Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

Discussion of the new series of Evangelion movies ( "Evangelion Shin Gekijōban", meaning "Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition"). The final instalment made its debut in Japan on March 8, 2021.

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Mon Aug 15, 2022 2:31 pm

View Original PostJornophelanthas wrote:Is it the case that she converted Fuyutsuki? It seems to me that the three ships were either defenseless against her Evangelion, or no longer served any purpose after Gendo had taken what he wanted (Unit-01) back into the Anti-Universe. (Remember, this left the AAA Wunder without a power source, so Neo-NERV would no longer see it as a threat.)

Either way, Fuyutsuki admitted that his part was finished, he had been abandoned by Gendo, and Mari only made an appearance in his command bridge (presumably aboard one of the three ships) as a courtesy to send him off. They do not seem to have much to say to each other, either. Really, all they do is reminisce.

If you disagree with this interpretation, please feel free to elaborate.

On top of what nerv bae wrote, just after his line, Fuyu adds "do with it as you see fit", then the three remaining Adam's Vessels appears, to which Mari notes "they're all lined up, just as expected of Fuyustuki-sensei's finesse" before utterly curb-stomping and absorbing them, putting out of fight the three battleships with it and thus securing the Wunder, which all but states that he ordered them to nicely get in line so Mari can absorb them.

And once you see that scene, you also see several of Mari's previous scenes under a new light, notably in how she seems to stay calm even in pretty bad situation, and mentions things that no one else in WILLE mentions ever again, suggesting that she was talking to herself:
  • in the prequel manga, she was the one who suggested that Asuka get in the frontline to wake-up the dormant Shinji, despite Asuka telling her that Ritsuko (WILLE's reference in everything Evangelion related) said that Shinji was gone for good. And this turned out exactly how she said, as if she knew how Unit 01 worked better than Ritsuko and thus that Shinji could still intervene and be retrieved. (fitting with my use of Mari as an "extra-technobabbler" for things that even Ritsuko doesn't know)
  • in Q, during Operation US, Mari seemed to not worry much for not being able to cover Asuka anymore, even doing a playful bow of apologize with her Eva, despite Asuka being in an objectively very bad position, attached to the tesseract with only one arm free and without weapons while an enemy drone was frying her alive, as if Mari knew that this ambush would happen, and that Unit 01 would intervene to save her, exactly like she said during the prequel manga. (and remember that neo-NERV and SEELE also counted on it, since Shinji coming back was essential to their plan to break the seal to Lilith's corpse). And we know from Thrice that Mari can be worried about Asuka, as seen when Unit 13 devours her.
  • again in Q, during the battle in Terminal Dogma, after Shinji removed the spears and the weird Lilith-12th-Rei fetus thingy appeared, Asuka was panicked at the prospect that Third Impact would resume, while Mari... was completely calm, even playfully telling Asuka if she's not curious to see what will happen, as if she thought that there wasn't any danger, as it would be Kaworu's plan to double-cross Gendo and SEELE and use the spears to restore the world that was about to happen. Then Kaworu, the 1st Angel, becomes the 13th Angel, Mari's Eva detects it and states that there shouldn't be a 13th Angel (something that no one else in WILLE mentions afterwards, Sakura's talk with Asuka in Thrice even implies that they don't even seem to know who was piloting with Shinji) and immediately know that this means that Gendo has something else planned and double-crossed everyone, again something not mentioned by the rest of WILLE, implying that in both cases she was talking to herself about things the rest of the organization didn't know.


View Original Postnerv bae wrote:While rewatching NGE recently I noticed in episode 19 that Unit 02's severed head crashes into Shinji's shelter after being cut off by Zeruel, in a coincidence just as great as Mari's Unit 02 full body crash in NTE. So, correction: I actually don't think this incident is a good example of the writers using Mari as a contrivance, because the same plot beat happens in the same way in NTE and NGE, with and without Mari.

That moment goes in my category of Mari being used as replacement to Asuka when the later is used somewhere else by the story: in Thrice is was as WILLE's remaining pilot so Asuka could stay in the village. In 2.0 it was to replace Asuka and Kaji's roles in the fight against Zeruel (the former having been "used" for the Unit 03 plot, and the later too busy staying close to Gendo)
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Jornophelanthas » Tue Aug 16, 2022 8:30 am

It seems I need to rewatch all those scenes.

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby nerv bae » Tue Aug 16, 2022 9:26 am

Cross-replying from the other active Mari topic because it seems more relevant here:

View Original PostAxx°N N. wrote:The bookreading goal strikes me as a character trait, not really an insight into her mind. It's akin to how massive rosters of characters in RPGs will often differentiate everyone on the basis of a handful of traits, like "she's the sporty one" or "he's always got a snack in his mouth." We don't really know what Mari thinks of literature beyond the vaguest of summations or what she gets out of it beyond it being an impossible dream, and I'm even liable to chalk it up to contrivance or rhetorical device: "See, she's actually much deeper than she appears, trust us." But like, so, she's read Finnegans Wake?

My kingdom for a computer vision tool that can catalog all of Mari's books. Maybe there are character insights hidden within.

SPOILER: Show
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Mildly interesting: the bookshelves are not consistent between frames; for example between frames 1 and 3 the books to the right have been reorganized.

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Tue Aug 16, 2022 3:57 pm

View Original Postnerv bae wrote:Cross-replying from the other active Mari topic because it seems more relevant here:

View Original PostAxx°N N.#936761 wrote:The bookreading goal strikes me as a character trait, not really an insight into her mind. It's akin to how massive rosters of characters in RPGs will often differentiate everyone on the basis of a handful of traits, like "she's the sporty one" or "he's always got a snack in his mouth." We don't really know what Mari thinks of literature beyond the vaguest of summations or what she gets out of it beyond it being an impossible dream, and I'm even liable to chalk it up to contrivance or rhetorical device: "See, she's actually much deeper than she appears, trust us." But like, so, she's read Finnegans Wake?

My kingdom for a computer vision tool that can catalog all of Mari's books. Maybe there are character insights hidden within.

SPOILER: Show
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Mildly interesting: the bookshelves are not consistent between frames; for example between frames 1 and 3 the books to the right have been reorganized.

IIRC there has been some analysis of her books, and it's a wild mix of every subject : there are novels, history books, science books... Mari seems to read everything she can get her hands on, for example in the prequel manga, she was reading a guide book to how to write a science-fiction book. Another interesting tidbit is that the boxes in her (and Asuka)'s room have labels in different languages that write "Book done" or "To do", according to a behind the scene tweet from Khara, there are labels in Japanese, Chinese, English, French, Italian, Latin... which shows that she's polyglot (something we also see with her talking also in English, French and Chinese in the movies).

Personally, I wouldn't take her claim to want to read all the books in the world seriously as a hint of a very deep motivation to become a repository of humanity's knowledge or something like that, rather than just meaning that she's a bookworm who simply loves reading.

Although you could have another level of interpretation: her love of books of every kind and languages shows how she wants to learn new things and has fun doing it, continuously growing her collection to fill her room, and enjoys her immortal body as her increased lifespan give her more time to enjoy her hobby for even longer, in short that she finds the positives even in the bad situation the world is in, in contrast of Asuka who only sees the negatives, lives a barren life with the same possessions she had 14 years ago, fitting in the same old box (which isn't even in her room, but in Kensuke's house), continuously playing the same game over and over (in the last screenshot of your post, you can see that she's at the level 999 and her score is 9999999, meaning that she "finished" that game a long time ago and was probably playing it for the past 14 years and even more, akin to Shinji continuously listening to the same tracks of the same tape - another hint that her Wonderswann is her equivalent to Shinji's SDAT to close herself to the world, not that was very subtle about it) and can't see the good sides of her curse, continuously insisting that she has a "disgusting" body (even adding more misery than necessary: the prequel manga shows that Mari has clothes aside her plugsuit, and in Q we see her selecting the flavor of her drink, meaning that sticking to her plugsuit or being naked and only drinking water is something completely self-inflicted from Asuka)

In short, ironically, Mari is following Misato's advice to Asuka (just because the fateful Unit 03 test) to enjoy her you to have fun and try new things whenever she can, while Asuka already acts like a bitter old woman.
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Seriously, that is the most fananked theory I've ever heard, more than Mari being Marty McFly travelling through time to keep her parents (Asushin) together. -- Jäeger

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Axx°N N. » Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:06 pm

I'm liable to believe the -120 Min. book is more of a sight gag for readers given the setting.

Mari's first appearance gives us a new Eva model, a new angel, and she knocks Shinji's player to a new track (although it's only a new track number to viewers), so that lends credence to reading her as newness and her tendencies as newness-seeking.

The contrast with Asuka is interesting, but it still makes the medium of choice the less pertinent aspect. It's not that games are a dead medium and literature an alive medium: you could read the same books again & again, or only play new games. This is what I meant by finding it hard to see anything literary in Mari, or for the book detail to lead a reading of her character in a meaningful way.

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:Although you could have another level of interpretation: her love of books of every kind and languages shows how she wants to learn new things and has fun doing it, continuously growing her collection to fill her room, and enjoys her immortal body as her increased lifespan give her more time to enjoy her hobby for even longer...

Case in point, this is an accurate way to frame it because Mari seems all about fun, but a lot of books aren't best described as fun and many reasons people have for reading couldn't be called fun-seeking, or at least not compared to the type of fun of video games. This makes it difficult to imagine having a conversation with Mari about, like, Kafka. What would such an unserious person have to say about something serious? Would she switch modes and treat a Dostoyevsky conversation with probing insight and strike a different tone, or would she be genki and atwitter the whole time?

I suppose it's a thesis you can't prove one way or the other, but I'm not sure her attitude can realistically be sustained in the span of a few decades, not least of which one full of reading a wide variety of novels. I don't think it would inevitably turn you into a misanthrope, but surely it would mellow you? :emogendo: To compare her to another famous meganekko book-paraphilia action heroine, even the hyper-spastic Yomiko Readman got a little dour in middle-age.
Last edited by Axx°N N. on Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:37 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:21 pm

View Original PostAxx°N N. wrote:I'm liable to believe the -120 Min. book is more of a sight gag for readers given the setting.

Mari's first appearance gives us a new Eva model, a new angel, and she knocks Shinji's player to a new track (although it's only a new track number to viewers), so that lends credence to reading her as newness and her tendencies as newness-seeking.

The manga has been explicitly depicted as being canon, so yes, that talk between Mari and Asuka on the launch platform did happened.

As for Mari representing novelty and it going with her likeness to seek new things, I agree with you.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Axx°N N. » Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:36 pm

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:The manga has been explicitly depicted as being canon, so yes, that talk between Mari and Asuka on the launch platform did happened.

Yeah, I meant just the book itself seems gag-like.

Also, apologies for editing my post so heavily post-facto, I farted it off way before I should have.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Wed Aug 17, 2022 4:12 pm

View Original PostAxx°N N. wrote:The contrast with Asuka is interesting, but it still makes the medium of choice the less pertinent aspect. It's not that games are a dead medium and literature an alive medium: you could read the same books again & again, or only play new games. This is what I meant by finding it hard to see anything literary in Mari, or for the book detail to lead a reading of her character in a meaningful way.

I don't think the medium is really important, it could be books, or videogames (then her room would be filled by consoles, laptops and game boxes), or music (then her room would be filled by tapes, vinyl records and mp3 players filled to the brim with songs), or drawings...

What's important is the fact that Mari seeks new elements of her hobby (as it is a hobby) as a way to show us that she seeks new experiences and joy even in this post-apocalyptic world, in contrast to Asuka who keeps ruminating the past and is heavily implied to had played the same game for years on no end, probably not because she enjoys this particular game that much, but because it's something she can do almost in automatic while still requiring enough concentration that it let her not think about anything and cut herself from the outside world, the same way that Shinji's tracks in his SDAT must be background white noise for him at this point, that let him tune out the rest of the world while not making think too much.


View Original PostAxx°N N. wrote:Case in point, this is an accurate way to frame it because Mari seems all about fun, but a lot of books aren't best described as fun and many reasons people have for reading couldn't be called fun-seeking, or at least not compared to the type of fun of video games. This makes it difficult to imagine having a conversation with Mari about, like, Kafka. What would such an unserious person have to say about something serious? Would she switch modes and treat a Dostoyevsky conversation with probing insight and strike a different tone, or would she be genki and atwitter the whole time?

I suppose it's a thesis you can't prove one way or the other, but I'm not sure her attitude can realistically be sustained in the span of a few decades, not least of which one full of reading a wide variety of novels. I don't think it would inevitably turn you into a misanthrope, but surely it would mellow you? :emogendo: To compare her to another famous meganekko book-paraphilia action heroine, even the hyper-spastic Yomiko Readman got a little dour in middle-age.

You can be a thrill-seeker and still enjoy calm activities on the side, she pilots a giant cyborg death machine in battles to the death against a myriad of enemy drones each with weirder and more esoteric abilities than the last, plus four nigh-unkillable enemy giant cyborgs, that must fulfill her adrenaline quota quite fine!

Also, she was a work colleague of Gendo, Yui and Fuyutsuki, and if Gendo's flashback is to be believed was only a teenager back then, which logically means that she must be very intelligent, a genius even, so it's very possible that yes, she probably can have a deep and insightful discussion about Kafka or Dostoyevsky if someone ask her. The thing is that she's only seen interacting with Asuka, which most of the time is akin to conversing with a wall who only get a reaction when the subject of Shinji comes up.
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Seriously, that is the most fananked theory I've ever heard, more than Mari being Marty McFly travelling through time to keep her parents (Asushin) together. -- Jäeger

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Axx°N N. » Wed Aug 17, 2022 7:17 pm

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:What's important is the fact that Mari seeks new elements of her hobby (as it is a hobby) as a way to show us that she seeks new experiences and joy even in this post-apocalyptic world, in contrast to Asuka who keeps ruminating the past and is heavily implied to had played the same game for years on no end, probably not because she enjoys this particular game that much, but because it's something she can do almost in automatic while still requiring enough concentration that it let her not think about anything and cut herself from the outside world, the same way that Shinji's tracks in his SDAT must be background white noise for him at this point, that let him tune out the rest of the world while not making think too much.

All true again. This comparison and mention of Shinji's SDAT instantly brought to mind the Kaworu piano duet scene; here too the medium isn't the culprit, it's the mindset applied. Where once music was an insulating escape, now it's a somewhat exhilarating/scary opening up he hasn't experienced before, where the medium becomes a connecting agent even though he's so used to using it to aid in alienation.

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:You can be a thrill-seeker and still enjoy calm activities on the side, she pilots a giant cyborg death machine in battles to the death against a myriad of enemy drones each with weirder and more esoteric abilities than the last, plus four nigh-unkillable enemy giant cyborgs, that must fulfill her adrenaline quota quite fine!

Also, she was a work colleague of Gendo, Yui and Fuyutsuki, and if Gendo's flashback is to be believed was only a teenager back then, which logically means that she must be very intelligent, a genius even, so it's very possible that yes, she probably can have a deep and insightful discussion about Kafka or Dostoyevsky if someone ask her. The thing is that she's only seen interacting with Asuka, which most of the time is akin to conversing with a wall who only get a reaction when the subject of Shinji comes up.

Well, that's actually a problem I have with the old show to some extent. Yui is a babe, Misato is a looker, Ritsuko is hot, and they're also intelligent, two of them scientific geniuses. It's like a guy maxing out the skills in a character creator, very dude-playing-with-his action-figures too-perfect. NGE is demonstrational though--we see Misato making her brilliant command decisions, Ritsuko has whole episodes where she demonstrates knowledge. Yui gets to be profound in EoE, although her presence in the series in general and especially Thrice remains "super brilliant apparently, but doesn't get to say any lines." Like, how much of a fantasy image is it for Mari to be glomping onto Asuka in their skintight suits hugging to their perfect bodies while surrounded by stacks and stacks and stacks of books? It's very "she's hot, also btw a super genius" kind of characterization, but beyond it being another perfectifying component we never see Mari really demonstrate the fruits of what must be a ton of labor. We never even see her read a book. We see Shinji curling up and hiding out in his headphones, why can't we see Mari scrunch her eyebrows and turn a page?

The problem for me with envisioning Mari or taking her suggested merits in stride is that she doesn't inhabit any range of emotion. Even in the flashbacks she's gape-mouth smiling and eager to pair everyone up, and her past-revealing (but not really) Fuyutsuki scene is said with a kind of cheeky savoring of the mystery of it all. When she's not matchmaking, leading someone on, outright molesting, or sweeping the battlefield, who is she?

I guess it all boils down to me personally seeing a huge trench between her suggested or intended role and her embodied role.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Archer » Sat Aug 20, 2022 11:15 am

I don’t think Mari is ever really characterized as a super genius, just very well-connected. The running theme with her character is she knows way more than anyone else… not because she’s SMARTER, but because she’s got her fingers in way too many pies. We don’t actually know WHAT her involvement in the Evangelion program was - it’s certainly possible that she was more on the high level politics/management side (maybe she was Gendo’s boss?) than the R&D side.

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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:37 pm

View Original PostArcher wrote:I don’t think Mari is ever really characterized as a super genius, just very well-connected. The running theme with her character is she knows way more than anyone else… not because she’s SMARTER, but because she’s got her fingers in way too many pies. We don’t actually know WHAT her involvement in the Evangelion program was - it’s certainly possible that she was more on the high level politics/management side (maybe she was Gendo’s boss?) than the R&D side.

She calls Fuyutsuki "sensei", so logically she must had been one of his students, and thus at least on Yui and Gendo's intellectual level, and if she actually was a teenager in the time depicted in Gendo's flashback, that means that she was working on project E since being a teenager, if that's not a genius, I don't know what is.
And yes, she does have her fingers in pretty much all the pies, but I suppose that she must had been both very intelligent and connected to know about how the Anti Universe works, being able to identify what Gendo was doing inside it as "quantum teleporting" and counter it so Shinji could reach Unit 01.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Blockio » Sun Aug 21, 2022 12:42 am

Well, she might also use "sensei" as a general honorific to his role as professor, regardless if she studied under him or not; given her playful nature and usual lack of concern for proper formality, she may even be using it ironically
(if I'm wrong about this, Nuke or one of the other fluent speakers, by all means do correct me)
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby ElMariachi » Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:35 pm

View Original PostBlockio wrote:Well, she might also use "sensei" as a general honorific to his role as professor, regardless if she studied under him or not; given her playful nature and usual lack of concern for proper formality, she may even be using it ironically
(if I'm wrong about this, Nuke or one of the other fluent speakers, by all means do correct me)

I don't know, but I think that Mari must had studied in the same classes as Gendo and Yui to know them enough to come to the conclusion that they would be good together and start playing matchmakers.
Also we do see that she's extremely polyglot: from the different labels shown in the movie and the behind the scene tweets, she knows around ten languages, not something anyone can learn.
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Blockio » Mon Aug 22, 2022 1:10 am

You have a point; I briefly forgot about the fact that she was in the flashbacks
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Re: Breaking the stalemate: Mari's role in NTE

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Postby Jornophelanthas » Sat Aug 27, 2022 6:52 pm

View Original Postnerv bae wrote:That's an interesting perspective. What do you make of Fuyutsuki's line "The things you wanted have been gathered" (Reichu) / "I've assembled the things you wanted" (Prime subtitles)? I had always understood this to point to prior collaboration between the pair -- you don't think so?

View Original PostElMariachi wrote:On top of what nerv bae wrote, just after his line, Fuyu adds "do with it as you see fit", then the three remaining Adam's Vessels appears, to which Mari notes "they're all lined up, just as expected of Fuyustuki-sensei's finesse" before utterly curb-stomping and absorbing them, putting out of fight the three battleships with it and thus securing the Wunder, which all but states that he ordered them to nicely get in line so Mari can absorb them.

View Original PostJornophelanthas wrote:It seems I need to rewatch all those scenes.


I rewatched the Fuyutsuki scene in 3.0+1.0 (although I still need to rewatch the earlier movies), and I must say my interpretation does not change (so far).

There are two things we know about Fuyutsuki by this time:
1. Gendo's endgame required bringing Unit-01 into the Anti-Universe. While Gendo took care of that himself, Fuyutsuki's task was to halt/stall the AAA Wunder and to prevent it - and the Evangelions it carries - from destroying Unit-13 before it awakened. (He probably also needed to prevent WILLE from either destroying or activating Unit-01 before Gendo could "board" the AAA Wunder to claim it.)

2. He is disillusioned by the role he has to play. His heart is no longer in Gendo's master plan, but he already committed himself irreversibly to it many years ago. He feels he has no choice but to fulfill the role appointed to him by Gendo, despite his lack of conviction. And he has nothing else driving him.

By the time he met with Mari, Gendo had already collected Unit-01 and begun his final ritual in the Anti-Universe, using the final two Spears (and Shinji, who was optional). The results of this could be seen outside the Gates of Guf, when all the Failures of Creation started to transform into headless Giant Naked Reis. The AAA Wunder had been scuttled, left without its power source, and Unit-08 had passed through the Gates of Guf, where Fuyutsuki's three ships could not follow.

This meant that Fuyutsuki had nothing more to contribute. His guardian ships irrelevant. The stolen guardian ship was irrelevant. WILLE was irrelevant. Humanity was irrelevant. He was irrelevant. His command bridge did not offer sufficient L-containment for him to maintain his bodily integrity for long, and he knew this and accepted this long in advance. He was an old man on his last duty, and he intended to meet his end right here, regardless of the outcome. He did not care to be part of Gendo's - or anyone else's - future.

And then, in this quiet moment of waiting for the end, Unit-08 emerged back from the Gates of Guf and that Makinami-Iscariot girl (off-screen) asked him to surrender his now useless ships, and then entered his command bridge to speak with him. She still had hope, the fool. He told her as much, but did not care to convince her of the futility of what she was still trying to do. So he lined up the ships for her and let that pointless act be his last. She left to do whatever she wished, and thankfully left him alone with the creeping doubt that Yui might not have approved of what was going on outside. A doubt that had been his constant companion for a long time. Until, finally, oblivion took him.

That is how I interpret that scene.


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