ayase said:
I suppose towards Rei the character I'm simply non-plussed. But it has always bothered me that she seems to be so popular because she has no personality (therefore is non-threatening to people who can't cope with real women, who can impress their own ideals onto her). Whereas personally I find it very hard to care about characters unless they have definable characteristics and flaws - I like to see realistic depictions of humanity, warts-and-all. I like Shinji for the exact same reasons many hate him.
If I may add my thoughts in defense of Miss Ayanami...
When I first picked up Eva, I was an intensely introverted girl in the prime of my youth with a depressive personality. As many of us no doubt know, depressed people often come off as extremely passive, since they don't appear to care about things in the normal way and tend to go along with things they might normally object to for much longer than they should. Rei fascinated me, in a world usually full of "normal" characters.
Of course they cheaped out and explained away a great deal of her personality in the show later on, but her quiet power and absolute disregard for fitting in really got me interested in the show. I don't see her as a weak, pliable character, because she has some things which clearly matter to her (e.g. Gendou, not wanting to eat meat) which she is firm about. She is just not the kind of "in your face" spunky which grabs attention, and her value system is completely broken compared to everyone else's. I think she's a much stronger person than Asuka when push comes to shove.
Having said that, I agree in principle with what you are saying and that characters set up purely to be fanservice-bait are not the greatest examples of human achievement. What I am trying to say is just that feisty girls such as Revy or Misato are just as much an otaku fantasy as the disconnected, aloof kind of bishoujo. If I were the kind of person who worried about such things, I'd be just as concerned that a society had an expectation of me to be spunky and highly fluent in socialisation as I would be that a society expected me to keep quiet and serve tea for the menfolk. Words like "housewife" and "mother" are almost dirty words now in the west in the pursuit of a different, equally sexist feminine ideal of a highly educated, outgoing overachiever.
Swerving back on topic I thoroughly enjoyed the Eva 2.0 film. Was a little irritated by a combination of pace and new content making Rei seem less "Rei" than before, but by the end I decided it had actually worked quite well and feel positive about the next ones when they are finally released.
R