It’s time for another Evangelion post, this time to address a question sertraline-queen posed about whether the Angels are attacking NERV in an attempt to stop Gendo and his machinations.
A while back someone asked, “Can you please explain the Human Instrumentality Project like I’m five?” and I hope that post can partially clarify the answer. It will also give you the basic rundown of SEELE’s goals and why they are actually disparate from Gendo Ikari’s.
As far as I can tell, the answer to that question — whether the angels are conscious of Gendo or SEELE’s goals and wish to stop them — is no. Remember, the Angels are Adam-derived beings (that is, borne from a Seed of Life and not a Seed of Knowledge) and their behaviors more or less conceptually echo this. While they are far from totally unconscious creatures, they do behave very much like children or babies. They have a basic survival drive, exhibited by their retaliation against NERV’s attacks, but whether they have a unified or even sensible motive is unclear. Kaji suggests that their reasoning is varied: some of them are looking to recover Adam and wipe out mankind, some are looking to engage or “reunite” with Lilith, and some — according to him — seem to have no motive whatsoever. Now, I’m not sure how accurate his assessment actually is, although the actions of the various angels would corroborate these conclusions. I think the only thing we can safely surmise is that the Angels have this intense, passionate drive to “get at” what is fundamentally their parent, Adam, or what arguably represents an object of sexual unification, Lilith.
In jest and in passing I have suggested that the Angels are “pissed,” but if they feel any rage, I think it is over these figures — parental and sexual objects — being made inaccessible to them, prompting a reaction that is like a kid single-mindedly shrieking for what it wants and ignoring anything unrelated. Whether or not they have some complex reason for their behavior is symbolically unnecessary, and I doubt they do; I think the Angels’ activity is meant to represent the unconscious desire to essentially crawl back into the womb (see: Otto Rank and The Trauma of Birth) or, alternatively, fulfill a sexual inclination (see: Freud). They don’t grasp at Adam or Lilith very elegantly, as is to be expected of a life form that lacks a full grasp of the meaning of its own intent; they seem sort of like naive, scared, and relentless id-machines. Aside from Zeruel, whether they feel a discrete antagonism toward humans specifically is debatable.
When the Angels DO express any sort of discernible reasoning, it is emotional and childlike in nature — and Kaworu, Tabris, displays these characteristics as well (albeit with more awareness and complexity than previous angels, presumably because he contains human DNA). Armisael is capable of expressing pain and a need to merge with the nearest entity to try and resolve that pain, but it lacks the insight to characterize what it is feeling as loneliness without Rei’s “help.” And Armisael communicates strictly through mimicking her image — like a baby, it doesn’t yet have a fully developed sense of self; instead, it just copies what it sees and pushes to do what it desires (at Rei’s obvious expense).
You do have to wonder why the First Ancestral Race, upon the knowledge that it was going to become extinct, would decide that its descendants could not possibly be endowed with both the Fruit of Life AND The Fruit of Knowledge, even though they themselves possessed both; recall that their Lances of Longinus are programmed to prevent this evolution from occurring again. I’m inclined to believe that there is something about this dual nature that originally led to the FAR’s own destruction, hence why they would try to protect their own progeny from inheriting the condition. But we are unlikely to ever get an answer beyond what we feel suits our own personal interpretation of events.
