Why Do You Love or Hate Mari Illustrious Makinami? What Do You Think About Her?
Hey everyone
I often think about different moments and characters in Evangelion, and today I want to talk about Mari Illustrious Makinami. Honestly, I don’t really like her. What I don’t like is how much her potential was wasted.(I like Mari as a character)
They say there are no bad characters, only bad writers. I won’t say the Rebuild script is terrible, but Mari feels somewhat unnecessary in it. The story could have worked fine without her. At the same time, Mari is a very important character for the overall lore of Evangelion.
Design
I’ll say right away that I’m not a professional in this, but I’ll share my opinion.
Mari has a design that is both simple and unusual. Glasses are a simple element that can show she’s smart, but they also carry symbolism, just like her hairstyle.
Mari’s glasses and hairstyle refer us to the Evangelion manga. I don’t remember exactly if it’s canon for the Rebuild, but even if it’s not, it gives us some basis for understanding the character. In the beginning of the manga, Mari walks around without glasses and with loose hair, but at the end Yui Ikari gives her the signature hairstyle and allows her to keep the glasses. So Mari wears them as a tribute to Yui’s memory.
The pilot suit is simply pink, matching the color of her Eva. It’s just unusual, and that’s it.
Character
From what we see, Mari can be called the most mentally healthy Eva pilot. But that’s only what they show us. Now I’ll share my theory about her.
As we know, Mari is active, straightforward, loves giving nicknames, a bit playful, and clearly enjoys piloting the Eva. But if you think about it — how often do we see her not in a cheerful state? What if her joy is just an image she puts on?
People cope with stress in different ways: some drink alcohol, some smoke, some are constantly cheerful. In psychology, when a person is always happy to avoid going crazy, it’s sometimes called smiling depression. We know that Misato seems like a fun woman who loves to drink, but we also know she has trauma. So the question is: what trauma does Mari have?
My thought is this: her trauma is that all her loved ones age, change, and die, while she herself cannot change physically. Mari is stuck in the body of a 15- or 16-year-old teenager. To not completely lose her mind, Mari keeps being cheerful because there’s nothing else left for her. Yui Ikari was her best friend (and possibly a loved one), but she’s gone. Gendo went crazy. Fuyutsuki helps Gendo and is also losing it. All of Mari’s acquaintances have changed a lot, but she herself hasn’t.
Mari is a victim of Eva’s curse — someone who is forever young, someone who has stopped changing. That’s what I think her drama is.
Lore
We know very little about Mari’s lore from the manga and Rebuild. We can say that she is a young genius who at the age of 16 was already working with Yui Ikari, Gendo, and Fuyutsuki. She is one of the people who was at the very beginning of the Evangelion project. This means she is a very useful person and most likely knows almost everything about the Evas.
A genius who started working with Yui at 16 years old must understand almost everything about Evangelion and even more. Mari’s knowledge may even exceed Ritsuko’s. If Mari had been in the original series, she could have told our heroes a lot of what she knows. But this is just fantasy and speculation.
From her lore we don’t know where she was from the time of Yui Ikari’s death until her appearance in Rebuild 2.0. We can only assume that she worked for Nerv Europe and various European countries or organizations. She operates outside of Gendo’s territory, which makes her a dangerous person for him. Also, don’t forget that Mari is British, so she definitely worked a lot in Europe and may have been hiding from Gendo while staying close. It’s even possible that Kaji knows her, since he travels around the world and doesn’t stay in one place.
I notice that we have almost no joint scenes between Gendo and Mari. This may mean that theories about them avoiding each other could be true, or maybe Mari is simply offended at Gendo. We don’t know for sure.
In general, Mari is a scientist character. She knows a lot and could potentially help everyone a lot if she wanted to or if the authors had thought of it. But what did the Rebuild authors do? They didn’t use her to the fullest. Of course, I’m not giving direct examples, but the authors made her mostly for fanservice and to make the Rebuild different from the original. If they had put any other person in a different Eva, it could have changed Evangelion too - whether Hikari or Kensuke - but we got Mari.
Another problem is that Mari has very little screen time. She interacts little with others. For example, we don’t know how she became friends with Asuka, what her relationship with Ritsuko is (they are both scientists), or how she feels about Misato. In the Rebuild, Mari is a functional character, a fanservice character, Asuka’s partner, about whom we don’t know much directly. At the same time, Mari helps Shinji, Shinji talks to her calmly, waits for her, and trusts her. In the end, it is Mari and Shinji who save everyone
I won’t say what I would have done with Mari. I just shared a little about her. Mari is perhaps the best new character from the Evangelion Rebuild, because she is so mysterious and incomprehensible. There is interest in her — who she is. But this charm is not a big plus, because the authors simply didn’t develop her as deeply as the original characters. Now everyone can think whatever they want about her.
Among the other new characters from WILLE, Mari is still more interesting, although I don’t want to offend fans of the others — everyone has different tastes and opinions.
You can talk about Mari for a long time, asking questions: who is she? Is she a human or a clone? But one thing can be said for sure — she had great potential, but the creators couldn’t realize it.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be glad to read your opinions, answers, and thoughts.