>>108917051The end result, whether this was Gainax's plan at the start or not, was that Evangelion thrived based on audience attachment to the CHARACTERS of the show, not the ROBOTS. You can find Asuka, Rei, and Shinji themed merchandise of almost any product. But compare that to models and merch of the Evangelions themselves, and you'll find much less than you would imagine in comparison.
Evangelion's success inspired copycats, so pretty much everything about Eva (from major plot twists to themes to character details) ended up getting rehashed by other works to the point that each of the 3 pilots basically ended up starting a whole character trope in and of themselves. If you ever wondered why every single Tsundere in anime seems to have pigtails, the answer is Asuka. And so on.
For the industry, realizing that the characters could be even more popular than the toys was a wakeup call, resulting in a greater business focus on that going forward. This over time grew into the formulaic structure of building up waifu casts in order to try and shotgun out character designs and personality combinations in the hopes of hooking otaku.
Originally the thought was that these character-pushes were just a spice to add to an existing anime genre, but this slowly grow a strong enough push that they no longer needed to be anything other than character shows. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiyah is a character pushing show, but it still operates under the context of a scifi mystery. By the time that you reach K-on, the studios have realized they don't actually need that scifi stuff at all, you can just have cute girls doing cute things.
And thats how Evangelion started as a mecha anime but kicked off a domino effect that snowballed into the moe anime boom that defined the 00s, and even though that boom is over the influence of those changes and lessons learned are still present throughout the industry.
