Neon Genesis Evangelion

This article is probably off-topic, but tolerated because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

This article contains something which makes absolutely no logical sense, such as Nazi Zombie Mercenaries, Fucking Space Orangutans, anything written by a certain Irish leper or Robin Crud-ace, or Wizards of the Coast hiring the fucking Pinkertons over a children’s card game. If you proceed, consider yourself warned.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a classic /a/ series from 1996 about an emotionally neglected 14-year-old girl who likes a boy so much that she exterminates all life on Earth for him. Then he decides that he liked the world better when it had people in it. Whoopsie! It achieved a cult following for its then-unusual blend of faux-Christian-inspired sci-fi horror aesthetics, and was essentially the result of one guy struggling with depression getting a major hateboner for /m/ and deciding to express both sentiments at the same time in animated format.

Basic Plot

Describe Evangelion's plot here... hoo, boy, where do we start?

The simplest way to describe NGE is this: emotionally abused and highly traumatized teenage boy is summoned by absolute asshole father and forced to fight ostensibly for humanity's survival against giant aliens, whilst in reality being used as a plaything in a secret conspiracy that ultimately ends up going horribly wrong for everybody. How horribly? All organic life on Earth is exterminated except for two people who hate each other.

As succinct as this is, however, it barely begins to even scratch the convoluted mess that is NGE's plot and backstory, which is made worse because so much of it is released in obscure Japanese-only documentation that was released piecemeal over decades. People are still trying to really make sense of the whole mess, but here's our attempt.

Some time in the 1990s, a dormant alien lifeform code-named Adam is discovered in Antarctica. Scientists immediately start fucking around with it without having any idea what they're doing, and in September of the year 2000, they make it asplode. One of the scientists manages to seal his teenage daughter, Katsuragi Misato, in some kind of protective pod immediately prior to the explosion, enabling her to survive; everyone else in Antarctica dies, as the continent is basically vaporized. The explosion is so massive that it fucks up Earth's axis and ecosystem, and the melting of the ice cap causes quite a bit of flooding as well. Billions of people die. The event becomes known as Second Impact.

This is around the time when SEELE, a group of 12 people who secretly kinda-sorta control the world, starts to become extremely important. SEELE is in possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which tell them that Angels - more lifeforms similar to Adam - are out there and might be headed toward Earth, and they conclude that humanity needs to get its shit together. To that end, they create GEHIRN, a scientific research institution. A college professor, Fuyutsuki; his student, Ikari Yui; and her boyfriend, Rokobungi Gendo are all recruited into GEHIRN for their expertise in genetics. Computer expert Akagi Naoko has been working there for some time as well. Over the next 15 years, a lot of drama happens. Yui and Gendo get married and he changes his family name to Yui's, becoming Ikari Gendo. They have a son, Ikari Shinji. Yui mysteriously disappears during an experiment which her son had been allowed to watch. Gendo abandons his traumatized son due to Shinji being a living reminder of his dead wife, and then starts banging Doctor Akagi, who eventually commits suicide and is succeeded by her daughter, Akagi Ritsuko, who Gendo then starts banging (srsly, what is it with this guy?). Another scientist (Soryu Kyoko Zeppelin) goes insane during an experiment similar to the one in which Yui disappeared. She eventually kills herself too. Misato and her boyfriend, Kaji, join GEHIRN at some point, and then manage to break up without killing themselves or each other. GEHIRN is "shut down" due to bad press and its personnel are "transferred" to a "new" organization called NERV, but it's really just a rebranding. NERV develops the "Evangelions"; lobotomized cyborg clones of Adam intended to be used as war machines to defend humanity against the Angels. Allegedly, if an Angel were to make contact with Adam's remains, it would initiate a Third Impact, which would be *really* bad for humanity. Zerogouki, the first Evangelion, is completed in 2014 and semi-successfully activated a month before the series begins in 2015. However, its activation is a disaster that results in severe injuries to its 14-year-old pilot, Ayanami Rei.

Finally, 15 years after Second Impact, the series proper starts. Gendo is the supreme commander of NERV. Shinji Ikari, now 14 years old, is summoned to Tokyo-3, which is being attacked by an Angel, and told to get in the fucking robot (the never-before-activated Shogouki, because Zerogouki is still frozen in carbonite at this point). He initially tells his dad to fuck off, but then Rei, still half-covered in casts and bandages and shit, gets wheeled out on a stretcher and told to get in the fucking robot, and Shinji finally grows a pair and gets in the robot to save her. He utterly spazzes out and gets his ass kicked in his first fight, but his Eva wakes up and wins the fight for him. Misato, now 28 and basically his commanding officer, invites him to live with her because she is a pedophile and wants to bang him. A few weeks later, he wins his second fight cleanly. By the time of the city's third attack by an Angel, NERV has two functioning Evangelions to play with, and Rei and Shinji defeat the Angel together and start emotionally bonding. Then a new Evangelion, Nigouki; its pilot, Asuka Langley Soryu (daughter of the NERV scientist who went insane and killed herself, Soryu Kyoko Zeppelin); and Misato's ex-boyfriend all arrive from Germany. Asuka wants to bang Kaji, but he's not a pedophile, so she has to move in with Misato and Shinji instead. Lots of drama ensues, many Angels are killed, dark secrets are revealed, Zerogouki is destroyed, Asuka is left comatose after an Angel mind-rapes her, and Shinji is forced to nearly kill one of his friends after that friend is recruited as an Eva pilot. A fifth pilot, Kaworu, is recruited to replace Asuka as the pilot of Nigouki. He's totally gay for Shinji, but he turns out to be the final Angel, and Shinji has to kill him too.

Then things get really fucked up. It turns out that SEELE had been working on a secret plan to initiate its own version of Third Impact, which would turn all of humanity into Tang so that our minds could be crushed together into a hive mind so we wouldn't be lonely anymore or some shit. This was actually GEHIRN/NERV's primary purpose, and killing Angels was basically an afterthought and a way to buy time and publicly justify NERV's enormous budget. However, after Yui's disappearance, Gendo started secretly planning to use NERV's toys to implement his personal version of Third Impact, which would somehow reunite him with Yui while leaving the rest of humanity out of the equation. Rei, who is part Angel, was a key part of this plan. SEELE eventually learned about Gendo's plan, but as long as Angels were attacking and he was killing them, they couldn't really do much. After the last Angel was killed, SEELE could safely liquidate NERV, but they knew Gendo wouldn't come quietly, so they instructed the Japanese military to launch a full-blown attack on NERV. Gendo tries to start his version of Third Impact while the attack is happening, but Rei betrays him and starts her own version of Third Impact in which she and Shinji finally bang. In the end, all organic life on Earth is exterminated except for Shinji and Asuka, who hate each other and have no food or water, and Shogouki is sent into deep space as proof to alien civilizations that humanity existed.

There is also a manga adaptation, which expands upon some parts of the story and abbreviates others, and the "Rebuild of Evangelion" movie series, which starts out as a retelling of the original TV continuity but becomes increasingly derailed and eventually drifts off into a whole new story. The Rebuilds are believed by some fans to take place in the same continuity as the original series based on some extremely sketchy evidence, but this raises more questions than it answers.

/tg/ Relevance

There is an official Evangelion RPG called "Neon Genesis Evangelion RPG: The NERV White Paper", which introduces a new character called Marie Vincennes. It's basically unknown outside of Japan.

/tg/ also created Adeptus Evangelion, which is an NGE RPG using Dark Heresy as the underlying mechanics.