Neon Genesis Evangelion

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Neon Genesis Evangelion is a classic /a/ series from the mid 1990s which achieved cult following for its then-unusual blend of faux-Christian inspired sci-fi horror aesthetics. It 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.

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.

NGE is set in a universe where a bunch of godlike alien precursors, The First Ancestral Race, looked out across a vast and infinitely empty universe devoid of all life other than themselves and thought "...Wow, this fucking sucks". So they decided to fill the void with life. To this end, they created the "Seeds of Life"; giant bioengineered monsters that also double as terraforming engines, which they made in at least two distinctive models. Each Seed of Life was placed in a celestial carrier, called an "Egg" or "Moon", and equipped with a back-up control unit called a Lance of Longinus, because it looks like a giant fucking spear. Now, all of this would have been just peachy, but on Earth, things started going wrong right from the beginning.

See, the First Ancestral Race were a little... scattershod... when it came to actually deploying their Seeds of Life. So it came to be that Earth initially became the landing point of a Type 1 Seed of Life, or "ADAM", about 4 billion years ago... but then a Type 2 Seed of Life, or "LILITH", crashed on Earth as well. This was a problem, because the two types of Seed of Life aren't supposed to coexist on the same planet. Because the LILITH's Lance of Longinus was destroyed during its crashlanding, the ADAM's Lance was the only one active, and so it deactivated ADAM and put it into stasis. With the rival Seed disabled, the LILITH began its terraforming process and 4 billion years later, we have Earth as we all know and love it. Yay! But then things go fucking wrong.

It all starts when a bunch of scientists discover the dormant ADAM in Antarctica, and proceed to poke it until it temporarily wakes up. This causes a partial activation of its terraforming abilities which fucks the planet over incredibly, including shifting the planet's axis, wiping out a vast percentage of humanity's population, and devastating the biosphere. This event is called "Second Impact", with the "First Impact" being when LILITH and ADAM first clashed 4 billion years ago. Now, how could you make this worse? Why, you have a bunch of incredibly shady douchebags, called SEELE, discover the Seed of Life Instruction Manual, known as the "Dead Sea Scrolls", and become fixated on the idea that they can monkey around with ADAM and LILITH's terraforming abilities to create a "Third Impact" that will allow them to recreate humanity in a "higher" form, with themselves as its godlike rulers - a process that apparently involves melting all of humanity back into primordial soup and fusing their minds together into a single gestalt consciousness. Because ADAM's brief reanimation allowed it to generate a number of proto-lifeforms, Angels, that SEELE knows will eventually mature and come after ADAM to fully reactivate it and complete the terraforming process, SEELE sets up the front-company NERV, whose official goal is to defeat the Angels and stop the Third Impact from occurring and wiping out humanity. Secretly, SEELE intends to have them destroy the Angels, and then trigger Third Impact on their own terms.

During the first few years of NERV's existence, as it struggles to get its anti-Angel weapons (Evangelions) developed, a researcher named Yui Ikari is absorbed into the test-type Evangelion model, leaving behind a traumatized son (Shinji) and husband (Gendo). In fact, it so traumatizes Gendo that he becomes absolutely obsessed with hijacking Third Impact for his own purposes so he can reunite with his dead wife, causing him to abandon his son and become an incredibly manipulative rat-bastard who schemes and schmoozes his way into control over NERV. SEELE knows he has his own agenda, but is confident they can outplay him.

Finally, 15 years after Second Impact, the series proper starts. Shinji Ikari is summoned to Tokyo-3 and emotionally blackmailed into fighting the Angels in Evangelion 01, the test-type model which basically ate his mom. He fights alongside Rei Ayanami (a genetically engineered clone who hybridizes his mom's DNA with DNA from LILITH) and Asuka Langley Soryu (a girl whose backstory is almost as fucked up as his own) through months of trauma and phyrric victories before they finally kill all of the Angels. Yay! ...And then SEELE decides that NERV has outlived its usefulness, so they send in troops to kill everybody so they can take the Evangelions and initiate Third Impact on their own terms. They succeed in triggering Third Impact, and Gendo tries to hijack it... and he fails, because it turns out that making the key control units of the process be "giant psycho-cyborg animated by Shinji's momma's maternal instinct" and "clone of Shinji's mom to whom Shinji has been far nicer than I have been" is an incredibly dumb move. The Rei-based LILITH 2.0 gives Shinji total control over Third Impact, and he ultimately says "fuck this shit" and rejects it, leaving things ambiguously hopeful that the rest of humanity will be free to emerge from the primordial soup and rebuild the world once again.

There is also a manga adaptation, which basically ramps up the bastardy of everybody, and the "Rebuild of Evangelion" anime series, which is implied to take place in a temporal loop type scenario where the original series happened, but Shinji's refusal of Third Impact basically reset time back to just before the Second Impact, allowing things to proceed from there.

Angels and Evangelions

Angels are the series' antagonists; prototype lifeforms created by ADAM who seek to reactivate ADAM and basically terraform Earth into their own homeworld. ADAM and LILITH are also referred to as Angels by official NERV documentation, which is part of SEELE's ploy to cover up their secret plan for Third Impact.

Evangelions are the titular anti-Angel weapons. Officially, they are just robots that are somehow able to preach the formidable psionics-based forcefields ("Absolute Terror Fields", or AT Fields for short) that make Angels all but invulnerable. The reality is that they are lobotomized, mutiliated cyborg Angel clones. To pilot an Evangelion, you need a special child pilot who has the unique psychic ability to telepathically mesh with the Eva's own nervous system, effectively replacing the removed chunks of its brain with themselves - as a downside, damage to the Eva triggers corresponding sensations of pain in the pilot. Evangelions seemingly can only become operational if a humanoid mind is somehow imprinted on whatever passes for their brain. In particular, Shinji's Unit 01 contains the mental imprint of his dead mother, who was physically absorbed into the Eva in a synchronization experiment that went wrong. As a result, Unit 01 is basically driven by the imprint of Yui Ikari's maternal instinct, making it psychotically protective of Shinji.

/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.