Weird_ocean wrote:Can you imagine Gendo, More than 14 years before that (!!!) decided to program all Rei clones to love his son! And Asuka somehow knows about it? And he did it to basically torture his son, so that there will be a crazy chance that Rei Q will follow Shinji to the village, will not receive her dose of LCL, and explode right in front of his eyes, so that he would feel the same pain Gendo did when he lost Yui. WHAT. THE. FUCK. This is so stupid. How can anyone treat this movie seriously after that retcon?
This is probably my least favorite element of Rebuild. I don't know what plot beat is the event horizon, but as of Shin we're far past the point where Gendo's keikaku is anything but elaborate to the point of being paradoxically dull. There's no stakes if every single event of the plot is masterminded. Even if you tapped into some kind of omnipotence, it would be a smoother ride than the ups and downs Gendo crafted. There's just something inherently ridiculous about it all, and it commits the ultimate sin of a sequel, which is that you introduce a plot element that lessens every prior installment in retrospect. At some point, it becomes easier to apprehend as a meme or shitpost than as serious plotting. Like, Gendo is brainstorming with Fuyutsuki: "Yes, and then after making my son horny for a clone of his mom, I'll put down my next hand, a royal flush: taking advantage of my son's latent bicuriousity, I will pair him up with an irresistable labrador retriever-type bishounen. Is that necesarry? What do you mean, it's the
most necessary! Plus, even though the bishounen wants to do the opposite of what he thinks I think I want him to accomplish, everything he does won't matter because I'm seventeen steps ahead." In NGE, Kaworu is at least sent by Seele. Why on Earth they decided to make
everything arc back to Gendo is a brainwracking mystery to me.
A lot of the problems of Rebuild are in collapsing plots that only made sense as part of a larger, more episodic ensemble and smooshing it down onto either Gendo or Shinji. I mean, as of Shin the entire globe is side-lined down to really only a handful of people mattering (read: even being alive), and then even still, only Shinji and Gendo really matter. But then, somewhat counter-intuitively, more focus doesn't end up translating to deeper characterization. The more things Gendo encompasses, the less he becomes.
Weird_ocean wrote:But this connection in the end not used to establish her character or tell any kind of story, it's just a mystery for the sake of mystery. And it is also incredibly convoluted. She doesn't show sings of recognizing Shinji in 2.0, but after the 14-year gap, that plotline suddenly appears. So, it adds another layer of the clone programming/memory manipulation. And it was also mentioned in 3.0 about Shinji's memories being erased.
Are you saying there's a possibility that the memory was, like, restored or recaptured? Or un-suppressed?
The problem with the timeskip is that I don't think a comprehensible series of events can actually lead us from 2.0 to Q. And what do you know, they never had to bother with making it exist and proving that right or wrong. The closest we got was the short with the pink hair girl, but if anything that made the setting feel even less comprehensible to me, at least in terms of character motivations feeling earned and organic.
Like, Wille knows certain stuff that they kinda need to know for the plot to go through. And I guess none of it matters anyway because, like with everything, there's the implicit suggestion that Gendo is stringing it all along anyway. Wille stood no chance of existing if Gendo didn't need them to for the sake of all the puzzle pieces. But that renders everything as some kind of carrot-stick game of benching a bunch of people who don't know any better ... except then of course the right thing goes wrong for the keikaku jenga-tower to come crumbling down and forget about it, the good guys win.
Except, like, it was already an unbelievable amount of winning on Gendo's part to get that far, so the win for the good guys comes across as equally obligatory and contrived. Nothing mattered because reasons until something mattered because reasons. Gendo was incapable of feeling enough to become ultra-Hitler until a thought that apparently never entered his head was imagined by a 14 year old, and that thing is, more or less, 'have you considered not being ultra-Hitler?' There's something so naive, hysterical and arrogant about it to me, this idea that moral superiority is evidenced by disagreeing with moral lapses, and that all we need to do is somehow package and deliver the right good-feel rhetorical pipebomb to someone who could, in reality, not be less interested if they even cared to try. And the implicit suggestion in the way the moral qualities of the plot are handled is that, if you disagree that redemption is still possible after a billion murders, you are part of the problem because you're not evincing The Type of Thinking That Matters, which is essentially just manifesting a sanctimonious emotion hard enough.
I don't know if that was articulated well or not, but the ethical/philosophical stances of Shin agitate me beyond reason.
To boil it down: Shin has a lot to say about how we should feel. It never shows anyone doing anything, though. What has Shinji learned about how to interact with others, other than flirt about breasts? We don't see a meaningful interaction with someone he's established to have performed certain actions with, like Asuka or Misato or Kaworu. It refuses to show us what it believes redeemed behavior resembles, just like it didn't care to show us the time-skip and actually flesh out a built world beyond aesthetics. Shin isn't interested in demonstrating to us anything concrete, and settles for vibes.
Weird_ocean wrote:I was not talking about the photo, it was her dialog when she's talking to Rei Q "You know, your original was a lot easier to deal with." She is obviously talking about Yui here, because Yui is the original of the Ayanami clone series, which proves that she has memories of that time. So to me the whole Mari going way back with Gendo and Yui was established in 3.0 and Sakamoto who was part of the team, knew about it, and put this in his manga. That is my guess at least.
That's true, although it might still have been a big extrapolation on Sadamoto's part, and it only looks consistent in hindsight now that we're familiar with the "knew Yui personally" premise. Like, at one point Mari's character was some kind of double, triple-crossing insider agent, so maybe it was just a reflection on some kind of intel she had and that line in isolation doesn't imply actual face to face intimacy.
I think one 'lead' or under-discussed thing about Mari is like ... she kind of doesn't really exist? It's pretty universal that people take her as amounting to a metaphor in the end; she's 'the new' that Shinji is going towards after letting everything else go. But there's room in the text, I think, to take that read even further. Like ... isn't it strange that she's barely present? Shinji meets everyone on board Wunder but Mari is weirdly absent, except when we see Asuka, and Asuka is such a lonesome character that I find it easy to view Mari as having this kind of headmate vibe in those scenes. It's like how she appears momentarily in Instrumentality for Asuka to say goodbye.
And then there's her job as of Q. She's strategic sniper support. What if this is both literal and figurative? She's a broad metaphor for support, or for one's capacity to push forward out of pure grit. She motivates Shinji in 2.0. She's who Asuka has seemingly relied on to get through the timeskip. And she's who leads Shinji into reality in the end.
The problem is that it's inconsistent with her portrayal in 2.0. Her role with Kaji and her infiltration and information-gathering don't seem to tie-in either literally or figuratively. It just feels like her character was completely retooled.
But more on Mari being a figurant: I know it's a stretch, but bear with me. What are the scant other times she directly interacts with anyone? The battle scenes that open 2.0 and Shin, but in the former she's always separate; on the phone, not in a room with who she's talking to. She only physically disturbs Shinji later on. As for the battle scene that opens Shin, of course she's there, but if you watch it again, there's this weird separation going on where she's always isolated into her own frame, and even over the com-link, is kind of not addressed to the point you'd expect by name. So she constantly feels separate.
And the biggest one for me is that in the flashback scenes, there's this feeling that she's not really there--like she's been inserted retroactively, or is only there representationally. Does Gendo ever address her by name, or confirm her importance? Like, she seemingly introduces them (albeit only visually) but he never even alludes to a third party.
There's only Fuyutsuki, but she appears there out of thin air because Instrumentality is already happening.
Speaking of, this (and the flashback) are after she goes quantum in the battle. What if her going quantum is retroactive across the entire narrative? Maybe she subs for Quantum Rei in this iteration? What if she's newly in the flashback scenes?
Of course, all of this feels like it's too in between all of these possibilities to amount to anything. If she's quantum and is newly inserting herself, wouldn't that have some kind of altering-the-past kind of effect? I guess it doesn't matter, because removing Eva units also would, depending on how existentially it is we're talking about removal. Are they removed from the present, or is it backwards? A similar problem is like ... a new reality is seemingly being created, so then why show the gene pods landing, won't that get superceded? Or like, an entire film was spent building up Village-3, but is it even going to persist going forward? All we get to see is Ube...
Everything I said above is as close as I can get to making sense of Mari in a way that's at least conceptually interesting, except I think it can all be better explained as the writers wanting to segregate her because they didn't know how to integrate her with the old cast. As for having a motif of being figurative support, or feeling like she represents motivation ... instead of being this abstraction, it might be more of a byproduct of them using her as a plot device instead of a sufficiently developed character.
