Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
I get that while NERV and SEELE were both apparently working to destroy the attacking "angels" and keep them from reaching Lilith that they were always planning to begin "Third Impact" all on their own, apparently. What I don't understand is why.
Of course, maybe I missed something. I still don’t get why any of them wanted to end all life on Earth and turn every living creature into Tang to begin with. In fact I was pretty much under the impression that they were trying to prevent that. There was a lot going on, though, so maybe I just missed something. Which, while I appreciate complex stories and all, I just didn't understand this one.
The series' thesis is that humanity's suffering is caused by the fact that people are individuals with conflicting thoughts and desires. Some people keep their real feelings to themselves out of fear of rejection or ostracization, hurting themselves. Other people have desires that conflict with the desires of another person, so thus there is a clash and someone (or both) will walk away unhappy.
SEELE wanted to "fix" human suffering by trying to merge everyone's souls/consciousness into one, monolithic soul/consciousness. There would no longer be any division between people. There would be no conflict between people. No one can hurt each other or feel hurt. There will only be one consciousness, one thought. Understanding. Peace. (Or at least, that was their rationale).
At the end, Shinji decides to break out of the single consciousness, and live as an individual separate from others, and embrace the suffering that will come with that.
SEELE's motivations and plan were one of the more interesting ideas of the series, IMO, for how out there, coherent (on a surface level), and nihilistic it was. SEELE's motives and plan became pretty popular after Evangelion came out. A lot of JRPGs and manga that came out after have done variations of the idea (to varying degrees of success).
Madara, the villain of Naruto, comes to the same conclusion that human suffering is caused by people being individuals with conflicting desires, meaning that not everyone is going to get what they want, and some people will hurt others trying to achieve their desires. So, he tries to satisfy everyone's desires by lulling everyone into their own escapist fantasy dream world, where they will get everything they want and live happily ever after. Again, the heroes come to a similar conclusion as Shinji did, and reject that idea and decide to embrace the hardships that come with being individuals living in a world where not everyone is going to get what they want.