Evangelion looks like a story about giant robots fighting monsters, and for about six episodes it is. Then it becomes clear that the robots are not robots, the monsters are not invaders, and the organization sending teenagers out to fight has a purpose it is not telling them.
Here is what the recurring images mean: what NERV is, what the Angels are and why there is a fixed number of them, what separates Units 00, 01 and 02, who the Second and Third Children are, what the AT Field stands for, and what Instrumentality was meant to achieve, and where each appears across our own Evangelion collection.
NERV
NERV is the agency that builds and operates the Evangelions. It sits under Tokyo-3, a fortress city built after the disaster called Second Impact, inside an underground cavern called the Geofront, and its stated job is to stop the Angels. Gendo Ikari commands it, Misato Katsuragi runs operations and Ritsuko Akagi runs the science.
The logo is a half fig leaf over a line from a Browning poem, "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," which is the series' first joke at NERV's expense. Above it sits SEELE, a committee that funds NERV, following prophecies it treats as a schedule, while Gendo runs a plan of his own. The Genesis hoodie, its matching sweatpants and the Third City Sortie long sleeve are our NERV-side pieces rather than unit or pilot artwork.
NERV pieces
The Angels
The Angels are not aliens and not a species. They are a numbered sequence of seventeen beings, each trying to reach the thing NERV keeps sealed in the deepest level of its headquarters. The first two, Adam and Lilith, are the source of everything else and never attack at all. The third, Sachiel, is the humanoid one that walks into Tokyo-3 in the first episode. After that the shapes stop being bodies: Ramiel is a floating blue octahedron with a drill and a particle beam, Zeruel the one that tears through the Geofront, and the seventeenth, Tabris, arrives as a boy named Kaworu Nagisa sent to NERV as a pilot.
What they share is what makes them dangerous: a red core that has to be broken to kill them, an AT Field that ordinary weapons cannot cross, and blood that NERV's sensors read as a blue pattern. They take their names from angelology, and the series counts humanity as the eighteenth in the sequence, which tells you the Angels and the pilots are closer relatives than the fights suggest.
Units 00, 01 and 02
The Evangelions are not machines. Under the armor plating is a living body, and the plating exists to restrain it as much as to protect it. Each unit runs off an external power cable, with a battery that lasts minutes when unplugged, and is controlled through the entry plug, a cylinder that slides into the spine where the pilot sits submerged in breathable liquid. Control is expressed as a synchronization ratio; the higher it goes, the more the pilot feels what the unit feels.
Unit-00 is the prototype, piloted by Rei Ayanami, orange at first and rebuilt in blue after it is damaged. Unit-01 is the test type, piloted by Shinji Ikari, purple and green, and the unit that goes berserk, moving with no pilot input and no power. The reason, admitted late, is that it was built from a different source than the others and the soul inside it is Shinji's mother. Unit-02 is the first production model, red, built in Germany for Asuka Langley Soryu and the first designed for combat rather than testing.
Unit-01 is the most drawn thing in our range, on the Eva Unit-01 tee and the Eva 01 hoodie; the Violet Frame and Scarlet Frame tees are a matched pair in the colors of Unit-01 and Unit-02, and the Unit Rise, Unit Surge and Eclipse Unit tees each take a unit in motion.
The Second and Third Children
The pilots are called Children, numbered in the order they were selected. Only children born after Second Impact can pilot an Evangelion, which is why every pilot is fourteen. Rei is the First Child, and the series eventually explains that there is more than one of her. Toji Suzuhara is the Fourth, chosen for Unit-03, and Kaworu the Fifth, sent by SEELE.
Asuka Langley Soryu is the Second Child. She arrives from Germany with a college degree, a red plug suit and the highest synchronization score of anyone, and her whole sense of self is built on being the best pilot. When her score falls and an Angel takes her apart from the inside, there is nothing under the confidence to catch her. Shinji Ikari is the Third Child, summoned by a father who abandoned him and put into Unit-01 the day he arrives because the alternative is a badly injured Rei. He does not want to be there, and fights anyway, and the series is honest about what that costs him.
Asuka is the subject of the Second Child hoodie and the Red Pilot tee; all three core pilots share the Eva Pilots tee.
The AT Field
The AT Field is introduced as a barrier: a wall of light, drawn as concentric orange octagons, that stops conventional weapons before they touch an Angel. The only thing that gets through is another AT Field of comparable strength, which is the practical reason the Evangelions exist.
Late in the series Kaworu gives it a second meaning. The letters stand for Absolute Terror, and every living person has one. It is the boundary that keeps one self from dissolving into another: the thing that makes you a separate person, and the thing that makes you lonely. Angels and Evangelions simply project it physically.
Instrumentality
The Human Instrumentality Project is what SEELE has been working toward all along: dissolve every AT Field at once so that the walls between people fall and humanity merges into a single being, ending loneliness by ending the separate self. Gendo wants the same event for a different reason, to be reunited with his wife.
The series shows the outcome twice. The last two television episodes stay inside Shinji's head; the film that followed shows it from outside, with a giant Rei rising over a red sea, and reaches the same answer: Shinji chooses to remain a separate person, walls and all, and it ends on a beach with him and Asuka. The four Rebuild films retell the story with growing changes; the third is titled You Can (Not) Redo, which is where the You Can (Not) Redo tee takes its name. The Terminal Impact and Core Break tees draw on the imagery of the ending.
How this translates onto cloth
Evangelion has one of the strongest graphic identities in anime, built out of things designed to be read at speed: a purple unit against a red sky, a warning stripe, a single line of text on a black screen. The artwork above is mostly a unit, a pilot or a symbol, and all three hold their shape on a chest or a back.
Every piece linked here is printed with a bonded matte finish on garment-washed cotton, so the blacks stay flat and the reds stay saturated rather than going glossy under direct light. Where a design sits on the garment is stated on each product page.
Measurements for every size are published on the sizing page rather than left to a generic S, M, L chart, and the whole set is in the Evangelion collection.
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Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.