Term · Neon Genesis Evangelion
SEELE
Twelve black monoliths in a dark room, numbered, voting on the future of the species.
In Otakana the clue reads: Committee of monoliths that gives the orders
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Neon Genesis Evangelion
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
SEELE is the committee behind NERV. It funds the agency, sets its objectives, and appears on screen as a set of featureless slabs floating in blackness, each labelled with a number and the words Sound Only. The men behind them are never shown doing anything as ordinary as sitting at a table until very late in the story.
What they want is a scenario, a planned sequence of events they have been arranging for decades, and their disagreement with Gendo about how it should end is the plot running underneath every monster fight. The show gives them very little dialogue and makes all of it portentous, a cheap effect that works because the design is so austere.
A still slab with a voice costs almost nothing to animate and reads as enormous, so the look outlasted its budget. A row of numbered monoliths is now shorthand for a shadowy council across anime generally. The name is German for soul, which puts it in a set with NERV, the German word for nerve.
Spelling SEELE
SEELE has a double E in the middle and that is the whole trap. It is German for soul, pronounced roughly ZAY-luh, so the sound gives you no reason to type two E's in a row. Five letters, three of them E, with the L sitting between the pair and the last one. Find any E and the shape of the row appears.