Lots to chip in with here. This is probably gonna end up as another one of these unintentionally long posts.
God help y'all.
Picking up with the Mari thing first and tying it into Geriatric hedgehog's point here...
I find your introduction to and reverse watch order of Eva fascinating!
It was just the way it ended up!
I ended up an
Eva fan, so it certainly did no harm.
But yes, starting as I did with 2.0, Mari is to a certain degree, for me, the original Eva pilot. And I like Mari as a character. Viewing her contribution to Rebuild with an understanding of the original TV series, Mari is very much like the anti-
Evangelion factor within
Evangelion, without any of the obvious psychological hangups of our other pilots. Personally, I enjoy her carefree nature and abnormal lack of fear.
Moving this on to Dai's take on Mari's purpose in Rebuild...
Call me cynical, but I'm pretty sure the main reason Mari exists is so they could market hundreds of figures to fans of big boobs and glasses.
Anime has certainly relied on merchandising in order to survive ever since
Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka effectively undercut his own medium back in the 1960s when selling it to TV stations, but I like to believe that Mari's presence was actually brought about by a more plot-centered need.
You see, there's a pair of books available in Japanese called
Evangelion 2.0 Complete Records Collection:
wiki.evageeks.org
It's a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the second Rebuild film. The "External links" section at the bottom of the above page brings up a translation of the book's content, including an interview with Hideaki Anno.
Link to the page here:
Translated interviews about making <em>Evangelion 2.0</em> w/Anno, Higuchi, Enokido, & Tsurumaki
www.gwern.net
In the section headed Part 3, Anno explains the reasoning behind the new character's creation:
āEver since I started the new films I had decided on this 'one trick' where I would increase the count of female pilots by one with a new character. I felt that there was a danger where, if I didnāt do this, I would end up repeating the same story, and be unable to significantly change things. I felt that, even if I had to force it, if I didnāt throw a new Eva pilot as an extreme, foreign element into the films, then Eva would not significantly change.ā
That being said, my attention has recently been drawn to a smartphone game called
Evangelion Battlefields.
This article has a collection of images to further represent its content. To see its gallery, visit Evangelion Battlefields/Gallery. Evangelion Battlefields (ćØć“ć”ć³ć²ćŖćŖć³ććć«ćć£ć¼ć«ćŗ, Evangerion Batorufiiruzu?), also known as EVABF, was a smartphone game based on studio Khara inc.'s Rebuild of...
evangelion.fandom.com
So far, the game has introduced another two new characters ā both female for reasons of marketability, of course.
This seems to have become rather a habit with modern anime and its spin-off media:
Can't come up with a compelling story to hold your audience's attention? Just stick some new characters in to generate interest instead, then.
This is why you keep ending up with an overly large cast with not enough plot for everyone to take a proper role in. Some might argue that it's a trap that
Eva Rebuild has now slid into, but your individual mileage may vary.