Teen Anime Philosophy Texts from Outer Space

by Brian Hioe

When I was growing up in a small suburban town in upstate New York, there weren’t a lot of kids who shared my interests in philosophy and literature. So when I went to college and became an English literature major, I was excited to take classes on many of the subjects I’d already been looking into. But I was disappointed to find that a lot of professors used pop culture–Hollywood films, mostly–to make philosophy into something bite-sized, palatable, and relatable to young people. I hadn’t grown up watching South Park or Family Guy or whatever, so maybe that’s part of why this approach didn’t resonate with me.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, I wasn't so different from my classmates—only instead of needing pop culture references to explain philosophy, I'd followed pop culture references into philosophy on my own. As a teen, I'd started reading Nietzsche and Freud or whoever, not out of nowhere, but because of my interest in Japanese anime and video games.

In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was growing up, the anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion cast a large shadow over the world of Japanese anime and video games. How to describe Evangelion, I’m not even sure; apart from forever changing the whole medium of anime, it’s a work that continued to shape my worldview in the decades since I first experienced it.

The protagonist of the post-apocalyptic story of Evangelion is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy recruited by his father into a mysterious organization to fight against extraterrestrial beings by piloting a huge bipedal biomechanical fighting machine called an Evangelion. On one level, then, Evangelion is a postmodern deconstruction of the Japanese giant robot genre, in which the fantastical sci-fi setting ultimately serves as the backdrop for a complex Freudian psychoanalysis-influenced character drama.

At first, the story’s philosophical and literary dimensions appear just as hints, for example in the titles of songs such as “Mother is the First Other,” and “Thanatos.” But the same way that teens in the ’70s might have discovered A Clockwork Orange after hearing David Bowie belt out, “the droogie don’t crash here” on “Suffragette City”—and deepened their understanding of Bowie’s work through Burgess’s novel—the ’90s teens who loved Evangelion were drawn to learn what Thanatos might mean, and they, too, found their curiosity repaid as the story unfolded.

Shinji’s relationships with both his parents (and with the biomechanical ship he pilots, Evangelion Unit-01) are expressed over time in ever-deepening layers of Freudian complexity. In a space-opera reconfiguring of the Oedipus complex, for example, we learn that Shinji’s mother’s soul inhabits his ship; by becoming its pilot, at his father’s demand, Shinji both enters and is entered by his mothers’ body.

Though Evangelion was before my time, it was a key influence on the video game works of the 2000s that got me hooked on philosophy, a list that includes Xenogears (in which the protagonist’s ego, superego, and id are explicit elements of the story) and its “spiritual successor,” Xenosaga (which directly explores Nietzschean themes such as the Will to Power and the Eternal Return), as well as the .hack game franchise, anime such as Boogiepop Phantom, Serial Experiments Lain, and Ghost in the Shell—a long, long list.

Back then, during the start of my nerd phase in life, which continues today (I went to Comic-Con most years during college in New York City), I marveled that commercially nonviable works like these had managed to get made at all. The first episode of the Xenosaga series had eight hours of cutscenes, for example, then a world record. That meant that playing the game involved watching cutscenes the length of four two-hour movies.

Looking back, I’m not too sure what the exact relation of a lot of these franchises was to capital-P “Philosophy” or capital-T “Theory” was.

There were a lot of citations, all right, and I could believe that the scriptwriters and director had read the relevant texts, or had needed to read them, in order to create an engrossing drama; grafting the complexities, the passions and emotional makeup of damaged human beings onto outer-space adventure stories that were something like a soap opera, like Star Trek, like Shakespeare.

Without a doubt, Anno drew a great deal from Freudian psychoanalysis, and from his own struggles with depression, in conceptualizing the characters of Evangelion; psychoanalysis played a large part in his own journey. But those references may just have been there to provide a “jargon of authenticity” for the story, to borrow a term from, uh, Theodor Adorno.

These were compelling character dramas, which used elements of philosophy and theory to layer their worldbuilding, or flesh out character motivations. The aim may not have been to proselytize directly for a specific worldview or school of thought, but Evangelion succeeded in developing a meaningful and lasting set of interrelated ideas—what Richard Rorty might have called a “vocabulary,” or Marshall McLuhan a “galaxy for insight.”

This would partly explain Evangelion’s lasting appeal. The less expansive view is that any developing art form may seek credentialed intellectual grounds in order to justify its own worth. In retrospect, I don’t think that was unlike myself growing up, seeking out philosophy as a way to give myself some veneer of sophistication. Perhaps that’s just intellectual adolescence, then.

Or maybe, aesthetics has always been a gateway drug to philosophy. I suspect I’d have become interested in philosophy in college, encountering it through literature, even if I hadn’t gotten there first through Japanese anime.

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