From Neon Genesis Evangelion to Sekaikei: Institutional Failure, Narrative Short-Circuit, and Mis-Inheritance

Modern warfare, bureaucracy, and technological systems operate through institutions rather than isolated individuals. Existing research on Neon Genesis Evangelion (EVA) and sekaikei, however, has paid far greater attention to subjectivity, gender, desire, and apocalyptic imagination than to the institutional organization of knowledge, action, and responsibility. This paper asks how the relations among private subjects, institutions, and world-scale crisis are reconfigured between EVA and three frequently identified “post-EVA” works: Saikano, Voices of a Distant Star, and Iriya’s Sky, Summer of the UFOs. Through comparative close reading, the paper develops a three-dimensional analytical framework of institutional mediation, distinguishing institutional operation within the story world, narrative visibility, and characters’ practical access to institutional processes. It argues that while EVA repeatedly narrates institutions as dysfunctional yet causally effective systems that produce knowledge, coordinate action, and distribute responsibility, the later works increasingly relocate the affective and ethical weight of global crisis into intimate relationships while rendering institutional mediation opaque. To explain this transformation, the paper introduces three concepts: narrative short-circuit, describing the divergence between continuing institutional causation and an affective narrative centered on intimacy; mis-inheritance, identifying the persistence of familiar motifs despite the weakening of their relational organization; and negative political form, in which political power remains effective while knowledge, intervention, and accountability become structurally inaccessible. Rather than arguing that institutions disappear in sekaikei, the paper demonstrates how institutional power persists precisely through its reduced visibility. The study contributes a transferable framework for analyzing institutional mediation in narrative media and offers a repoliticized reading of post-EVA works by reconnecting private affect to the organization of public action, technological systems, and responsibility.