Indeed. Admiration of human industrial progress is the foundation for every mecha show, but Evangelion really makes it visual and in-your-face, down to the most unheroic pieces of machinery. Power lines, payphones, escalators, elevators, funiculars, cables, gantries, hatches, and long shafts with quick-closing blast doors work almost like everpresent background characters, reminding viewers time and again about the little-noticed, mundane strength that resides in machinery all around us. Typography is merely another piece of tech in this context, and it gets displayed like the rest, in honest, spare, brutalist form.

Some viewers might see this industrial aesthetic as just eye candy (and in the Rebuilds, it mostly is), but I actually think it's at the core of what makes the original series great. The most memorable part of the series, the fragility, anxiety, and despair of its characters, doesn't land nearly as hard without a foil to contrast against. This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. We're constantly seeing juxtapositions between frail man and stable machine, whether it's the elevator patiently clicking through floors while someone inside seethes, the telephoned voice that falls upon would-be-closed ears, or the commuter train being used not to go places, but rather to avoid all places entirely. (And that's just at the surface level --- the broader plot, of course, goes much further and deeper into these themes.) It's only because the industrial aesthetic is so heightened in Eva that the opposing human-fragility aesthetic can reach as low as it does.