing people typing on computers until the alarms switch off.

The biggest gripe I have with this episode is that Ritsuko's plan worked perfectly. There was zero tension or conflict to any of it. The alternative--destroying the MAGI, as Misato proposed-- was apparently so unthinkable that it barely got any traction. So Ritsuko's plan was the only option. Ritsuko herself had no problem implementing the plan. It would have been nice if she felt some sort of inner turmoil over this. Like, maybe she could have been worried that she wasn't good enough to pull this off. Maybe she had some unpleasant memory of her mother inside Casper's inner workings, so she just has an aversion to crawling back inside. Anything, as long as it's more than just sitting inside a computer and typing on another computer.

Well, at least she looks good doing it.

#neon genesis evangelion #2024ngeliveblog #shinji ikari #rei ayanami #asuka langley soryu #gendo ikari #clownshoes #misato katsuragi #ritsuko akagi

[zzmeowvx]

intro!! (￣ω￣)

call me nicole or nic, i wont be giving out my real or full name out for personal reasons ^_^

im a minor but im fine with adults being on my page but please dont be really weird that shits creepy as hell

im obsessed with bungo stray dogs and neon genesis evangelion its a problem…

this blog may be triggering to other people as it involves ed talk, sh, and vents (reporting doesnt do shit and just makes me not have a safe place at all ^^)

(this blog isnt all just about vents sometimes i will post art or ranting stuff about my life)

#intro post #sh tumblr #ed tmblr #ed twt #safe place #i want to cvt #🕯️as a feather #4nor3xia #ranting #tw s3lf harm

[digital-chance]

Heyo there! Ask incoming!

Tell me about some inspirations for you original works, whether those be conscious "I need something like this in my story" inspirations, or ones where you've realised later, "Oh this probably influenced my stuff now that I think about it".

I love to hear about what things inspire others.

Sorry for taking so long to respond! This is such a good ask and I want to talk about all my wips, but I'll just pick one.

Nova Futurum was inspired by many things. Directly, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Ghost in the Shell, and mechas like from Neon Genesis Evangelion. After some thought, some stuff from Blade Runner 2049, Akira, and Minority Report (2002). There is also this y2k Digimon movie that is so fucking cool that I love and it really inspired me from a young age. Like it might not have been amazing but I still liked it and it influenced me so idgaf.

It's also directly inspired by a different one of my works which is an original OC species called Mechangels. I really like that work a lot but it's on the backburner for now.

I've mentioned this before but another source of direct inspiration for Nova Futurum is the Kowloon Walled City and the culture that was built after stacking buildings so close together and maximizing the amount of space being used. I know a lot of people are inspired by the same city and get orientalist but I do not intend to take that route. Nova Futurum is American and it's based on the idea of "how can America get even worse?" and the like.

I'm such a fucking nerd about cyberpunk media, especially cyberpunk anime, which is a bit funny because I haven't seen a lot, just some. But what I've seen i've thoroughly enjoyed. I'll take any cyberpunk media recommendations, ofc, but I don't guarantee any timeliness about when I watch/read it.

;// nova futurum tag list: @dru-reads-writeblr @another-white-void @outpost51 @zeenimf / contact me to + or - from list

#answered #wip: nova futurum #nova futurum #my worldbuilding #my writing #me #writeblr

[honoka-marierose]

SEGA is reportedly developing new Panzer Dragoon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sakura Wars (Sakura Taisen) games, according to new report. All three of these franchises first saw their release on the SEGA Saturn in Japan, with Neon Genesis Evangelion having received its very first video game adaptation on the platform.

SEGA’s revival projects for Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, and Streets of Rage: Revolution quickly went viral after the announcement at The Game Awards 2023. Several trademarks were filed just one week after the event, giving fans hope for even more revivals. Classic SEGA Saturn titles appear to be in the running for revivals and new entries as well.

New Panzer Dragoon, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sakura Wars Games at SEGA

Insider Gaming’s new report suggests that new Panzer Dragoon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sakura Wars games are currently in early stages of development. Two other games have been greenlit as well, but these titles were not specified. This should be considered a rumor for now, but this could also be a very promising sign of new SEGA projects to come.

Panzer Dragoon first launched on March 10, 1995 for the SEGA Saturn in Japan. One year later, the first Neon Genesis Evangelion video game adaptation launched on March 1, 1996 on the same platform. The original Sakura Taisen game released on September 27, 1996 for the SEGA Saturn.

Lastly, here’s an overview of the confirmed SEGA revivals in development:

Crazy Taxi – Innovative & Fresh Style Driving Action! Cheerful feeling of freedom x Fusion of nature and city. Peel out the new stage of Crazy City!

Jet Set Radio – “Counter-Culture”. Tokyo Street Open World: Experience the “rebellion” movement that feels free in a suffocating society. Make friends, increase your fans, and create a movement!

Shinobi – Slay the enemies in the silence of the moment. Run through the world of Shinobi full of monsters and ninja actions. Grab Oborozuki, the legendary sword, and slay evil once more. Your clan and the world are counting on you.

Golden Axe – Warriors arise to subdue the demons! Defeat your enemies with a variety of attacks with swords and magic! The legendary story about the battle axe, “Golden Axe” is about to begin!

Streets of Rage: Revolution – Beloved side-scrolling beat ’em up action series! Take control of one of the ex-officers and make the city a place where people no longer have to walk the “Streets of Rage”.

#sega #sega sammy #sega of japan #sega of america #panzer dragoon #neon genesis evangelion #sakura wars #sega saturn #crazy taxi #jet set radio #shinobi #golden axe #streets of rage #streets of rage revolution

[comfortfoodcontent]

Newtype Magazine piece on the PS3's Misato Katsuragi's Reporting Plan, which was an app where a virtual Misato voiced by Kotono Mitsuishi hung out with you & read you the latest news from the Mainichi Newspapers. You could customize her outfit, hair or location. I desperately wish this was still a thing and I could access it.  Art by Hidenori Matsubara

#newtype #newtype magazine #sony #playstation #playstation 3 #ps3 #evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #anime #hidenori matsubara #misato #misato katsuragi #misato katsuragi reporting plan

[samasmith23]

Evangelion: You Can (Not) Marathon — (Part 14)

Neon Genesis Evangelion, “Episode 14: Seele, Throne of Souls/WEAVING A STORY”

Continuing my Evangelion re-watch marathon with NGE, “Episode 14: Seele, Throne of Souls/WEAVING A STORY” For my thoughts on the previous episode, click the link to the post below:

We’re now officially halfway through the original 26-episode Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series here at Episode 14, which similar to Episodes 7 & 10 beforehand is an incredibly polarizing episode among fans & critics. This divisive response primarily stems from the fact that Episode 14 is divided into two halves. Essentially, the first half of the episode is predominantly a glorified in-universe clip-show recapping all of the previous Angel battles throughout the series so far, whereas the second half is entirely new material. While I can certainly understand why this kind of structure is jarring and off-putting for a lot of viewers, I not only feel that Episode 14 handles the clip-show format a lot better than the majority of other shows do, but this is an incredibly interesting and important episode for the series overall since it serves as a major turning point for the series’ narrative & tone as a whole! 

As countless other viewers have noted, NGE is simultaneously famous & infamous within the anime community due to behind-the-scenes production issues that significantly altered the look & feel of the series as it progressed. In particular, I’ve heard most critics characterize the show initially beginning as a somewhat conventional monster-of-the-week giant mecha anime, but that halfway through production due to a combination of increasing financial troubles for Studio Gainax and the series’ creator Hideaki Anno experiencing a severe depressive episode, EVA’s second-half became increasingly psychoanalytical and introspective rather than action-oriented. While these arguments are not without merit, I personally feel that it is a lot more complicated than that since as I’ve discussed throughout this marathon so far, NGE has functioned as an incredibly unconventional series that actively interrogates and deconstructs the tropes of the mecha genre with incredibly nuanced characters and subtle attention to detail. What changed in my opinion, however, is that these deconstructionist elements became increasingly more evident in the series’ later half due to Anno’s pre-existing depression worsening, as well as Gainax’s aforementioned financial woes derived from the 1989 collapse of Japan’s economic bubble plus some other outside factors that I’ll discuss in greater detail later on. It is also worth noting that while many critics cite Episode 16 as the official turning point in EVA’s production timeline, former Gainax employees such as American translator Michael House instead point to Episode 14. According to an archived 1998 Japanese Association of Translators interview posted on the website Gwern, House not only speculated that Anno’s fears of TV Tokyo censorship “especially [started] around Episode 14” in correlation with “the series’ first-run ratings increasing,” but also stated that, “Anno [realized] by the midpoint of production that the characters he’d created couldn’t bring the story to the end that he originally had in mind.”

There’s more behind-the-scenes trivia that I’ll discuss later on concerning specific elements of Episode 14’s plot & characters, but with that lengthy introduction out of the way let’s finally dig into the episode itself! 

Alright, I mentioned earlier that while the first half of this episode is essentially just a clip-show, I honestly really love the framing device Anno & crew utilize to recap the series’ events so far! The retelling of all the previous Angel attacks & subsequent battles is primarily conveyed through official reports & eyewitness accounts narrated by the series’ characters. 

For instance, the details concerning the 3rd Angel, Sachiel’s, fight with EVA Unit-01 are presented through both a “New Tokyo-3 Urban Combat” Interm Report by Misato and an essay by Toji. While Misato’s report about the damages caused by Unit-01’s berserker rampage is framed through the lens of a military de-briefing, Toji’s essay provides a much more personal recollection of the battle by commenting on his little sister being injured by Unit-01 (which correlates with Toji initially bullying Shinji in Episode 3).

It’s honestly a creative way of emphasizing the character’s contrasting perspectives of the battle through their militaristic and civilian roles respectively.

Additionally, this clip-show recap is notable for not only being the first time that each Angel’s official name is directly revealed within the series itself, but it also introduces the reoccurring motif of flashing text cards to convey relevant information, which becomes an important feature throughout the rest of the EVA going forward!

I like how the 4th Angel, Shamshel’s, attack is retold through a note written by Hikari since the civilian perspective of this specific Angel’s attack was originally presented back in Episode 3 through the eyes of Shinji’s male classmates, Toji & Kensuke. It’s not only nice to witness a different character’s perspective of past events, but it also allows for further commentary on societal gender norms since Hiraki describes “the guys acting like jerks as usual, like they were on a field trip,” regarding the students being generally in phases by Shamshel’s attack due to prior evacuation training. 

The fact that Hikari also describes “the girls being unafraid either” is also a nice touch in highlighting her general frustration with Toji & Kensuke’s obnoxiously boorish behavior, which heavily aligns with the patriarchal expectations of young Japanese boys (and in particular, Otaku…) that Anno actively critiques throughout EVA.

Also, I love the complete lack of background music during this half of the episode, since it helps enhance the documentary/interview style of this plot recap.

Interesting… not only did Shinji personally recollect the events of his & Rei’s battle with the 5th Angel, Ramiel, to Kensuke, but this serves as yet another example of Kensuke being surprisingly more observant than most of the other characters give him credit for. Despite his lack of direct interactions with Rei, based on Shinji’s descriptions of her Kensuke is easily able to deduce that not only does Rei “lack respect for her own existence,” unhesitant willingness to sacrifice herself for others in combat situations, but that her psychological struggles are “something much much more” than the mere pessimism demonstrated by the majority of 14-year-olds.

Oh dang! It’s here with the recap of EVA Unit-02’s battle with the 6th Angel, Gaghiel, that we get our first indication that this retelling of events is taking place in the present day during a conference meeting between Gendo & the Human Instrumentality Committee. Not only does the committee’s chairman, Keel Lorenz, go off script by pointing out that Gaghiel’s assault on the Pacific fleet “did not occur within accordance of our scenario,” but Gendo counters by arguing that “the result was within the projected parameters of, we can make the necessary adjustments!”

That interaction in particular effectively foreshadows the esoteric pre-determinist ideologies that heavily motivate the Human Instrumentality Committee’s overarching plans and actions. The fact that the committee not only expected the arrival of the Angels on specific dates but is deeply angered when said events go against protocol suggests that there is far more to Gendo’s supervisors than previously expected.

From a personal perspective, the revelation that the committee was not only more than just a simple collection of UN representatives overseeing NERV’s operations, but seemed to be deliberately predicting and planning when each Angel attack should occur took me by complete surprise on my first viewing!

Also, while the members of the Human Instrumentality Committee are normally portrayed as highly intelligent strategic planners with immense foresight and unlimited resources at their disposal, the fact that they didn’t consider the possibility of an Angel targeting the fleet transporting the frozen remains of their progenitor Adam feels uncharacteristically stupid on the committee’s part. Whoops…

Ah, so we finally get confirmation of which sunken city Asuka’s fight with Gaghiel took place over! Apparently, it was “Old Itoh.”

Huh… I’m curious as to which specific committee member’s nation the battleship fleet specifically belonged to. Judging by the fact that these concerns were dismissed by the yellow French member who visually resembles Spider-Man’s nemesis, the Vulture, and the voice is nowhere near as deep as that of the blue Russian member who resembles the Batman villain, the Penguin, I’m guessing it’s either the red British member or the green American member based on the sound of their voice…

Lol! I love how the first time we hear the voices of one of the EVA pilots themselves during this clip-show, it’s simply Shinji & Asuka screaming as they launch their synchronized dance-kick attack against the 7th Angel, Israfel!

Also, no second-hand recounting from NERV personnel or the pilot’s classmates for Israfel. Nor any commentary by Gendo or the Human Instrumentality Committee. Weird…

Nor is there any commentary from the other characters for Asuka’s magma battle with the 8th Angel, Sabdalphon! 

MAGMADIVER deserves greater respect than that darn it! I don’t care what anyone else says, that episode will always be an underrated gem and a personal favorite episode of mine!

Oh yeah, it wasn’t until the 9th Angel, Matarael’s, attack during the Tokyo-3 blackout that Rei’s Unit-00 was finally repaired! It probably got its pall-ate swap from orange to blue armor sometime off-screen between Episodes 6 & 11 then…

I love how the text cards emphasize the fact that the Matarael battle was the first time all 3 EVA Units were deployed into combat together!

Given that there wasn’t any secondary commentary for Matarael either, I’m guessing we won’t hear any for the 10th Angel, Sahaquiel, either…

But we do get some commentary regarding the 11th Angel, Ireul, from the previous episode, which the text cards not only describe as a, “Wild rumor of a direct invasion of NERV Headquarters,” but instead of having a visual retelling of the Angel’s hacking of the MAGI system, we get a final text card stating, “Human Instrumentality Committee special meeting convened,” before immediately transitioning the boardroom with Gendo and the 5 Committee members!

That’s honestly a clever method of ending the clip-show portion of the first half of the episode since it not only clarifies to the viewer that this entire recap of the series was an in-universe progress report of NERV’s battle with the Angels to the Human Instrumentality Committee, but it also expands upon Gendo’s shady behavior from the previous episode as he continues to deny and suppress information of Ireul’s infiltration of NERV HQ since it violates the committee’s preordained schedule of events!

Oh dang! Gendo’s got some serious guts lying about Ireul’s invasion directly in the faces of the committee members! Especially since the yellow French member immediately warns him that such actions are “punishable by death!”

I wonder if the UN is aware of the committee being granted authorization to carry out death penalties. I mean, I know the committee itself is actually part of a secret organization with far more power and influence than the United Nations, but that still can’t look good under international human rights watchdogs. Or do those not exist anymore in a post-Second Impact world?

I’m guessing that Gendo personally instructed Ritsuko to eliminate all of the MAGI’s data pertaining to Ireul’s hacking of the system. I can only imagine how time-consuming and exhaustive that must have been for poor Ritsuko!

That blue Russian committee member is certainly one smart cookie! He clearly sees through Gendo’s act and isn’t putting up with his bullcrap!

Also, apparently the committee was expecting an Angel to infiltrate NERV HQ at some point in the future, but Ireul simply arrived too early and jeopardized their “scenario.” Definitely suspicious… 

Oh boy, Gendo just name-dropped the Dead Sea Scrolls, stating that NERV’s operations are being conducted in accordance to the specific text of those mysterious documents! The Dead Sea Scrolls are a simultaneously crucial and ambiguous cornerstone of EVA’s world-building and mythology! 

In contrast to the real-life Dead Sea Scrolls, which are ancient Hebrew & Aramaic manuscripts of the Old Testament of the Bible originally buried in Qumran on the Dead Sea’s northwestern cave network before being uncovered by archaeologists in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls in the EVA universe additionally function as instruction manuals providing detailed descriptions about the true nature and origins of humanity, the Angels, Adam & Lilith, and the Lance of Longinus.

This interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls being extraterrestrial in nature is heavily rooted in then-contemporary speculation and rumors about the contents of the real-life Dead Sea Scrolls, which according to the EVA Geeks Wiki, were “classified at the time of Evangelion’s production [during the mid-90s, but] have since been made available to the public.”

Also, it’s worth noting that the only visual representation that’s provided for the Dead Sea Scrolls throughout the entire original anime is from the concluding flashing image during the iconic “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” opening credits, which further emphasizes the ambiguity & intrigue surrounding these documents!

The first half of the episode then concludes with Chairman Keel warning Gendo to not further deviate from the committee’s scenario before Gendo replies with the ominous words, “I understand. Everything is proceeding according to SEELE’s plan…”

And how appropriately fitting that immediately following Gendo’s name-dropping of SEELE (which is the series’ first official reference to the Human Instrumentality Committee’s true identity) the scene then cuts to the episode’s first title card, “SEELE, Throne of Souls!” 

Normally the first title card is shown much earlier in the episode, usually after the first scene, but I love how here in Episode 14 said-card was delayed until the commercial break right before the second title card! It’s such an effective method of building suspense and not spoiling the mystery for the viewer!

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the famous Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #121 also intentionally held off revealing its title, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” until the very last page of the issue!

I absolutely adore it! 

So it is here at the halfway point/commercial break that I want to dedicate some time to discussing some of the fan misconceptions and potential behind-the-scenes influences for the portrayal of SEELE in the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series & The End of Evangelion movie. It is worth noting that information surrounding the mysterious organization overseeing NERV is left incredibly vague and sparse throughout the anime itself, which has led to different interpretations of both the organization’s true purpose and the duration of its existence. For instance, while it is heavily implied in the anime that SEELE has been around since at least the conclusion of World War II (and it is confirmed that they were the corporate sponsors behind the doomed 2000 Katsuragi Antarctica Expedition which tragically resulted in the Second Impact…), it is implied that SEELE has existed for much longer in both the official manga adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto as well as the “Classified Information” bonus material from the Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 Playstation 2 game from 2003. In Sadamoto’s manga, Kaji informs Shinji of the existence of SEELE which he refers to as, “A secret society [that] some people think [has] been running the world for hundreds… thousands of years,” which is further reinforced by the PS2 game’s Classified Information describing SEELE as, “An esoteric secret society born during the medieval Dark Ages and originally a religious order. Slowly but surely, they extended their influence, until at last they crushed the final forces of opposition in the mid-20th century and became a latent power with covert rule over human society.”

These descriptions of SEELE are not entirely reliable however, since not only does Sadamoto’s manga heavily deviate from Anno’s original version of EVA in regards to several important plot points and character details, but according to the EVAGeeks Wiki page for the NGE 2 video game, the data files “should be considered  ‘second-tier’ or ‘third-tier’ cannon” since they were based primarily on interviews between the game’s developers and Anno himself. Nevertheless, these elements of SEELE’s characterization have in recent years led to a small but vocal minority of Western EVA fans arguing that Anno was directly inspired by antisemitic conspiracy theories. Most notably, in 2018 Tumblr blogger QMisato posted a thread that openly accused “NGE [of borrowing] from the [antisemitic forgery], ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’”

Personally, however, I feel that these criticisms largely miss the forest for the trees. While it is undeniably important to identify and criticize antisemitic dog-whistling within popular media, I feel that unlike more infamous examples such as the Goblins from Harry Potter (who were not only characterized as hooked-nosed bankers in the original novels & films but directly played into the dangerous antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theory in last year’s Hogwarts Legacy video game; even the original European goblin folklore that series author & notorious transphobe JK Rowling drew inspiration from were heavily antisemitic as well…), the criticisms against SEELE leveled by individuals like QMisato conveniently ignore or overlook the vital Japanese cultural context in which Evangelion was originally produced in. After having conducted extensive research, I feel that Anno was more likely inspired by entirely different sources while conceiving SEELE. 

The first potential inspiration for SEELE is the book Ai to Gensou no Fascism (roughly translated to “Fascism of Love and Illusion”), by famed Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami. I’ve briefly referenced Fascism of Love and Illusion in prior posts for this marathon, but it is worth reiterating that Anno has stated in multiple interviews that Murakami’s works have served as a major inspiration for his body of work, since in addition to Evangelion his live-action directorial debut, 1998’s Love & Pop, was an adaptation of another Murakami’s novels, Topaz II. In addition to the names of Shinji’s classmates, Toji Suzahara & Kensuke Aida, being directly lifted from Fascism of Love and Illusion, the EvaGeeks Wiki article “Investigation of Love and Fantasy” provides both a plot synopsis for the book as well as its similarities to NGE.

According to the article: "[Murakami’s novel] depicts the ‘activities’ of the ‘Hunting Company,’ a political association that thoroughly rejects the weak and weak democracy and aims to establish a dictatorial and fascist society. The story is set in Japan, which is in the midst of a crisis of global depression and a sense of extreme stagnation, and the political organization ‘Hunting Company’ engages in both open and closed conspiracy, violence, and terrorism.”

Based on this description, one can draw parallels between Murakami’s Hunting Company and Anno’s SEELE, since the latter also engages in “open and closed [conspiracies]” in the middle of a global crisis, seeking to assimilate all human souls into a collective whole through Third Impact due to their rejection of the “extreme sense of stagnation” of humanity. These similarities are further reinforced by SEELE’s conflict with Gendo Ikari who seeks to initiate his own version of Human Instrumentality outside of SEELE’s strictly preordained vision, which heavily mirrors “the Hunting Company's plots and sabotage [being] carried out according to carefully crafted scenarios.”

Anno’s second potential influence for SEELE can be traced back to then-unforeseen tragic real-world events which significantly altered the overall trajectory of NGE’s storyline and production during its second half. Specifically on March 20, 1995, Tokyo experienced a deadly terrorist attack in which five members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, released sarin gas into the city’s subway systems, consequently resulting in the deaths of 12 people and the injuring of 60,000 more in the process. Since these events occurred before the original Japanese broadcast release of NGE’s pilot episode on October 4, 1995, and the general production length for a single 24-minute episode of TV animation is usually approximately 9-months total, this means that several episodes of EVA were likely already fully animated around the time the Sarin Gas Attacks occurred. In her essay discussing NGE Episodes 13 through 16 for the website Notebook Column, writer Willow Catelyn Maclay states that due to “the attacks [hewing] too closely to a plot that Evangelion was covering, Anno feared censorship from the Japanese government and had to scrap initial plans for the back half of the television show.”

Essentially the Sarin Gas Attacks, combined with Anno’s deteriorating mental health and Gainax’s dwindling financial resources, heavily influenced the massive changes and rewrites of Evangelion’s plot from Episode 16 onwards. 

As for how the Sarin Gas Attack’s perpetrator Aum Shinrikyo specifically relates to SEELE, it is worth noting that according to the Wikipedia page for Aum, its founder Shoko Asahara, established the doomsday cult around “idiosyncratic interpretations of elements of early Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Hinduism [and] Christian millennialist ideas” with the intent of restoring “original Buddhism” to Japan. Furthermore, scholars and terrorism experts have acknowledged the antisemitic and conspiratorial of Asahara. For instance, Dr. Ely Kamron's special report "The Anti-Semitism of Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo: A Dangerous Revival" highlights how in addition to Ashahra's martyr complex as a self-described “one and only person who has acquired supreme truth,” in 1992 the cult leader promoted the idea that "a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, the British royal family and rival Japanese religions, would launch a third world war."

These antisemitic elements of Aum's ideology are further elaborated on by Roten Kowner, whose essay “On Symbolic Antisemitism: Or the Success of the Protocols in Japan and its Consequences,” states that public intrigue with conspiracy theories about occultism and doomsday prophecies throughout the 1980s could be traced back to early publications of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Japan. Furthermore, these dangerous beliefs were demographically popular among Otaku, whom Kowner describes as “young introverted males obsessed with computer games and perverse animation, who are often sexually frustrated (8).” A demographic that Hideaki Anno was both a prominent member of and becoming increasingly introspective & critical towards during the mid-90s both before and following the Sarin Gas Attacks.

The influence of Aum on Evangelion’s troubled production following the 1995 terrorist attack was further elaborated on by Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma. Specifically, in the 1998 interview "TOWARDS A CARTOGRAPHY OF JAPANESE ANIME" conducted by Krystian Woznicki for BLIMP Filmmagazine, Azuma not only stated that Anno was vocally critical of Aum Shinrikyo because “they lost any contact with reality,” interpreted NGE as “an intrinsic critique of Aum.”

There is certainly room for interpreting SEELE as a pastiche of Aum, since not only is SEELE also a doomsday cult that heavily appropriates the imagery and mythology of various world religions (including Christianity…) as part of their mission to restore humanity through Third Impact, but even their subsidiary/rival Gendo tries to transform himself into a Christ/God figure through grafting Adam’s flesh onto his hand to try and carry out his separate version of Human Instrumentality. This is supported by the article “After Aum: Coming to terms with the Aum Shinrikyo Tragedy Through Narrative,” which compares SEELE’S overarching plan to “bringing about the apocalypse and human singularity through quasi-religious doctrine” to Aum’s real-life doomsday prophecizing of “[transforming] human anxiety and the end of human life into the hope of rebirth.”

Heck, even the official Human Instrumentality Project document (left) that briefly flashes on-screen in NGE Episode 2 during the first meeting between SEELE and Gendo bears an almost identical resemblance to a real-life document published by Aum Shinrikyo (right):

So overall, I would personally argue that the fictional Hunting Company from Ryu Murakami’s Fascism of Love and Illusion and the real-life doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo are the most likely candidates for Anno’s inspirations for SEELE in EVA, rather than outright antisemitic conspiracy theories like QMisato suggested in his Tumblr post. But this behind-the-scenes trivia side-tangent has gone on for long enough already, and I’ve still got the remaining non-clip-show half of NGE Episode 14 to analyze & dissect. I’ll reserve future discussions about NGE’s production troubles for another time!

Huh… well this is strange. For whatever reason my Blu-ray edition of the classic dub of NGE has this weird screech sound effect just as Rei begins to pontificate about the nature of her existence poetically. I checked and this weird sound isn’t present on the Japanese audio track, and I don’t recall it from my original DVD copy…

Must be a minor error specific to this disc since this issue doesn’t occur anywhere else on Disc 8 for my boxset…

Speaking of Rei’s poem though… oh boy! Now we’re getting into the real meat of psychoanalysis that EVA is well-known for!

As I mentioned before, while many people cite Episode 16 as the moment when NGE’s narrative became increasingly introspective since that episode notably transports Shinji to a psychedelic and trippy inner-mindscape setting wherein he has a mental back-&-forth interrogation with himself, interrogating the very essence of his being. However, that’s not entirely accurate since Rei undergoes a similar experience here in Episode 14 while sitting inside of the Entry Plug for EVA Unit-01.

While this mental monologue segment is quite notable for being the first instance of Anno having his characters directly engage in psychoanalytic, it is also interesting that he specifically chose to have Rei be the first instance of this recurring motif throughout the series. As I mentioned back in my Episode 6 post, out of all the characters in EVA’s cast Anno was the least interested in Rei’s development since he felt that he didn’t understand her character and felt he had already concluded her story arc by the end of said-episode. However, it was around the time of Episode 14’s development (which was allegedly concurrent with Episode 16’s production) that Anno’s depression got more severe, and he stated in the November 1996 edition of Newtype magazine that, “I wrote about myself. My friend lent me a book on psychological illness and this gave me a shock, as if I finally found what I needed to say.”

These elements are on full display with Rei’s monologue here since her introspective analysis of both her sense of individuality and intrapersonal relationships with others underscore the same kind of energy that Anno engaged in concerning his self-critiquing of the otaku subculture that he had deeply rooted himself in.

But let’s analyze the individual stanzas of Rei’s poem itself and the potential underlying meanings about her character that can be derived from them.

Mountains… Heavy are the mountains. And that changes with the passage of time. 

Sky... Blue sky. What your eyes can't see. What your eyes can see.

One can apply Rei’s commentary about the ongoing cycle of change and impermanence for seemingly strong & rigid stone objects (even the tallest & sturdiest mountains are susceptible to weathering, erosion, and plate tectonics) to the idea that life on planet Earth, and by extension human existence, is inherently fragile & insignificant. 

A notion that is reinforced by Rei immediately contrasting the terrestrial mountains against the celestial sky. From an Abrahamic theological perspective, the sky is often representative of the Heavens, or a plane of existence that is unchanging and borderline incomprehensible to the mere minds of mortals. This is reflective of how Gendo & SEELE seek to evolve humanity to a higher plane of existence comparable to that of God and his Angels.

The Sun... Only one.

Water... It is agreeable. Commander Ikari.

The sun is the center of our solar system allowing for the existence of all life on Earth. Similarly, water is a substance that is also vital for the ethe continued existence of life. Since these analogies are immediately followed by Rei’s referencing of Gendo, whom she was indoctrinated to view as a father figure, one can interpret Rei as describing Gendo as the sun or center of her universe, and that just like how humans require water to survive, Rei misguidedly believes that her connection with Gendo is what fuels her existence. 

Additionally, water symbolism also plays a key role concerning Rei’s associations with humanity’s Seed of Life, Lilith, and her Black Moon.

Flowers... So many the same... so many without purpose.

While one can easily discern flowers to be a metaphor for the rest of EVA’s cast whom Rei recognizes as living empty and hollow existences without clear meaning, this stanza can also serve as foreshadowing to the Dummy Plug Plant which utilizes soulless Rei Ayanami clones to fuel its existence.

Sky... sky of red. Red the color. The color I hate.

The liquid flows. The drips ripples and pours.

Blood... The scent of blood of a woman who does not bleed.

From the red soil, the humans come.

Oh boy, there’s certainly a lot to unpack with this set of stanzas! In addition to the red sky imagery directly contrasts with the earlier more ambiguous visuals of a blue sky, Rei not only declares her contempt for the sight and scent of blood, but her words are juxtaposed against visuals from previous episodes of Rei’s blood on Shinji’s hand, the red cooling liquid in EVA Unit-01’s holding pen, and the medical glasses in Rei’s apartment bedroom. These stanzas and imagery not only communicate Rei’s surface-level physical & psychological trauma when she was injured during EVA Unit-00’s test activation and was nearly forced to pilot Unit-01 while still in critical condition to fight Sachiel, but they are also illustrative of Rei’s internalized fears concerning the nature of her true identity. 

While the image of EVA Unit-01 is clearly reflective of Rei’s status as a clone of Shinji’s late mother Yui Ikari, her line about the “blood of a woman who does not bleed” could also potentially refer to both her housing of Lilith’s soul. In addition to potentially inferring that Rei does not menstruate due to her physiology as a clone, it could also be a subtle reference to the fact that Lilith’s body in Terminal-Dogma has been completely bled dry of Liquid LCL for the EVA’s Entry-Plugs, LCL being the blood or primordial soup from which all human life originates from. An allusion that is reinforced by the proceeding stanza, “from the red soil, the humans come.”

Humans made by man and woman.

I will concede that this line is sadly outdated from a trans and non-binary perspective, since AMAB trans-women and NBs can still impregnate others, and AFAB trans-men and NBs can give birth.

Within the context of EVA’s lore however, this stanza could potentially serve as both a biblical reference to Adam & Eve as the father and mother of the human race (although that doesn’t make sense considering EVA’s humans are the children of Adam’s first wife, Lilith), as well as Freudian psychosexual theories concerning the relationship between children and their parents which are a thematic cornerstone of EVA’s overarching narrative.

City... A human creation.

Eva... A human creation as well.

What are humans? Are they creations of God?

Humans? That which is created by humans?

Oh boy, this series of stanzas is going into some serious “chicken-or-the-egg” territory here! In addition Rei’s line about Tokyo-3 functions as a visual callback to her cautionary speech from Episode 11 about technology operating as a crutch for humanity’s fears and limitations, these themes are expanded upon through Rei also referring to the Evangelions as “human creations” before asking whether or not humans or God are primarily responsible for the existence of other humans.

While these lines thematically harken NERV and SEELE initially conceiving the EVA’s as essentially manmade clones of God due to being made from the flesh of the Angel’s progenitor Adam, the fact that Rei asks this question over a still image of Unit-01 specifically, which was instead cloned from the severed bottom half of humanity’s progenitor, Lilith, meaning that Unit-01 is a human creation imitating God.

In essence, Rei’s words highlight here how humanity relies on technology in their struggles to attain an existence comparable to that of God, or in this case Adam and the Angels who were originally selected as the true inheritors of Earth.

And from a parental perspective, Rei’s line of “humans created by humans” additionally corresponds with the idea that a child can psychologically perceive their parents as gods since their individual existence was brought about by the sexual unification of a mother and father. 

Rei’s certainly delving into some Freudian territory with that one! Lol!

This is that which is mine. My life. My heart. I am a vessel for my thoughts.

The Entry-Plug. Throne of the Soul.

Oh dang! Rei directly name-drops a portion of of episode’s first title, “Seele, Throne of Souls!” 

This is appropriate considering that not only does SEELE refers to both the in-universe organization and the German phrase for “soul,” but the Entry-Plugs that are inserted into the EVA’s function as literal “thrones for the soul” since it is through a symbiotic bond with a human pilot that the EVA’s dormant soul becomes operative. 

From a metaphorical perspective however, the Entry-Plug can also refer to Rei’s life and heart, inferring that her personal “throne of the soul” is meant to refer to the collective body of her memories and feelings.

The fact that Rei’s reference to the “throne of the soul” is juxtaposed with the visual close-up of her eye from the “Cruel Angel’s Thesis” opening credits is reminiscent of how eyes are often interpreted as windows to an individual’s mind and soul.

This neatly segways into the next series of stanzas though…

Who is this? This is me.

Who am I? What am I? What am I? What am I? What am I?

I am I. This object that is, is myself.

That which forms me. It is the self that can be seen, and yet this is not like that which is myself.

These stanzas right here serve as the central thesis of Rei’s poem. Essentially, Rei is unsure of her personhood and reason for existing. This is reflected through both the repeated echoing of the phrases “Who am I” & “What am I,” but also through Rei’s aforementioned glance providing the viewer iconic and striking visual of a line of hundreds of Rei’s standing in perfect unison with each other

Rei’s inability to truly define herself is further reinforced through the floating silhouette of her body across the orange sunlit sky (which directly parallels imagery from the opening credits with Shinji looking at Rei & Asuka’s floating silhouettes across a bright blue sky). Plus, Rei’s description of the blank silhouette being the version of Rei that others perceive but is opposed to how she perceives herself is terrifyingly relatable to me as an individual with OCD and anxiety (I often worry about how others perceive me while struggling to figure out what I want to do with my life).

Honestly, I’m a massive sucker for creatively abstract psychological imagery like this!

Also, I wonder if Rian Johnson was directly inspired by the visual of hundreds of Rei’s standing together in a line for the cave Force-vision scene from Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It would make sense considering that Rey in that scene is also attempting to define her existence through her misguided efforts to discover her true parentage, only to be told that her parents are nobody through the two merging silhouettes that form herself in the mirror at the end of the line of hundreds of Reys!

Also also, what an astonishing coincidence that two characters named Rei (albeit spelled differently…), had very similar psychological visions!

A strange feeling. My body feels as if it is melting.

I can no longer see myself. My form, my shape fades from view.

Awareness dawns of someone who is not me.

Who is there, beyond me here?

In addition to these stanzas still correlating with the image of the floating Rei, Rei’s lines about her “awareness dawning of someone who is not [her]”  further foreshadow that this monologue is occurring inside of the Entry-Plug for EVA Unit-01.

This is not only indicative of Rei coming into contact with the soul of Yui dwelling inside of Unit-01, but it also highlights that while Rei’s body is cloned from Yui, her soul is entirely different from Yui’s since Rei is the reincarnation of Lilith.

Also, Rei’s line that her “body feels as if it is melting” inside of the Entry-Plug foreshadows Shinji’s near-death experience later completely fusing with the Liquid LCL inside of Unit-01 for the majority of Episode 20, which itself serves as a precursor for Human Instrumentality in The End of Evangelion.

Additionally, Rei’s questioning of who lies “beyond [her] here” could refer to not just Yui’s soul inside of Unit-01, but also to the relationships which help define Rei’s existence:

Shinji?

This person I know, Major Katsuragi.

Dr. Akagi.

People, I call classmates.

The pilot of Unit-02.

Commander Ikari?

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

Alright! This last series of stanzas for Rei’s poem are important for understanding the exact nature of the relationships that Rei possesses with the other characters in the series so far. 

Despite questioning the visual of Shinji smiling, Rei’s wording here could infer that she sees opportunity and hope in discovering potential meaning to her existence through Shinji since he was the first person to demonstrate legitimate concern for her well-being and encouraged her to emotionally open herself up. 

Conversely, the fact that Rei refers to Misato & Ritsuko only by their last names and job-rankings effectively highlights the formal and detached nature of her relationship with these two authority figures. 

Likewise, Rei neglects to mention the names of Kensuke, Toji, Hiraki, & Asuka by name, instead referring to the first three only as “classmates” while describing Asuka as the pilot Unit-02. Combined with the fact that Rei identifies these four simply as “people,” this indicates that Rei lacks any real meaningful connections with these specific individuals despite their recurring presence in her life. And even among these individuals with whom Rei has the closest connections, Asuka, is wholely antagonistic thus far, but Rei still doesn’t know how to process these feelings.

While Rei’s referencing of Gendo as “Commander Ikari” parallels her earlier referencing of Shinji as a question rather than a statement, she not only refers to Gendo as “commander” but his identifying feature is conveyed by his broken glasses instead of a face like the previous characters in the montage. This illustrates that Rei is beginning to question the authenticity of her relationship with Gendo, which was originally the sun & water of her personal universe…

And Rei’s poem concludes with the repetition of the question, “Who are you” over two images of EVA’s Unit-01’s exposed head and eyeball, as well as the close-up of Rei’s blood-red eyeball, indicating that she’s questioning the parts of being that are later revealed to be Yui Ikari & Lilith respectively. 

Whew! That was quite a lengthy analysis! I can’t remember the last time I dissected every single stanza of a poem with such precise detail! Woof…

Still… even though Anno described Rei as being the character that he was the least interested in fleshing out, he honestly has done a phenomenal job of utilizing Rei’s status as a complete enigma to develop her into one of EVA’s most muti-layered and interesting characters due to just how much introspective & thematic symbolism underlies her seemingly emotionless exterior!

But alas… we now officially exit Rei’s inner mindscape and return to the real world proper to find her sitting inside the Entry-Plug of EVA Unit-01 as part of a pilot interchangeability test!

I find it interesting that Rei describes Unit-01’s Entry Plug as “[Smelling] like Ikari.” Its almost as if she’s still contemplating the lingering awareness of Yui’s presence, but because Rei is unaware of precisely who Yui is and Yui is Shinji’s mother, she instead immediately associates the feeling with that of Shinji.

Also, Ritsuko’s assessment of Rei’s synchronization ratio in Unit-01 being practically identical to her synch ratio for Unit-00 further foreshadows her true nature as a clone of Yui!

Lol! Asuka being as confidently smug as usual when the data confirms that there aren’t any harmonics issues between herself & Unit-02! 

The way Tiffany Grant delivers the line, “Of course I’m normal,” cracks me up!

Huh… I like how Asuka questions why she isn’t being swapped with another pilot’s EVA Unit like Rei was with Shinji’s unit & vise-versa. While Misato simply chalks it up to Unit-02 potentially being “incompatible” with the other EVA’s, it is honestly not too far from the truth considering that both Units-00 & 01 share a piece of Yui Ikari’s essence (I’m still guessing that Unit-00’s soul is the first Rei clone later shown in the flashback from Episode 21…), whereas the soul inhabitting EVA Unit-02 is that of Asuka’s dead mother, Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu.

Also, this exchange hints at the cracks in Asuka’s superiority complex beginning to emerge, but she immediately suppresses them when Misato reassures her that, “We didn’t think that you’d want to pilot any EVA except yours.”

I love how Shinji’s reaction to his feeling inside Unit-00 directly mirrors and contrasts with Rei’s reaction inside of Unit-01. While Shinji describes Unit-00’s Entry-Plug as “[smelling] like Rei,” he can’t help but get a “weird” feeling inside while inside. Almost as if he’s subconsciously recognizing that the soul inhabiting this Unit simultaneously is and is not his mother, whereas Unit-01 is entirely his mother.

The fact that Shinji’s synch ratio is lower inside of Unit-00 only seems to reinforce my hypothesis!

Nice! The first explicit reference to the Dummy Plug system in NGE. While the Dummy Plugs were implied during the special harmonics test from the previous episode, this exchange between Ritsuko & Maya not only officially confirms that these unusual synchronization tests were all part of the development for the A.I.-operated backup Entry-Plugs, but Maya’s ethical concerns about these back-up plugs also effectively foreshadow the problems they will cause going forward!

I can’t help but find the wording of Ritsuko’s dismissal of Maya’s reservations here to be somewhat interesting: “People who develop too many principles will always have difficulty working among others. You’ll learn once you’ve gotten your hands dirty. You’ll see.”

Ritsuko’s specific usage of the word “dirty” here… while on a surface level, she could be referring to her direct involvement in NERV’s more shady and classified operations, could she also be hinting at her affair with Gendo as well?

Also, Maya truly is an innocent and pure-hearted soul among NERV’s staff. I honestly feel pretty bad for her knowing what I know the organization is secretly planning…

Oof… Asuka’s insulting comments, “Shinji’s missing his mama’s breast, does he like being in her womb or what?” while he’s inside Unit-00. Laying it on a bit thick there, aren’t ya Asuka?

Double oof… not only is the feeling of whiplash strong when Shinji’s suddenly experiences visions of all his past encounters with Rei, but that image of an eerily smiling naked Rei floating towards him in an empty black void as he states, “This feeling… impression… Rei! It’s hers!” Pure Grade-A nightmare fuel!

My personal theory is that while the initial flashes Shinji experienced were representative of the memories of the current Rei, known as “Rei II,” the creepy smiling Rei in the black void is meant to be the vengeful soul of the original Rei I whom we’ll later learn was brutally murdered by Ritsuko’s mother Naoko in Episode 21.

Also, I’m curious as to what exactly triggered Unit-00’s soul into a berserker state while synchronizing with Shinji. Could Rei I recognize some familiarity with Shinji, but was panicking due to the unfamiliarity of their bond due to it being derived from the mother-son bond between Yui & Shinji. A concept that is foreign to Rei I’s conscious mind since she was still a small child when Naoko killed her.

The fact that Ritsuko & Maya deduce that Unit-00 is trying to absorb Shinji into itself rather than rejecting his presence seems to back up my interpretation. Like Rei I’s soul is attempting to assimilate Shinji into herself in an attempt to understand and fill this empty void within her soul!

Also, while this scene of Unit-00 once again going berserk during a harmonics test and angrily punching the glass window of the control room could easily be dismissed as Anno & crew cutting corners and repeating animation due to Gainax’s declining budget, I feel that this scene effectively illustrates how NGE works around its limitations experimentally and thoughtfully! Specifically, Anno uses the recycled frames of Unit-00’s rampage to deliberately mirror the flashback scene from Episode 5 to further develop and foreshadow Rei’s tragic past. Similar to how Unit-00 was previously aiming its fists toward Ritsuko back in Episode 5, here in Episode 14 Unit-00 is punching toward Rei. Not only does this further hint that the soul inhabiting Unit-00 is that of Rei I, but it also suggests that in addition to harboring a violent grudge towards Ritsuko due to being strangled to death by Naoko, but also towards the current Rei II who replaced her.

This scene emphasizes Anno’s ability to advantageously utilize Gainax’s declining animation budget to visually communicate nuanced characterization. He truly is one of the most gifted and talented directors in the Anime industry! 

And even while being forced to recycle animation, Anno & crew still take the opportunity to draw new frames whenever possible. As is the case here, since instead of Unit-00 being forcibly frozen in place with Bakelite while punching the glass like it previously was in Episode 5, Unit-00 continues to jerk around before being shut down via computer. We don’t even see Shinji’s Entry-Plug getting violently ejected and rocketed across the room like we did with Rei’s beforehand!

Also, Rei II once again demonstrates her lack of fear of concern for her own safety as she just blankly stares at the glass while Unit-00 attempts to intrude, even blatantly ignoring Misato’s order to flee.

Oh boy! Even Misato can’t help but notice the similarities between Unit-00’s berserker rampages! But while Ritsuko denies there being any real connection between the two incidents, she can’t help but confirm her previous suspicions that the EVA was targeting her specifically (which contradicts both mine & Misato’s hypothesis that Unit-00 was instead “trying to kill Rei”…).

Lol! Not only is the audio gag of Shinji waking up in the hospital to a radio recording of a dog show is absolutely hilarious, but we get a continuation of the unfamiliar ceiling motif with Shinji stating to himself, “Again… I hate this ceiling,” since he’s already been in this room twice beforehand.

I love how Asuka continues to question being deliberately kept in the dark about the true nature of EVA Units-00 & 01, while also asking to herself, “Just what is the First Child?” Asuka almost feels like an audience surrogate in this episode…

Lol! Now I just want to watch Fuyutsuki in a Shogi tournament match with Shikamaru from Naruto!

Damn… Gendo’s pretty confident in his statement to Fuyutsuki that “[they] hold all the tiles, all the winds and dragons, [and that] there is nothing that [SEELE] can do.”

Yeah… I’d probably listen to Fuyutsuki’s advice. SEELE is among the LAST secret villain organizations that I’d want to piss off!

Nice callback to the first half of the episode with Gendo stating this time that “everything is going according to the scenario,” further building up Gendo’s distinctive vision for Human Instrumentality.

Fuyutsuki’s mental remark about Gendo being “too concerned about protecting Rei”…  I wonder exactly just how much Fuytsuki knows about the true nature of the two’s relationship. Because given some of the sexually abusive overtones that some other fans have derrived from Gendo & Rei’s interactions, I think smiling is an inappropriate facial expression for Fuyutsuki to be having right now…

Nice! The episode ends with the first onscreen appearance of the Lance of Longinus, which is the mysterious object that Gendo & Fuyutsuki retrieved from the ruins of Antarctica back in Episode 12! Since this post has already gone on for way too long, I’ll save my discussions for the trivia about the lance for next time, since we won’t discover until Episode 15 where Rei is transporting the lance to.

Also, the fact that Gendo mentions the lance regarding the “Adam project,” only seems to aid in some long-standing fan confusion concerning a specific plot point in NGE… which again, I’ll discuss in greater detail next time…

I will say though… this final shot of Rei walking down the darkly lit deeper into the bowels of NERV HQ is incredibly ominous and foreboding! What a perfect way to end this episode and pique interest for the next one!

So that was NGE, “Episode 14: Seele, Throne of Souls/WEAVING A STORY,” and whew! Remember how I said after my discussion post for Episode 13 that my analysis of Episode 14 would most likely be shorter due to the first half of it essentially being a clip-show? Oh boy howdy was I wrong in that department! While many fans & critics are dismissive of this episode due to the clip-show format of the episode’s first half, that feels unfair IMO since not only do Anno & crew effectively utilize said format and Gainax’s limited budget to creatively interweave an in-universe recollection of all the previous Angel battles from first and second-hand witness accounts (therefore making EVA’s universe feel much more organic and lived-in), but it also serves as a brilliant springboard for the official introduction of SEELE as an organization while foreshadowing their mysterious plans for Third Impact and Human Instrumentality. So yeah, while the first half of Episode 14 is a clip-show, it’s a very good clip-show IMO!

Even with the non-clip-show portion of the episode, there was a lot of meaningful material for me to analyze with Rei’s poem alone, which further develops Rei’s internalized struggles with her identity as well as organically introduces the more trippy and psychoanalytic elements of EVA’s storytelling that will become increasingly prevalent for the rest of the series going forward! Plus, this is the first Rei-centric episode since Episodes 5 & 6! Essentially, one could interpret Episode 14 as simultaneously being a re-cap/jumping-on-point as well as a teaser promoting new elements to the series’ overall format and tone! In that regard, it feels unfair to negatively dismiss Episode 14 as mere filler, since while it is far from my personal favorite in the series I’ve always had a strong level of respect and appreciation for how well it works within its limitations!

Next time it's Episode 15!

#Evangelion: You Can (Not) Marathon #neon genesis evangelion #evangelion #nge #eva #hideaki anno #gendo ikari #seele #human instrumentality committee #rei ayamani #ritsuko akagi #maya ibuki #misato katsuragi #shinji ikari #asuka langley soryu #fuyutsuki #90s anime #anime and manga #NERV #studio gainax #ryu murakami #fascism of love and illusion #cw: discussions of antisemitism #cw: discussion of cults #hiroki azuma #spider man #gwen stacy #star wars the last jedi #rey nobody #poetry

[thelastunison]

if you want to see my art, search for the tag #Bennett’s Drawings

Byf:

I frequently use the word ‘queer’ as an umbrella term for all lgbtqia+ identities and am an inclusionist. Exlusionists will be blocked.

I tag stuff with whatever I find may be triggering (or simply a squick) for many people. if there’s anything in particular you’d like to have tagged, tell me per asks or dms.

I very frequently reblog posts about social issues, mainly transphobia, racism, ableism and antisemitism. If you’re more interested in fandom-dedicated blogs this one may not be your cup of tea.

apart from the following disclaimer, I do not want to further involve myself in shipping discourse: As far as I’m concerned if an author or artist of any other kind can approach topics with the respect they deserve they can write about whatever they want. Skepticism towards the topic is important but doesn’t need to be spelled out literally in a work of art. One should trust that the reader can figure things out themselves. It's important to distinguish between narrator and author. Just because I may personally not be comfortable in consuming certain media doesn’t make it inherently morally wrong. The author’s blatant glorification and romanticisation of things such as (child) sexual abuse, incest, racism and ableism are things I will not tolerate. It’s an instant block if I see the latter in your works or attitude.

also I’m bad at keeping myself short sometimes 👍

DNF:

-If you’re under 16 years old, as is mentioned in my bio.

-This should be obvious already but terfs are not welcome here. Same applies if you’re a harry potter apologist.

-You discriminate against fat people

-You’re ableist towards psychotic, personality or dissociative disorders. Yes, this includes claiming that ‘narcissistic abuse’ is a real thing. It’s not. There’s no such thing as a mental disorder that makes you evil by default.

-don’t be a dickhead. Bullying other people simply because you think “they’re cringe” or whatever is an extremely pathetic move.

if there’s anything about the previously mentioned criteria that genuinely confuses you, you can,-politely-, ask me about it and I will try to give you a thorough answer. Generally speaking, it’s easier for me to explain matters concerning mental disorders and their reputation, as (clinical) psychology is my special interest. I refuse to interact with clearly mean-spirited attempts at stirring shit up apart from reporting and blocking users.

interests:

lots of them. Currently I’m mostly reblogging Jojo, Golden Kamuy and Disco Elysium stuff, with the occasional Breaking Bad, Revolutionary Girl Utena and Yakuza (as in Ryu Ga Gotoku) here and there. I also really like Signalis, Arcane, Witch Hat Atelier, Undertale and Deltarune, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mob Psycho 100, Hades, Ace Attorney and the original Frankenstein book. Of course, I look at my interests critically and do not support any bigotry expressed by them or their creators.