[EVA] Tokyo-3

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Carl Horn wrote:
> 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.

Another important point here is the secretive nature of the Geofront and 
Nerv in general. The massive construction projects need to create the 
fortress would need some sort of cover story. Rebuilding a high tech new 
capital would have served to allay suspicion of why so many millions of 
tons of materials and hours of manpower were being sunk into a tourist 
hotspot.

I'm partial to the soul screening idea though.