Do you remember last year's War of the Worlds? Me neither, but also, can you believe that movie came out in 2025? It's anniversary is on the 30th.
Come to think of it, July this year is boasting more than its fair share of anniverseries. There was America's 250th, for one — and, agruably more importantly, my 18th. What I'm most excited for, though, is the rerelease of End of Evangelion in theaters on the 22nd, coming 30 years after its debut.
In light of that, I thought it was finally time to rewatch Neon Genesis Evangelion and get myself hyped up. Of course, it's known for telling a nuanced and thematically complex story, but I didn't expect this — my second watch through — to give me much value beyond a refresh on the plot. Come Suser Todd, however, I had a dozen pages of notes on threads that I wanted to pull — on character, on symbolism, on pacing and style and XXX (seriously, expect more explorations of Evangelion in the future).
What enraptured me most, however, was the modern social commentary sewn into this decades-old series. Neon Genesis Evangelion very well could have been created today, given how topical its discussion of government mismanagement, AI, and climate change is. In comparison to a movie like War of the Worlds (2025) — which wanted to say a lot and ended up saying very little about nuanced issues like government surveillence — Evangelion strikes me as a case study in how to incorporate depth, breadth, and subtelty into social commentary.
Depth: Government Incompetence
I don't think it's a stretch to say that Evangelion is rooted by its strong, nuanced characters. The main cast remains culturally relavant and recognizable, and every ending that the franchise has seen is a deep dive into their psychology.
Most of these characters are, at their core, lonely people — broken by some combination of mommy and daddy issues. These characters also share an association with NERV. Outsiders — like the class representative and Kensuke — obviously have their own struggles, but have much healthier relationships with them, as demonstrated by their willingness to be vulnerable when appropriate and a lack of overcompensation in personality traits. Kaiji occupies a kind of middle-ground because he is only associated with NERV in an investigative capacity; he also struggles with loneliness, as revealed in "Of the Shapes and Hearts of Humans," but he is also shown to garden as a hobby — a kind healthy coping mechanism that isn't so pronounced with other characters.
Pardon that tangent, but we're arriving at the point now: NERV is, in many respects, coded as a character within Neon Genesis Evangelion. Like it's employees, NERV at first appears well-organized and capable — almost too well-organized and capable — but that facade begins to slip further into the show.
While literal characters may maintain appearances with boisterous personalities or demonstrations of their competence, NERV does so with an abundance of jargon. On it's face, that doesn't belie fraudulence — but neither does Asuka's provokative mouthiness or Ritsuko's stern condesention. A closer look begins to reveal superficiality, however.
While Shinji is lost in the Dirac Sea, many of NERV's graphs flash onscreen, one of them measuring his libido versus his destrudo. While libido has (ironically enough) taken on a life of its own, these terms were used by Freud to describe the two antithetical motivations of life; to simplify, they are the urge to create and the urge to destroy, respectively. A NERV worker exclaims that Shinji's cathexis (cognitive involvement) is normal and destrudo is nil.
This draws attention to the total lack of any psychological resources at NERV. Between the talk of synch rates and brain waves and destrudo and libido — between the teenagers piloting giant mechs — one would expect NERV's operational doctrine to have significant overlap with the domain of psychology, yet there is no familiar expression of psychological involvement. We often see NERV's medical facilities, but not once is there a shrink's office. In fact, during Asuka's mental breakdown in "Staying Human," Misato encourages her to carry out the mission while implying that this is her last chance to prove her worth.
Now, plenty about Evangelion's world is unfamiliar. Maybe NERV has simply found a way to quantify a person's psychoanalytics — to chart their libido and destrudo on a graph — and therefore have no need for traditional psychological diagnostics or counseling.
How can this be true, though, when NERV's models are proven to be incoherent? When Kaworu's synch rate is measured, it is found to be over 300%. Even notwithstanding Angel shenanigans, how are NERV's tools able to register anything above 100%? 100% is total — the theoretical limit for measurement.
There is also the matter of the EVA graveyard. Evangelion units are expensive and dangerous; it wouldn't make sense to produce so many full-size models before getting a functional proptotype — at least, not if NERV was systematically diagnosing and redressing issues systematically.
These oddities all fall into place with the words of a 'scientist' working for the Katsuragi Expedition: "There is no need to validate what is already proven."
This plainly flies in the face of the scientific method, which aims to derive truth through peer review and ever-improving systems of measurement and analysis — by thinking up new possible ways to disprove our conclusions and by continually, persistently testing these possibilities.
The Katsuragi Expedition was funded by SEELE, so it's not a stretch to imagine that this pattently unscientific mindset is also at the heart of NERV. If it is, then it makes sense why they try to quantify psychonalytics and have faulty models and bury dozens of identical death machines; NERV operates on pseudoscience that does not accurately depict reality. The organization that we see is built on mountains of trial and error conducted without vision. NERV's systems work, but only on a superficial level — and, as more and more holes are punched in NERV's pseudoscience, the facade begins to slip.
I won't be too specific about how this all relates to our real-life government today, because — truthfully — I don't feel like it. There is something to be said about inauthentic people, veneers of competence, and world-ending religious motivations, but I'll let you connect the dots.
I will say, though, that interlacing all of this thematic delivery with what amounts to the framework of Evangelion's pot — that being, NERV — is masterful. It provides a lot of room to expand on and explore ideas without getting sidetracked.
Breadth: AI
Back in the 1990s, I imagine that Evangelion's Magi AI existed in the same realm as the mechs; that is, total sci-fi. Today, though, the issue of AI is not just forthcoming or present; it is also plainly visible in our daily lives. Willingly or not, contact with AI is unavoidable — on social media, in our inboxes, under every Google search. That seperates AI from the other issues that Neon Genesis Evangelion covers; neither are government incompetence and climate change presently unimportant, but we don't so readily see their effects. AI, therefore, stands out as a specific, relatable problem.
One scene, specifically — a conversation between Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko in "In the Still Darkness" — cements the Magi in Evangelion's world, and therefore provides us the means to draw parallels. Here, Tokyo-3's city council is said to be a sham — less governing themselves, and moreso being a vehicle for Magi's governance. Fuyutsuki also praises it for assisting him with menial work. Our culture would seem to hold this as idealistic, given our growing tendency to defer to AI.
In the abstract, I wouldn't hold this tendency to be totally negative. There is a significant environmental toll associated with the use of AI, but Evangelion deals with AI only as it pertains to cultural change, so that's the lens through which I will be examining it's forecast of AI. Through such a lense — one where AI is used to promote efficiency and offload menial work — the problem only arises when a model corrupted. Corruption, as I am using it, means any deviation from what society at large wants from an AI.
In that sense, a non-corrupted AI is "in precise accordance with democratic principles," as Fuyutsuki describes the role of Magi in Tokyo-3's governance. However, while, I find this description apt for an ideal AI system, Magi is not that system — or, more precisely, it suffers from the constant threat of being corrupted.
On the surface level, Magi only appears to be threatened once — during the 11th Angel attack in Angel Infiltration." (And — as a tangent — even then, the big threat was the 11th Angel self-destructing Magi. Today, this is a best-worst-case-scenario for an AI system as powerful as Magi). However, in that same episode, we also see how easy it is for Ritsuko to reconfigure Casper.
Now consider how NERV is in possession of Magi. In the first episode, NERV's role as it relates to the UN is to defeat Angel's; why, then, does it have the keys to Magi — an AI that spends most of the time managing a city? It gets more worrisome when you remember the many ways in which NERV is a fraudulent organization, some of which we covered, and another of which being SEELE's world-ending ulterior motives. If an AI is to be democratic, it follows that the AI must be protected against corruption by a democratic institution.
We seem to be barreling toward a future that uses AI in a very similar way to Evangelion's world, and we are also suffering from the constant threat of corruption. While the keys to MAGI are held by NERV, the keys to Gemini, Claude, and Grok are held by Google, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI (by the way, I thought it was still just "xAI." SpaceXAI is somehow exponentially stupider).
To reiterate, AI models like these ones are unavoidable for a lot of Americans today. While many of Evangelion's other themes are grandstanding, this one is tangible. It casts a wide net, you could say, and having that kind of thematic entry-point for the consumers of a piece of media can do a lot to raise the tides.
Subtlety: Climate Change
What will also raise the tides is the arctic ice caps melting; that's, like, climate change 101. Somehow, though, the aftermath of the Second Impact is not so easily identified as an instance of climate change. I, for one, flagged it as just a global catastrophe on my first watch-through — climate-related, sure, but the phrase 'climate change' never came to mind.
Admittedly, this all is very anecdotal. However, it highlights the fact that Neon Genesis Evangelion does not draw attention to or linger on its environmentalist themes. Climate change exists as worldbuilding on the periphery of the Evangelion's plot, important only to demonstrate the cataclysmic power of the Second Impact and to justify the creation of Tokyos-2 and -3.
It also should not be overlooked that Evangelion's climate change is very sudden, almost boolean. In the real world, we have been aware of ongoing, human-prompted climate change for decades — and, though the effects are plainly visible over time, year-on-year changes are not so noticeable. When Evangelion's world take a discrete step toward climatic climax, it doesn't fit with our cultural understanding of climate change as a gradual process, so we don't make the connection between the two — and when we don't make the connection, we are able to observe our own practices through an etic, unfamiliar lens.
See, people have a tendency to accept ipso facto what is familiar to them; conversely, what is unfamiliar may be regarded as devient — maybe irrational, maybe unnatural, maybe just benignly peculiar. Either way, the skeptisim we show a given subject may largely be informed by our relationship to it.
Something strange happens when our relationship with a given subject is manipulated; say, if familiar routines are made to feel foreign by discusing them with unfamiliar terminology. For a concrete example to look at, skim through Horace Miner's Body Ritual Among the Nacerima — on a first reading, it might not be apparent that "Nacerima" describes the population of the United States, and that their "Body Ritual" is actually just regular customs of midcentury American culture.
While Body Ritual Among the Nacerima fabricates an etic perspective so as to satirize the otherising, tribalistic language often used when describing nonwestern societies, I posit that Neon Genesis Evangelion fabricates one in order to prompt reflection on our relationship with climate change.
In Evangelion, the world's laissez-faire, apathetic attitude toward the Second Impact is somewhat jarring. Half of the world's population died and the world map was redrawn, but — 15 years later — it appears that the cataclysm did very little to meaningfully upset society. Tokyo got swallowed by the ocean, but it was soon replaced — in both name and function — by Tokyo-2 and Tokyo-3. The financial system didn't collapse, as plenty of pre-Second Impact consumer brands — Mitsubishi, Converse, SEGA — are still present in post-Second Impact society.
This behavior is not foreign to us, broadly speaking. Though I wouldn't be so hopeless as to say our society is apathetic toward climate change, it can't be said that Americans dedicate consistent, daily, conscious concern toward climate change. The principles that our society operates on have not been meaningfully revised in light of our own climate apocolypse; companies chase profit, consumers chase products, and the government doesn't intervene. It is soothing to assume that, one day, we'll reach a tipping point where society will have to confront the climate problem — but what can a tipping point look like when climate change is not broken into discrete steps? I can imagine very easily a future with submerged cities and billions dead — a future where we continue to engage in the destructive practices of today simply because the world, through gradual change, has remained familiar.
This future is more-or-less identical to the world of Neon Genesis Evangelion (minus all the sci-fi stuff). We would arrive to it in a different way — whereas Evangelion's climate change was sudden, ours would be gradual — but the effect would be the same: a post-apocolyptic world that humanity doesn't treat with the gravity it deserves.
Only by being subtle with its environmentalist messaging — by not making a direct connection between our climate change and that due to the Second Impact — is Neon Genesis Evangelion able to present its viewer with their own behavior in an etic way.
Conclusion
It's done. It's over. Almost 2,500 words.
I've been rushing to get this one done before the 30th Anniversary, and I just barely made it! Or maybe I lied about the date this was posted. You'll never know.
If anyone made the mistake of reading through this rant, take everything I said with a pinch of salt; use it as fodder for your own thoughts more than a complete analysis on its own.