Evangelion- Explained

Scott Gladstein
8 min readJul 3, 2017

Ok so let’s talk about one of the most confusing ending in Anime- Neon Genesis Evangelion. Rumors abound about them running close to a deadline, having no money, etc etc etc but the director, Hideaki Anno, has come out and said it was designed “as intended”. As production continued, his thoughts evolved- particularly influenced by a psychology textbook a friend had given him and that ending is what we got.

So- what actually happened?
For the purpose of this the only sources we will consider canon are the 26 episodes of the original anime and I will talk about the movie “End of Evangelion”.

There is a lot of mythos so here is the background, in a nutshell. I’m going to be talking in super simplified strokes and just know that there is some debate over some specifics that I won’t get into:

What You’ve Gotta Know

Souls and bodies are independent from one another. A soul can make its own body from a special substance (think of it like the primordial ooze) or can inhabit a vessel made for it.

Many thousands of years ago there is an alien race was on the brink of destruction. They detached their souls…

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Scott Gladstein

Game Developer (Little Red Goblin Games LLC), MBA, Absurdist, Nerd, Indie Dude, Comic Reviewer, and SCA Rapier Fencer.