In the previous installment (Part 2), we mapped out the grand scheme of the First Ancestral Race and the "cosmic-scale traffic accident" that unfolded on Earth.
This time it's the grand finale. We're wrapping things up with a War Crimes Ranking: "Who, ultimately, was the biggest villain in the world of Eva?"
The Premise: Evangelion Was a "Divine System Failure"
To sum up everything we've covered in a single sentence, the story of Evangelion is:
A cosmic-scale system failure caused by a sloppy god (the designers) and a clever-for-their-own-good humanity (the end users).
Let's work through who's responsible, from the top down.
🥇 #1: The First Ancestral Race — The Root of All Evil
Charges: Design negligence, abandonment of operational oversight
If they had done their jobs properly, none of this would have happened. They had incredible technical prowess, but their crisis management (the operations manual) was embarrassingly lax.
List of Design Failures
- Duplicate nav destination: They set both Lilith and Adam to the same destination (Earth).
- No collision-avoidance system: The design didn't detect a problem until the two were practically on top of each other.
- Inadequate manual: The spec was "if two Seeds meet, extinction follows" — and the only failsafe was a spear that could shatter on impact.
- No separate routing algorithm for Adam vs. Lilith: They could have sorted them — "Angels, who can live anywhere, go to other planets; Lilith, who needs a habitable zone, goes to Earth" — but instead set both to "go to the best planet available."
- Fire-and-forget neglect: They launched the Seeds with a "we're counting on you!" and never planned for any follow-up, course correction, or coordination.
Evidence of Operational Abandonment
Why did they choose the "Seed" method in the first place? Because:
- Their home planet was confirmed doomed, and they couldn't emigrate themselves.
- So they encoded their souls and genes into data and entrusted them to the future via Seeds — essentially USB drives.
In other words, this was a project where they said "We can't make it ourselves, so good luck out there!" and sent it off with a prayer. Which is exactly why they should have designed it more carefully…
Verdict
"Capable but careless creators."
Their sloppy shipping error turned Earth into a deathmatch arena for four billion years.
🥈 #2: SEELE — Hackers Who Exploited a System Vulnerability
Charges: Abuse of the manual, terrorism on a species-wide scale
They decoded the Dead Sea Scrolls left behind by the First Ancestral Race and deliberately triggered the forbidden "fusion of the two Fruits" — fully aware of what they were doing.
What They Did
- Obtained and decoded the Dead Sea Scrolls (the instruction manual for the Seeds).
- Devised the Human Instrumentality Project: "Fuse Adam (the Fruit of Life) with Lilith (the Fruit of Wisdom) to artificially evolve humanity into the same 'perfect gods' as the First Ancestral Race."
- Plotted a forced murder-suicide that would drag all of humanity along with them.
The First Ancestral Race had explicitly decreed: "Do not combine the two Fruits (do not become gods)." SEELE hacked past that safety lock to try to reach the creators' own level.
Verdict
"Administrators who became a cult."
If they hadn't pulled the spear or tampered with Adam, the Second Impact might never have happened, and the Angels might have slept on forever.
🥉 #3: Gendo Ikari — The Perpetrator Who Hijacked the Plan for Personal Use
Charges: Privatization of the project, child abuse
A man who pretended to go along with SEELE's plan while hacking the system entirely for his own ends.
The Impurity of His Motives
- He couldn't care less about human evolution.
- He sacrificed the world and his own son purely for a personal wish: to see his dead wife (Yui) one more time.
The Chaos He Created on the Ground
- Concealed information.
- Used his subordinates and his son as disposable pawns.
- Effectively replaced "the Human Instrumentality Project" with "the Gendo Ikari Reunion with His Wife Project."
Verdict
"An egotist driven mad by love."
The single person most responsible for making the story needlessly complicated and for tormenting Shinji.
Honorable Mention: The Victims
The Angels
They simply booted up following a four-billion-year-old program that said "dominate the Earth" — only to find squatters (humanity) already there, and got killed without a word of explanation. Victims enslaved by an inflexible, by-the-book program.
To make it worse, their original role was simply to be "trust-fund kids (complete beings from the start)." Humanity, by contrast, started at Level 1 with no equipment and grinded their way up over four billion years. The grinders then went to war against the trust-fund kids and stole their power (the S² Engine) — that's essentially the setup of the whole series.
Humanity (Shinji and the Gang)
They were just living ordinary lives on the planet where they were born, and then got swept up in:
- The First Ancestral Race's design errors,
- SEELE's conspiracy,
- Gendo's personal baggage,
— and nearly got wiped out for absolutely no reason. Pure collateral damage.
What Shinji Finally Did
Laid out this way, the meaning of the "Neon Genesis (New Creation)" that Shinji performs in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time comes into sharp focus.
What Shinji did:
- Destroyed the "unjust system (the rules governing Eva and the Angels)" built by the First Ancestral Race.
- Rejected the "grotesque evolution (Instrumentality)" that SEELE was aiming for.
- Put to rest Gendo's personal lingering attachment, letting it finally pass on.
In other words, he "uninstalled a bug-ridden old OS (the world) and rewrote it as a new OS where everyone can just live normally."
A "cosmic bug fix" four billion years in the making — pulled off single-handedly by a 14-year-old boy (chronological age: 28).
That is the full picture of the story called Evangelion.
Summary: Eva Was the Story of a Massive Incident Response
Here's a compact recap of everything covered across these three articles.
| Phase | Event | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
| Planning | Project to launch seven Seeds into space | First Ancestral Race (◎ solid concept) |
| Design | Shared nav destination, no collision avoidance, weak failsafe | First Ancestral Race (× design failure) |
| Operations | Fire-and-forget abandonment | First Ancestral Race (× operational abandonment) |
| Incident | Two Seeds collide on Earth (First Impact) | System defect |
| Incident response | Adam's spear misfires and seals its master | Lucky accident |
| Secondary disaster | Humanity pulls the spear during an experiment → Second Impact | Katsuragi Research Team |
| Exploitation | Attempt to hijack the system via Instrumentality | SEELE |
| Privatization | Instrumentality repurposed for a reunion with his wife | Gendo |
| Final resolution | System rewritten and shut down | Shinji |
Eva is the story of "a divine system failure that was ultimately resolved by an end user (Shinji) performing a manual reset." When you think of it that way, it really is a remarkably epic incident response log, isn't it?
Closing Thoughts
When you revisit Eva through the lens of the First Ancestral Race's "grand plan and its miscalculations," everything clicks into place — why the Lance of Longinus matters, why Angels and humanity are physically compelled to slaughter each other — all of it explained cleanly as "an alien civilization's system design and its catastrophic breakdown."
Try watching the series again with this perspective in mind. Lines and scenes you never paid attention to before will suddenly hit you with a completely different weight.
"Farewell, all of Evangelion."
Thank you so much for sticking with me through this long deep-dive.