Mari is not afflicted with the “Curse of Eva”

[Archer]

1. Mari’s first time piloting an Evangelion was in the beginning of 2.0.
2. Mari appears in a Gendo’s flashback looking her current age

Unless she somehow got afflicted with the “Curse of Eva” not long after the flashback without actually ever piloting an Evangelion, we can only conclude that she does not in fact have the “Curse of Eva”, or at least that her un-aging nature is completely unrelated to it.

[nerv bae]

... we can only conclude that she does not in fact have the “Curse of Eva”, or at least that her un-aging nature is completely unrelated to it.

Or that she is a clone, or literally Satan.

Personally I'm riding the clone train: Fuyutsuki's "Mary Iscariot" is merely a colorful metaphor, Mari's original is seen in Gendo's flashback, and clone Mari receives the Curse of Eva when she exceeds the safe plug depth in 2.0.

[Szmitten]

Mari being a clone is totally unsupported for me because she's depicted as having too much memory and two-way familiarity with characters that a clone dumped with perfect recall of the original's life is unlike anything we've seen with Rei/Asuka.

I think it's totally acceptable to think that she didn't age beyond the Gendo/Yui/Fuyutsuki generation (and those out-of-time generational ticks are some of the few consistent things about her character) for "reasons" that resemble whatever it is that the Eva Curse does - the curse of eva itself a vague concept and possibly just a glib remark.

[Zoop]

There is this theory which I like, that Mari is indeed a clone and that she has known her "mother", the dna-donor she is cloned from.
And that she received a full set of memories from her "mother"-donor.
The Iscariot Fuyutsuki is referencing, would be that actual mother-donor, but technically, this is Mari too, since she is an actual clone (memories and all).
It's why Mari is the oddball, why she isn't like Asuka or Rei, why she seems to know so much and why she seems to have aged backwards.

If there is yet another thing that makes people semi-immortal, unaging, or aging backwards or whatever, other than the Curse, then imo, that gets a bit lame, right?
So I choose to believe only the Curse can cause this, and thus Mari MUST have the curse too.

The mystery is about what and who Mari actually is, I dont think there should be any question about her unaging condition.

[Archer]

But what could the cause of said not-aging be? Why the hell was she involved with Gendo and Yui in the first place as a teenager? Was she perhaps NOT a teenager in those flashbacks at all? The woman in the photo with baby Shinji, who is more or less confirmed to be Mari at this point, appears to be around Yui’s height. Evangelion pretty consistently depicts the “children” as being significantly smaller than the “adults”, and Yui is never depicted as being notably shorter than the rest of the adult cast.

Gendo’s flashback (or at least the screenshots I can find, haven’t actually gone back and re-watched it) also doesn’t seem to give any real size references where she’s standing next to someone else. The only thing of note is that in his flashback she’s wearing her classic headband, whereas in the photo she’s wearing a hair clip, but like… people can change their hair accessories, and if she had her hairband in the photo there would have been zero doubt that it was her.

Now, yes, theoretically it is possible that the woman in the photo is her (un-named, un-mentioned) mother, but I really think Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s just Mari. I suppose it’s possible that she was an adult researcher who was decently high up the food chain at NERV who got age-regressed thanks to some experiment or other with an Eva’s core.

Getting into serious bullshit fanfic territory here, but this could possibly offer a really simple explanation Fuyutsuki referencing her as Mary Iscariot. Maybe that’s literally just her real name, whereas “Mari Makinami Illustrious” is a false identity created for the mysterious teenager who ended up under NERV’s care shortly after esteemed head researcher Mary Iscariot died in an experiment gone wrong. After all “Illustrious” obviously isn’t a real English surname, while Iscariot is.

[nerv bae]

I don't think there's a broad consensus that the red-haired woman in the photograph is confirmed as Mari, is there?

[Archer]

I mean, it’s gotta be either her, her mom, or her clone donor, depending on what you think her origin is. There’s no way it’s a completely different and unrelated brown-haired, red-glasses-wearing woman who just so happens to look a lot like Mari.

I just think that it straight up being Mari is the simplest explanation. All the textual evidence (both how she speaks/acts, and how people like Gendo and Fuyutsuki think/speak about her) suggests that the Mari in the present IS the Mari in the flashbacks. There is no evidence that might suggest she is anything but the real deal.

I think that assuming she was the result of a failed contact experiment requires less unfounded leaps in logic than the clone theory. After all, we know that contact experiments are a thing that NERV did back then (this is how Yui died); that exposure to the core fucks with your humanity and can stop aging (Shinji and Asuka); and that you can get completely broken down in the core and re-constituted at a later date while retaining continuity of identity (Shinji in 3.0). The only leap in logic we have to make is that an adult Mari could’ve been re-constituted as a teenager, which is something that we do not have a precedent for. Cloning on the other hand requires the assumption that there exists another unmentioned cloning process that behaves entirely differently from how clones in Evangelion are established to work, while adding nothing to the character. It’s just an overly complicated explanation for something that I think Anno&co. just expected us to take at face value - that the Mari in Gendo’s flashback is indeed the real deal.

[nerv bae]

Right, I think that list of three alternatives is the current consensus:

1) She's Mari.
2) She's Mari's biological mother*.
3) She's Mari's original (from whom Mari was cloned).

I don't think #1 is a great choice because if the animators wanted her to look just like Mari, they could have drawn her that way. But they didn't! #3 is a bit easier for me to believe than #1 because we can imagine some variation/tuning/error introduced by the cloning process.

*random and off-topic: Another theory states that she's not only Mari's biological mother but also Asuka's, because she looks a bit like Asuka too, so maybe that's why there are two men in the photograph -- who AFAIK have no speculated identity at all -- but maybe they're the girls' originals' biological fathers? Anyway, don't mean to start a derail.

[Archer]

IMO, they drew her slightly differently to give plausible deniability, because I assume they didn’t want to hard-confirm that she was around back then before 3.0+1.0. I think it’s intentionally ambiguous, meant to provide another piece of circumstantial evidence that she was, in fact, around back then.

Let’s assume she IS a clone, and the woman in the photo (who we’ll call Mary) is her mom/donor. In that case, going by the logic you present, the person in Gendo’s flashback is Mari, not Mary, because if it were Mary, they would’ve drawn her with Mary’s hair clip instead of Mari’s hairband. This still wouldn’t explain how she hasn’t aged since the flashback, since you’ll have to once again assume the clone was involved in an accident that afflicted her with the Curse. Unless present-day Mari is another, newly minted, clone that shares the memories of the first clone..

Basically, my two questions for proponents of the clone theory are:
1. Is the person in Gendo’s flashback the clone or the original? If she is supposed to be the original, why is she drawn identically to “our” Mari?
2. If the person in the flashback is the clone, how has she stayed un-aged to the present day? Is “our” Mari a newly-minted clone who only got afflicted with the Curse in 2.0?

If the answer to Point 2 is “well, she was involved in a contact experiment that left her afflicted with the Curse”, then her being a clone doesn’t even answer why she doesn’t age, all it does is explain why a teenage Mari was hanging around NERV HQ. To which I think my explanation is much more simple and elegant: there was no teenage Mari hanging around NERV HQ, she was always an adult who got de-aged and Cursed some time after the photo was taken.

[The18°angel]

I think Mari is a clone, possibly the last generation of clones or created at the end of the project. because Asuka who was confirmed as a clone we can see her wake up inside an LCL tank with an age that appears to be 10-12 years old however Asuka apparently has memories of seeing Shinji, gendo and yui at some point in the past when he was only 4 years old which implies that she received memories from her original (unless they were manufactured to ensure a specific behavior on Asuka's part which would give blade runner vibes where the replicants were implanted with artificial memories to make them more human and control their behavior)

if she was left for dead in a contact experiment and was later rebuilt as Shinji was in 2028 this causes a plot hole where it is not explained why ritsuko left Shinji for dead shortly after N3I and no kind of attempt was made rescue before sending the eva into space (even if it was seele who had control of that operation we know that ritsuko had already left him for dead), mari seemed sure that Shinji was alive but this creates plot problems perhaps mari and fuyutsuki worked together from the beginning and just let things happen the way they wanted? How much does Mari know then, how much was she indirectly involved in that she went against WILLE, did she perhaps know about the ambush they set for Asuka or was that not part of the plan? Did she let the world suffer an apocalypse just to fulfill her goals? How many people did she let die just so the pieces would fall in the right place for a chance to use god-like powers to restore everything without the evas.

were the actions of mari and Shinji the reason why WILLE has explosives in the pilots' rooms? (in this case one pilot went rogue and caused the almost end of the world, and the other pilot is a triple agent in whom no can be trusted, but the problem is that if they trust their pilots)

if mari really received the curse of Eva in the beginning of the evangelion project what was the point of using children / clones for war. I'm sure they could have offered Misato the job of pilot when she was a teenager to get revenge at the angels and Misato
wouldn't have minded being immortal.

If there is a process other than having to use an EVA and force it to contaminate you, then why didn't the WILLE troops and the people in the villages use it? I mean becoming immortal and requiring only water may sound horrible but it's better than dying bursting in LCL when the pillars inevitably fail or dying of starvation or disease due to lack of resources plus it would literally give them all the time in the world to fix all the mess that left after the apocalypse.

In addition, all the pilots except Shinji and Mari have a common factor.

kaworu is an angel.

Asuka is a clone/child soldier created specifically to pilot an eva and was contaminated by an angel.

Rei is a clone.

Gendo transformed into something beyond human with the key of Nebuconodezzar

Shinji apparently pilots the Eva thanks to his mother and was later altered and supposedly began to develop the curse of the Eva.

then we have mari. the only point where we see that she could receive the curse of the eva was in 2.0 with unit 02. but if she is not a clone specifically designed to pilot an eva as she can pilot two different evas in the same movie. if mari is already immortal at that point what was the first eva she piloted then when fuyutsuki says that yui was the first and apparently the only one to enter directly into the core of an eva to become the control system of unit 01.

If Mari was 16 when she met Gendo and Yui in 1998, by 2000, which is when the second impact occurred and the creation of the Evas began, she would be 18 and in 2004 when the photo was taken, Mari would be 24 years old and has the appearance of a young adult woman.

unless mari has experimented with the angel in betania and something about her physically altered her at that point after all the angel she has an entry plug. but that doesn't explain why she reverted to a 16 year old body nor why mari doesn't seem to recognize Shinji in 2.0 only referring to him as pilot/nerv puppy.

[nerv bae]

Let’s assume she IS a clone, and the woman in the photo (who we’ll call Mary) is her mom/donor. In that case, going by the logic you present, the person in Gendo’s flashback is Mari, not Mary, because if it were Mary, they would’ve drawn her with Mary’s hair clip instead of Mari’s hairband. This still wouldn’t explain how she hasn’t aged since the flashback, since you’ll have to once again assume the clone was involved in an accident that afflicted her with the Curse. Unless present-day Mari is another, newly minted, clone that shares the memories of the first clone..

Good point! I'll have to double-down, as it were, and believe that there are at least two clones in the Makinami series:

1) Mary is shown in Fuyutsuki's AEL photograph (age 35+). Mary is Mari1's original or Mari1's mother.
2) Mari1 is shown in Gendo's flashback (age 18ish). Her fate is unknown.
3) Mari2 is introduced in 2.0 (age 18ish). Either Mary or Mari1 is Mari2's original.

because Asuka who was confirmed as a clone we can see her wake up inside an LCL tank with an age that appears to be 10-12 years old however Asuka apparently has memories of seeing Shinji, gendo and yui at some point in the past when he was only 4 years old which implies that she received memories from her original (unless they were manufactured to ensure a specific behavior on Asuka's part which would give blade runner vibes where the replicants were implanted with artificial memories to make them more human and control their behavior)

In addition, Fuyutsuki mentions brainwashing techniques in 1.0 and memory erasure in 3.0. So, the capability to transfer memories among Mary, Mari1, and Mari2 certainly existed.

[Archer]

Is Mari’s “apparent age” ever confirmed anywhere? Maybe a freeze-frame of a personnel file or something?

I also choose to believe that she is (frozen at) 16-17 in 2.0, but I dunno if there’s anything that actually suggests she isn’t just 14-ish like the other pilots.

[Blockio]

No set number as far as I'm aware, just the bit in Ha when she's referred to as a child by people/refers to other people as adults; which for the purposes of this discussion is good enough I feel.

[Axx°N N.]

Is there anything in NTE that indicates Ritsuko was in charge of the cloning program this go around?

My current headcanon is that the woman in the photograph is NTE's cloning program overseer from which Mari is cloned. This could (if you allow me to get a bit whacky) explain two things:

1. Why Mari, of all potential clones, seems to act outside certain norms for clones, being somewhat of an uber-clone. If her original was in charge of the cloning program, she could have potentially rigged the system to let her clone retain memories for *purposes*.
2. Why Mari, of all characters, is free from a sense of baggage and conflict despite said retention of memories/awareness of goings-ons. Why? Because her original played around with eugenics and took out the anxiety, depression and fear centers of Mari's brain!

It could also explain Mari's attachment to Asuka, who she knows is the result of a brutal cloning system, although I've always found it odd that Mari and Rei don't have many (any?) interactions and logically this explanation for her attachment should also extend to Rei.

[Blockio]

If memory serves me, the closest we get is some fairly vague stuff implying that Fuyutsuki was in charge of the whole thing, although no specified degree of involvement, if he was actually there for it or just in an overseer position.

A theory that one of my circles has is that Mari might be a case of a partial transplantation of consciousness of her mother (who would be the woman in the picture), but I do not feel capable of laying out the in-depth reasoning for it in any comprehensible shape

[nerv bae]

Is there anything in NTE that indicates Ritsuko was in charge of the cloning program this go around?

Ritsuko is shown giving Rei a medical examination in 2.0. I feel like there's more, but I can't remember at the moment despite having rewatched everything last week.

IMO, they drew her slightly differently to give plausible deniability, because I assume they didn’t want to hard-confirm that she was around back then before 3.0+1.0. I think it’s intentionally ambiguous, meant to provide another piece of circumstantial evidence that she was, in fact, around back then.

But also in 3.0 we have this line of dialogue:

Mari: 'I knew Yui and she was cooler than you.'  SPOILER: Show

Can this line be anything but a hard confirmation that Mari (whether Mary, Mari1, or Mari2) was a contemporary of Yui? If not, then there's no use for such plausible deniability, right? The cat's out of the bag.

[Archer]

Theoretically, she could be referring to Rei II. Is this line before or after Fuyutsuki reveals to Shinji that Rei is a clone of Yui?

Why the hell do we call her Rei II anyways when there’s no evidence that there was ever a Rei I in the Rebuilds?

[Konja7]

Theoretically, she could be referring to Rei II. Is this line before or after Fuyutsuki reveals to Shinji that Rei is a clone of Yui?

Why the hell do we call her Rei II anyways when there’s no evidence that there was ever a Rei I in the Rebuilds?

Rei II wears a necklace with number 2 during her LCL baths. So, we can assume she is the second one.

Also, Rei Q has a necklace with number 6 during LCL baths. And Fuyutsuki confirmed she is the sixth.

[nerv bae]

Mari's line of dialogue, addressed to Rei Q during the fight in Lilith's chamber, is after Fuyutsuki reveals to Shinji that Rei is a clone of Yui during their shogi game. I don't think Mari is referring to Rei II as Rei Q's original because:

1) If Rei II wears a necklace with number 2 on it as Konja7 points out, a number 1 is implied. It thus just wouldn't make sense for Mari to call the second Rei Rei Q's original.
2) I don't think we have any evidence that Mari and Rei II ever get to know each other. I think they only interacted during the 10th Angel battle in 2.0, and based soley on this I don't believe Mari would form the opinion that Rei II is "easier to get along with" than Rei Q.

Therefore Mari is referring to Yui as Rei Q's original in 3.0, eliminating any motivation to draw "her slightly differently to give plausible deniability, because ... they didn’t want to hard-confirm that she was around back then before 3.0+1.0"!

Edit: doing some forum diving and seeing that people have been debating this for a long time lol

[Archer]

Obviously we know factually that she is actually referring to Yui NOW, but that doesn’t remove the plausible deniability. Within the context of the movie, Rei II very much fills the role of the “original Rei”, and if you are making the (mistaken) assumption that she’s not talking about Yui (e.g. she wasn’t around back then), there’s also no reason to assume she knew about the existence of Rei I. Hell, there’s no reason to assume the audience would know about the existence of Rei I, since it’s basically just an easy-to-miss Easter egg that I doubt most people would’ve noticed on their first watch anyways. IMO, unless she explicitly mentions Yui by name, it’s merely a very, very strong implication.

Anyways, how about an alternative hypothesis: Mary was absorbed into the core some time after the photo was taken, and was in fact only recovered as Mari very recently - possibly FROM the skeletonized Angel at Bethany Base. I think I actually like this explanation the best, as it no longer requires you to come up with a justification for what the hell she was doing during the last 20-odd years. You’d think that having a pilot candidate who’s forever young, has no debilitating mental health issues, is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of how and Evangelion works, and is actually pretty gung-ho about getting in the robot would be a valuable asset they would’ve made use of sooner.