[EVA] Tokyo-3

[Carl Horn]

Something occurred to me the other day (after fourteen years ^_^).  
There are certainly reasons of dramatic and genre convention for  
Tokyo-3 to have been built (i.e., so giant monsters can attack a  
Japanese city), but how much practical sense does it make? Isn't it  
exceedingly reckless (and heedless of human life) to deliberately  
construct a brand-new civilian metropolis directly over NERV?  
Certainly, the city is famously designed with defensive measures (and  
here, another non-practical reason--art direction, the cool concept  
of a retracting city). But wouldn't it have been better to simply,  
er, locate Tokyo-3 a few more miles down the lake shore from the  
Geofront? People could commute. In real life, military bases and high- 
security government labs are usually some distance from major cities-- 
or at least, they're not located right underneath their downtown area.

This is, of course, pure speculation, but a *practical* reason I  
could think of--although I don't recall if this is actually used in  
Evangelion--is if the presence of a large mass of humanity has some  
tactical implication vis a vis the Angels; if (let us say) several  
million people gathered together provides some sort of "soul static"  
that helps to conceal the presence of Terminal Dogma (at least, until  
2015), whereas if it was beneath an isolated base populated only by  
NERV staff, it would have more quickly "stood out" to whatever senses  
the Angels were using to try and locate it. In this scenario, NERV  
wasn't defending Tokyo-3, it was Tokyo-3 that was defending NERV,  
buying it precious years of concealment after the Second Impact to  
fortify the Geofront.

Considering that the original Tokyo was the victim of a mysterious  
bomb attack one week after the Second Impact, perhaps the "fortress"  
nature of Tokyo-3 was a selling point, as it were, designed to  
convince people it was a safer place to relocate to--it would  
certainly have been easier to move evacuees there than to Tokyo-2, up  
in the mountains in Nagano. An especially paranoid fellow might begin  
to wonder if that wasn't the reason behind the Sept. 20 bomb attack  
in the first place, and why it wasn't big enough to kill everyone there.

--C.