Anime / Neon Genesis Evangelion

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

God's In His Heaven. All's Right With The World.
^{Clockwise from top}Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami, Asuka Langley Soryu, Gendo Ikari, Misato Katsuragi, Ritsuko Akagi.
In the background: Evangelion Unit 01.
Not pictured: Mental health.

"This is a giant robot saga the same way Twin Peaks was a cop show."

— Comic Buyer's Guide

Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン, Shinseiki Evangelion, lit. "New Century Evangelion") is a 26-episode science fiction/action/horror/drama anime series, produced by Studio Gainax, Studio Ghibli, Production I.G and Tatsunoko Production and directed by franchise creator Hideaki Anno, which first aired on TV Tokyo from October 1995 through March 1996.

In the year 2000, a global cataclysm known as Second Impact changed the world. The event annihilated Antarctica and shifted the planet's axis, resulting in catastrophic flooding and drastically altered climates worldwide. The ensuing destruction and global refugee crisis created such extreme unrest that nuclear exchanges broke out in mere days. By the time the dust finally settled, half of Earth's human population had perished.

Fifteen years later, 14-year-old Shinji Ikari finds himself summoned to the fortress city of Tokyo-3 by his estranged father, Gendo, for a single purpose: to pilot a Humongous Mecha called an Evangelion in order to defend civilization from physics-defying monstrosities known as Angels. But can a young, damaged boy like Shinji bear the weight of humanity's survival?

What starts off as a relatively standard Humongous Mecha premise gradually transforms into a dramatic study examining the implications of its genre and themes like societal alienation, depression, and the pain of human subjectivity, surrounded by slick visual design and an air of religious mysticism. This unprecedented approach is credited with the work's runaway success and inspired a number of productions imitating the formula to varying degrees of success.

However, the series' mature content also resulted in pulled sponsorships, conflict with network censors, and a radical change in time slot (from evening to late-night, only increasing popularity among its older demographic). The production schedule and budget also became perpetual concerns as the project wore on, eventually forcing the studio to throw out their original plans for a two-part, action-packed finale. The series would instead leave the plot hanging and end with a decidedly literal (and, conveniently enough, visually conservative) summation of the work's themes: an introspection on the principal cast's respective motivations and neuroses, taking place in their own minds.

This didn't sit well with fans, partly motivating Gainax to adapt the scrapped series finale to a feature-length film. Budget was still an issue, however, and only 27 minutes of footage were completed and debuted as the second act of the Compilation Movie Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, another unpopular decision with the audience. Eventually, Gainax was able to complete the rest of "Rebirth" and released the finished product four months later as The End of Evangelion^note Or Shin Seiki Evangelion Gekijouban (meaning Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Movie/Theatrical Edition) in Japanese, finally bringing the story to a definitive, if still controversial, conclusion.

Despite the numerous difficulties surrounding its production and first airing, Evangelion became a massive surprise hit that would go on to both revolutionize and redefine TV anime as a medium for the rest of the 1990s and well into the 2000s, paving the way for a wave of original Anime First properties exploring darker and more mature themes, as well as a slew of more or less successful imitators. The show is today seen as one of the cornerstones of Japanese pop culture, comparable to the impact Star Wars had in the West, and as such, its influence still looms heavily over the anime industry to this very day. As a result, Evangelion would come to define the career of Anno, whose personal battles with depression during production directly inspired many of the show's themes. Anno has since come to fully own it, even as it grew into an enormous multimedia empire comprising a bevy of merchandise, corporate partnerships, and spinoffs which often play with the original's themes or even ignore them. In particular, the series' confusing and controversial ending (and the ending of The End of Evangelion to a slightly lesser degree) became the first instance of what would come to be known as the Gainax Ending, as the studio embraced the surrealism necessitated by budget shortages and made it a cornerstone of their later works.

Evangelion was first broadly introduced to the English-speaking audience through the Texas-based ADV Films, who released the first officially sanctioned English dub of the show on VHS between 1996 and 1998. ADV would be the main distributor of the show to the Western world for about a decade, and evidently had some greater plans for it, as they secured the license from Gainax to do a Live-Action Adaptation and were even in talks with WETA about the prospect for some time. However, said adaptation languished in Development Hell for years, and due to its increasing financial troubles in the 2000s, ADV eventually lost both the adaptation rights, leaving the live-action project dead in the water, and the distribution license to the show entirely, with their last release of the show on DVD occurring in 2008. Netflix announced in November 2018 that they had obtained exclusive streaming rights to the series globally and began streaming all 26 episodes, Evangelion: Death (True)² (a recut of Death and Rebirth omitting what would be folded into the completed version of End), and The End of Evangelion on June 21, 2019. This version of the show is largely unchanged, but international versions feature new translations and dubs and omit all instances of "Fly Me to the Moon". However, GKIDS announced on October 3rd, 2020 that they have the home video and theatrical rights to release Evangelion in NA in 2021, including the original 26 episodes and both movies, which would see release in 2021 sub-licensed to Shout! Factory with both dubs (albeit with the originals exclusive to the collector's editions).

See here for more information about the Evangelion franchise as a whole.

Please move any character tropes to the proper character page.

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Neon Genesis Evangelion provides examples of:

# - C

• 10-Minute Retirement: Shinji does this frequently: when he runs away in episode 04, when he leaves NERV after the Unit 03 debacle, when he breaks down in the movie...
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The series takes place in 2015, fifteen years after Second Impact.
• Achilles' Power Cord: The Evas need an external power source and an early episode even has Shinji do a power cord transfer at one point to move into an area that his current cord doesn't reach. If the connection is severed, they can only function for a limited time on backup power (one minute at full power, five in a reduced power mode). However, this is subverted once it becomes apparent that the Evas can function just fine without the power cables if they go berserk—the power supply is there for the entry plug mechanism, to keep the pilot in control of the Eva.
• Action Girl: Asuka, Misato and Rei. Asuka, in particular.
• Action Insurance Gag: In both the TV series and the manga, the blast from the N² Mine used against Sachiel seriously damages Misato's car. She gets it patched up and running again, but she frets internally about having almost 3 years of payments left on it.
• Actor Allusion: In the Latin American Spanish dub of the Netflix version, it's not the first time we hear Idzi Dutkiewicz (Gendo) voicing a main character with a distant and terse relationship with his son, while both had the save the day against divine forces. Extra points since the respective wife and mother of both heroes died previously before the story began.
• Adam and/or Eve:
  • The names humanity gave to the Seeds of Life: Adam and Lilith, Lilith being Eve's predecessor as the first woman.
  • For more fun: The short-hand term for Evangelion is "Eva", the form of "Eve" in most European languages, including most importantly Greek and Latin. The parallel is easier to see when you consider Evangelions are made from Adam's flesh, as Eve was made from Adam's rib.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Kaworu Nagisa only first appears in episode 24 of the 26 episode long TV series, but he is seen in the first movie of the new Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy. He also shows up quite a bit earlier in the manga adaptation, and is among the first introduced characters in pretty much every Alternate Continuity. This may have something to do with the creators acknowledging him as being a popular character with the fanbase and thus deciding to given a more prominent role in the stories of adaptation by introducing him earlier.
• Adults Are Useless: Zigzagged. Only those born after Second Impact can pilot the Evas, so the adults of NERV can't directly assist in battling Angels. However, they are extremely competent at providing support: the Evas are always in top shape, the pilots are constantly fed intel from mission control, and the research enabling any kind of anti-Angel response is obviously performed by adults. However, what the kids truly need isn't tactical support, but positive, nurturing role models, a role none of the adults can fulfill due to their own neuroses and NERV's quasi-military structure. How can Misato be a surrogate mother to Shinji when her abandonment issues mean she has trouble expressing love non-erotically? How can Shinji really trust her as a mother figure when she must also be the commanding officer sending him to his death?
• After-School Cleaning Duty: Shown in one scene where Shinji and Rei stay behind to clean the school, and Shinji causes Rei to blush by remarking on how she has very motherly mannerisms, and would perhaps be good as a housewife.
• After the End: The series is tragically set in an area of this and Just Before the End, taking place 15 years after the second horrific cataclysm, and right before the inevitable third one.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Played with; the MAGI computers never turn evil, but the most human of them betrays Ritsuko at the worst possible moment by refusing the order to self-destruct NERV headquarters, leading to Gendo killing her.
  • Subverted with the Evas when you find out they aren't actually robots.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Ritsuko, and to some extent Gendou.
• The Alleged Boss: Misato may be the pilots' commanding officer, but her orders come off as more motherly than bossy, and she acts like a big sister to Shinji and Asuka at home.
• Alleged Lookalikes: The "late" Yui Ikari and her clone, Rei, possess different hair colors, eye colors, skin tones, and facial structures, yet Gendou felt the need to destroy all photos of his wife to keep people from noticing the resemblance.
• Alien Geometries:
  • Ramiel is a floating octahedron whose edges are hundreds of feet long.
  • Leliel looks like a huge marble with swirling black/white patterns that floats in the air and can disappear and reappear at random...except that what's seen is actually its shadow. Allegedly.
• Aliens in Cardiff: While it was renamed "Tokyo-3", the events of the series happen in the city of Hakone (which is located 89.4 kilometers away from Tokyo).
• All According to Plan: Used by Gendou and SEELE to indicate that current events have not upset "the plan"—specifically, they tend to say 'all according to the scenario', as the plan is based around the prophecies in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Considering that they ultimately have different motives, by the end of the series it becomes clear that this is just lampshading. Their differing scenarios diverge at the end, so it makes sense. At the point where something goes according to Gendo's scenario that is not according to SEELE's scenario, SEELE begins to distrust Gendo, realising they are being betrayed, and when he finally admits that he isn't going to go along with their plan for Instrumentality, SEELE sends the JSSDF to kill everyone at NERV HQ.
• All There in the Manual: There are a few guidebooks that attempt to elucidate the series. Given that it's intentionally left up to the reader, they are less than helpful. There's also a PS2 game (Neon Genesis Evangelion 2) that contains a large amount of backstory for the series, including on the "First Ancestral Race". The in-game info is based on interviews with Hideaki Anno; however, since it's never been confirmed, the canonicity is technically up for debate. It's worth noting that the voice actress for Ritsuko, Yuriko Yamaguchi, practically spells out Gendou's silent line from The End of Evangelion in her essay in the film's theatrical pamphlet, but non-Japanese fans are still scratching their heads nearly fifteen years after its release since the essay was never made available to them. The manga version of events further complicates the mystery by offering a different version of events leading up to the line (which is actually "heard" in the manga), and some fans believe that the manga line could also apply to the original version events despite obvious differences in characterization and the line's incompatibility with Yamaguchi's essay.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Invoked, come episodes 25 and 26. "The you which exists in my mind and the me which exists in your mind" is this.
• Alternate Continuity: Especially noticeable in the video games and mangas Girlfriend of Steel 2 and Shinji Ikari Raising Project as well as in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse and the Hobby Japan-exclusive "sequel" Evangelion ANIMA.
• Alternate Universe: In the omake at the end of The End of Evangelion, and during the Third Impact sequence in episode 26; the latter has of late become an official Elseworld with its own manga.
• Ambiguous Robots: The Evas themselves. While it's said that they're "organic" to an extent, it's left vague as to how much. In supplemental material, and if you watch close enough, it turns out the Evas are almost entirely organic, with their armor and the entry plug mechanisms being the only mechanical pieces. They are essentially clones of the first Angel, Adam, implanted with the souls of the pilots' mothers (save for Unit 00, as Rei has no mother).
• Ambiguous Situation: Numerous instances, most notably Gendou's silent line to Ritsuko before shooting her and the final scene of End.
• Ancient Conspiracy: SEELE, Omniscient Council Of Vagueness that it is, has led one for an undefined amount of time, ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. By following the Scrolls' predictions and manipulating everyone in their path, their goal is to bring about the Human Instrumentality Project via Third Impact, effectively bringing about the entire series because of it.
• Angst: While Shinji is considered the poster child for the trope in regards to the series, all of the named characters, especially the pilots and NERV personnel, are angsting about something, whether it be their broken sense of self-worth (Shinji and Asuka), their place in humanity (Rei, by the end of the story), or interpersonal relationships (most of the adults, especially Misato, Ritsuko, Fuyutsuki, and Gendo).
• Anime Theme Song: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis", which was written and composed after TV Tokyo nixed Anno's original plan to use the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor as the theme. It would go on to become one of the most popular anime opening themes of all time.
• Anti-Escapism Aesop: Shinji Ikari occasionally tries to avoid his interpersonal problems and self-loathing, and at one point he even says, "What's wrong with running away from reality if it stinks?!" The show makes it apparent that trying to avoid problems will not make them go away, and, ultimately, he repeatedly steps up to take on any challenge he has to. This culminates in Shinji rejecting Instrumentality at the climax of The End of Evangelion. Instrumentality being the ultimate form of escapism (a literal escape from reality).
• The Anti-Nihilist:
  • Shinji grows into one at the end of End of Evangelion. With all the hell he's put through, and with the horrifying End of the World as We Know It, it would make sense that he would jump into the Despair Event Horizon and become an omnicidal Straw Nihilist, especially when Rei gives him control over the fate of humanity. Nevertheless, he lets the Assimilation Plot fail, and chooses to live life as an individual. Based on how you interpret it, Evangelion itself is loaded with Existentialist themes, like Jean-Paul Sartre's "Hell Is Other People" (in Eva, the so-called Absolute Terror Field surrounding all souls), but at the same time affirms that being alive and suffering are parts of life and that happiness can be achieved.
  • Kaji also has very strong traits of this. He knows more about what's going on than almost anyone else, yet he's the only character who appears genuinely happy. During one very close battle against an Angel that appears to be the final moments before the end of the world, he is watering the melon patch he is growing, with the battle being visible in the distance. If the world does not end on that day, then the melons need to be watered. If it does, then it won't matter what he is doing in the final moments anyway. Either way, he can't do anything to change what's going to happen in the next ten minutes.
  • Yui Ikari is also revealed to have been an optimist despite everything she knew about the darker secrets of the world. She believed that, so long as you were still alive, it was possible to find happiness no matter what.
• Anti-Villain: To varying degrees, all of the non-Eldritch Abomination antagonists fall within this territory. Big Bad Keel Lorenz and the rest of the SEELE council only wish to eradicate all flaws in humanity and create a perfect utopia, Dragon with an Agenda Gendo is a clear-cut case of Love Makes You Evil, the Mad Scientist Akagi women are driven to madness because of Gendo, and Humanoid Abomination Kaworu ultimately opts against his internal drive to unite with Adam and allow humans to live on, at the expense of his own life.
• Apocalypse Cult: The members of SEELE like to dress themselves up in Judaeo-Christian Kabbalistic occult symbolism while bringing about their plans to awaken the Eldritch Abominations.
• Apocalypse How: Second Impact was a Planetary event that bordered on Societal Collapse. The explosion melted the Antarctic ice cap and shifted the Earth's axis; coastal regions were flooded, and the entire ecosphere was thrown into chaos. Wars broke out, some going nuclear; many species went extinct; the oceans around Antarctica are completely dead; and roughly half of humanity is dead. The driving force behind the creation of NERV is that the Third Impact, if initiated by an Angel, will raise the severity to Total Extinction. This apocalypse comes to pass in End of Evangelion, with all humans (and possibly life in general) being merged into a collective conscious with the success of the Instrumentality project. It initially appears to be a Total Extinction bordering on Physical Annihilation due to this, but it's later revealed that humans will eventually be able to physically re-manifest themselves if they're willing to do so, with Shinji and Asuka being the first to do so, reducing the impact to Societal Collapse again.
• Apocalypse Wow:
  • The brief scenes of Second Impact in the series.
  • Third Impact in End.
• Appendage Assimilation: Unit 01 tears off one of Zeruel's "arms", and reshapes it to replace the arm that was torn off earlier in the battle.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The AT Fields and the LCL, whose nature is barely explored, and, to a lesser extent, bakelite.
• Arc Symbol: Both SEELE and NERV's logos. The former depicts seven eyes arranged in an asymmetrical triangle shape, the same symbol which is emblazoned on the mask covering Lilith's face. It's unclear whether this is part of her body, though the implication is that the logo was copied from here. The latter is a fig leaf, which has a very distinct shape, and is the leaf Adam and Eve used to hide their nakedness after eating the fruit of the Tree.
• Arc Words:
  • "I mustn't run away."
  • "Unfamiliar ceiling"
  • "I'm home." "Welcome home."
  • "Do you want to become one with me?"
  • From End: "I need you"
• Armies Are Evil: Downplayed. The JSSDF in End are relentlessly brutal in their attack, remorselessly gunning down surrendering and wounded NERV personnel and specifically seeking out the teenage Eva pilots to execute them, but they've been led to believe that NERV are Omnicidal Maniacs who will cause the Third Impact and obliterate humanity if they fail in their mission.
• Armies Are Useless: Zigzagged. The Japanese Strategic Self Defence Force (JSSDF) and UN forces are hopelessly outmatched by the Angels and barely ever scratch them. NERV are openly contemptuous of their abilities and resent attempts by them to contribute. Unfortunately this underestimation comes back to haunt them as SEELE turn them loose on NERV and they excel at fighting a human opponent.
• Artistic License: Misato having a RHD Renault A310. Can be justified that she probably had brought the automobile to a professional car shop that converted the vehicle from LHD to RHD and from gas to electric.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • A fairly mild form of it; it is SF biology, after all. Though it might be argued it's meant as metabiology and actual science has very little to do with the show.
  • It's also not what a Hayflick limit is. The Hayflick limit is the number of times a (non-stem) cell can divide. Why is there a limit? Because cells that don't have it are cancerous.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • That's not what a Dirac sea is... at all. The show also fails quantum physics forever by throwing it around as a metaphor combined with Rule of Cool.
  • The S² Engine inside the Angels' red cores apparently stands for Super Solenoid. Solenoids are long coils of wire, sometimes wrapped around a metal core, that generate magnetic fields. And they're inside biological alien heart things!
  • An in-universe example for whoever came up with the "Second Impact" cover story, which was that the cause was a tiny meteorite (10 cm/4 inches wide) traveling at 95% of light speed. Regardless of speed, a meteor that small would airburst from friction, not capable of surviving our atmosphere long enough to hit the ground. Also, regardless of speed or angle, it would take a gigantic (dozens or hundreds of kilometers) stellar body to knock the Earth's axis off enough to cause the changes in seasons shown (for that matter, how would Adam's self-destruct be forceful enough to cause that?). Not to mention that an impact that destructive would hurl a shitload of ejecta into the atmosphere, causing a global nuclear winter that would lead to far more negative long-term effects than shown in the show (maybe Adam's explosion was focused up and out, not down?). How, exactly, a meteorite could travel that fast without some kind of outside interference is also never given a justification.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: NGE takes the idea of a child as the pilot of a Humongous Mecha and strips it down to spotlight the fact that these shows are basically about Child Soldiers.
• Author Appeal: The Judeo-Christian overtones, giant Adams, etc. probably also count as Author Appeal, when you compare Eva to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and other Gainax/Khara series. So do the angsty characters, ethical debates about biotechnologies, DNA imagery, etc.
• Author Tract: Having been inspired by Anno's own battle with depression, the series contains numerous in-depth discussions of the human condition and concludes with a lengthy exposé on the thought process that leads Shinji to overcome his own depression, go on living and reject the Assimilation Plot he finds himself a part of.
• Author Avatar: Word of God says Shinji is this, but Anno has mentioned that there are small aspects of himself in every main character; for instance, he is a vegetarian like Rei and was edgy (before his marriage) like Asuka.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • This applies to pretty much every bit of technology NERV owns. The Evas themselves are badass and extremely powerful, but can only operate for, at most, five minutes on a battery, and have various unpredictable problems caused by their only-vaguely-understood operating principles and immature pilots.
  • Even more obviously, the Jet Alone, a gigantic, hammer-wielding, remotely-piloted, nuclear-powered mecha that lacks the Eva's AT field, making it pointless for Angel defense.
• Badass Adorable: Shinji, Rei and Asuka all qualify for this trope in one way or another.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Played straight, averted, and subverted, depending on which part or version of the story you're talking about. As a general rule, the original series plays this trope straight, the director's cut and movies have the characters Nipple and Dimed, and the movies contain some genital-like imagery.
• Bath of Poverty: Asuka, who suffered a mental breakdown after being Mind Raped by an Angel and ceased being able to pilot her Eva, is found by NERV personnel in a destroyed house sitting in a tub filled with nasty brown water...which, under the circumstances, might not have all been water. Things just keep getting worse for her from there.
• Battle Against the Sunset: The battle between Shinji, Asuka, and Rei against the Angel-possessed Unit-03 in Episode 18 takes place against the setting sun. This battle was iconic enough to be recreated in Rebuild of Evangelion.
• Because Destiny Says So: According to the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is, however, an interesting interplay between destiny and human will.
• Behemoth Battle: The eponymous Evangelions are used by NERV to fight Angels, which resemble weird giant aliens with no uniform appearance. The only thing that qualifies them as "Angel" is that they have a "blood pattern blue".
• Betty and Veronica: This goes two ways. In Japan, Rei is seen as the Betty because of her gentle disposition, reserved nature, and tendency to get horribly injured, whereas the Fiery Redhead Gorgeous Gaijin Asuka is the cultural Veronica because her forceful and aggressive personality is just so strange to the generally reserved Japanese public. However, in the more demonstrative U.S. and other western countries, the more outgoing, more human, more badass, and more overtly in love Asuka is the familiar Betty, and the bizarre, cold, and strangely unsettling Rei is the exotic Veronica.
• BFG: Any Eva gun, but especially the Positron Rifle, which is the size of a train and utilizes Japan's entire power output.
• Big Bad: SEELE. All the catastrophic events that take place in the series are all by-products of their plan to bring about Human Instrumentality. However, they may or may not subvert this by the end of End of Evangelion, as the rest of humanity may or may not be happy with the result.
• Big "NO!": Asuka, at the end of her Mind Rape.
• Big "SHUT UP!": From this exchange in episode 16:
  Hyuga: You look tired, Miss Misato.
  Misato: Yeah, for a lot of private reasons.
  Ritsuko: *with a knowing smirk* Kaji?
  Misato: Shut up!
• Bilingual Bonus: Many. For example, the Japanese title for the last episode is "The Beast That Shouted 'Ai' at the Heart of the World". Because the "ai" is written in katakana, the word's meaning can only be inferred, allowing for two interpretations: "The Beast That Shouted 'I' at the Heart of the World", or "The Beast That Shouted 'Love' at the Heart of the World", the title of a classic science fiction story and anthology by Harlan Ellison.
• Bishōnen Line: The Angels follow an interesting variation: their physical forms continue to vary wildly between monstrous and abstract, but there is a running theme among the later Angels of them becoming significantly more intelligent and attempting to communicate with the pilots. Armisael, the 16th, is even able to partially assume a human form. Then, suddenly, Kaworu/Tabris appears, looking and acting like a normal human, but actually being the 17th Angel. In fact, the last three Angels, together form the image of of the classic Angel, being respecitvely the wings (Arael, the 15th), the halo (Armisael, the 16th) and the human (Tabris (17th). After that, the Angels who serve as NERV's final opponents are the Lilim...actual human beings.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The conclusion of Shinji's battle with the last Angel (Kaworu) comes across as this. The Angels are gone and mankind is safe, but Tokyo-3 has been ruined; Kaji is dead; Touji is a cripple; Kensuke, Hikari, and their families have moved away, taking Pen-Pen with them; Asuka is catatonic; Ritsuko is in prison; Misato is a nervous wreck; Rei is having an identity crisis; Shinji is utterly broken psychologically after having to kill the only person who has offered him unconditional love in the course of the whole series; and SEELE is still about to initiate their plot. The worst is still to come.
  • The End Of Evangelion can be described as a happy ending as viewed in a cynical light. Instrumentality occurs along with the Third Impact, significantly changing the Earth's geography and atmosphere and causing all of humanity to morph into a single being—but Shinji chooses to give people the ability to escape from this state, knowing that even if people end up hurting one another, no one means to in the end. Shinji eventually wakes up on the surface of the Earth and finds that Asuka is alive, showing that people can actually recover from Instrumentality and that more could come soon. Humanity has another chance, but they'll have to adapt to an extremely altered environment that is more hostile than the world after the Second Impact. And even though he attempts to strangle her again, Asuka gets him to stop by caressing him, even though she's disgusted by what he's done. Given how dark the movie is, it's certainly hard to notice the "happy" part of the ending.
• Bizarro Apocalypse: A series of events known as the Impacts each irrevocably altered the laws of physics and reality itself, also resulting in a series of Eldritch Abominations called Angels popping up to destroy all living things on Earth. Furthermore, in End of Evangelion, when an angel merges with Adam, all life just turns into the vaguely defined LCL fluid that is used inside the cockpits that are needed to pilot EVA units and apparently becomes a Hive Mind. The endings of the various incarnations of the franchise has left a LOT to debate and interpret, as nobody can seem to agree on just what the hell they just witnessed.
• Black Box: The Angels are described this way by the scientists "not in the know"; they also complain about how dangerous using the S² organ is, since they know nothing about it.
• Blame Game: When the Jet Alone goes rogue, the various executives and private investors related to the project are preemptively doing this by trying to avoid the direct responsibility of giving the emergency deactivation code.
• Blue with Shock: Several instances.
• Bloody Horror: Gendou takes control of Shinji's Eva through the Dummy Plug and forces him to kill Unit 03 against his will, causing him to experience (through the mech) ripping someone apart and having blood splattered all over him. This both traumatizes and infuriates Shinji so much that he walks away from NERV with barely any hesitation.
• Body Horror: Certain Angels will invoke this with infectious attacks, like Bardiel and Armisael.
• Body Motifs: The series places a lot of attention on hands, eyes, (symbolic) vaginas and combinations thereof. In particular, a wounded/damaged right eye and broken left arm is a recurring combination, to the extent that when Rei first appears in the OP a window pane is covering said eye and arm.
• Book Ends:
  • The first episode begins with a caption informing the audience that it is the year 2015. The final episode features almost the same caption, the difference being that it is now 2016.
  • The bookend Reis, one in the first episode and the other in End.
  • Another easily-overlooked example, probably Fridge Brilliance: Shinji's first line inside Unit 01 is "Kimochi warui" (something akin to "I feel sick.") This is more famously Asuka's last line in End.
  • The boat Ritsuko is riding during her first appearance is visible in the foreground during her death scene.
• Bowdlerize: When The End of Evangelion was re-broadcast on Nippon Television, three scenes were cut as a result of airing around prime-time. The infamous "masturbation" scene at the beginning, Asuka's Cruel and Unusual Death when Unit 02 is ripped apart by the Mass Production EVA's, and oddly enough, the part where Asuka screams "I DON'T WANNA DIE!".
• Bragging Theme Tune: Despite the lyrics being about Shinji, the overall theme of the song is carried through in the anime, as Shinji does save the world multiple times and eventually starts, then ends Instrumentality. "Young boy, become a legend" indeed.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Both the original ending and Evangelion: Death include visual references to a theater stage. The End of Evangelion takes it even further. A young Shinji is shown building a sand castle of the GeoFront...and then the camera backs up and shows that he's under stage lighting. Later on, there is a live-action sequence, which includes equivalents of several of the characters. The latter is even described as being a "dream" and "not Shinji's reality," hence the postmodern overtones of the movie.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Shinji's already-fragile psyche is gradually worn down by the pileup of trauma he undergoes, culminating in him completely snapping in End when he sees what the Mass Produced Evas have done to Unit-02, and thus to Asuka, then seeing Rei's gigantic form as Lilith, and then when Asuka coldly rejects him during the "kitchen scene" in Instrumentality.
  • Asuka's shell of ego is repeatedly pummeled by failure, and is completely crushed when Arael invades her mind and dredges up her memories. When the final break happens is arguable — it could be her defeat by Arael, or her agonizing death at the hands (and jaws) of the MP Evas, or when Shinji strangles her during the "kitchen scene".
  • Rei's characterization makes it difficult to pinpoint a true breaking moment, but the most likely one is when she is brought back after sacrificing herself to kill Armisael. As she contemplates how hollow her existence is, she squeezes Gendo's glasses almost to the point of breaking, sharply contrasting her protectiveness of them in an early episode.
• Breathable Liquid: Eva cockpits are filled with oxygenated LCL that allows pilots to mentally sync with the mech, and dampens impacts during battle. Despite that, no one is animated as if they are submerged; visually, the cockpit may as well be full of air.
• Bright Is Not Good: The last two episodes are a complete psychological breakdown (and recovery!) which feature the brightest colors in the series at many parts.
• Broken Bird: All the female characters, by the time it's all said and done. Of course, more than one were very broken already...
• Bug Buzz: The cicadas are used to dramatic effect in episode 4, where Shinji is overwhelmed by the din of cicada sounds at one point.
• Butt-Monkey: NERV itself, including the people who work there, are constantly hit time and time again. In the earlier episodes this can be rather funny, as in episode 12 where NERV undergoes a blackout resulting in huge problems with maintaining functionality, widespread problems in accessibility, everyone's jobs being disrupted—cue the following:
  Fuyutsuki: Regardless of the cause, it would be disastrous if an Angel were to attack right now.
  [cut to the JSDAF's headquarters]
  Voice over speaker: Radar has detected an unidentified object.
  • However, later on when things go From Bad to Worse, this stops being funny.^note This happens right about the same time everyone starts having their respective mental breakdowns.
• Cannot Spit It Out:
  • A central theme of the series is that characters can't admit their deeper feelings for one another, and/or can't find the right way to comfort those they care about. So many examples, it's almost easier to list the aversions, and even the aversions tend to have a tragic cast to them.
  • Asuka is a simultaneous example and subversion; she has no problem letting everyone know the "depths" of her feelings for Kaji, but this becomes a way of deflecting attention from her developing feelings for Shinji.
  • Another exception: Kaworu, the final Angel, is the only character in the whole series (and possibly the only person in-universe since the death of Yui) who expresses love to Shinji in so many words.
  • Even Gendou admits to his fear of bonding with his son once his vague apocalyptic plan has failed and he realizes he's going to be killed.
  • Obviously there's some overlap here with Love Dodecahedron
• Cast Full of Crazy: Deconstructed. Although all of the cast is mentally broken in various ways, the reasons why are clearly explained and shown in detail. It's also notable in that the characters' various instabilities helps bring about the worst possible outcome. Or not...
• Casting Gag: Ben Diskin, Kensuke's voice in the 2019 Netflix dub, previously played a bespectacled nerd who was also the main character's best friend.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The Second Impact, which killed off half of humanity and scarred the survivors deeply.
• Cataclysm Climax: Invoked twice. The Second Impact was a less successful invocation, but come Third Impact, Assimilation Plot, The End of the World as We Know It, and "Everybody Dies" Ending are all in play.
• Cerebus Syndrome: As the series progresses to its final episodes, all attempts at making jokes are dropped.
• Character Catchphrase: In the anime, Shinji is constantly saying "I mustn't run away!"; also Asuka's repeated refrain of "What are you, stupid?" Let's also not forget all the times when Gendou tells Fuyutsuki to "handle the rest of this" "Scenario" and variants of "So," "Yes," and "I understand."
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: This happens with the first Angel in Episode 1. We only find out how the first battle went through flashbacks in Episode 2.
• Chekhov's Classroom: Early on in "Magma Diver", Shinji is doing homework on thermal expansion. That episode's Angel, Sandalphon, which is able to somehow withstand the heat and pressure of swimming in magma, is defeated by pumping its body full of coolant.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Touji's sister is his motivation for getting in Unit-03.
• Child Soldiers: The pilots, who are even called "Children" both individually and collectively.
• Child Supplants Parent: One of many interpretations of the series. Interviews with Hideaki Anno suggest that he was actually aiming for this, since Shinji has a love-hate relationship with his father and motherhood is a central theme of the series. Most importantly, one of Shinji's love interests, Rei, turns out to be a clone of Yui, while Yui's soul is housed inside his Eva. In the manga, Gendo also turns out to have harbored feelings of jealousy towards Shinji for "stealing" Yui away from him. This is even lampshaded in Shinji's (Blooper Reels only) rant:
  And what's an Eva? Is that, like, a Freudian thing?
• The Chosen Many: It turns out that every single student at Shinji's school is a potential pilot candidate. But even then, him and Rei are still extra special for other reasons...
• Cicadian Rhythm: Cicada chirps frequently accompany outdoor scenes. The reason given for this is that Japan has been in a perpetual summer since Second Impact, and since the ecosystem is returning to its former state, cicadas are coming back to Tokyo-3.
• Citadel City: Tokyo-3, designed to fight back against the Angels. Defense systems surround the city, buildings can retract underground, and there are structures holding scaled-up weapons to support the EVAs.
• The Comically Serious: Some of the bumbling, useless UN officers.
• Clip Show:
  • About half of episode 14 is a clip summary of the first half of the series, packaged as an internal SEELE report about Gendou’s activities, and some commentary from Shinji’s classmates.
  • Episodes 25 and 26 of the original TV-broadcast re-uses old footage all over the place, albeit with entirely different dialogue.
  • Death is a clip show version of the entire series...26 episodes packed into 70 minutes. But then again, it also contained some new scenes that would later be used in the Director’s Cut episodes, and some scenes from what appears to be an Alternate Universe in which Asuka, Rei, Kaworu, and Shinji are part of a string quartet at school.
• Comedic Underwear Exposure: Asuka's first appearance has her sundress get blown up by the breeze on the battleship, giving Shinji, Toji, Kensuke, and the viewer a look at her underwear. This immediately cuts to the title screen, with three prominent slap sounds overlaid. Cut back, and the boys all have handprints on their faces from their "viewing fee".
• Conspicuous Gloves: Gendou always wears gloves, which cover burn scars he received rescuing Rei from an accident involving Unit 00. He later has an embryo Eldritch Abomination implanted in one of his hands, which make the gloves even more necessary.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: Played for dark humor with the note from Gendo. It probably started out as a long, somewhat flowery letter, but at some point it was sent to the Magi and came back 99 percent redacted for security purposes, leaving him to frustratedly scribble "COME—GENDO IKARI" in the white space at the bottom. Although it's rather telling that he signed it with his complete name instead of "Your father".
  • If you examine a freeze-frame, it doesn't have the right shape to be a letter, but instead is probably a printout of Shinji's pilot candidate profile. There is clearly a square to the right for a photo, the little bars at the top are things like birth date and blood type, etc. Tellingly the only un-redacted things are Shinji's name and an ID number which matches the ID card that is pinned to the paper. It's entirely fitting for Gendou to have just wrote "Come!" on the printout someone handed him about Shinji and handing it back to be sent out (and security redacted essentially everything before sending it).
• Cooldown Hug: Stroke rather than hug, but in End of Evangelion, when Asuka touches Shinji's face in the same way that Yui had done earlier, which stops him from strangling her.
• Cosmic Horror Story: But the Psychological Horror of it all is also coupled with contemplations on existentialism.
• Cosmopolitan Council: The members of SEELE seen in person are German, American, British, French, and Russian.
• Cowardice Callout: Misato gives several callouts to Shinji in some instances where he wants to no longer be a pilot; in The End of Evangelion, Misato's last words to Shinji are telling him to stop fleeing and wanting to kill himself and to instead make a choice.
• Covers Always Lie: A mild example at the back cover of End Of Evangelion's DVD; Touji and Kaworu are shown wearing plug suits, even though Touji does not appear at all and Kaworu only appears in the film as part of the Adam/Lilith hybrid that convinces Shinji to begin Third Impact.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: This is one of the roles of NERV, being the ones in charge of the Evangelions who were made specifically to fight Angels.
• Creepy Doll: Asuka's mother, Kyoko, kept one around during her confinement in a mental hospital, talking to the doll as if it were Asuka. The creepiness of this skyrockets when Kyoko asks the doll to "die with [her]", and later when Asuka discovers her mother hanged both herself and the doll.
• Cross-Popping Veins:
  • Asuka, continuously.
  • Misato, whenever she finds Kaji flirting with and/or groping another woman.
• Cryptic Conversation:
  • Gendou and Fuyutski's interactions are made almost entirely of this trope.
  • Any scene involving SEELE.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Happens every time the Evas go berserk, and the first time the Dummy Plug is activated.
  • In End of Evangelion, Asuka's fight against the JSSDF and the MP EVAs...at first.
• Curtain Call: At the Grand Finale of the series, all of the named characters of the show appear at one final scene, congratulate Shinji on his epiphany, and then congratulate you, dear viewer.
• Cut Short: Not the series itself — controversial as it is, the TV ending does wrap things up pretty neatly, if only from a thematic standpoint. Rather, in the original cut of Death and Rebirth, the "Rebirth" episode just...ends. Right in the middle. This effectively pissed off a number of Japanese fans who saw the movie in theaters (and Western fans who bought the VHS/DVD) expecting the final conclusion to the series, only to find out that they had to wait for The End of Evangelion.
• Cyber Cyclops: Unit 00, and some of the failed Evangelion heads in End.
• Cyberpunk: Evangelion has quite a few transhumanist, cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk traits, such as The Singularity.

D - H

• Dated History: While it's never exactly made clear what the Dead Sea Scrolls referred to by SEELE are, it's possible that they are referring to the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. At the time the show was made, the full contents of the Scrolls had not been disclosed, which led to much speculation and forming of conspiracy theories as to what they actually said. However the complete scrolls have since been made public, removing the mystery surrounding them that serves as the basis for this show.
• Deadly Force Field: Asuka in EVA Unit 02 managed to use her AT Field offensively. More generally, throughout the Evangelion franchise EVAs have to use their AT Fields offensively to neutralize that of an Angel so they can make the kill.
• Death of a Child: In a blink-and-miss-it moment in Episode 19, Unit 02's head crashes into the shelter and kills several people, including a baby that was audibly laughing a few seconds earlier.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Half the characters are first presented as classic anime stereotypes, but as the series progresses they are revealed to be extremely messed-up individuals whose behavior is an endless source of troubles.
• Deconstructor Fleet: The series was the first in a while to attempt to answer a lot of the nagging questions about Humongous Mecha series and anime in general and returns answers so simple, direct, and reasonable that they are some of the most frightening or most awakening depending on the viewers interpretation.
  • Why are all the central protagonists the same age? Due to a quirk of the setting, 14 is the current maximum pilot age, and the technology has been under development for their whole lives, so these children are all to some degree Tyke Bombs.
  • Why would a vehicle care about its pilot's mental state? Because the vehicle is a Soul Jar containing the soul of its pilot's mother.
  • Why are the mecha's abilities so closely matched to their enemies? The "mecha" are actually lobotomized clones of the enemy species fitted with machinery to control them like Meat Puppets by the pilots.
  • How did the main character suddenly become the best fighter with zero experience? While the Evas follow orders, they have wills of their own and are fully capable of independent action. The pilot is only truly necessary to animate the Eva.
  • Special note also goes to the characters of this series, who are initially presented as cliche anime stereotypes (Tsundere, The Hero, The Quiet One, and so on) before revealing that every one of them is far more psychologically complex than those reductive labels. Indeed, these stereotypes are shown to be very harmful, since the cast's expectations of each other are dictated primarily by these tropes. Asuka, the Tsundere, is put off by Rei's stoic silence, and irritated by how Shinji doesn't match up to a traditional macho image, and that's just one example.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Some Angels explode when they die, some do not. At least one self-destructs in a massive explosion before it can be properly killed.
• Defusing The Tykebomb: Rei's the Apocalypse Maiden and Shinji's interactions with her is akin to him wandering around a powder keg with a zippo, not having a clue the crap's flammable. Surprisingly, it works to some extent, and in the movie Shinji becomes the tykebomb and Rei takes a stab at defusing him.
• Demythification: The show presents the Dead Sea Scrolls as being left by the god-like alien who seeded Earth with life; this is the justification for the use of Biblical names and symbols used for the "Angels".
• Depending on the Artist: The show's artwork and animation quality varied a good bit from episode to episode. For example, episode 19 has noticeably thicker lineart in close-ups◊, 16's coloring is very saturated◊ & washed-out looking◊ (though a good part of this is due to the loss of the episode's original master reel, meaning that all subsequent copies had to be made from a lower quality source), and 9 brought us◊ a girly-faced Shinji. Episode 11, (ironically) despite being animated with help from Studio Ghibli, is one of the worst-looking episodes of the show, due to the bizarre◊ and lumpy◊ art style◊ making everyone◊ look "off". Also, due to the budget shrinkage that led to, well, you know, much of episodes 21-24 needed to be redrawn for DVD, leading to further variation in the styles.
  • Whether Misato has lipstick on◊ or not◊ rotates, sometimes several times in the same scene.
  • Most of the female characters' hair lengths change frequently, particularly Misato who sometimes has fairly long hair and sometimes it appears to only reach down to her collarbones.
  • The colour of Shinji's eyes seems to differ from scene to scene, sometimes being clearly drawn as black◊ or brown◊ instead of blue◊.
• Deranged Animation: Numerous examples, but especially episodes 25 and 26 and The End of Evangelion.
• Description Cut:
  • Episode 11 sets up long chains of this and Ironic Echo Cut. After all, the whole point of the episode is how the characters, while isolated by a power outage, still manage to think the same.
  • The Death segment of Death & Rebirth is practically nothing but these.
• Destructive Romance: The fallout of the one between Shinji and Asuka provides the impetus for many of the events of the plot, especially towards the end of the TV series and in The End of Evangelion. When you really get down to it, Eva is essentially the story of the most dysfunctional romance ever.
• Detrimental Determination: Asuka's sheer determination and drive to succeed at all costs leads to her breakdown when her mental stability eventually starts buckling under the strain of the many personal setbacks she experiences and is no longer able to keep up.
• Deus Angst Machina: At the start of the plot, Shinji hates his father and blames him for the absence of his mother because she died in mysterious circumstances involving his father, after which he sent him to live with his teacher (his aunt and uncle in the manga), being incompetent to raise him without her. When his father requests his presence again, it isn't apparently because of regret but of necessity: he needs Shinji to work for him; if Shinji doesn't comply, the world will end. After Shinji agrees to do this, he requests to live alone and was going to, but decides to live with Misato due to her insistence. Misato, we discover, was also abandoned by her father twice: once in favour of his job, the second time in favour of her life over his, and absolutely hates the Angels for robbing her of him. Rei, whom Shinji met during his reunion with his father, actually does live completely alone. This isolation is enforced by her caretakers on Gendou’s orders because she plays a key part in Gendou’s Instrumentality scenario. Later, she undergoes a Suicide Mission to protect Shinji, who saves her from death; then, she undergoes another Suicide Mission to protect Shinji, and goes all the way. After meeting Rei, Shinji meets Touji, who resents him deeply because his sister was badly injured in Shinji’s first Eva fight. Eventually, Touji forgives and befriends him, eventually becomes an Eva pilot himself with everyone but Shinji aware of this, and is later crippled (in the anime)/killed (in the manga) by Shinji’s Eva, despite Shinji’s protests. Then he meets Asuka, who despite regularly berating and bullying him, takes a secret liking to him. She later takes a shot in the foot thinking that he'll reciprocate by kissing him while holding his nose; he doesn't. After this, her pride is further broken down by Shinji achieving a higher synch rate than her and thus displacing her as top pilot, and after being psychologically assaulted by an angel that unearths all of her worst memories and experiences, she decides suicide is her best option. Finally, Shinji meets Kaworu: the only person to love him unconditionally; too bad that ceases when Shinji discovers that Kaworu is a disguised enemy and kills him (at Kaworu's insistence), crossing a line he’s never dreamed he would. All this blame, responsibility, deception, and alienation prove too much for Shinji, who won’t bring himself to fight and save Asuka to prevent the Third Impact, and, when finally given the choice, decides to end the world rather than save it — and even though he changes his mind, the world that's left is an absolute mess.
• Diabolus ex Machina: In End of Evangelion, Asuka manages to destroy the MP-Evas sent to terminate her and the rest of NERV after a Heroic Second Wind... and then the giant blades of the MP-Evas suddenly turn into copies of the Lance of Longinus, impale Asuka, and the MP-Evas regenerate from their apparent deaths and maim her.
• Disastrous Demonstration: Invoked when Gendo has Ritsuko sabotage Jet Alone's demonstration. Justified in that it nearly suffering a nuclear melt down in a populated area after going out of control throws up all manner of red flags.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Averted with Asuka verbally, and at times physically abusing Shinji. Asuka's constant verbal bombardment and puts-downs toward Shinji seem like typical tsundere behaviour, but due to Shinji's low self-esteem, it only serves to push him further and further away from her. Shinji recoiling from her frustrates Asuka which, in turn, causes her to be even more scathing.
• Downer Ending:
  • Episode 26, depending on interpretation, implies that Shinji completely embraced Instrumentality and SEELE won (which is not helped by the ambiguity of Shinji's epiphany). Whatever the hell happened, at least Shinji ends it finally happy.
  • The same goes for End; although a brighter future is possible and the main conspiracy has been averted, the film ends with Shinji weeping after trying to strangle Asuka, who is horrified and disgusted with Shinji, the Earth in ruin, and there's no guarantee that either of them will recover.
  • An even darker ending, "Last B", was in the storyboard stages for End at some point. It starts with Shinji lying on the beach while holding hands with someone. He notices that he will probably never see his friends again, but that he also will keep on living anyways. He then squeezes the hand he is holding and sees a short flash of Rei. It is then revealed that nobody is lying next to him, and the hand he is holding belongs to that arm Rei lost earlier in the film.
• Do You Want to Copulate?: Rei has no visible reaction whatsoever to Shinji seeing her naked, then falling on her and accidentally groping her. In the manga, she actually looks surprised but doesn't say anything.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Episode 17 ("Fourth Children") is a textbook example of dramatic irony. At Shinji's expense, of course. Everybody except Shinji knows that Touji is the Fourth Child, and the plot of the episode is centered on the fact that everybody conceals that fact from Shinji (either intentionally or unintentionally^note Asuka, for example, had mistakenly assumed that he knew all along, and when she realized during the sortie that nobody bothered to tell him even now, she was started to spill the beans to him before she was cut off by a surprise attack from the Angel.) until it's too late.
  • And then you have the scene where Shinji and Asuka kiss. Asuka likes Shinji and offers to kiss him, but she treated it like a game to waste time in case he was going to reject her (saying she was bored, pinching his nose...). And since Shinji stood still, gasping for air instead of kissing her back or hugging her, she thought he had rejected her and ran off. The sad thing is Shinji DID like Asuka, but because of how mean she's been to him and her treating it like a game, he didn't think she liked him back and he did not dare to do anything. So instead of getting them closer, their kiss made Shinji feel worse about himself and contributed to Asuka's breakdown (that scene played during her Mind Rape).
• Driving Question: Many, but possibly the biggest one is the nature of the Evas, which is also the closest one to getting a straight answer.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady:
  • Shinji is essentially a Gender Flip of Nadia (see here for notes from Sadamoto himself). He was described by Sadamoto as looking like "a boyish young girl" (more evidence here◊), and was made as such to distinguish him from the mecha heroes at that time. Shinji's feminine facial features are brought up by Misato in the first episode, and during the eighth and ninth episodes he's made to look like a girl from nothing more than a wardrobe change◊.
  • A scene from the Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 video game, had Fuyutsuki say that Shinji looked just like Yui and then crossdress Shinji for the role all while saying how beautiful "she" looks; Fuyutsuki's actions soon become overtly sexual.
  • Shinji and Kaworu also make rather pretty girls with little more than a hair and eyelash change (and breasts); in the GenderFlip version of episode 24, longer haired Shinjiko ends up looking like a young version of Yui.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: First subverted when Shinji tries to kiss Asuka in her sleep, but ultimately decides against it. Then, in End of Evangelion, Shinji pleases himself over a scantily clad and comatose Asuka.
• Dying for Symbolism: Really, all of these are up to anybody's guess, but in End of Evangelion Kaworu's death possibly represents the death of Shinji's sanity, Asuka's death could mean the death of Shinji's hope, Misato's death could represent the death of Shinji's love (Gendou might count), and the god-like Rei's death at the end could mean the death of Shinji's fear and return to peace. This movie is virtually the definition of Mind Screw, so you may have a different interpretation.
• Dysfunction Junction: One of the defining examples of this trope in anime. The psychological issues of virtually every single member of the main cast could fill a sizable portion of the DSM-IV. The show also goes into some detail about how this came about - long story short, a bunch of very rich, very insecure people decided to act on their insecurities, and deliberately picked the only people broken enough to buy what they were selling (while causing enough collateral damage thanks to their monstrous actions to create a new generation of suitably traumatised people for them to harvest for their own ends).
• Easter Egg:
  • Spike Spencer (Shinji's English dub actor)'s famous rant about the original ending from Shinji's POV, which includes gems such as "W-what's an Eva? Is that sort of a Freudian thing, or...um...am I real?" and "I mustn't run away, I mustn't run — okay, I got that, good, okay, now if I were to run away, let's analyze that, where the fuck would I go!?" Take a listen. It's even better if you think about how much Spencer's Shinji voice sounds like Larry the Cucumber from VeggieTales.
  • The End of Evangelion has an awesome one. Early in the movie when Misato checks the computers, the screen with orange text has her saying "So that's what happened during Second Impact". However, the text is in fact a brief bio of Studio Gainax where every instance of the word Gainax is replaced by GEHIRN, and IMPORTANT-LOOKING, ALL-CAPS phrases like SECOND IMPACT and ADAM inserted at random. Additionally, there are some bogus "binary" numbers (10-bit instead of 8-bit), and there is a 4 among them. This could be a symbol for death, which is pronounced the same as the number in japanese (shi).
• Eldritch Abomination: The Angels are bizarre, extremely alien beings who are capable of destroying physical and psychological barriers. Some of them don't even look like organisms, such as the infamous Ramiel, a beam-shooting blue octahedron. Evangelion also takes the "eldritch" to a level that many other works of fiction don't by explicitly pointing out how deeply they violate the laws of physics—for example, their flesh exhibits wave-particle duality, and one Angel is a fourth-dimensional being who has a two-dimensional appearance and casts a three-dimensional "shadow".
• Empathic Weapon: Due to synchronization, the pain an Eva feels when it is damaged is felt by the pilot, and at a high enough synch level, the pilot actually suffers the same wounds. Asuka's fight with the MP Evas in End graphically demonstrates this, as she appears to lose an eye and have her guts ripped open inside her plugsuit, and actually has her right arm split in two as a result of the MP Evas' fake Lances damaging Unit 02. Thankfully, we don't see what happens when the Eva is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice at the end of the fight. The trope is also deconstructed in that Shinji's empathy with his Eva is psychologically dysfunctional. For example, Shinji describes Unit 01's destruction of the possessed Unit 03 along the lines of "Father used my own hands to hurt Touji," despite the fact that (a) it was the Eva's hands, not his own hands, and (b) he was not in control of the Eva at the time; the dummy plug was. Also, Shinji's apology to Asuka when he fights the Kaworu-controlled Unit 02 can be seen as Shinji seeing the Eva as an extension of Asuka, so that attacking it is at some level equivalent to attacking Asuka.
• The End of the World as We Know It: What apparently happens if an Angel ever merges with Adam. It happens anyway, but through other means. All sentient life is seemingly reduced into LCL, their souls joining together and forming a Hive Mind.
• "End of the World" Special:
  • Rei invokes this in End, giving the responsibility to Shinji.
  • Shinji remade the world in the manga ending. Probably.
• Epiphanic Prison: End of Evangelion thrust Shinji into one. His solution? Destroy the world.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: It has precisely one, during an ending scene, with Shinji and Asuka getting into a spat that is broadcast live to the whole NERV complex.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Should an Angel ever manage to penetrate into the depths of Tokyo-3 and manage to merge with Adam, the need for protection will be rendered moot.
• Evil Versus Evil: End of Evangelion contains a rather odd example. Gendo and SEELE finally definitively turn on each other with their conflicting plans for the Third Impact, leading to SEELE sending the JSSDF to exterminate NERV. While the leaders of the respective sides are both trying to cause the Third Impact, the actual grunts on both sides are unaware of their true intentions and are convinced that they're attempting to stop it.
• Exact Time to Failure: The Evas can run for precisely 5 minutes disconnected from their power cord... except almost every time this happens they simply go berserk and kill the Angel anyway. It's also used a few other times to add drama to incoming disasters.
• Expositing the Masquerade: Shinji, a slightly dysfunctional boy, witnesses an Eldritch Abomination attacking the city then is promptly thrown into the cockpit of a Humongous Mecha that's not really a mecha at all: it's alive and is VERY bloodthirsty. It takes a few episodes until he gets the explanation about what the hell is going on but never gets told about what he's piloting until three episodes from the end. It's unclear which is worse: that he was told so late or that he was told at all. Regardless which one is true, Shinji got an all-expenses-paid visit to the Despair Event Horizon for his effort.
• Expy
  • Shinji, Ritsuko, Asuka, and Kensuke are similar to Nadia, Electra, Grandis, and Jean from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, respectively. Also, Asuka may be viewed as a partial expy of Jung Freud of Gunbuster fame.
  • Misato, meanwhile, is based on Usagi Tsukino, if she was an adult.
  • It has also been revealed that some characterisation and appearances have been based on British drama series from the mid-20th century: Gendo and Fuyutsuki are based on Ed Staker and Col. Alex Freeman from UFO (1970), according to Sadamoto, whereas Kaji is based on Col. Foster, with elements of Emma Peel from The Avengers (1960s).
  • Additionally, the later Gainax productions FLCL and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann seem to exist to represent how Shinji would have turned out if he was raised more successfully. Gainax staff have said that while creating the male protagonists for their recent major productions, they asked themselves how Shinji would have turned out if he had been brought up in different circumstances.
  • The Evas themselves are loosely based on the God Warriors, giant radioactive cyborgs from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which Anno worked on during his brief stint as an animator for Studio Ghibli.
• Extinct in the Future: Thousands of plant and animal species were wiped out by Second Impact, which also rendered Antarctica and much of the area surrounding it completely barren of life.
• Extra-Long Episode: The Director's Cut version of episodes 21-24 are several minutes longer than the others. Some scenes were cut out in their Original Airing to trim them down to the normal length, despite their vital role in filling out some bits and pieces in the massive Mind Screw that the series is.
• Eye Scream: A few times.
  • Sachiel pierces Unit 01's right eye all the way to the other side of the skull.
  • End of Evangelion has two major ones: when the MP Eva's Lance of Longinus hits Unit 02 in the face, with the resultant injury to Asuka and when Unit 01 bursts through Lilith/Rei's eye. The latter has come to symbolize for many how much of a Mind Screw End is.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: In End, Rei/Lilith manifests a huge eye from a vagina in her forehead (yes, you read that right) that the Unit 01/Tree of Life is absorbed into.
• Everyone Went to School Together: There are a lot of school-related trios in Evangelion.
  • Ritsuko, Misato, and Kaji all went to college together.
  • Gendou, Yui, and Fuyutsuki; Yui was Fuyutsuki's favorite student at university, and Gendou was his advisee and Yui's boyfriend.
  • Shinji, Asuka, and Rei are all in the same homeroom. Also, Kensuke, Touji, and Shinji form their own trio, complete with an endearing label from Asuka. This one is justified, as all of the students in the pilots' homeroom are potential Eva pilots.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: The 8th angel Sandalphon, which looks like an Anomalocaris. It is discovered in a volcano in embryonic form, and later ages rapidly to a subadult form. It is shown to be completely unaffected by lava both internally and externally, and is able to swim it in as if it were water.
• Failed Future Forecast: The JSSDF soldiers that raid NERV in End of Evangelion all carry H&K G11 rifles, which would have been considered futuristic... in 1997. The G11 program fell apart in 1990 and the rights were repurposed by 2004 with only a few functioning rifles ever being built, and today it's considered an abject and expensive failure instead of the future of military arms.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: So much, it is rumoured the series generated a reinforcement of censorship laws in Japan.
• Fan Disservice: While the anime and related works have many moments of genuine fanservice, there are several instances where such material is deeply disturbing, either on its own or in context. Such scenes include Ritsuko being interrogated by SEELE in the buff; the scenes in End of Evangelion of Shinji masturbating over a comatose Asuka and the more bizarre aspects of the Rei/Lilith hybrid, and the "naked Yui tempting Shinji" sequence in the manga. A milder (and more humorous) instance is in Episode 10, where Asuka's Type D heat-resistant plugsuit inflates from the usual skintight bodysuit to an enormous balloon shape, much to her chagrin.
• Fanservice:
  • The anime actually lampshaded this in the "next episode" previews, as Misato always promised "more fanservice!" Ironically, episodes that Misato promised would have fanservice always seemed to have less than episodes where no such promise was made in the previews.
  • Straight examples include the brief shot of Ritsuko unzipping her diving suit in the first episode; Misato's more revealing outfits, such as the crop top she wears in episode 7; and Asuka's sun dress getting blown up in episode 8, giving Shinji, Toji, Kensuke, and the viewer a look at her underwear (and leading to her slapping the boys as their "viewing fee").
• Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product: The LCL that sustains life within the entry plug (that is described as being identical to amniotic fluid) is the bodily fluid of Lilith, the being that spawned all of humanity.
• Fatal Flaw: Every major character has at least one. It could be said that during Instrumentality they are all forced to face them:
  • Shinji: A crippling fear of being rejected and hated by others. It ultimately leads to him being too late to save Asuka in episode 25 and setting off Instrumentality in End of Evangelion.
  • Asuka: An overwhelming need to validate her own existence through the approval of others, which eventually leads to self-esteem so low that it renders her unable to pilot an EVA. Her brash attitude and abusive behaviour towards Shinji, especially after he outdoes her in the synchro test, completely messes up the group mentality and damages Shinji psychologically to the point he has to struggle to recover.
  • Rei: A general disregard for her own life and being incapable of understanding the feelings of herself or others. Both are due to her being a clone.
  • Misato: Much like Shinji, an overwhelming fear of rejection. As opposed to Shinji, she deals with it by never allowing her relationships to deepen to the point where she can be hurt to be begin with.
  • Ritsuko: An inability to live outside of her mother's shadow, despite her attempts otherwise.
  • Naoko Akagi: Her lingering affection for Gendou prevents her from destroying NERV and preventing the Third Impact when Gendou brings Rei to initiate it.
  • Gendou: An inability to let go of his late wife, leading to much misery for his son and, by extension, the rest of the world.
• Faux Fluency: Asuka speaks German in a few scenes, but her pronunciation is so awful it's pretty much unintelligible.
• Fearful Symmetry: The Angel Israfel, in the episode "Both of You, Dance Like You Want to Win!", can split into two smaller copies of itself. In the series, it can recombine; in the manga, it remains split.
• Fighter-Launching Sequence: The Evas are launched on elevator-like lifts that can get them from the Geofront to the streets of Tokyo-3 in just a few seconds.
• Final Battle: The series proper has Shinji's battle against Kaworu/Tabris and the possessed Unit 02, which marks the end of the Angels as a species and finally causes Shinji to completely snap. The actual final conflict in the series is the JSSDF's merciless assault on NERV HQ, where an entire army division is deployed alongside air fusion bombs and Mass Production Evas to exterminate the organization as punishment for Gendo's disloyalty.
• Finger-Tenting: Gendo is pretty much the poster boy for this trope, doing it in almost every scene in which he's sitting down; sometimes also combined with a Psychotic Smirk. His trademark covering-the-mouth variant is often called "the Gendo pose". (As a bonus, using the pose repeatedly helped cut down on animation costs and nobody had to worry about matching lip flaps when dubbing into another language.)
  • Scans from the original designs show Shinji doing a happy version of the pose. It must be a tradition in the Ikari family.
  • Rei also does this several times. She must unconsciously have copied it from Gendo.
  • Misato can be seen doing it too.
• First Church of Mecha: Evas were made as a substitute for God, apparently. It's more complex than that, but there's no way to explain it in short. Oh, and they aren't just a substitute for God, going by the Japanese notion of 'kami', the Evas pretty much are Gods.
• Five Rounds Rapid: Conventional military efforts tend to do precisely jack against the Angels, with one notable exception—the UN Pacific Fleet defeats Gaghiel by getting two battleships inside it and firing their cannons by remote, then self-destructing the ships and killing it. They did have Unit 02's help though.
• Flash Back: Episode 21 is dedicated entirely to this, delving into the lives of the adult cast, pre- and post-Second Impact.
• Flawed Prototype: Jet Alone. To be more specific, there were two Jet Alone models created. The first appeared in the television series. The second was improved and renamed Jet Alone Prime, appearing in the game Evangelion 2 for the PS2.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: The residents of Tokyo-3 all appear to flee for shelters well away from the carnage whenever Angels appear, which explains why so little collateral damage happens during the early battles. This becomes most notable in Episode 3, when an Angel shows up while Shinji is at school and the other students are forced to shelter there instead.
• Flooded Future World: When Adam/Antarctica blew up during Second Impact, a "ripple" almost a quarter-mile (four-hundred meters) tall in places spread outward, wiping out every coastal city in the southern hemisphere and resulting in a lot of underwater real estate.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Episode 7, the representative from Japan Heavy Chemical Industries mockingly compares Evangelion Unit-01 to "a hysterical woman".
  • In Episode 9, Asuka struggles to synchronise her movements with Shinji and gets angry when Rei does it with ease. This is a first indicator of her fragile ego and of the Assimilation Plot triggered in End of Evangelion.
  • In Episode 11, Ritsuko talks about the three Magi supercomputers and how each one contains an aspect of her mother, Naoko Akagi. She talks about how much she admired her mother as a scientist and how much she hated her as a woman. In End of Evangelion, guess which personality belongs to the Magi supercomputer that chooses Gendou's scheme over Ritsuko?
  • In Episode 22, Hyuga talks with Misato about the production of EVAs 05 through 13 having begun in several countries around the world. They finally appear in End of Evangelion as the tools of SEELE.
  • In Episode 24, Shinji is introduced to Kaworu who himself is sitting on top of a ruined statue of a traditional angel that is missing its head. This is exactly what Kaworu is, and how he ends up.
• Four Is Death:
  • Unit 04 explodes on its activation test. Unit 03, the actual fourth Evangelion, is infected by an Angel and eventually killed in a brutal manner by a dummy plug-controlled Unit 01. The pilot was, naturally, the Fourth Child, who just became the fourth person his new girlfriend makes lunches for.
  • When Shinji reaches 400% synchronization rate, his body disintegrates into LCL.
• Freudian Excuse: Oh boy, where to begin? Every single main character is mentally unstable to some degree, as are most of the secondary characters. Given the crap they have been going through for the last 15 years, everyone has very good reasons for it.
• Furo Scene: Numerous instances, but most memorably Asuka's in episode 22...which, typically for the series, is not so much titillating as it is disturbing, what with it showcasing her mental breakdown and all.
• Gainax Ending: What The Prisoner was for the UK, Evangelion was for Japan. After 24 episodes of mecha action and conspiracy plotting, the show ends with a look into Shinji's psyche, where he ultimately finds peace of mind. Some fans consider End Of Evangelion (the allegedly planned ending that is also concurrent with the TV show's last episodes) to be this, but ultimately it provides more of a conclusion than the TV series, not least because it follows up on a lot of the Foreshadowing from the series and closes many of the running plotlines due to its blatant kill-all nature.
• Gambit Pileup: As the series goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to know who knows what, who has what interests, and who's leading the game.
• Gambit Roulette: A whole lot. Yui could have arranged her own "accidental" death in order to save humanity from being lost forever to Instrumentality. She would've been counting on Gendou's undying love for her to have him rescue her soul to inhabit Unit 01 where she could build up Shinji's confidence and ensure he was at the center of Instrumentality so that he could resist it and convince Lilith/Rei to let anyone come back who had the strength of will to rebuild their own AT Field.
• Gender Flip: Several fans have theorized that the three leads are examples; noting how few would speak ill of◊ a sad little Moe Shinji, Hot-Blooded Jerkass Asuka, and The Stoic Rei were they the opposite genders. This video shows a nice example of that idea.)
• Genre-Busting: It's simultaneously a Giant Robot, Real Robot and mecha Deconstruction, a sci-fi thriller, a psychological drama, and a trippy Postmodernist diatribe.
• Genre Deconstruction: Arguably the Trope Codifier for modern anime. The series has an axe to grind with the entire Super Robot Mecha Show genre, which becomes ironic given its sheer pop-cultural osmosis.
  • The basic premise of the show, at first, seems absolutely formulaic; an Ordinary High-School Student falls into the cockpit of a Humongous Mecha designed by his father. He is the last hope for humanity in a war against various alien lifeforms called "Angels." However, it is quickly shown that using fourteen-year-old children as child soldiers in extremely traumatic battles against Lovecraftian horrors is, to put it bluntly, not very nice and certainly not the kind of idealistic "insert-positive-emotion-here conquers all obstacles" affair that previous super robot shows portrayed it as. Case in point, Shinji's first battle almost kills him and he only is bailed out at the last second by a Deus ex Machina. It also played with the following mecha tropes:
  • Changed the mecha from an unfeeling machine with unlimited energy that is easily repaired to a biological entity that bleeds, feels pain, needs an extension cord for power, and may even have a personality.^note The Jet Alone episode illustrates that said unfeeling machine with unlimited energy wouldn't actually be as useful as it's typically portrayed as in most mecha shows since it can be easily sabotaged by rival factions, would be surrounded by bureaucracy that makes it next to impossible to get anything done in a crisis, and its vaunted unlimited energy source can be just as much of a danger as the enemy the mecha was created to fight. Plus, a simple machine has limits that would make it useless against creatures with powers that border on reality warping.
  • Most super robot shows have a teenage mecha pilot and a long-absent father who designed the mecha. So Evangelion shows how traumatizing it would be for a real teen to fight in a giant robot — and what kind of father would abandon his son to design the robot. In short, Gendo Ikari is in the running for worst anime dad ever.
  • Half the cast is made up of what seem at first to be stereotypical anime characters. As the series progresses, however, they are revealed to be severely messed-up people with the same sort of problems that would be expected of real-life tsunderes, hard drinking party girls, and lovable sex maniacs. Shinji's Shrinking Violet nature also gets ripped into, viciously, as he's been forced into a gender role he has no training or capability to handle.
  • Quite a few old super robot shows featured mysterious, alien villains with very lightly defined motivations; cue the relentless attacks of the Angels, alien (or not) assailants on whose motives, constituents or psychology we have a little idea of, simply malevolent MacGuffins to enable the story to play with 'giant robot' tropes. They also happen to get progressively creepier, and more unexplainably eldritch as the show progresses. Most importantly, there is an emphasis on showing the fear and uncertainty that comes with fighting an enemy that is just plain undefinable, thus showing how it just takes a little to turn an idealistic, formulaic Super Robot anime into a depressing Cosmic Horror Story. Various factions within the series vie for the opportunity to take down the Angels in the way they deem most appropriate, with the winner, of course, being the one that causes the most collateral damage.
  • Tokyo 3 is all but destroyed by the end of the series, and its populace is either dead or evacuated — a sharp contrast to the likes of most examples of the City of Adventure. The constant warfare tears the city apart and eventually NERV no longer has the funds to repair it.
  • In some ways, Eva resembles the early days of the Real Robot Genre. Shinji Ikari has quite a few similarities with Amuro Ray, the most iconic mecha protagonist in anime history. While Amuro's relationship with his father is not nearly as bad as Shinji's, Amuro's father does go insane while building the RX-78 and due to his injuries in the first episode (which Amuro himself caused). Amuro is just as "whiny" as Shinji, but is forced to accept responsibilities in the military hierarchy and grows to maturity through that. Even his reaction to his accidental killing of Lalah resembles Shinji's after killing Kaworu.
  • This stance has become increasingly disputed in more recent years, however, thanks to a combination of said pop-culture osmosis alongside the much wider availability of older mecha anime and tokusatsu. It's become known that Evangelion drew heavily from Space Runaway Ideon and the Ultraman series. Given that Ideon was directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who has been known to play around with already existing mecha tropes some 15-20 years before Evangelion even was concieved, the more dedicated retro anime circles have started to think of Evangelion as a revival of the late 70s-early 80s cynicism rather than a completely new deconstruction. It just so happened that the newer deconstructor was brought first to the States instead.
• Genre Shift: The series moved from a shonen magazine (Shonen Ace) to a seinen magazine (Young Ace), more due to its infamous Schedule Slips than for actual changes in the content.
• Geodesic Cast:
  • The casting for the show pretty much revolves around the three heroes, with a few characters even being part of more than one. In fact, the only two characters that don't fit into a trio are Pen-Pen, that Jet Alone guy, and the students' teacher...crap, that's three!
  • A meta example also appears in the American dub of the series, as the voice actors for the Bridge Bunnies and the voice actors for the pilots all got married after the production for the series was done. Tiffany Grant (Asuka) married Matt Greenfield (Hyuga), Amanda Winn (Rei) married Jason C Lee (Aoba), and Spike Spencer (Shinji) married Kendra Benham (Maya).
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man:
  • Kaji does this to Misato in episode 15 — also notable as one of the few (only?) scenes in which he is completely sincere.
  • Happens twice in End of Evangelion:
    • Shinji tries this to get Asuka out of her coma, but it doesn't work.
    • Misato does this to Shinji later to try to get him to snap out of his shellshock and motivate himself to try to save Asuka.
• Giant Eye of Doom:
  • Shinji's memories of the fight with Sachiel come flooding back near the end of episode 2, including Unit-01's battered head armor breaking off and falling away and its punctured eye regrowing and seeming to look right at Shinji.
  • In a way, Matariel, because it has camouflage that looks like eyes, and its actual working eye cries tears of acid.
  • Sahaquiel is a gigantic eye with wings that bombs the planet from space, leaving giant craters that get ever closer to Tokyo-3. It's taken to an even greater extreme in Rebuild.
  • The explosion of Third Impact in End of Evangelion is shaped like an enormous eye that literally brings widespread death and destruction in its wake—though it could be an artsy Shout-Out to Anno's previous anime, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
• Gigantic Moon: The distant moon is drawn larger than nearby objects. In Episode 6, for example, it is shown bigger than Rei's body.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Angels frequently force the protagonists to resort to desperate measures to stop them. Each of the last five is able to invoke this in their own way.
  • Leliel's nature is so baffling that the only thing NERV can think of to recover Unit 01 from it is to hit it with every N2 mine in the world to try and dislodge it. Ultimately subverted because Unit 01 is able to break itself out after going berserk.
  • After Bardiel sweeps aside Units 00 and 02 and Shinji proves unwilling to fight back due to the possibility of killing another human being by doing so, Gendo activates the Dummy Plug system, forcing Unit 01 to fight back and savagely kill the other EVA against his son's will.
  • Zeruel's rampage through the Geofront, where it is again able to sweep aside Rei and Asuka with minimal effort, forces Shinji to come out of retirement and pilot Unit 01 again. The threshold isn't truly crossed until Zeruel has Unit 01 on the ropes, and is threatening to break into the Dummy Plug itself and personally kill Shinji. This awakens the soul of Yui inside the EVA and causes it to go berserk, completely ripping apart and eating the Angel while also causing Shinji's sync rate to skyrocket to the point where he literally merges with the EVA.
  • Arael's assault on Asuka, as well as the impossibility of hitting the Angel while it's floating in space, gives Gendo all the excuse he needs to make the unprecedented step of removing the Lance of Longinus from Lilith and using it to kill the Angel, greatly accelerating his own plans for the Third Impact.
  • Armisael is able to infect Units 00 and 01 to the point where Rei is left with no choice but to blow her own EVA up, obliterating what's left of Tokyo-3 in the process.
  • Tabris comes closer to triggering Armageddon than any Angel before him, forcing Shinji to kill the only person who's ever shown him unconditional love.
  • The villains end up resorting to this in End of Evangelion. When Asuka finally reactivates Unit 02 and starts obliterating the JSSDF, SEELE is forced to deploy the Mass Production EVAs. Though she is able to savage them, she eventually runs out of power and is gruesomely torn apart.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The ultimate result of Asuka's Mind Rape by Arael. The montage played as she is assaulted suggests that the Angel isn't so much poisoning or impregnating her, but shining an incredibly powerful mirror into her mind, so that all the ideas of her present and memories of her past (very powerful and uncomfortable ones) align themselves perfectly inside her head to create an overwhelming and arguably unbreakable dread that demands she acknowledge that her life isn't worth living.
• Good Morning, Crono: Spoofed in the final episode, when Shinji is shown what his life could have been like — a clichéd shounen Slice of Life series.
• Gory Discretion Shot: All that is shown of Kaworu's death in the anime is the silhouette of his head falling into the LCL lake. The manga represents his death as Shinji strangling him in a field similar to where they first met.
• Goth Spirals:
  • The Lance of Longinus is essentially two long shafts of metal that are twisted around each other then separate and spread into blades. In End, the Lance's blades twist together into a single point just before it penetrates Unit-01's core. As the Lance leaves Earth with Unit-01 at the end of End, its handle has almost completely separated, leaving only a small bit twisted together in the center.
  • When the Lance is merged with Unit-01 in End, the Eva becomes surrounded by twisting material that forms a titanic cross.
• Government Conspiracy: The coverup regarding Second Impact.
• Grand Finale: End of Evangelion is the surreal, apocalyptic, and thoroughly ambiguous conclusion to the saga.
• Grasp the Sun: Asuka in End of Evangelion, as she's trying to get her critically-damaged Eva moving again. It doesn't work, and only provokes the remainder of the MP Evas to throw their fake Spears of Longinus down and impale EVA 02, then consume almost all of the remains.
• Gratuitous English: Frequently. Also, each child pilot is referred to as a "Children" in the Japanese soundtrack: Rei Ayanami is called the "First Children"; Asuka Langley Soryu is called the "Second Children"; Shinji Ikari is called the "Third Children"; and so on.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The title itself is gratuitous Greek which would translate into English as "New Beginning Gospel" or "Gospel of the New Genesis" which may be more appropriate considering the way Shinji and Asuka are left at the end of End of Evangelion...
• Gratuitous German:
  • GEHIRN = brain, NERV = nerve, SEELE = soul.
  • Asuka's dub dialogue features the occasional German word or phrase, and she has an entire conversation in German on the phone in one episode. Her German is so bad, it does worse things to German-speakers' ears than Arael did to Asuka's mind. The English dub was even more fond of this, with Asuka shouting "PERVERSER MENSCH!" ('perverted human') where the Japanese original had the much less cumbersome "ecchi!", just to name one of the many examples. However, it's safe to say that the English voice actresses for her had a somewhat better grasp of the language and got the pronunciation at least kinda right.
  • The title of the song "Komm, süsser Tod", which means "Come, Sweet Death". However, despite the German title, the song's lyrics are in English instead.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Opponents NERV/SEELE and the Angels share a common goal: to defeat the opponent and initiate Third Impact for their own ends. NERV and SEELE want to hijack it and start the Human Instrumentality Project, and the Angels want their planet back.
• Grilling the Newbie: Shortly after Shinji arrives in his class, Toji and Kensuke discuss between themselves how he's already rumored to be the Eva pilot after his first fight. The moment he innocently confirms it, everybody (save Hikari, Kensuke, and Touji) surrounds him to ask him questions related to the Eva.
• Guardian Entity: In The End Of Evangelion, Asuka realizes her mom's soul is in Unit 02. She sees it as her mom protecting her in battle.
• Guilt Complex:
  • Shinji, in spades. It's his fault Touji's sister got hurt because he should've been more careful when fighting the Angel that almost killed him. It’s his fault Asuka hates him because he can’t do anything right. It's his fault he had to kill Kaworu because he could've chosen to Take a Third Option. It's his fault Asuka died because he couldn't get his Eva out of its restraints in order to save her... This behavior is so ingrained in him that some fans think it was a minor breakthrough for him when he was angry at his father during the Unit 03 incident. But then he goes back to kicking himself in the head again.
  • Misato also blames herself often for things she had no control over.
• Hammered into the Ground: During the episode "Both of You, Dance Like You Want to Win!", Shinji and Asuka are defeated when they first face the Angel. Each of their Evas somehow end up buried head-downwards with legs sticking up in the air.
• Hanging Around: Asuka's mother Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu killed herself by hanging. She also hung a doll that she thought was Asuka, so to Kyoko, she was hanging her own daughter as well.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Hurting other people, even ones you love, is an unavoidable part of life, and part of being human is learning to live with your regrets from doing so.
  • You will make the same mistakes, over and over.
  • Self-acceptance doesn't necessarily guarantee happiness.
• Hates Being Touched: The Absolute Terror Field is essentially weaponized personal space. Later in the series it's revealed that all humans have A. T. Fields holding their shapes together, created by their fear of intimacy and rejection. There is a persistent Urban Legend among fans that "Absolute Terror" is a pre-existing psychological term, but this is false.
• Heart Drive: The Angel's cores; they're the major weak point and a source of limitless life energy and "immortality." For good reason, his goes for the Evangelions too.
• Heart Is Where the Home Is: Shinji (Japanese) is caught in a love triangle with Rei (Japanese) and Asuka (American, German, and technically Japanese, but raised in the former two). While the series has Ship Tease moments with both couples and doesn't resolve anything by the end of the series, different nationalities interpret the triangle based on different cultural expectations. In native Japan, the Rei/Shinji ship is definitely the winner, to the point that the reboot Rebuild of Evangelion makes it canon and has Asuka drop her feelings for Shinji the minute she realizes Rei likes him. In the West, however, Asuka is far more popular, and most Western fanfiction has her come out as the clear winner for Shinji's heart.
• Heavy Mithril: Kinda. British rock band Fightstar are fans of the series and titled several songs from it. Their song "Lost Like Tears In Rain" even ends with the line "It's Neon Genesis".
• Heroic BSoD: Shinji and Asuka are the king and queen of this trope towards the end of the series, though it's debatable who's the king and who's the queen.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Multiple. Misato sacrifices herself in order to get Shinji to pilot, bravely fighting through several invading soldiers. Rei Ayanami also gives her life heroically in order to defeat Armisael, saving both children and all of mankind.
• Hero Killer: The Mass-Produced EVA series, which tear Unit 02 apart and kill Asuka in End of Evangelion and then force Shinji to begin Instrumentality.
• He's Back!: Played straight with Shinji; subverted with Asuka, who comes out of her coma, but simply dies fighting 5 minutes later.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Touji and Kensuke, eventually extended to Shinji until the Unit 03 incident.
• Hidden Eyes:
  • Shinji and Asuka on various occasions.
  • Yui does this a few times, too.
• High-Pressure Blood: The Angels, and Unit 01 in the first episode, spray enormous fountains of blood that can literally paint the town red. The Rei/Lilith hybrid actually paints a stripe of blood on the moon when she dies. Justified, perhaps, when you consider how much blood there is in something taller than office buildings and what's needed to move it around, and when you consider how much pressure is required to pump blood in an organism that size.
• Hint Dropping: Asuka does this towards Shinji a couple of times, but Shinji is too socially inept and unsure of himself to pick up on these attempts, which also fuels much of Asuka's anger towards him. Ironically, her anger towards him is also a big part of what keeps Shinji from realizing how she feels.
• Hit Me, Dammit!: Touji tells Shinji to hit him back as a "macho" way of apologizing. The manga subverts the trope, with Shinji deciding it'd be more interesting to have Touji owe him one instead, and later pranking him in front of the girls in their class as payback. In Rebuild, he actually hits Touji right away.
• Hive Mind: This would be part and parcel of Instrumentality as envisioned by SEELE — the souls of all of humanity combined into a gestalt where individuality would be completely erased.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The other reason Unit 01 wakes up when it runs out of power during the Zeruel battle is because Zeruel's merciless — and rhythmic — beating of Unit 01's core simulated a heartbeat in the entry plug.
  • This is also how Gendo dies—EVA 01 devours him after Rei betrays him and slices off his arm. Overlaps with a Karmic Death—it only happened because Gendo had just given Rei the power sources needed to do so.
• Hope Spot: A few. Most notably Asuka's very brief recovery in End.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The events of End of Evangelion, according to Word of God, occur on New Year's Eve. That's right, we never see Christmas as this is Japan, and everyone gets Tanged to death just before 2016 comes. Great.
• Hospital Surprise: People awaken in hospital beds all the time.
• Hot-Blooded: Deconstructed in more ways than one. Characters in combat fly into berserker rages which prove either to be completely ineffectual or come at great cost to the characters. Also, while Asuka seems to be the typical Hot-Blooded Ace Pilot, it becomes apparent that her sense of self worth is possibly even worse than Shinji's, and that her brash attitude covers up the fact that she requires the praise of others for validation.
• Hot for Teacher: It's implied that Maya may feel this way about Ritsuko, who is somewhat of a mentor towards her. In an Alternate Universe, this trope is played more straight.
• Hufflepuff House: Japan has ascended to the role of the world's one superpower following Second Impact, an alleged meteor strike that killed billions and completely altered the global climate. Despite the extinction-level threat posed by the Angels, nations that were powerful pre-Second Impact are close to absent from the story. America is noted to be alive but struggling, with little further elaboration. Meanwhile, the other UN Security Council nations—Britain, France, Russia, and China—are basically uninvolved outside of NERV's occasional communications with the UN and their seats on SEELE's committee.
• Humanoid Abomination: Kaworu, who is actually the 17th Angel, Tabris.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Humanity is entirely incomprehensible to the Angels who seem to have little understanding of existences that aren't themselves, much less an entire race of individual entities like humanity. Extremely basic emotions like 'being lonely' make them question why humanity would choose to exist in such a state. A question that becomes more pointed when it turns out that existing this way is a choice. The entire human race is a single Angel that uses its AT Field to split its consciousness into billions of individual beings.
• Humans Are Flawed: NERV and SEELE's motivation is that humanity, as it exists, can't be happy. Kaworu, despite having been raised (and perhaps created) by SEELE values the achievements of human culture and respects Shinji's ability to pick himself up and keep going after heartbreak instead of giving up on life the way Gendou and SEELE have. The belief that humans, not Angels, should have the future is the motive for his Heroic Sacrifice, and he later appears after Third Impact as a Spirit Advisor and the symbol that not all Humans Are Bastards: he's the one person to ever show pure, untainted kindness to Shinji, and if even an Angel can do that...
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The reason for the plot. The First Ancestral Race sent Adam to Earth, and Lilith ended up there too. Lilith didn't know what to do, so she just used her blood as the basis for life. This life, the Lilim/human race, ended up populating the planet. So the Angels are now trying to reunite with daddy and eradicate the human race so that they can have their own planet.
• Humongous Mecha: The Evas are technically piloted cyborg kaiju, and are only labelled as robots as an in-universe cover story, but Jet Alone, an unmanned robotic competitor design, is a straight example. It's implied that it was sabotaged by NERV so that the UN couldn't use it as a point of comparison and start to understand just how strange and supernatural the Evas really are.

I - Q

• I Can't Do This by Myself: In End of Evangelion, Shinji says this to Asuka when the burden of creating a new world falls on his shoulders. She refuses.
• If You Can Read This: The show's scripts are periodically used as dummy texts.
  • On the other hand, in one episode freeze-framing the show during a particular scene will reveal a shockingly detailed account (written in English, no less) of the official cover story for Second Impact.
  • Misato, in End, was reading what really happened during the Second Impact. If a curious person decides to read it, they find that it's really a company biography detailing the history of Gainax with words like GEHIRN inserted in all caps here and there to make it look plot relevant to the casual observer.
• Immune to Bullets: The Angels are for the most part immune to conventional weapons, and super-weapons only slow them down. Only an Eva can hurt most of them, due to their usage of "AT fields".
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: Plugsuits. So skintight they are pretty much the wearer's second skin, very leathery, and they come in a variety of eyecatchy colors. It's no surprise that plugsuit version merch of the characters is among the (if not the) most popular.
• Incest Subtext: Episode 17 reveals that Rei has romantic feelings for Shinji (though the full extent of them is never revealed), and it's implied throughout the series that he felt the same way about her. Though neither character is aware of it, the truth of the matter is that they're technically siblings due to the fact that Rei was created using DNA from Shinji's mother, Yui.
• Inconsistent Dub: In the English dub, "Eva" is pronounced like "ey-va" in the series, while in End Of Evangelion it's closer to "evva". Going by the Greek/Latin form of both "evangel" and "Eve", it should be pronounced "ey-va". Going by the Japanese, it's either or.
• Instant Expert: Triply subverted in the first two episodes. At first, everyone's really excited because it looks like Shinji just might save the day, despite having absolutely no experience piloting the Eva unit. Then he trips, gets beaten up rather brutally by the Angel, and the next thing we see is him waking up in a hospital bed. However, it turns out that he really did turn around and beat the Angel...but this turns out to be due less to Shinji's own abilities and more to the fact that the Eva units are actually alive and intelligent, and more specifically because Yui Ikari's soul is inside Unit 01. It's Mama Bear doing the fighting, not Shinji.
• Insult Backfire: After a tense meeting with Gendo following the 13th Angel's defeat and the 4th Child's hospitalization Shinji tells him he's done and is leaving NERV. As he walks out Gendo attempts to get under his skin by telling him he's disappointed in him as a son and they will probably never see each other again. Shinji coldly brushes this off and tells him, "That was my intention."
• Internal Monologue: Lots of it, most notably in episodes 14, 16, 20, and 22, and encompassing the entirety of 25 and 26.
• Inverted Portrait:
  • At an early point in the opening credits, Asuka and Rei's naked silhouettes pan over the screen in the background. Asuka is upside-down while Rei is upright.
  • Rei's silhouette can be seen, reflected upside-down in water, spinning against the dark blue background of the Closing Credits.
• Irony:
  • The show was meant as a deconstruction of Merchandise-Driven Giant Robot series. It has become the most heavily marketed, publicized, referenced, and rereleased animated production ever.
  • Rei, who throughout the series is tormented by the knowledge that she is replaceable and struggles to establish an identity of her own, has become one of the most archetypal anime characters in history, and most of her "clones" lack the Hidden Depths of her character.
  • Euangelion means good news in Greek. Considering how it "ends," it's not exactly good news.
• It's Always Spring: Justified. The Second Impact caused a dramatic shift in the Earth's axis, not only causing worldwide environmental damage, but also forcing significant climate changes (Japan, like the rest of the planet, is now trapped within an eternal Heat Wave). The End takes place on December 31st, and the weather looks just as it did when Shinji first arrived in Tokyo-3, some months earlier. It's Always Sunny in Tokyo-3, indeed.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Being a pilot features: being yanked around by an uncaring dickhead of a commander who won't hesitate to dispose of his own son, being trapped in a horrific steel-and-flesh monstrosity, fighting horrific monsters that can drive you insane, feeling intense pain each time said monsters land a hit, a lack of a social life, and having to deal with bizarre co-pilots. In addition, being an EVA pilot usually means having your mother absorbed into the thing, and leaves the young pilots with some sort of trauma.
• Japan Takes Over the World: A later case. Japan is a major if not THE player in the world following second impact. The formally home-defence-only JSDF now deploys all over the world. NERV is entirely manned by Japanese personnel.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The series has a lot of foreshadowing and little revealed details in the first half, and it takes a while for the latter half to start revealing more details about SEELE’s conspiracy, the nature of the Angels and the Evas, etc. Generally, the show requires some serious attention to detail and details that receive fairly little attention to understand in full.
• Kaiju: The show is directly inspired by Ultraman, and has as much in common with this mini-genre as Humongous Mecha (especially since the Humongous Mecha are actually semi-pilotable kaiju - People in Rubber Suits, no less).
• Kavorka Man:
  • Gendou, even after growing into a scraggled hard-ass when his wife 'died', managed to woo Dr. Akagi's mother and the doctor herself completely and utterly. hence the ReDeath meme "IT'S GENDO!".
  • Shinji also, as he is fourteen, lacks self-confidence and social skills to a spectacular extent, is rather average looking, and still has at least Rei, Asuka, and Kaworu expressing interest in him, with some continuities taking it up to a pretty huge Unwanted Harem.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • In the anime: Kaji; Naoko Akagi; Kyoko Soryu; Misato's father.
  • The aforementioned also die in the manga, as well as Touji. Misato, Ritsuko, and Gendou also apparently die normally and irreversably as opposed to through Instrumentality.
• Kill It with Fire: Flamethrowers are one of many toys the JSSDF employ to clear NERV HQ. We don't see the results but we can certainly hear them.
• Kudzu Plot: Invoked by, and at the same time resulting in the Mind Screw.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: Episode 26 features "The Heady Feeling of Freedom" and "Good, or Don't Be.", both of which are instrumental versions of the opening.
• Latex Space Suit: The plugsuits for both sexes have a button that once pressed automatically makes the suit shrink to conform to the pilot's body. However, it is shown in episode 8 that they don't conform entirely to the pilot's body, with Shinji rather embarrassed to wear Asuka's shapely, feminine plugsuit, and Toju and Kensuke taking a humourous interest in Shinji's chest as a result. This is subverted in episode 10, "Magmadiver," where Asuka wears a special plugsuit that expands to a balloon-like shape and causes her no small amount of embarrassment.
• Leave the Camera Running: Appears frequently in the later episodes since the studio was getting increasingly short on money and time. This resulted in lots of still images, many scenes showing the characters from a great distance, and liberal use of Stock Footage, presumably to save some coin for the scenes where the Animation Bump was needed (and it was well worth saving the money for those stunningly animated fight scenes). Thankfully these cost-saving strategies also worked double-duty as methods of expressing the themes of isolation and alienation found throughout the series. Notable examples include:
  • Misato watching the train Shinji has apparently boarded leave the station.
  • The elevator ride with Rei and Asuka. The Directors Cut version at least mixes it a little bit up. That is to say, Asuka moves briefly and only once. The same shot is reused in Evangelion: 2.0, but for a much shorter amount of time (making its inclusion a bit of a joke for fans).
  • Misato being questioned by SEELE after Leliel's defeat: the longest still shot in the series at 80 seconds.
  • Shinji holding Kaworu in Unit 01's hand for one full minute before he crushes him. This is very effective at highlighting Shinji's inner conflict over killing his closest friend, who is also the last Angel.
  • Asuka curled up in Unit 02 at the bottom of the lake.
  • Misato and Shinji's Last Kiss.
• Licensed Game: A number of games were created for Evangelion, including Neon Genesis Evangelion 64, a Nintendo 64 adaptation of the anime and End of Evangelion; Evangelion: Jo, a PS2/PSP adaptation of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie, anime, and The End of Evangelion: and Neon Genesis Evangelion: Battle Orchestra, a PS2 Platform Fighter.
• Light Is Not Good: The Angels in general, along with the Mass Production Evangelions.
  • Sandophlon appears as a glowing frog-like thing.
  • Arael appears to be a gigantic bird-like construct of light carrying its core between its "feet", but is one of the most destructive Angels, starting with turning Asuka into a barely-functioning wreck.
  • Armisael is a large double-helix ring of light that turns into a rope-like form to attack the Evas.
• Like Father, Like Son: Not very obvious to begin with, but as the series delve deeper into their respective characters, especially near the end of the series, it becomes clear how alike Shinji and Gendo actually are, especially in their problems and shortcomings; both being at their cores, socially-awkward people who are stuck between their desire to be loved by the people around them, their problems with forming interpersonal relationships as they fear leaving themselves open to be hurt by other people, as well as dragging themselves down through constant low-intensity self-loathing stemming from a subconscious belief that they are unwanted people who are unworthy of love. The main difference between them is really that Gendo has given up hope than anyone but Yui could ever love him, while Shinji still has some hope that he will one day find love and acceptance, though he gets pretty damn close to completely losing that hope over the course of the series.
• Limited Wardrobe: While Misato and Asuka have pretty varied wardrobes, most of the other characters seem to have about two changes of clothes in their respective wardrobes. Granted, most of the following examples are justified (given that most of the character's clothes are uniforms, and many are only ever seen at NERV, but still.
  • Rei has her plugsuit and her school uniform, and is rarely ever seen wearing anything other than these two costumes. Any moment when she's not seen wearing one or the other is when she's switching between them. Her lack of wardrobe might be tied to her lot as the Emotionless Girl, with clothing serving nothing more than a plain function.
  • Shinji seems to be in a similar boat, having only his plugsuit and uniform, plus a few shirts and such.
  • Ritsuko is usually seen with a few combinations of the same articles of clothing, plus or minus her labcoat (of which she has several). She does have a few formal dresses for weddings, though.
  • Gendo and Fuyutsuki are pretty much always seen in their uniforms. Same goes for the command crew at NERV HQ, although at least they have a few different items of clothing.
• Literal Metaphor: Kaworu's leitmotif. Notice that he's entering Heaven's Door as the choir sings "Und der Cherub steht vor Gott". Also, "Einen Freund geprüft im Tod" could describe his relationship to Shinji, other interpretations notwithstanding.
• Living Relic: Revealed near the end of End of Evangelion to be the ultimate fate of Unit 01, and by association Yui Ikari.
• Living Shadow: Leliel, the 12th Angel.
• Locked in a Room:
  • Asuka and Shinji's training to fight the Seventh Angel is a variant; they're not actually locked in a room, but they do have to spend almost every waking moment together.
  • Kaji and Misato are stuck in an elevator for hours during the attack by the Ninth Angel.
• Lonely Piano Piece
  • "Rei I."
  • "The Sorrow of Losing the Object of One's Dependence."
  • "Opening of Dream," as well as the other versions of it found on the S² Works set.
• Lonely Together: Basically subverted. The conditions are there, but the characters are ultimately too screwed up to really help each other, as demonstrated by scenes like Misato's failed attempt to console Shinji after Rei's death. Asuka in particular is very bitter that Shinji only wants to be with her because he doesn't have anyone else.
• Lost in Translation: As a result of the varying translators and distributors, some nuances of the screenplay, particularly several instances of Arc Words and phrases, are lost or at least obscured by the English translations, especially in the dub. This is acknowledged in the DVD commentary of End of Evangelion.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: At some level, the Evas. Some of the Angels' attacks (notably Leliel's, Arael's, and Armisael's) and Instrumentality are this.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: The Evas are literally Powered by a Forsaken Child, and Leliel (Alien Geometries), Iruel (nanites), Sahaquiel (Cast from Hit Points), Arael (Mind Rape), Armisael (more Body Horror), and Giant Naked Rei (Assimilation Plot, Go Mad from the Revelation, and associated tropes, in addition to dissolving) all certainly qualify. Not to mention the And I Must Scream factor of the dummy plug: Picture being unable to control your body, but you can still feel the bloodlust of the thing controlling your body, only to learn that it just killed one of your closest friends.
• Lovecraft Lite: Despite the cosmic horror setting, humanity is able to overcome the odds through technology. This doesn't negate the psychological sacrifices, however. And in the end, the Eldritch Abominations are revealed to really only be a secondary threat, as mankind itself turns out to be its own worst enemy.
• Love Dodecahedron: Played for angst rather than laughs. Here's◊ a schematic diagram.
• Love Makes You Evil: One of the series' main themes is that love, despite being an overall good thing and an essential part of being human, can also be an incredibly destructive force when it turns into obsession.
  • This is best exemplified by Gendo, who through Yui's love was able to find happiness after a horrible upbringing, only to find himself so broken by sorrow after her "death" that he dedicates his life to sacrificing the entire human race for a chance to be with her again.
  • It is also in play with Ritsuko, whose love for Gendo, a man who will never reciprocate, leads her to help him with NERV's more morally dubious work and repeatedly lie to her best friend Misato in the process. When it finally dawns on Ritsuko that Gendo doesn't value her one tiny bit as a person, she tumbles over the Despair Event Horizon and tries to take revenge on him, in very self-destructive ways.
  • To a lesser degree this applies to Fuyutsuki—while he is the least "evil" of the characters listed here, he merely protests the human costs of NERV's projects and is still willing to help Gendo out of love for the same woman. However, it is later revealed that his true agenda was to help Yui derail SEELE's plans all along, arguably making him a co-Big Good to her.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Or rather, Mother. Unit 01 contains the soul of Shinji's long lost mother. Unit 02 actually holds the maternal aspect of Asuka's mother, Kyoko. At least that helps explain the term "Eva", which was made from Adam. Sounds like Everybody is Mecha Jesus In Purgatory, huh? Foreshadowed by Shinji's reaction the first time he's inserted in the entry plug: "It smells like blood... But I feel comfortable in here." He's nestled in a fluid-filled chamber inside a being that has the soul of his mother embedded in it. Pregnancy metaphor, anyone?
• Lyrical Cold Open: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" immediately begins with "Zankoku na tenshi no you ni".
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Komm, Süsser Tod", legendarily so. Not only does the upbeat, seemingly happy melody sharply contrast its depressing lyrics, the song itself also accompanies the Rei/Lilith hybrid triggering Instrumentality and ending the world.
• Madness Mantra: A favorite of the series. To wit:
  • Shinji: "I mustn't run away, I mustn't run away, I mustn't run away..." (Used as Arc Words, to the extent that they're practically his catchphrase)
  • Asuka: "I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die... [skip a few] I DON'T WANNA DIIIIIIIIIIIE!!"
  • Shinji: "I can't take it anymore... I can't take it anymore... I can't take it anymore... I can't take it anymore... Ican'ttakeitanymore... Icanttakeitanymore..."
  • Asuka: "I'll kill you... I'll kill you... I'll kill you... I'll kill you..."
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Ritsuko is probably the straightest example, but one might also be able to make a case for Misato, Rei, and Asuka.
• Mama Bear:
  • All the Evas (excepting Unit 00), but particularly Unit 01 to Shinji. This goes as far as the Unit 01 moving and behaving like a raging bear.
  • Misato definitely deserves a mention for her very protective attitude towards Shinji and even the other pilots, whenever their safety was an issue. She even goes as far as to slap Ritsuko when she felt Shinji's life was being threatened.
• Male Gaze: Episode 5 has a sequence where Shinji's class is doing PE, with the girls swimming and the boys playing basketball. The boys who aren't playing are ogling the girls standing around the pool, with Toji and Kensuke making some lustful comments and poking fun at Shinji for watching Rei. Some of the girls are watching the boys watch them, and one remarks that Toji looking at them makes her want to take a shower.
• Marilyn Maneuver: Asuka's introduction; her sun dress gets blown up by a breeze.
• Marshmallow Hell: Misato accidentally does this to Shinji when they, along with Asuka, Touji, Kensuke, and Kaji, are stuck in a too-small elevator.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Gender role subversion runs rampant in Evangelion, especially with Shinji and Asuka. Played for drama in that Shinji wants Asuka to be more feminine, and Asuka wants Shinji to be more masculine, but they just end up clashing against each other due to wanting the other to change first and neither knowing how to effectively express their feelings.
• The Masochism Tango:
  • Shinji and Asuka's "relationship" is a never-ending waltz of personality clashes, misinterpreted emotions and communication failures.
  • Misato and Kaji's relationship, once it is revealed that she may have been using him as a replacement for her father.
  • This can be the case with Touji and Hikari in the background, but it never gets developed because of the Unit 03 incident. Amusingly enough, Asuka is quick to put two and two together in this case.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: The End of Evangelion opens with Shinji in a suicidal state after the events of the previous few episodes. When he tries to wake Asuka up from her coma in the hospital, he accidentally exposes her breasts. Torn between his attraction to her and his stress from fighting the angels, he instinctively masturbates to the sight, complete with a close-up of his semen-covered palm. Afterwards, he immediately feels as revolted as the audience is. What Shinji then says in the ADV dub sums up his actions best.
  Shinji: I'm so fucked up...
• Meaningful Name: Quite a few:
  • "Shinji" ironically evokes the words for "truth" or "to believe" and can also mean "divine child." Shinji's name is even punned on in Rebuild 1.0; Misato exhorts Gendou to "believe in his own son", invoking of course the word shinji.
  • "Rei" can mean, among other things, "zero," "ghost/soul", and "cold."
  • "Yui" puns on the word "yui" meaning "the only one."
  • "Gendou" is "limit" or "boundary."
  • "Ikari" uses the character for "anchor" (part of the nautical theme), but with a different character would be "wrath" or "anger."
  • "Nagisa" means "shore", but if you split the kanji in two you could read it as either "messenger" or "dead person."
  • The Japanese word given to the Angels, "shito," actually means "apostle" and in the original draft they were named accordingly in English. The "shi" in it is the same as in "shisha" (messenger; the literal meaning of Greek angelos and the Aramaic term it served as the translation of) and "tenshi" (heavenly messenger, i.e. angel in the English sense). It also sounds very close to the Japanese word for "person" or "human being," "hito", maybe hinting at one of the deep secrets of the series.
  • The Angels are given names that match their appearances and abilities. For example, Sandalphon, the angel of embryos, starts off as an embryo in a volcano; Arael, a feathered being who attacks from orbit, is the angel of birds; Israfel, who is killed through coordinated dance, is the angel of music; Kaworu aka Tabris is the angel of free will, and chooses to die rather than kill humanity and Shinji in the process.
  • "Evangelion" comes from "eüangélion", the Anglicanized version of the Greek word meaning "gospel" or "good news", which has led the series' title to sometimes be interpreted as "New Century Gospel" or "New Beginning Gospel".
  • "Seele" is German for "soul"; "Nerv" for, well, "nerve"; and "Gehirn" for "brain".
  • At an almost esoteric level, Akagi was also the name of a Russo-Japanese War-era Maya-class gunboat. How quaint.
  • See also the similar fates of the Hyûga and Aoba, both in reality and in Evangelion; it's even tempting to try and draw some parallels between Mana and Rei's fates and the fact their namesakes were both lost in the same battle.
• Meat-Sack Robot: The titular Evangelions piloted by Shinji, Asuka, and Rei, and etc. were made from organic bodies cloned from the Angels with armor, weapons, computer networks, and other technological features. They were intended to be this, but some of the Evangelions themselves subvert this trope by managing to develop their own consciousnesses, with the case of EVA-01 (Shinji Ikari's) being due to having the soul of his mother Yui Ikari due to her body being merged into it.
• Mecha-Enabling Phlebotinum: The AT fields projected by Angels can soak N2 mines, necessitating the use of Evas that can project their own fields.
• Mech vs. Beast: The Evas fighting Angels seem at first to be a case of this, before it's revealed that Evas are actually cyborg cloned Angels.
• Medium Blending: The real-life photographs scattered throughout the series, particularly in the last two episodes, and an entire live-action sequence in The End of Evangelion.
• Melancholy Moon: Rei is often visually paired with the moon, and often as a backdrop both in the original and follow up series.
• The Men in Black: NERV's Intelligence Division Mooks.
• Merger of Souls: The Third Impact as envisioned by SEELE would've resulted in all human beings on the planet having their souls merged into one singular whole, with all individuality dissolved. Although the process is initiated in the middle of the End of Evangelion movie, it fortunately gets aborted before it reaches the point of irreversibility.
• Messianic Archetype: Yui Ikari, the self-sacrificial Rei Ayanami, and Kaworu "He Died For Your Sins" Nagisa. Shinji even has a few "temptation scenes" involving the choice of rejecting the world completely and being Tanged forever or, in the manga, of going ballistic on humanity with his Luciferian dad. Granted, he's a darkly ironic and/or pathetic kind of messiah. Then again, to quote the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
• Metaphorically True: In The End of Evangelion, Asuka's Madness Mantra of "I'll kill you" towards the MP Evas is basically this when you consider the sequence where Instrumentality begins to fall apart. The scenes toward the end with Shinji, Kaworu and Rei imply that Shinji ultimately chooses to reject Instrumentality because they made him regain faith in the possibility of finding love and happiness with other people in the real world. When he does return, Asuka is the one that he finds. Recall that the MP Evas die when Instrumentality and the GNR fall apart after Shinji leaves and Yui is able to leave with the Lance of Longinus.
• Mildly Military: NERV's exact organization is never really defined. Its senior leadership is civilian, but it has an armed uniform division. The highest known military rank is Colonel.
• Million to One Chance: Ritsuko likes to predict that there's a 0.000000001% chance of Misato's plan succeeding, with lower probabilities as the series progress. There's also a subversion since the chances were actually 100% each time, as the happenings ride on a pretty accurate prophecy-based schedule.
• Mind Screw: This show is the codifier for this trope in anime, especially in End. The fact that it also named Gainax Ending should definitely tell you something. The show starts with a basic Monster of the Week format, but the monsters in question are... weird. As the show enters its second half, surreal psychological sequences and Body Horror begin to ramp up and up until the incredibly experimental endings. The plot itself, about the Angels and Evangelions, is a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot that doesn't care whether you put it together your first time or not.
• Mind Screwdriver: By actually showing the events of Instrumentality and filling out the plot, End is supposed to be this to the TV ending. End itself is so weird and intense, though, that your might be even more confused afterwards.
• Missing Mom: A frighteningly recurring theme, to the point it could put some of the characters' damages into perspective. Although we only see the fates of a few characters' mothers (namely Shinji, Asuka and Ritsuko's; Misato's only gets mentioned), a conversation between Shinji and Kensuke leads the latter to realize that all their classmates have deceased mothers.
• Mission Control: Misato, and occasionally Ritsuko, serve as this for the pilots.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The use of "Fly Me to the Moon" as the show's ending theme is a frequent source of this. Touji's just been nearly mortally wounded and is scarred for life? Cue cheery rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon".
  • Episode 9 has the Angel Of The Week turn out to be an Asteroids Monster. One Gilligan Cut later and we're watching the after-action report, which shows... Units 01 and 02 both planted into the earth like vegetables, head first, while Asuka berates Shinji, neither of them the worse for wear. When set against the Angels of previous episodes, all of whom seemed perfectly willing to kill the Evas, it's kind of jarring.
  • Episode 26 has after the first breakthrough in his introspective mindscape, Shinji experiences a reality that's played as a straight highschool romantic comedy. Contrasted against the Mind Screw that is Shinji's revelation sequence, the scene is incredibly jarring.
  • Generally, the show is more than happy to bounce from scenes exploring the devastating effects of battle and impossible stakes on the lives of innocent teenagers essentially recruited to serve as child soldiers to scenes in which a couple of horny schoolboys make funny faces and drool over an attractive woman. Or to scenes in which a pet penguin eats a bunch of fish while wacky music plays in the background. And then back to the harrowing depictions of PTSD.
• Mundanger: While the Angels by all means are a pretty supernatural threat, the show also frequently makes use of Psychological Horror, through its themes of self-loathing, social phobia, and the inevitability of hurting and being hurt by those close to us, which is to say nothing of the conspiracy-related plot threads and the horrific portrayal of war (and the notion of being attacked by your own government and countrymen) in The End of Evangelion. It's also worth noting that the series contains what is probably one of the most thorough and realistic portrayals of manic depression in any medium. All of this is a case of Real Life Writes the Plot: Hideaki Anno was going through a very rough patch in his life at the time he worked on the show.
• Murder-Suicide: Attempted by Asuka's mother, except the "Asuka" that was murdered was the rag doll that Kyoko thought to be Asuka. It's not clear whether Asuka's more angry that her mother committed suicide or that she didn't get to die along with her.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Shinji's reaction to his Dude, She's Like in a Coma moment. Such is his horror and disgust that he utterly gives up on himself and makes no effort to stop the JSSDF soldiers that are seconds away from killing him.
• Myth Arc: The Angel war, NERV, the Evas, and the tangled web of secrets surrounding all three.
• Never Be Hurt Again: This can be said to be one of the central themes of Evangelion at work. All characters want to avoid getting hurt in varying degrees. Even SEELE's ultimate plan can be said to be this trope taken to the extreme.
• Never My Fault: Shinji is a universal target for people unfairly shifting blame.
• New Neo City: Even moreso in Japanese, where Tokyo-3's name translates as "New Tokyo No. 3". Justified, though, in that it is, in terms of Evangelion's alternate-history, Exactly What It Says on the Tin — after the original Tokyo was destroyed, at least THREE new cities were built around Japan, all named New Tokyo.
• New Wave Science Fiction: When you boil down the Cyberpunk elements and enter the Angels' domain, that's where things get really far out. Classical Anti-Hero? Check. Starfish Aliens? Check. Post modernism? Dear Anno, there's so much subtext. Much of the controversy about this series stems from, in addition to Real Life Writes the Plot, using anything (and everything) as a symbolic device, to the point of inconsistent meanings per symbol.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Shown in The End of Evangelion and the Director's Cut version of episode 22. The drawings are implied to be of Asuka's design.
• No Communities Were Harmed: See New Neo City above; Tokyo-3 itself is a fictional stand in for the real-life town of Hakone, located in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan.
• No Conservation of Energy: Heavily implied to be the case with the so-called S² Engine (or "the Fruit of Life") that powers the Angels. By all appearances, it is a biological organ that can somehow produce infinite amounts of pure energy out of nothing.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The instances of Unit 01 going berserk, and the activation of the Dummy Plug. Honorable mention however, is the end of Episode 19, where we bear witness to a vicious one as the Dummy Plug-controlled Unit-01 overpowers the Angel-possessed Unit-03 and tears it to pieces in an animalistic rage that horrifies most seeing it...especially Shinji, as he's feeling everything the Eva is doing despite not being able to control it.
• Non-Dubbed Grunts: The 2019 Netflix English dub retains some of the Japanese Eva roars, most notably in End of Evangelion where Unit-01's core is exposed during Third Impact.
• Non-Indicative First Episode: Anno reportedly complained about the first episode being "a failure" and out of tune with the rest. It was supposed to create an atmosphere of total despair.
• "No Peeking!" Request:
  • When Gaghiel attacks the warships, Asuka needs to quickly change into her plug suit to get into her Eva, and goes to change in an emergency stairway, warning Shinji to stay outside while she does so.
  • When Misato and Kaji are stuck inside a lift during a power outage. A rather frantic Misato is trying to force open the roof exit while standing on Kaji's shoulders and he's looking up her skirt. She angrily tells him not to look up.
• No Periods, Period:
  • Averted for Asuka in both the anime and the manga—her period causes her a realistic amount of discomfort, shame, anxiety, pain and mood swings. Her written-out thoughts show that "menarche" is as much a source of anxiety for her as "sex".
  • Possibly implied to be the case with Rei by a cryptic piece of her dialogue in episode 14.

• No Sense of Personal Space: Asuka, to both Kaji (mostly) and Shinji (when she's not shunning him).
• Nostalgia Heaven: The end of the last episode, if you get past the Mind Screw location.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: Assuming that N² Mines really are "non-nuclear".
• Nudity Equals Honesty: When Ritsuko is questioned by SEELE, they insist on her being naked, supposedly so that they will know absolutely nothing is being held back. (But probably really because they wanted to humiliate her. Plus they're all men, and they never asked Gendo to strip...)
• Nuke 'em: N² Mines (the series' equivalent to nukes) are occasionally used against Angels, and only succeed in slowing them down. The ultimate Godzilla Threshold is reached when Ritsuko plans to use all existing N² Mines on Earth (which is 992 of them) to kill Leliel, though Unit-01 manages to kill it from the inside-out before this can happen.
• Number of the Beast:
  • Ritsuko uses a "Type 666" firewall to protect NERV's MAGI from hacking by SEELE in End of Evangelion.
  • In "Rebirth" Misato is seen in (or in the bay next to) parking bay 667, which the English voice actors joked was the Neighbour of the Beast.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: During the Jet Alone incident, Misato has to deal with a five-person chain of command to force a deactivation command on the mech, who ultimately agree to grant her clearance... effective upon the arrival of the paperwork. Note that this is during an imminent nuclear disaster. After being given this message, she says "screw it", takes charge, and deploys Unit 01 to hold it steady so she can hang onto Jet Alone's back and manually input the shutdown command.
• Official Couple: Amongst the tangled mess of unspoken/unrequited feelings, manipulations, and misunderstandings, Misato and Kaji as well as Gendo and Yui stand out as the closest things the show has to this trope.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: SEELE, who plan to use the arcane prophecies of the Dead Sea Scrolls to create their Assimilation Plot.
• Omniscient Morality License: End suggests this for Yui Ikari and Shinji's other two Spirit Advisors, Rei Ayanami and Kaworu Nagisa.
• One-Woman Wail: The track "INTROJECTION" from the album Neon Genesis Evangelion III.
• Our Angels Are Different: Ironically, these are a lot closer to the actual, very trippy angel descriptions in The Bible, such as "beryl-coloured wheel within a wheel, each rim covered with eyes" and the like. Of course, they're not really angels, though. They're aliens. But they weren't meant to be.
• Our Clones Are Different: It is gradually revealed that Rei is actually several different clones of the same person. One horrific scene even includes a massive vat filled with lifeless clone bodies of Rei, currently without having her memories and personality implanted. Rei herself is a mishmash between Yui Ikari and the second Angel, Lilith, looking like the former with blue hair and red eyes.
• Our Humans Are Different: Humans, like the Angels and EVAs, naturally generate AT Fields. They aren't strong enough to use as physical Deflector Shields, but are important because they're what keep humans' minds and bodies separate from each other. The Human Instrumentality Project is all about forcibly nullifying them all, causing humanity to merge together. In fact, the EVAs' ability to create AT Fields came from imitating and magnifying that of humans, hence why they turn out to be giant Artificial Humans themselves
• Our Souls Are Different: Souls are, in the Evaverse, not an ethereal/theological concept, but proven to exist as a form of entity/energy that is present in all living things, and controls the thought pattern, personality, and the sense of the self in a being. A whole field of science, "metaphysical biology" is dedicated to the study of souls (though it is vaugely implied to be a relatively young and somewhat obscure field of science). It appears that souls are also capable of being split into fragments (although doing this seems to inevitably cause some sort of insanity in the person it happens to) which can re-merge with other fragments of the same soul, and can be extracted from the original host and transferred into another. This is the principle behind the clones named Rei Ayanami—Lilith's soul is housed in Rei and transferred to a new clone whenever a previous one dies.
• Out-of-Clothes Experience: Especially Shinji and Rei, but it happens once or twice to Asuka too. And to manga Yui. Also, to humankind in End.
• Overly Long Gag: The elevator scene.
• Over-the-Shoulder Murder Shot: Unit 01 does this to an Angel in an incredibly disturbing scene.
• Paperwork Punishment: During the more lighthearted first arc of the series, we get a glimpse of how much paperwork Misato has to deal with in her role as Operations Director of NERV, by which we mean literal mountains. She certainly thinks that it's punishment in episode nine of the show, when she has to file after action reports of an operation gone humiliatingly FUBAR.
• Parental Abandonment: Evangelion deals with its consequences.
• Parrot Expo-WHAT?:
  Ritsuko: Homeostasis and transistasis.
  Misato: Homeo-what?
  Ritsuko: One is a force to maintain the present status and the other is a force for constant change. Anything that lives is composed of these two conflicting forces.
• Peculiar Penguin: Misato's pet penguin Pen-Pen is introduced while taking a steamy ( as opposed to the typical cool water preference of a penguin) bath and then, once Shinji is terribly affected by this sight and comes to tell Misato about it, naked no less, Pen-Pen simply walks in and goes to his capsule habitat, and takes a contemptuous side glance at Shinji before walking in.
• People in Rubber Suits: A truly bizarre in-universe example. This is basically what the Evas are—cloned human-Angel hybrids in suits of restraint with some cybernetic implants. It's almost certainly a sly nod to the preferred special effect for giant city-destroying monsters in Anno's beloved Kaiju movies.
• Personal Horror: All the main cast, but Shinji Ikari might be the poster boy for this trope. A person with very high moral standards, but a fragile and tender heart that cannot shoulder them against the odds. He develops a bad case of self-loathing, reaching a Despair Event Horizon after the final angel and a Moral Event Horizon for himself after masturbating over a comatose Asuka.
• Pillar of Light: The explosions set off by the Angels Sachiel and Zeruel turn into crosses and in one instance, an inverted cross. Likewise, the N² Mine, the only conventional weapon capable of harming the Angels, forms a pillar of light when it explodes. Second Impact also qualifies - twin pillars this time.
• Poor Communication Kills: A main theme of the show. The main characters frequently wind up making already bad situations worse by failing to communicate openly and honestly with each other, often because they (mistakenly) believe that avoiding discussing the truth is more convenient and will make things less awkward. Specifically:
  • Several people, chiefly Misato, have several opportunities to tell Shinji about Toji's selection as the Fourth Child, but they all neglect to do it, mainly because they don't want to upset Shinji. Shinji then proceeds to first find out when Toji's broken form is extracted from the devastated Unit-03.
  • Shinji and Asuka's relationship gradually degenerates, and eventually ends up being the final push towards Shinji causing The End of the World as We Know It, because they're unable to discuss both their attraction towards and frustrations with each other.
  • Misato dies from a lack of preliminary discussion, careful placement, and cooperation on Shinji's behalf.
• Possession Implies Mastery: Significantly averted: Unit-01 keeps going out of control and doing things that Ritsuko and her staff can hardly believe. This is presumably because NERV didn't so much "invent" the Evas as copy them from the Angels that they possess.
• Postmodernism: Oodles of it, especially in The Movie. The show is so postmodern the leaders of the superflat movement claim it as one of its precursors. Now that's some homage...
• P.O.V. Sequel: The End of Evangelion is generally considered to show the series' ending in a relatively objective light, whereas the last two episodes of the series show Shinji's personal experience.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Evas themselves. They're made from the remains of Angels imprinted with the minds and souls of their respective pilots' mothers. Unit-01 completely absorbed Shinji's mother, leaving only trace amounts of genetic material which were used to create Rei Ayanami. Unit-02 only absorbed the maternal part of Asuka's mother; she developed a dissociative disorder that eventually led to her suicide, and it's implied that the remains of her soul entered Unit-02 after her death. Units -03 and -04 had more successful results but still required a (somewhat less) dangerous bonding process. The pilots themselves can also be considered said forsaken child, since piloting the Eva Units inevitably causes psychological damage. The synchronization process merges the minds of the pilot with the Eva, and high synchronization levels lead to hallucinations, dissociation, and sharing the experience that can only be felt by a human mind trapped inside a Body Horror cyborg.
• Pre-Ending Credits: The End of Evangelion has the credits in the middle, between the two episodes that make up the movie.
• Precision F-Strike: The English dub of the series uses moderate swearing throughout, but does not drop the F-bomb until the movie, at which point it does so twice in suitably memorable fashion.
• Precursors: The mysterious "First Ancestral Race" left Adam and Lilith on Earth, at least according to the first draft and one video game that pretty much just exists to deliver supplemental material. The show itself merely alludes to them; In episode 21, Gendou points out to Fuyutsuki that the Geofronts found under Antarctica and Japan were "left behind by someone, who was not us."
• Prefers the Illusion: The ending involves protagonist Shinji Ikari having to choose between staying with all of humanity in the sea of LCL or returning to Earth as a singular being. He chooses the latter, but since no one appears alongside him at the beach except Asuka, we can infer the rest of humanity preferred to stay in the "perfect", unthinking, unfeeling LCL sea. Well, possibly.
• Product Placement: Yebisu/Yebichu beer is seen prominently, episode 2 features an actual Sony TV and Mitsubishi Fuso trucks, and you can actually buy Shinji's Walkman, almost — it's a real DAT (Digital Audio Tape) player, again made by Sony^note model WMD-DT1. The artists just changed the DAT logo to SDAT, and added a non-existent LCD panel to the player. Asuka plays a Sega Saturn in episode 23.
• Psychosexual Horror: Parts of Shinji's ordeal are related to the urges and sexual frustration of early puberty and his physical attraction to Asuka, Misato (further complicated by the fact that she is also a parental figure), and Rei (who also turns out to be a parental figure of sorts, in more than one sense). Indeed, in The End of Evangelion, part of the finale is Asuka, Misato, and Rei asking him whether he wants to have sex with them.
• Psychological Thriller: The series focuses a lot on the psyches of the main characters and the emotional tension between them, especially in the last two episodes of the anime.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The series uses various pieces of classical music for half or more of its soundtrack. The frequency of classical music appearing goes up as things get worse. Also when they started to run out of money.

R - Z

• Rapid-Fire Typing: Played straight and subverted in episode 13, when it takes Ritsuko a significant amount of time to dismantle and restructure the Magi in order to program a back-hack for the attacking Angel.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Averted. While the Angels are often pondered upon as possible messengers from God, all existential rage by any character is directed either at society in general or at oneself.
• Raging Stiffie: Shinji gets one when he overhears Misato and Asuka’s slightly erotic-sounding tomfoolery at the onsen. Fortunately, the only one who notices is Pen Pen.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: At one point Shinji reaches a 400% synchro rate with the Eva. He dissolves into the LCL in the entry plug.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: The Giant Impact (also known as "First Impact" in-universe) is stated to have been the result of Lilith's starfaring vessel, the Black Moon, crashing into primordial Earth about 4 billion years ago, with said vessel's rocky exterior separating from the vessel and coalescing into the Moon; as for the real-life explanation, it's a cover-up story by Seele in-universe.
• Real Robot Genre: While the Evangelions are firmly in Super Robot territory, the series dips its toes into this genre on occasion. The Evas only exist because of funding from multiple governments and a shady philantrophist group, use an obscene amount of power to the point that they need to be plugged in at all times or else they only have 1-5 minutes of operation before they shut down, and their weapon loadouts, aside from the Lance of Longinus, are mass-produced and relatively disposable. That's not even getting into the psychological effects of using Child Soldiers to pilot them.
• Reality Warper: An AT-Field, the primary weapon of both the Evangelions and the Angels, is basically the territory within which you can alter reality to your own designs. It's mostly used to create Deflector Shields, but there are plenty of more exotic applications as well.
• Recap Episode: Episode 14. The first half is a clip show framed as a report to SEELE, and while the second half is made up of brand new events, it relies heavily on Recycled Animation.
• Redemption Equals Death: Subverted with Gendou Ikari, who dies guilt-ridden and without making amends with his son.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Asuka and Rei, who've taken up where Kei and Yuri left off and ran with it. 3-4 paired figure sets a year for more than a decade. Also notice that their hair and eye colors are inverted — Rei's red eyes and blue hair vs. Asuka's blue eyes and red hair. It even carries over to their Evas once Asuka is introduced.
• Regional Redecoration:
  • Antarctica was destroyed by the Second Impact, leaving a sea devoid of all Lilith-based life, including microbes.
  • After dropping an N2 bomb on an Angel, Fuyutsuki complains that they'll have to redraw the map of Japan again.
• Rejection Projection: Multiple characters, but especially Shinji, who claims nobody wants him both before and after being swarmed by adoring fangirls he barely reacts to and is never shown thinking about again, and Asuka, who in episode 9 stomps on her classmates' love letters yet spends much of episode 22 screaming over perceived rejection from guys who were either too old for her or were afraid holding her would end even worse for them.
• Remake Cameo: In the Netflix Italian dub, Domitilla D'Amico (the younger Asuka) and Barbara De Bortoli (the original Maya Ibuki) respectively voiced Misato Katsuragi and Ritsuko Akagi.
• Remote Vitals Monitoring:
  • When synchronization testing is being done on the Evas and the pilots, a computer station run by Maya shows the pilots' vital signs and their synch levels with their respective Evas, with the changes in this information becoming a driving plot point in both individual episodes and Asuka's character arc.
  • When the Evas are in combat, Maya helms a separate computer station where the pilots' vital signs, synch levels, and other information are kept up with and relayed to Misato so she can direct them for optimal performance.
• Re-Release Soundtrack: The Netflix release replaces the various covers of "Fly Me to the Moon" with "Rei."
• Rescue Introduction: Shinji meets Misato when she rescues him during the Third Angel Sachiel's attack.
• Rescue Romance: Although their relationship is really too complex to point to one thing as the source of Asuka's feelings for Shinji, it seems probable that him diving into a volcano to save her probably had something to do with it. However, when you consider that she wasn't just rescued by him, but also shown up by him by doing something really heroic looking, it takes on a new light. Considering her Inferiority Superiority Complex, being rescued while also being outshone by Shinji likely left her feeling very conflicted which is probably the reason she has so much difficulty acknowledging her feelings for him, even to herself.
• The Reveal: Quite a few later on, but like everything at that point in the show, there are times when it can get a little hard to figure what exactly is being revealed.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The Evas bleed and seem to have at least some kind of personal set of emotions. It turns out, of course, that they're not really robots at all.
  Ritsuko: We call it Evangelion. It is a synthetic cyborg created to fight the Angels.
• Riding into the Sunset: Occurs in a very odd and somewhat disturbing fashion in The End of Evangelion as after Instrumentality is overturned, Unit 01, fossilized and still carrying Yui's soul, flies into space accompanied by the Lance of Longinus, beginning its "eternal reminder" journey.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The manga mentions the Human Genome Project, which was in full swing during the series' creation, as a key milestone in the setting's history. According to NGE, it was an even bigger deal than in real life, being a breakthrough in biology and metaphysics because it somehow confirmed the existence of the human soul. These discoveries would eventually lead to the creation of the Evangelions.
• Rivers of Blood: Many of the Angels spill enough blood that the city streets end up flooded when they're killed, though this is understandable given their sheer size.
• Room Full of Crazy: Post-its all over the guts of the Magi; quantum physics graffiti in the room where Rei was born; random religious symbols and artifacts strewn about the place; graphs from a particle accelerator...heck, we're talking about a massive underground complex full of crazy here.
• Rousseau Was Right: Hidden so carefully under a thick veil of cynicism that you'd be forgiven for missing it entirely. But at the end of the day, all of the characters — even Gendou and SEELE — want nothing more than to be loved and accepted, and their actions, however twisted, all stem from their fear and misunderstanding of themselves and others. See the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism entry for more details.
• Running on All Fours: Evas when Berserk.
• Sacred First Kiss: Subverted. Shinji and Asuka kiss, but it's painfully unromantic, it doesn't lead anywhere, and she never does stop bullying him. She's later revealed to have been very hurt by his lack of enthusiasm, although Asuka childishly pinching his nose during the kiss until he nearly passes out is probably a factor in that. A different subversion happens in the manga; Shinji and Asuka are just about to kiss, but are interrupted by Kaji and Misato.
• Sanity Slippage: Oh so much...
  • Episode 22, in particular, pretty much revolved around Asuka's mental breakdown.
  • Shinji goes through a gradual one over the latter half of the series, and finally cracks in End.
• "Save the World" Climax: Every fight has the fate of humanity hang in the balance, but it's all a plan by a few fractions of humanity to initiate the end of the world on their own terms. As their plans collide, the end of the world ends up in the hands of a mentally fractured teenager, with disastrous results.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Gendo, to emphasise him being a case of Four Eyes, Zero Soul (well, actually a subversion).
• Scenery Gorn: The End of Evangelion is unprecedentedly, lovingly meticulous in its depictions of violence and destruction on a massive scale.
• Scenery Porn: Especially notable whenever Shinji runs away.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: Shinji will wear his school uniform even when he goes out at night to wander the streets of Tokyo-3. Rei is also an example, although more justified than Shinji since she doesn't seem to own any clothes other than her uniform, school swimsuit and undergarments notwithstanding. While Asuka's wardrobe is a bit more diverse at home, she usually wears her school uniform when going out; in some video game spinoffs, she even wears it when going to the amusement park, when out to town, or when school's out.
• Science Fantasy: NGE is among the very softest science fiction. Those Humongous Mecha? They are revealed to be biological. Cloned from Angels! Who are aliens. Aliens with weaponized pseudo-Christian Kabbalah and existentialism-based force fields. And with human-like DNA but a different wavelength color(!?). All predicted by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The bodies of wizards and scientists alike are strewn across the field.
• Screamer Trailer: The show and, by extension, its director are very fond of this effect. Even the DVD menus could qualify for this description.
• Self-Abuse: Shinji masturbates once, but the setting and the result testify that the show's creators/creator don't view it in a positive light.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism:
  • The Geofront has a self-destruct mechanism. It's meant as a last-ditch attempt at preventing an Angel from making contact with the Captured Super-Entity kept underground. However, all three MAGI supercomputers must consent to activating it, which prevents it from ever being used. This is good when an Angel manages to hack into MAGI — it never quite gets enough control to make all three computers agree to the protocol — but is bad when one of the computers refuses the protocol at the end of the series, which could have stopped Instrumentality, due to the aspect of its creator's mind it was based on.
  • Unit-00 has a self-destruct mechanism, although it's unclear if this is unique among the Evas (it is a prototype, after all). This works to NERV's benefit when Armisael fuses with Unit-00, as it allows Rei to kill the Angel.
• Sex for Solace: In Episode 23, Misato goes into Shinji's room. After he talks about trying to process Rei's death, says "This is all I can do for you" and puts her hand on his, but he quickly draws away from her and she leaves. The implication that she was trying to come on to him is very strong, and documents related to the episode confirm that she was offering herself.
• Sexy Discretion Shot:
  • At one point, Misato and Kaji are in bed together, nude. The "camera" turns away, and stays focused, unmoving, on a nearby table while you hear the two of them going at it.
  • End features a couple. The "Shinji wanking" sequence is an Unsexy Discretion Shot; we hear what's going on but only see the output. Later on, Shinji is treated to a trippy flashback of Misato and Kaji screwing around in college. We mostly just see their feet, but the movement (and Misato's squealing) during the scene makes it decidedly more graphic than any of the TV sex scenes.
• Shadow Archetype: A good example is Gendou-Shinji: Gendou gives a pretty good idea of an embittered, corrupt and still antisocial adult Shinji.
• Shadow Government: While not said outright, there is no doubt that SEELE is the real controlling power of the United Nations, and maybe even the world. And that is still not enough power for them.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: After a certain event, the only thing left of people are their clothes and pools of orange fluid.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Kaji may actually be the most damaged of NGE's cast, just the best at hiding it, says Sadamoto. Misato is also one, and Shinji and Asuka too by the end. Gendou is one as well.
• Ship Tease: Has its own page.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: While supporting characters with a more comedic disposition appear less and less frequently (especially after Touji loses a leg in Unit-03), when Pen Pen is sent off to live with the Horaki family in episode 24, you just know this episode will be extra-dark.
• Signature Style: This work pretty much codified Anno’s. Just look at his works from before this series (Gunbuster and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water) and after (His and Her Circumstances, Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu).
  • A villain whose motivation and characterisation are not explored in detail, if at all.
  • A collaboration with Shiro Sagisu.
  • Using a black or white screen with writing on it, representing questions characters ask or tell themselves, narration, or parts of dialogue of some characters.
  • Use and design of Eldritch Abomination characters, both as a director and an animator.
  • Focus on industrial city views (electric wires, grey buildings, etc.), which Anno has said he is very fond of.
  • Focus on sci-fi technology, using Technobabble and close-up shots.
  • Long, suspenseful scenes waiting for an enemy attack, accompanied by unnerving music, usually played on the piano.
  • Cuts between scenes that feel ‘premature’, often to industrial urban views, creating suspenseful pacing.
  • Surreal imagery, usually containing rapid cuts, making the viewer stop focusing on external conditions and focus on a character’s (or characters’) state of mind, accompanied by unsettling music and often a spotlight turning on loudly to indicate something.
  • A general theme of a main character in a poor emotional state going through a crisis, or a series of crises, to grow as a person. The theme used in the way Anno is most famous for was codified only in Evangelion, inspired by Anno’s own struggle with depression after the Troubled Production of Nadia took a heavy emotional toll on him.
  • Producing works far on the character end of the Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters.
• Signed with a Kiss: At the beginning, Shinji receives a photo of Misato with her lipstick kiss on it. This is the start of their ambiguous, Mrs. Robinson-esque relationship.
• Single Specimen Species: Despite the common denomination of Angels, each of them is completely different from the others, with the exception of the red core near their center. Well, it's more accurate to say that most of them are completely unique...
• Sinister Geometry: Ramiel. Unlike other Angels, defeating it required a very precise shot that Shinji had only two chances of making, using all of the electricity in Japan, as it was impossible to approach or shoot from a distance otherwise; this made Ramiel arguably the strongest Angel in the series.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • Asuka, who joins in episode 8 and disrupts the social equilibrium and harasses Shinji to the point he starts to regress.
  • Kaworu Nagisa, who joins in episode 24 and is revealed to be the last Angel, except humanity.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Deconstructed with the Shinji / Asuka pairing. The scene where they kiss was actually a heartbreakingly epic and twisted failure of communications for both of them contributing to Asuka's mental breakdown and Shinji's Despair Event Horizon. They are attracted to each other but both fear rejection, so Shinji doesn't dare believe it's anything more than just a way to pass the time and Asuka pinches his nose (ostensibly because his breathing is bothering her) to get at least some kind of reaction out of him AND to ensure some kind of "plausible deniability" of her own emotions in the face of possible rejection. And rejection is what she reads from his passiveness even if he doesn't mean it as such, because he doesn't understand there to BE anything to accept or reject... mostly because her words and actions just then and there give him no reason to actually think so! So after seeing Shinji's reaction (that is, gasping for air, not hugging or comforting her) she ran into the bathroom, making gargling noises as a front (as seen in ep. 22 director's cut version). Shinji is left feeling even worse.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Falls on both the idealist end and the cynical end simultaneously, via Ambiguous Situations and playing planetary extinction and Meaningless Villain Victory completely straight, simultaneously.
• Smash Cut: Often, usually skipping from an Eva having its butt whooped to a replay of the damage.
• Smoking Hot Sex: In episode 20, Misato is shown to have lit up a cigarette after an intimate meeting with Kaji. He comments on it, saying that he wasn't aware she still smoked, she replies that she only ever smokes after "things like this".
• Soaperizing: ...to the point where the last 2 episodes abandon the rest of the plot.
• Solar and Lunar: Rei is frequently associated with the moon, initially as a visual motif, but later it turns out to be foreshadowing — Rei is Lilith; Lilith arrived in an object called the Black Moon, and the First Impact, her arrival on earth, created the actual moon (it must be noted that the moon is actually believed to have been created by the debris from the impact of a large object with earth). Asuka, meanwhile, has occasional moments of being associated with the sun, but this is mostly done to strengthen her contrast to Rei.
• Solemn Ending Theme: Several different versions of "Fly Me to the Moon".
• Something for Everyone: The multiple avatars of Rei/Lilith who appear to guide each individual human through the transition into Instrumentality have the ability to appear in the form of someone that individual loves. There are several shots of cast members getting a last look at/embrace from what appears to be someone they care for, right before bursting into orange Tang LCL. The notable exception is Aoba Shigeru, the Air Guitar-playing Bridge Bunny who only sees a swarm of naked Reis and screams in terror before he's taken. The writers have said this was because Aoba was a nihilist who didn't have anyone in his life he truly trusted.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Evangelion loves this trope. Examples include:
  • At the beginning of Asuka's Mind Rape, the freaking Hallelujah Chorus starts playing while we see them go through a traumatic Freak Out.
  • The battle with the Seventeenth Angel in Episode 24, accompanied by a rousing rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".
  • The ending credits of Death, a visage of an apocalyptic landscape with an overwhelming sense of foreboding, set to Pachelbel's "Canon in D".
  • The brutal fight with the Mass Production Evas and confrontation between Ritsuko and Gendou in The End of Evangelion, set to the soothing strains of Bach's "Air on the G String".
  • And of course, Instrumentality itself, mind-melting psychological trauma of epic proportions, accompanied by "Komm, süsser Tod", an original composition featuring upbeat, jazzy soft rock with lyrics about suicide.
  • In an ironic twist, "Komm, süsser Tod" ends up being used in an entirely different soundtrack dissonance moment in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3. In sharp contrast to the nihilistic lyrics, an instrumental version of the song is played during the upbeat ending for the Evangelion campaign, which sees the events of the film averted and most of the cast alive and happily reunited.
• Spirit Advisor:
  • Yui Ikari to Shinji and Gendo — and also to Fuyutsuki in the videogame Evangelion: Another Cases.
  • In End, Rei and Kaworu become this. This raises questions about Omniscient Morality License, though, as they all do some pretty questionable stuff.
• Spoiler Cover: The cover for The End of Evangelion is actually an epilogue of sorts to the film, depicting the immediate aftermath of the very last scene.
• Spoiler Opening: Played straight and subverted. The opening is loaded with information from all over the series, including prominent shots of all major characters and Evas, thus spoiling their introduction up until nearly a third of the way through the series. On the other hand, the opening also contains Foreshadowing of events right up to The Movie that viewers will not appreciate as such except in retrospect.
• Squat's in a Name: The Angels' names and some terminology may be biblical, but the series itself has nothing to do with Christianity.
• State Sec: NERV. They are not only funded directly by the UN (actually SEELE), they have special legal protection and are the sole organisation operating Evas. There was one instance where an American admiral was forced to cooperate by a NERV captain, which shouldn't be possible in real life. In another example, the same captain requested a prototype weapon from the Japanese military and immediately got it without any red tape (they just waived a requisition order in their faces and had Rei's EVA fetch the cannon). It is said that their expenses involving Eva repairs and collateral damage could immediately bankrupt a small country. They also happen to have an Elaborate Underground Base as their main headquarters and a Captured Super-Entity in the basement.
• Stealth Insult: Implied when Rei tells Asuka she will befriend her only if ordered to. Given that she befriends Shinji without being ordered to and defies Gendo's orders twice later on — when told to attack the Angel-possessed Unit 03, because Touji was inside, and when told to allow him to initiate the Third Impact the way he wanted, this could be either a verbal slap to the face or a case of character development.
• Stealth Pun: After Sachiel shanked Unit-01 through the eye in the second episode, it went berserk and jumped several city blocks at the Angel. Well, what do you expect from a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater?
• Stock Audio Clip: The Netflix dubs of Evangelion: Death(True)² and The End of Evangelion often use the recordings from the TV series for flashback sequences.
• Stock Footage:
  • Note how much time the characters spend on elevators and escalators in most episodes; also, Eva launch sequences. The end of the Unit 01 vs. Kaworu scene was also the longest still shot in anime history back then and might still be (but the end of the "Ode to Joy" sounded good!). Let's also not forget the original episodes 25 and 26, which consist almost entirely of reused footage, as the studio had run out of budget by that point.
  • The same clip of Shinji eating breakfast is reused several times, as is a clip of Misato drinking beer.
  • One scene of a forest being destroyed was actually recycled from Nadia.
  • The clip of Shinji waking up with a start in the hospital is used numerous times.
• Stress Vomit: Maya Ibuki does this after seeing Unit 01 devouring another Angel.
• Suggestive Collision:
  • Shinji falls with Rei, causing him to land on top of her, with one hand on her breast. Being an Emotionless Girl, she doesn't react in any way except to flatly ask him to move off her.
  • In the aftermath of a battle, Shinji and Asuka find that their Evas have run out of power and collapsed in a very suggestive position. Asuka immediately blames Shinji and calls him a perv while accusing his Eva of molesting hers.
  • Happens when Kaji is holding Misato up to access the emergency hatch in the elevator they're in during a power outage. The power comes back on and the two collapse to the ground in a rather suggestive position, causing Ritsuko, who sees them as soon as the door opens to call them a pair of perverts.
• Sunglasses at Night: With the exception of flashbacks, Gendou is never seen without his scary shades, even when NERV suffers a station-wide blackout in Episode 11.
• Surrealism: Eva's usage of metaphor and symbolism to depict characters' psychological experiences is a heavily surrealist technique. The most notable instances of this are probably the Mind Rape and sandbox sequences, although really it's omnipresent throughout the series.
• Surreal Horror: The series periodically slips into this, particularly during encounters with the Angels and The End of Evangelion.
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: Not just music. Sometimes the characters will be watching a movie or TV show, or listening to the radio, or, hell, really any indirect dialogue, and what is being said always relates to their mindsets, their situations, their world at large, or philosophic inquiries that appear later in the series. For example, in episode 4, "The Hedgehog's Dilemma", after Shinji slips out of his 10-Minute Retirement he and Misato stare at each other at the train station right after his train leaves. The woman at the intercom then says:
  Woman: If you are accompanied by small children, please keep them close.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: "Non"-nuclear mines.
• Swirling Dust: In "Love is Destructive", Shinji's EVA goes through its awakening. It creates a gigantic AT Field, wrecking the already destroyed city and NERV facility as well as kicking up the mother of wind updrafts.
• Symbolic Serene Submersion: The franchise uses images of the characters' passive submerged bodies a lot for advertising, especially for End of Evangelion. It symbolizes the Lotus-Eater Machine that everyone gets stuck in at the climax of the movie, and mostly is played for Surreal Horror (especially since the liquid everyone's suspended in is often red).
• Synchronized Morning Routine: This is part of the Training Montage in which Shinji and Asuka learn how to move in synch for a Monster of the Week. Ends in a mutual Death Glare when they get in each other's way.
• Takes One to Kill One: The Evas are basically the only weapons humanity has which can go toe to toe with the Angels themselves, partially because they are derived from Angels.
• Tanks for Nothing: In both the opening episode and the movies, tanks will fire massive barrages at the Angels, and do no damage at all.
  Fuyutsuki: (dryly as he watches the numerous shells hitting Shamshel to no effect) It's a waste of the taxpayers' money.
• Techno Babble: Averted. The technological jargon makes sense if you make an effort to follow it, even though there is a lot of it.
• Teen Genius: Asuka claims to have a college degree, but it's never addressed.
• Tell Me About My Father:
  • Shinji asks both Rei and Kaji about Gendou at different points. Neither of them offer up much info.
  • He also asks about his mother at one point... to Gendou, of course, so it had much the same result.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In episode 11, when the power goes out in the city, Fuyutsuki comments that it would be really bad if an Angel were to appear now. Cue next scene, showing an Angel appearing and approaching the now defenseless city.
  • In episode 22, Asuka complains about how the Angel hasn't shown up—just before she gets hit by its Mind Rape beam.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Whenever "The Beast II" plays, something's going to die.
• Theme Naming:
  • More stylistic naming instead of thematic, but characters all have their given names in katakana, which is very irregular (for personal names, katakana was used mainly by women, a practice that has become uncommon after World War II).
  • Many of the characters were named after various WWII-era naval vessels; most of them were sunk or never completed rather than surviving the war. Katsuragi, Akagi, and Soryu were all aircraft carriers; Akagi and Soryu were part of the Pearl Harbor attack, and sunk at Midway; and Ibuki, Maya and Aoba are names of heavy cruisers.
    • Katsuragi was also one of Japan's very last operational aircraft carriers, surviving mostly through delayed construction, as it was completed so late it never actually operated aircraft. It was scrapped after the war.
    • Ayanami ran troops to Guadalcanal, but was destroyed by the battleship USS Washington during the climatic naval battle of the campaign.
    • Kirishima was a battlecruiser converted to a fast battleship, and it fell in the same engagement as the Ayanami as another victim of the USS Washington.
    • Hyûga was converted into a battleship-carrier hybrid and survived into 1945 before carrier aircraft sank it in the Inland Sea.
    • Maya made it until 1944 before being torpedoed and sunk by the submarine USS Dace in the opening round of Leyte Gulf.
    • Ibuki would have led the Imperial Japanese Navy's "next generation" cruiser class, but the keel was never laid and the class was cancelled. The ship converted to a light carrier due to losses, though even that was never finished before being scrapped after the war.
    • Aoba lasted until 1945 only to suffer the same fate as Hyûga.
    • Langley is also the name of an American aircraft carrier which was sunk by the Japanese off Java (though it wasn't operating as a carrier at the time).
    • Graf Zeppelin is the name of an uncompleted Nazi-German aircraft carrier (uncompleted, just like Kyouko's mind was left fractured...) which was sunk as a target by the Russian Navy after the war.
  • Other human characters are named after ship parts or something of maritime nature, such as Ikari ("anchor"), Nagisa ("shore"), and Yamagishi (second kanji means "beach"); some instead take their names from Ryū Murakami's novel Ai to Gensô no Fascism, either wholesale like Tôji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida, or in part like the surnames of the Horaki sisters, Mayumi Yamagishi, and several minor characters in Episode 7.
  • The Horaki sisters (Hikari, Kodama and Nozomi) are named after Shinkansen lines.
• Theotech: The title mecha are named after Eve from the Bible, and the antagonists are Eldritch Abominations named after angels from Hebrew folklore (but they are not actual angels). Other oddities include a supercomputer named MAGI, an alien artifact named the Lance of Longinus, and the implication that the Bible was actually an alien technical manual (making Christianity in-universe an example of Cargo Cult). In End of Evangelion, a group of aerial Evas form a diagram of the Sephirot in the sky using Instant Runes.
• There Are No Therapists: The world would fare better with them, but SEELE's interests probably wouldn't, and Gendou himself is too mentally damaged to care, which is why NERV doesn't have any. Using The Other Wiki as a source, one could easily diagnose:
  • Shinji with avoidant personality disorder.
  • Asuka with histrionic personality disorder. Something of a case of narcissistic personality disorder, save that it stems from self-loathing rather than true self-love, meaning that she is easily a better fit for the "vulnerable" subtype of the disorder.
  • Rei with schizoid personality disorder.
  • Gendou, as shown in Episode 21 might also be a case of ASPD.
  • And Misato could be a potential sufferer of borderline personality disorder. Specifically, "borderline" type.
  • It should also go without saying that all of the above and a few others have post-traumatic stress disorder.
• This Loser Is You:
  • Shinji gets this treatment a few times. It's been theorized that Shinji, and even the whole show, were meant as Take Thats against otakus. What makes it funnier is that Shinji might be an Author Avatar of Anno himself, so he'd be including himself as a target with that giant middle finger.
    • Funnier, or possibly sadder, since Anno genuinely doesn't have a very high opinion of himself.
    • Sadamoto confirms in the manga's Bonus Material that Shinji is based on Anno.
  • Kensuke notably averts this: Despite being an otaku, he functions normally in society, takes his army roleplay hobby with a grain of salt, and can rely on the knowledge he accumulated as a military otaku to correctly notice that Misato got a promotion (something even Shinji didn’t notice).
• Through His Stomach: Hikari's method for getting close to Touji.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: It's debatable whether the final two anime episodes really happened or were all taking place in Shinji and the other protagonist's heads.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Shinji's only moments of 'happiness' are so far and few they deserve their own drinking game. Let's see: when Gendou or Misato actually praise him overtly; when Rei reacts somewhat warmly to his presence; when he can hang around with Touji and Kensuke; when he thinks he's fusing with his mom; when Kaworu stands close to him looking handsome and saying ambiguous things. That's all. Every form of comfort has gotten out of his reach by the time The End of Evangelion happens. But congratulations, Shinji and all the children of the world!
• Title Drop: Episode 21:
  Naoko: This is what man has created from Adam — Eva.
  Gendo: Project E, the Adam Revival Project. And that is Evangelion Unit 0, our system prototype.
  Fuyutsuki: Prototype? Prototype of what?
  Gendo: Fuyutsuki, will you join us in creating a new genesis for mankind?
• Title Scream: The eyecatches originally had this during the show's development. These versions can be heard on the S Works CD soundtrack set, where they are marked "F-0" and "F-1."
• Toilet Humor: In the first Petit EVA short, Unit 01 trades lunches with Shinji...but its lunch is nothing but batteries. Unit 01 expects Shinji to eat, so he does. The last scene shows Shinji coming out of a bathroom stall holding his butt and groaning.
• Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Why are the Angels attacking Tokyo-3? Turns out that the "Black Moon" from which all life on Earth emerged just happens to be right underneath Japan, (although according to the Classified Information it was originally at the South Pole before being shifted to underneath Japan by tectonic movement) and their ultimate goal is to get in there and reunite with Adam. Subverted when Adam wasn't there originally and they were completely heading in the wrong direction, and then played straight after episode 8 when Gendou has Adam brought there.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Humanity, being the ultimate result of the terraforming process started by Lilith, is collectively the 18th Angel, and every sentient lifeform on Earth is just protoplasmic ooze held bodily together by energy fields which are the physical manifestation of the ego. Angels are another, alternate conception of humanity, with the ability to exert physical control but with limited self-understanding.
• Took a Level in Badass: While Asuka has already proven to be a capable fighter, her taking on not only one but nine Mass Production Evangelions in End Of Evangelion and seemingly succeeding right after snapping out of her catatonic state clearly tops the previous displays of her fighting ability.
• Tragedy: The fatal flaws of the characters undo them in the movie.
• Training Montage: Shinji and Asuka training for the second battle with the 7th Angel.
• Transformation Trauma:
  • Especially in End of Evangelion where Rei merges with Lilith and embryonic Adam and becomes a giant... something... and subsequently ushers in the infamous "Everyone hugs and turns into Tang" sequence.
  • On the other hand, the trauma is noticeably absent in the case of Gendou merging his hand with Adam. Heck, he's so stone-faced about it that in the manga, he even eats Adam in a very insane and squicky scene. Later, when Adam appears as an eyeball in his left palm, Gendou's reaction is basically "Oh, there you are."
• Translation Convention: Foreign dubs of the show (including English) make it clear that the characters are still speaking Japanese canonically.
  Dub Asuka: (grunt) You're thinking in Japanese, aren't you?
• Trauma Conga Line: Most of the main characters suffer from this to different degrees.
• Trauma Swing: During Asuka's Mind Rape and during a flashback to Shinji's childhood in The End of Evangelion. However, unlike other examples of this trope, neither one actually sits on a swing.
• Troperiffic: Deconstructing them, playing them straight, codifying them, and subverting them among other things. Just look at the length of these pages.
• Troubled Toybreaker: Asuka has massive issues with adults, as a result of seeing her mother hang herself at 4, and before that, hearing her father cheat on her with his mistress, who he later married. When she is Mind Raped by Arael, she has either a memory or a vision of tearing a stuffed monkey that was a gift from her new stepmother. When her father asks her why she doesn't like it, her teenage self steps on the monkey and declares, "Because I'm not a child! I grew up faster than other people, I don't need a stupid stuffed toy!" This is immediately followed by a voice-only memory of young Asuka begging her mother not to stop being her mother, and then not to kill her.
• Tsundere:
  • Anime: Asuka is a glorious Type A; Misato has a few tsundere characteristics too.
  • Non-canon: In Shinji Ikari Instrumentality Project, Yui is a Type B with violent approaches and Hilarity Ensues, whereas Rei tends to be a Type B who gives the cold shoulder to Shinji whenever she can't deal with her feelings towards him.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: Despite the series being set 20 years after its production, technology seems to have developed fairly little, the only obvious exception being the ubiquitous use of laptops in classrooms. Justified, given the tremendous effort needed to rebuild the world after the Second Impact.
• Two Girls to a Team: Asuka and Rei are the two girls to the other guys - Touji, Shinji and Kaworu. This is inverted in Rebuild where Shinji and Kaworu are the two guys to the other girls.
• Two-Keyed Lock: This is how the MAGI self-destruct works: the three cores vote among themselves. Starting or cancelling the sequence requires unanimity of all three; cheating is impossible since any attempts at one core hacking another are immediately discovered. If two disagree and the third is undecided, they'll ask the human crew.
• Unbuilt Trope: Many examples (leading to its Once Original, Now Common status among some modern viewers).
  • The most obvious is Rei, who would appear to be a brilliant deconstruction of the Emotionless Girl archetype if not for the fact that she more or less created it.
  • Many tropes that Eva deconstructs have actually been deconstructed in older Super Robot Genre shows, notably the ones that come from the 1970's; in fact the stream of Lighter and Softer shows that defines the Super Robot Genre as a whole isn't so apparent in the 1970's era of Super Robots.
• Unflattering ID Photo: The photograph on Misato's NERV ID card shows her with a very strange facial expression, seemingly either dazed or annoyed.
• United Nations Is A Super Power: It underwent heavy reforms following the Second Impact and the Valentine Treaty of February 2001. To illustrate, all of the world's national militaries are explicitly under direct control of the UN, and are effectively subordinate to UN Special Agency NERV.
• Unreliable Expositor: Almost everything we are told in the first half of the series is a lie, though mostly told by people who believe what they are saying is true. Even once the shocking truths start being revealed, many said shocking truths are also lies. Many of these untruths are still held up as facts on fan sites, and on this very page. For example the Evangelions do not need external power to move. The power cord and batteries only power the entry plug which allows the pilot to control the thing. The Evas are designed to shut down if the entry plug loses power because it's better to shut down than add a berserk Angel clone to whatever bad situation is already happening. As this is never explicitly stated, you still see it said they require external power to operate despite it being repeatedly shown in the show that they can move without power just fine if the Eva itself is properly motivated to do so.
• The Unreveal: So many examples, but two very noteworthy [and memetic] examples are who killed Ryouji Kaji^note Word of God is that it was by a random Mook and "Ritsuko Akagi, the truth is..."^Japanese赤木リツコ君、本当は….
  • The manga had this to offer out for the latter - "Ritsuko Akagi. Until now, your work was quite exemplary. I did love you."
  • As seen in All There in the Manual, there's some evidence to indicate the anime version was "I need you".
• Unrobotic Reveal: Twice, first with the Evas and then with the dummy plugs. The former are Angel clones, and the latter are Rei clones.
• Unusual Euphemism: One episode mentions thermal expansion in several different scenarios. One of these scenarios involves Shinji hearing Asuka and Misato giggling and talking about touching each other while at a hot spring. Shinji looks down and complains about "thermal expansion".
• Unwanted Harem: Shinji is quite pimpin', for a skinny teen with a crippling social phobia.
• Urban Legend Love Life: Misato and Kaji are both perceived (possibly even by each other) as far more flirty and promiscuous than they actually are.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: SEELE's ultimate plot: bring humanity into a state of eternal peace through the destruction of individuality.
• Vapor Wear: Seeing how Rei strips off all of her undergarments before putting on her plugsuit, it seems to imply that none of the pilots wear underwear while wearing their plugsuits in order to boost their synchronization rating. Asuka probably gets to have her panties on in her period, though.
• Vibroweapon: The Progressive Knives, the enormous combat knives each Eva unit carries. They can hurt Angels, but are generally a last-resort weapon.
• Video Phone: A variation is used, featuring full sized holograms when SEELE is talking to Gendou.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: NERV's strategy is to simply hole up in Tokyo-3 and kill each Angel as it invades. Only once do they get proactive and try to kill an Angel before it awakens (the fact that this was the only Angel they could actually find before it was already storming Tokyo-3 helps.)
• Villains Never Lie:
  • Seen when SEELE turns Ritsuko against Gendou and Rei in Episode 23 by telling her the truth: that Gendou sent her to be interrogated instead of Rei, because she is not as vital to his plans. This causes her to realize she was being used the entire time.
  • Gendou, on the other hand, averts this. He repeatedly lies to Kaji about the nature of Adam up until he is killed (by either Nerv or Seele, it's deliberately left ambiguous).
  • Ritsuko, although it's debatable as to what extent she's really a villain, also averts this, repeatedly lying to Misato about the nature of the Evas and claiming that she's told her everything there is to know when there's a whole wealth of information she's keeping secret.
• Vocal Evolution: The voice actors' performances become more nuanced and multidimensional as the series does. This is more obvious in the English version, but it is true for the Japanese original as well.
• Wall Slump: Misato's death in The End of Evangelion, where she leans against the wall to hide her mortal injuries after being shot from Shinji, then collapses against it when he leaves.
• War Is Hell: In play in The End of Evangelion, in which NERV staff are stabbed slowly, ripped apart by machine gun fire, and torched alive with flamethrowers while attempting to flee to safety; the aggressors also target Asuka and Shinji.
• The War Room: Central Dogma's command center, with Mission Control, natch.
• The Watson: Sometimes Maya, sometimes Misato, sometimes Shinji. Actually, so few characters know what's really going on that they all have their Watson moments.
• We Have Reserves:
  • The "Reiquarium", where all of Rei's soulless clone bodies are kept.
  • All of Shinji's classmates are potential Eva pilots.
• Weakness Turns Her On: One way of looking at the causes of Asuka's attraction to Shinji.
• Weak Boss, Strong Underlings: Due to NERV's military-like hierarchy, this trope comes in layers and could be seen as an inversion of Rank Scales with Asskicking. First, we have the Children: teenagers with no military training who synchronize with and pilot Humongous Mechas known as Evas — the Evas are kind of sentient and contain the souls of the Children's mothers and that's why only the kids can control them. Then we have Major Misato, the children's tactical commander in battle and the tutor of two of them as well as an accomplished Action Girl. So, she is only stronger than the kids when they aren't piloting the Evas. Above them are NERV Commander Gendō and his Deputy Fuyutsuki; neither of them is an action guy and their strength lies on respectively being The Professor and The Chessmaster. Finally, there's SEELE, the shady global organization funding and overseeing NERV. SEELE's Cosmopolitan Council comprises regular politicians with a penchant for theatrics.
• Weirdness Magnet: Primarily Shinji, as the plot mainly revolves around the Mind Screw that happens to him (and let's face it, how often do you accidentally fall on a naked blue-haired clone of your dead mother?); Misato, due to her wacky Angel-beating schemes and zany alcohol problem; Gendou has psychosis-induced plot-distorting abilities and lacks a sense of ridicule, especially in the manga and (on 'shrooms!) in Shinji Ikari Instrumentality Project; the rest of the cast, to various degrees.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Shinji; one of the central pillars of his character is to do something to get Gendou to acknowledge him.
• Wham Episode:
  • Episodes 18 to 24, each to varying degrees, given the amount of information these episodes supply.
  • To a lesser degree, Episode 14. Even though half of it is a clip show and nothing particularly dramatic happens, it's the point at which the show begins to switch tracks from a by-the-numbers mecha show to a bizarre Mind Screw with existentialist undertones. Notably, this is the first episode with a mind trip sequence, as well as hints about the connection between the pilots and their EVAs and the first appearance of the Lance of Longinus.
• Wham Line: In End of Evangelion; "We are the Eighteenth Angel."
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: An in-universe example. All of the religious terms given to the elements of the seeding system cloud their (rather mundane) purposes. For instance, the "Spear of Longinus" is a control rod; the "Dead Sea Scrolls" is an instruction manual/troubleshooting guide.
• What If?: A number of the Alternate Universe works differ in varying degrees. Evangelion ANIMA in particular takes place three years after the anime in a universe where the Third Impact never happens in part due to Kaji staying alive to warn NERV of SEELE's planned attack.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Shinji angsts about this after the double whammy of learning Rei's secret and being ordered to terminate Kaworu.
  • Surprisingly, prior to the tail end, this remains of little issue to the cast in regards to the Angels, whom display little sentience, and are annihilated consecutively without a second thought.
• When It All Began: Second Impact is the linchpin event to everything that happens in the series.
• White Mask of Doom: Several of the Angels have what looks like white masks with little more than eyeholes.
• With Friends Like These...:
  • Despite being friends since college, Ritsuko keeps Misato in the dark about all of NERV's most important secrets until near the end of the series. She also gets into frequent (and sometimes physically violent) arguments with Misato about how to handle situations which could endanger the pilots, and while she never misses an opportunity to poke fun at Misato, her jibes become very cruel after things really blow up between Misato, Shinji, and Asuka. It gets to the point where their relationship at the end of the series can best be described as just a few steps away from full-on We Used to Be Friends territory. And eventually, after the events of Episode 23, it ends up there. It may be argued with some justification that Ritsuko never really considered Misato a friend, and was just manipulating her the entire time.
  • Asuka probably deserves mention as well, though in her case the trope is deconstructed since her hostile behavior ends up driving most potential friends away.
• Working with the Ex: This applies to Kaji and Misato, who was none-too-pleased when she found out that Kaji would be staying with NERV after delivering Asuka and Unit 02, and lashed out at him at nearly every chance she got afterwards. The bickering led Ritsuko to comment that they sounded like an old married couple.
• The World Mocks Your Loss: Rei embodies this trope for Shinji due to her being a clone of his (not-really dead) mother, though he doesn't fully realise this until it's spelt out for him near the end of the series by Ritsuko.
• Worth Living For: The infamous ending of the series centers around Shinji deciding that his life is worth living. Interesting in that he doesn't find a reason so much as he learns to accept his own limitations.
• Writer on Board: End of Evangelion apparently subverts this; Anno has made several statements (supported by hints in the TV series) to the effect that it was the planned ending, but there are still fans who say otherwise. A lot of people believe that the hospital scene is nothing but this.
• Xeno Nucleic Acid: The Angels have some truly bizarre genetics, assuming that's even the right word to use. They're physically made of an exotic form of matter with properties of both waves and particles, just like light. However, their molecules are arranged in a pattern that is 99.89% similar to human DNA, just with a different color wavelength.
• Yandere: The Akagis. Like mother, like daughter. Naoko murders the first Rei when she realizes that Gendo doesn't love her, and, once she realizes she's killed Rei, she kills herself. Ritsuko suffers a complete mental breakdown and destroys every clone body of Rei except the current one out of jealousy for Gendo's affection for her before, in The End of Evangelion, trying to blow up the entire Nerv HQ and kill Gendo, herself, and countless other people.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Shinji, over and over and over...
• Your Size May Vary: The Evas are exactly as tall as they need to be to look cool/imposing/sinister in whatever shot they're in. Particularly egregious during The End of Evangelion, when Giant Naked Rei emerges to be at least as tall as the earth is deep: EVA Unit 01, as it pierces GNR's forehead, is about an eighth of the width of that head. Try and imagine something that size traveling through the surface chutes it's been catapulted through numerous times in the series previous.
• Youthful Freckles: Both Kensuke (energetic) and Hikari, combined with Girlish Pigtails to highlight her idealistic and innocent character.
• Zeerust: No New Fashions in the Future? Check. Cassettes? Check. Video games? Asuka loves her Seca.

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Misato: Tune in next time for more fan service!