Rei’s true nature is never fully revealed, and there is always a hint of something otherworldly about her. She also embodies aspects of the kind of mysterious waif character who often appears in fairy tales and mythology. The interesting thing about Rei is that she is more than a human who acts like a robot. With her blank face, bluish-white hair and inexplicable behaviour, Rei is a beguiling character. (There’s even a chapter of It’s Not My Fault I’m Not Popular where Tomoko attempts to imitate one, with little success.) Rei is not a robot, but she does bear some similarities to Bokko-chan, if only on the surface.
The character of Rei Ayanami fascinated so many viewers that many of her clones began appearing in other series, to the point where she’s almost become a stock character.
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Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most well-known anime series of the nineties, as well as one of the most influential. While this isn’t the first appearance of a robot girl in fiction (Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Sandman featured a similar gynoid character), Hoshi’s does seem to have been one of the predecessors to an archetype that would end up becoming quite popular in Japanese comics and animation. A sort of futuristic folk tale, it combines dark humour and wordplay, with a clever and totally unexpected ending. In the Shinichi Hoshi short story Bokko-Chan (which, for those interested, can be found in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories), a “bar-master” constructs an emotionless robot girl, who soon becomes the object of many of his patrons’ affections.
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