Dr. Nick: Misato's final lines here pull double duty by being audience-directed as well. While the Commentary Project is primarily meant to be a breezy run-through of the text of Evangelion, it bears acknowledging that this is a show that was, one way or the other, meant to shake up the otaku culture in Japan.
UrsusArctos: Evangelion is indeed a text with multiple subtexts woven through it, and it all lies within the context of the lost decade of the 1990s in Japan, when the prosperity of the 1980s ended leaving many people in a state of existential misery.
Reconstructing that context to understand the reason for Evangelion's indelible impact upon Japanese culture is no easy task, even though we have pointers to the texts that Anno was influenced by in the Character Name Origins page, such as Minako Narita's Aitsu and Ryu Murkami's Ai to Gensou no Fascism. Neither of those have been translated into English. From what little I've read online, Murakami's novel appears to have been immensely influential on Anno's thinking although the content precludes an English translation altogether.
As a result, while we in the English-speaking Eva fandom may have an edge up on Anno's English-language SF influences (UFO, The Andromeda Strain, 2001, etc.) and can keep pace with his anime and tokusatsu TV show nerdery, we are unlikely to ever completely grasp the complete web of influences that define the Curse of Eva, for the better or the worse.
