But that seems to be describing a different experience than those with the curse of Eva. Asuka and Mari aren't being held back, they're in pretty important combat roles. Maybe they're isolated, but they have each other, and who isn't isolated and held back from moving on aboard the Wunder? I tend to lump it in with the "Asuka is a clone too" aspect, where it doesn't really justify its difference from anything else. If the idea of being stunted at a young age were leaned into, however, it'd pretty much have to be mostly or entirely about that, but I guess at that point, like, why include an idea if you're not going to really explore it with any dedication?

Well, as Eva pilots they aren't held back, but it's clear that Asuka is at a horrible spot mentally, and in general she is very much a loner, especially at the Village. The fact that she is an Angel hybrid muddies up things here however, but with Shinji I think it's more clear. A big part of his entire gist is him being left static while the entire world has progressed without him, and once again in the Village the contrast between him and his once same - age classmates is I believe very stark.

As for Mari, I don't think any of her traits are bad (they're sort of self-evidently good), but the degree to which she's inexhaustible can only be described as ideal, and I dunno, I just think that presenting her as the escape route and contrasting her with Ayato is suggesting he, now, is also inexhaustible. And so many wrongs are being righted by these two that the narrative is more or less positioning them under a kind of "this is how to be" spotlight. And that that's where this all ends up gives it a sense of permanence, and it verges on communicating what is a pretty cliche and in my opinion misguided sentiment--"there is in fact a point we can reach where we're good forever," and I suppose that's the same unreality that's always attended happily ever afters. Showing people as happy only because they've hit on a completely one-note state of mind clashes with the fact that the mind is anything but.

They are presented in a positive light alright. Many characters are in general. That doesn't mean though they are ideals or that they have no bad sides to them. Also, fundamentally, I do not consider the ending to be escapist or completely positive, so I can't agree with what you say about her being an "escape route" (Shinji naturally considered nothing more beyond his one and only path that would had ended with his self - sacrifice), nor with the idea that everything is "good forever" for Shinji in the end.

You're right, it was replaced by incoherent mumbo jumbo and magical macguffins. And fanservice.

Point was EoE was written for adults, the Rebuilds feel more like the shounens the original run used to deconstruct; the type that would unironically feature "doho the waifu breast pressed my face, so silly".

Oversimplifications do not help your argument, I'm afraid. Yes, the Rebuilds crank up most of these elements, but characterizing them based solely on this fact and writing them off as "childish shounens" is ridiculous imo.

It's not bittersweet. It's full on sweet. He's forced to live on a world where he got everything he possibly could have considering the situation. Again, he shounens the hell out of the ending.

Compare Thrice to EoE's ending and there's a stark difference (which I get is the point).

But in no way is Thrice bittersweet. It's wish fulfillment.

Not at all. I of course assume you don't mean that just because the ending is different from EoE's it is "full of sweet", in it of itself though, lots of lovable characters die, and depending on your exact interpretation, Shinji is forced to live the rest of his life in different world from everyone he loves, the ones that actually survived at least. This makes the ending neither completely positive, nor wish - fulfillment, because plain and simple there are consequences and losses and no scifi wish can change that.

ChrisTamv wrote:Well, as Eva pilots they aren't held back, but it's clear that Asuka is at a horrible spot mentally, and in general she is very much a loner, especially at the Village. The fact that she is an Angel hybrid muddies up things here however, but with Ayato I think it's more clear. A big part of his entire gist is him being left static while the entire world has progressed without him, and once again in the Village the contrast between him and his once same - age classmates is I believe very stark.

Yes but the non-curse adults aboard the Wunder are variously unhinged, so I don't think the curse in itself can be related to being stunted. If curse = stunted, are we to say Mari is stunted?

ChrisTamv wrote:That doesn't mean though they are ideals or that they have no bad sides to them.

What are Mari's bad sides?

Astaroth wrote:

Blockio wrote: she has the same amount of character, runtime and arguably also character progression as the other three pilots that aren't Ayato

Easily demonstrated as false:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xlMUruLhB0

Interesting video, but I'm skeptical of the underlying data. The video's text states that the "IMDB provides the official Rebuild Of Evangelion screen time values, they count screen time every time character appears in scene, even in the background." Is this really true? Seems far-fetched to me.

AsukaisLiterallyMe wrote:I am willing to overlook the whole "curse" thing because of course they would do that (they even did it to Haruka, not a single aging line at all and she never once got in the EVA) to keep the waifu-ing going.

Is "Haruka" an April-fools word filter? Which Rebuild character was cursed despite never getting in the EVA?

nerv bae wrote:Is "Haruka" an April-fools word filter? Which Rebuild character was cursed despite never getting in the EVA?

M i s a t o, lol.

Literally looks the same when she undoes her hair and takes off the glasses.

Meanwhile they did Akagi bad.

Ah, I disagreed with Archer about Misato's aged appearance last year:

nerv bae wrote:Haruka looks older to me, but maybe that's just my mind filling in missing details again.

In 1.0:

SPOILER: Show

In 3+1:

SPOILER: Show

Admittedly she's just been gutshot, but still! I see a matured face here somehow. Wish she took off her sunglasses more. ...

Yeah I think it's just the higher budget making her look different and getting shot in the guts that made her look like that lol.

Wasted opportunity, cause a milfier Misato would have made the Rebuilds 20% better.

See, it's hard to say either way because the new character designs are more modern so everyone kinda looks more yassified than ever.

Yassified?

Like...YAS GURL?

AsukaisLiterallyMe wrote:Yassified?

Like...YAS GURL?

I link this with pride that I'm contributing to the academic air of EGF: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yassification

AsukaisLiterallyMe wrote:Yeah I think it's just the higher budget making her look different and getting shot in the guts that made her look like that lol.

I agree it's due to the change of design. Misato in 3.0+1.0 looks different from 1.0, but she doesn't really look older.

Ritsuko doesn't look older either. Her new hairstyle just has a big effect effect in her appearance.

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:

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.

First of all, great post ElMariachi!

To my mind, the challenge with applying this kind of holistic analysis to Mari is that by all evidence, the character wasn't shaped in a holistic manner. Even within 2.0 itself aspects of her character were oddly contradictory. She was (not) covert, as mentioned with the parachute. And then in 3.0 onward there's the issue of her (non-)invisibility. As the audience we get show-starting performances with her singing and bombastic combat skills, and throughout the films she's offered up on a platter with very forward hypersexuality and action prowess. She's an in your face character. And those who actually acknowledge her existence within Wille (is it just Asuka?) treat her as like, "oh, that Mari!" And yet she's still basically invisible to the rest of the workings of Wille, by being ... the least invisible possible staff member? If part of her motivation is to be covert, or at least not show her hand, she's choosing to go about it by being ... extremely notably combat-skilled, and constantly, weirdly emotionally out of tune to the events? And like OK, you can say that's a strategy: they'll never suspect the butler. But did no one casually ask, like, "woah, where'd she come from?"

Like, I get that she apparently had scenes cut where she actually interacted more, but her personality doesn't really live up to its impression because we never actually see what her reputation is among staff beside being a combat tool and a dot on a screen. We get the bravura action acrobatics of Avant, and then ... skip to elsewhere, who knows what it looked like inside as she docked. Did anyone pop a wine bottle? Do people find her a tad off? We get nothin'.

Then another contradiction, the book hobby. I almost feel like this might have been a clever attempt to make sense of her other contradictions: yeah, she's extroverted outside/within Eva, but indoors, she's introverted. But the passion isn't really integrated. We don't see her read, we don't get a sense of what it means to her outside of declaration. Instead what we do get is her doing a sexy pin-up pose in front of her untouched book stacks.

And as for her omniscience, it seems she was given a certain attitude and vibe in 2.0 far before all these revelations were appended. The two aspects contradict so directly that the only solutions seems to have been to avoid potentially incoherent motivation by basically refusing to do any characterization at all. But like, ok, let's say she has this omnipresent insight and so her attitude is because she knows none of this warrants seriousness--if she were rational and this omniscient, shouldn't she determine that even though it's not serious to her, everyone else around her believes these are life and death stakes and are suffering immensely, and that acting the way she does is uncalled for at best, deeply offensive at worst?

RE: Yui, I'd tend to agree with the idea that Yui indirectly represents Moyoco far more than Mari, and the very first time I watched the Gendo flashback sequence, I took it as autobiographical. It kind of had this art-school, obvious self-insert feel. Not just because of the literal wife angle, but because clear analogues can be drawn to Gendo's stubborn, cyclical obsession and determination to, ultimately, only create a convoluted plot and pale imitation. I think the fact the narrative launches into a liberating metanarrative overlapping with Gendo's redemption isn't coincidence; Anno is freeing his analog at the same time he frees his role in being glued to the specifics of the plot. Maybe we could even say Yui represents the unreachable pure core of what he was working with and had trouble reaching again, per a couple statements in interviews about how the original material resisted his attempts at alteration. Really, the Gendo stuff only becomes interesting to me when you realize NTE itself is a cloning project.

Another way that having Mari having come clean to WILLE could had benefited the plot, not just in coherence but also in its narration, is that it could had let her be a Obi-Wan Kenobi figure to Shinji: someone who knew his father before he turned evil and could tell Shinji more about him (and Yui) and the kind of person he was before, which would had let him get more perspective on his parents and give him a motivation to try to understand him beyond the fact that he sired him.

Axx°N N. wrote:Then another contradiction, the book hobby. I almost feel like this might have been a clever attempt to make sense of her other contradictions: yeah, she's extroverted outside/within Eva, but indoors, she's introverted. But the passion isn't really integrated. We don't see her read, we don't get a sense of what it means to her outside of declaration. Instead what we do get is her doing a sexy pin-up pose in front of her untouched book stacks.

For what it's worth, she's seen reading in the drafts of the first version of 3.0, and she had a bookmarked book in her hand in -120min, implying that she had been reading it until meeting with Asuka, and had it next to her folded clothes while she was changing into her plugsuit. It's even subtly brought up in the Evangelion: Battlefields mobile game where it's strongly implied that she sent some of her books to Shinji's cell in the Wunder through Sakura so Shinji can have something to occupy himself aside going crazy running in circles.

But I think I get what you mean: in the main movie (which is the only part that the majority of people will see), this hobby is presented as something very important to her, the huge amount of books she possesses even implying that this collect and reading takes most of her free time when not fighting or training, but it's just shown to us in the scene when she reunites with Asuka and then completely dropped.
It gives the feeling that there was some characterization here that wasn't developed more because there wasn't enough time remaining.

And we also never get an insight of her motivations behind her course of action

From what I've read and thought about, I would say motivations is the only thing Mari actually does have as a character.

1. She genuinely loves both life and piloting, hence why she does and even enjoys fulfilling this role in this existential conflict.
2. She one of Fuyutsuki's students, but most importantly, a good friend to Yui. It's very possible that she considers protecting Shinji as her duty, to repay her late friend.
3. Mari goes through a monologue while the Spear of Gaius is being created in 3.0+1.0. She talks about how humanity is advancing without any help from any "Godly" entity and how that's always been one of Yui's wishes. Considering how she single - handedly gets rid of almost everything Adam - related in the end, that means she also shares that wish, possibly for Yui's sake or after having been inspired by her.

I'm wondering what you might think about these.

ChrisTamv wrote:3. Mari goes through a monologue while the Spear of Gaius is being created in 3.0+1.0. She talks about how humanity is advancing without any help from any "Godly" entity and how that's always been one of Yui's wishes. Considering how she single - handedly gets rid of almost everything Adam - related in the end, that means she also shares that wish, possibly for Yui's sake or after having been inspired by her.

It's possible Mari shares this wish with Yui, but I doubt her motivation to work with WILLE is so related to that. Mari mentioned to Fuyutsuki that she doesn't want all humanity to be affected by Gendo's wishes (even if she understand his feelings). I think this is her main motivation.


Now, it's interesting the Spear of Gaius creation is considered by Mari as advancing without help from any "Godly" entity.

The Spear of Gaius was created using non-human technology and WILLE also needed the blueprint of the Black Moon Spear creation. That said, human intelligence (Fruit of Knowledge) was what allowed WILLE to know how to handle the non-human technology for their benefit.

ChrisTamv wrote:From what I've read and thought about, I would say motivations is the only thing Mari actually does have as a character.

1. She genuinely loves both life and piloting, hence why she does and even enjoys fulfilling this role in this existential conflict.
2. She one of Fuyutsuki's students, but most importantly, a good friend to Yui. It's very possible that she considers protecting Shinji as her duty, to repay her late friend.
3. Mari goes through a monologue while the Spear of Gaius is being created in 3.0+1.0. She talks about how humanity is advancing without any help from any "Godly" entity and how that's always been one of Yui's wishes. Considering how she single - handedly gets rid of almost everything Adam - related in the end, that means she also shares that wish, possibly for Yui's sake or after having been inspired by her.

I'm wondering what you might think about these.

It's what you wrote: "possibly", "maybe"... what I meant was that her objectives are indeed clear (to save the world and prevent Instrumentality), but we don't know about her motivations behind the pursuit of objectives, and neither her motivations for acting the way she does (ie keeping everything secret).

I wouldn't mind to not know about her deep motivations if she stayed a simple half-British new character brought up to have more cool fighting scenes and sell more merch and was simply an (important) supporting character to Asuka, both in battle and in life. After all, I don't feel the need to know about Maya, Hyuga or Nagara's deep motivations, for example.

But when the story turned her into a pivotal part of the story, who drove many of the events behind the scenes, then yes, I felt that knowing more about her motivations and thought-process was necessary, because I don't think that you can have such an important character with such a succinct and vague motivation that keeps her in the realm of being a plot-device. (unless you have a generic character to excuse the plot like you generic Demon King who want to conquer the world because they're evil, to give a rather extreme example)

Konja7 wrote:Now, it's interesting the Spear of Gaius creation is considered by Mari as advancing without help from any "Godly" entity.

The Spear of Gaius was created using non-human technology and WILLE also needed the blueprint of the Black Moon Spear creation. That said, human intelligence (Fruit of Knowledge) was what allowed WILLE to know how to handle the non-human technology for their benefit.

I admit that it made chuckle a little when I saw Mari speaking about humanity advancing without help from gods while piloting her demi-god cyborg quadruple-jacked on gods' corpse while riding a giant biomechanical dead god who generated a godly spear so the nearly ascended god-kid would restore the world to a pristine state via a "Neo Genesis".

How do you feel about Shinji ending up with Mari?

Lore-wise doesn't make a lot of sense, meta-wise I feel it's a great fit.

Cola-09 wrote:How do you feel about Shinji ending up with Mari?

Lore-wise doesn't make a lot of sense, meta-wise I feel it's a great fit.

Don't keep it so short, can you expand on what you mean?
By "meta-wise", do you mean of the "moving on from Evangelion" angle?

Tsurumaki said in an interview that Mari was created precisely because he couldn't figure out how to create a new ending to Evangelion (that wasn't EOE) without coming up with a new character to twist things up.
Mari is, by all accounts, the embodiment of Shin Evangelion. Her character is very much in line with the worldview the film is centered around. With that in mind, I can't think of a better character to hold Shinji's hand at the end and lead him into a new world.
Do I like or relate to this movie's worldview? Not at all. But I can see why Mari "ending up with Shinji" is thematically in line with what it was proposing.

ElMariachi wrote:Don't keep it so short, can you expand on what you mean?
By "meta-wise", do you mean of the "moving on from Evangelion" angle?

I'd be less vague if I hadn't a Gendo avatar :P.

Jokes aside, I believe Mari's role in the movies makes most sense from a meta perspective. If she was remotely relevant to the lore, Anno would have fleshed out her character, which he didn't. Instead he put this light-hearted character into the series. With her (almost calming) comical and all-knowing character she's a stark contrast to the dark, depressing and confusing universe that Evangelion is. I believe that she represents the change in Evangelion but also within Anno himself over the years, so that's why I feel she's a nice fit for Shinji.