Astaroth wrote:So why Mari? Mari is neurotypical. And convenient. And not as unrealistic as might seem. I had an ex kinda like Mari. A very easy relationship. Ultimately we got bored of each other. We were so comfortable together we didn't achieve much beside playing family and caring for each other, and we both thought we should go do something worthwhile in life. I suspect this is what Mari represents for Anno, his settling down, and it being "better than expected", beyond all the ideas he might have about it. His attempt to tell Otakus yet again that real women are actually not so bad and you ought to touch grass, settle and be happy.
I wouldn't say that Mari is neurotypical, seeing her reckless in battle bordering on bloodthirst (her first scene has her charging the Third Angel and self-destroying her Eva, escaping by the skin of her teeth, "without hesitating one second" according to Kaji) and how gleeful she looks everytime she unleash her Eva's true power and can rip apart an enemy (seen in Beast Mode against Zeruel in 2.0 and after absorbing the first Adam's Vessel in Thrice), or also her idea to "infiltrate" Japan: by parachuting herself
in school uniform in the middle of the city before casually sniffing the first guy she met.
Mari is quite the adrenaline junky, in fact in an interview the folks of Khara described her as "someone out of FLCL" (Tsurumaki's most known work, and he was the one who created the character of Mari), and the people of that anime are anything but what you could call "neurotypical".
As for Mari being a metaphor for Anno's wife, to be honest, Anno and the rest of the staff so vehemently denied it, which was the only thing about which they came out of their silence and gave a clear answer (and apparently Anno was genuinely annoyed by this theory) that I believe them when they say that Mari is not a metaphor for Moyocco.
And after thinking about it for some time, there's a crazy theory I came up with: that Moyocco (or at least the "concept" of Moyocco as the light in Anno's life) isn't Mari, but Yui. Anno stated in several interviews that both Shinji and Gendo are the characters where he put the most of "himself", and that by the time of the Rebuild, he felt closer to Gendo rather than Shinji (to the point that during the production of 3.0, he asked Shinji's VA about how the character would react to Kaworu's death), my totally gut-feeling induced guess is that the part of Gendo that Anno identifies with is the part about being a successful and influential person who also found the love of his life who helped him overcome his issues (I could launch a tangent about how much of Gendo's flash-back in Thrice could be auto-biographical, but frankly I know nothing of Anno's past so I won't go there), and as such, Yui is to Gendo what Moyocco is to Anno.
With that in mind, that could explain why Yui is drastically less developed as a character in Rebuild compared to the TV show, and also why she was much more part of Gendo's story rather than Shinji's (for whom she didn't seemed to mean more than "she was my mom, and she died a long time ago"). We never got an equivalent of episode 21 that properly introduced her and gave her characterization and motivations of wanting to found a family and stop SEELE's plans (then with EoE, the revelation that she was actually even more batshit crazy than her husband and that her actual goal was to become an eternal monument of mankind's existence)
But her being a general ideal of goodness and salvation would explain why she nearly doesn't have any scenes in Rebuild, except the ones from NGE (berserk against Sachiel and refusing to activate with the Dummy Plug), why Gendo's big acknowledgment of Shinji at the end of Thrice is that he realized that his son had "part of Yui in him", which is what ultimately grants Gendo his salvation, like Moyocco saved Anno from his depression, and also why Anno keeps insisting that none of his characters are a stand-in for Moyocco, which is right, as Yui is more of an incarnation of the kind of goodness and salvation one's love can bring to someone's life rather than a literal insert in the story.
Just food for thoughts.
Axx°N N. wrote:This would warrant a definition of what the ideal fantasy waifu is and I'd wager at the end of said discussion Rei would fit the definition more, especially in a Japanese context. Mari's open discussion of smells and breasts diverges from many norms, and I'd wager that describing her as neurotypical is willfully ignoring her polyglot book and language hobby and that her unsinkable optimism and enthusiasm isn't very normal, especially in the doom and gloom context. I'd wager that one could even say she's just as mentally unwell as everyone else,
because the cheerfulness is in fact a little unhinged given the scenario and stakes.I'm not sure I agree with the notion that she gets just as much development, though. Several characters are sidelined and forefronted depending on which movie we're talking about, but Mari was introduced in 2.0 and was more or less a supporting character, basically an ancillary character in 3.0, and then comes in out of nowhere to steal the show in Shin. We know the least about her origins or motives. I don't think it's fair to say because Mari doesn't have scenes where she's having an emotional breakdown means compared to everyone else she's undeveloped, but I certainly don't think enough time was spent establishing her relationship with others in a way that made her a coherent character. It's a shame that discussions seem to conflate her bright attitude with legitimate critique of her character writing. It's not surprising that her role as battle & emotional support without insight into her own perspective outside of just supporting other characters makes her seem more like a device than a person.
About the bolded part, I think that the revelations about Mari at the end of Thrice blurs the line between her natural optimism and chirpiness, and how much she knows about the current situation to so she can properly assess how bad it truly is, so while we know that her reactions are always genuine, we can never be sure how much on each side of the balance (optimism vs secret knowledge) it rests.
To give an example to illustrate my point:
While her singing before any big battle is one of her more defining traits (to the point that three of the four Rebuild movies start with her singing), I found that for once, her singing while she and Asuka were looking for survivors in -46h was really out of place, because they were looking for survivors while the land was being turned to core, meaning that there were people dying right underneath them, that really didn't looked like the place to happily sing an old song to cheer you up before a big battle.
But then, since she knows about the secrets of the Evas, Impacts, Precursor race... she logically knows that people aren't actually dying, and that it could be reversible, so anyone caught by the core erosion and tanged to be added to an FoIs will only at worst be an inconvenience until they get restored to their original form (and they might not even remember their time inside the FoI). But since we don't know how much she knows exactly, we're left wondering how much of her attitude is just being cheerful on general, genuinely unhinged or just knowing that all this is not that bad actually. (even though the latest would lessen the impact of the drama of Midori's story happening in the very same short)
Also blurring the lines (as you wrote in the second part of your message) is the fact that we don't have any insight on her perspective or motivations: we never learn what are her personal stakes beyond a generic "saving the world", what personally motivate her to get up and fight every day, was it pure altruism? Loyalty to Yui and her initial plan (assuming it was the same as in NGE)? In honor of the time when she, Gendo, Yui and Fuyutsuki were friends? A promise to Yui to protect and take care of Shinji perhaps? For shit and giggles?
And we also never get an insight of her motivations behind her course of action: with the few revelations on her past in Thrice, we know that she knew much more than she let on, probably the only person to have a general knowledge on the Evas, Angels, SDSS, and SEELE and Gendo's plans... almost on par with Gendo and Fuyutsuki. -120min strongly implies that she knew that Shinji could come back from inside Unit 01 and pushed Asuka to go in first line for that to happen, she was the only one who knew what the sudden appearance of a 13th Angel meant in 3.0, she didn't seemed too phased about the anti-universe and even knew how to navigate it, is all but stated to had turned Fuyutsuki to her side... and she kept it all those cards close to her heart, never revealing to WILLE, why?
Sharing her knowledge with them would had given a real advantage to WILLE, an opportunity to actually even the fields against SEELE and NERV, instead of having them continuously falling head first into Gendo's traps, and that's not even talking about her implied secret alliance with Fuyutsuki, who could had actually given an advantage to WILLE for once, so why did she kept her silence?
Did she thought that she would be thrown in jail, unable to help (unlikely, she was personally targeted by Gendo, was Kaji's ally, and Ritsuko also dabbled in shady shit with Gendo and is Misato's XO)? Did she thought that WILLE would screw things up if they knew everything? That they wouldn't try to rescue EVA-01 if they knew everything? Did she wanted to have give a chance to her former friend to patch things up with his son and that wouldn't happen if WILLE knew everything?
In the end, it can give the feeling that Mari is a character for whom all of the story is one big game, that is completely out of place in the story, and not just in a "she's
happy in an Evangelion story/the whole 'breaking Eva' thing", but like an interloper, a character who knows that she's in a fictional setting and that she'll eventually get out of it and will also drag Shinji out of it, like a story where someone is trapped in a virtual world and someone else goes to rescue them to bring them back to the real world, and why not have some fun while they're at it? After all none of this is real. And that feels completely out of place with how the story, characters and stakes were built up for three movies (and half of the fourth) and a decade and half IRL.
Which can make her really hard to get invest into her as a character.