When the mass media target consciousnesses insofar as they are metamarkets, spectators constitute a “primary material” for sale, the clients are the advertisers, and through them, industry tends to cause the adoption of behavior. The “primary material” is what one calls the audience, a mass of consciousnesses controlled by systems and processes for diffusing signals—that is, material states incorporated by the said “consciousnesses” (because the information is not “immaterial,” it is a transitory material state)—and these consciousnesses are mental states engendering in their turn motor behaviors. When audiences of this kind are synchronized, they tend, asymptotically, to no longer constitute a we but rather a they. I don’t want to say that when you (that is, your consciousness) watch television (and you necessarily watch it with others, at the same time as others), you are led immediately to think the same thing as others. I mean to say that television is a process that tends to make you conform progressively to an average. In that average the difference between I and we is diluted, giving the they, that is, the loss of individuation of both the I and the we, at the heart of which alone can one individuate oneself.
Stiegler, Bernard. Acting Out. Stanford University Press, 2009.
I believe that it is more appropriate to use the image of the database to grasp this current situation. The emergence of Ayanami Rei did not influence many authors so much as change the rules of the moe-elements sustaining otaku culture. As a result, even those authors who were not deliberately thinking of Evangelion unconsciously began to produce characters closely resembling Rei, using newly registered moe-elements (quiet personality, blue hair, white skin, mysterious power). Such a model is close to the reality of the late 1990s. Beyond Rei, characters emerging in otaku works were not unique to individual works but were immediately broken into moe-elements and recorded by consumers, and then the elements reemerged later as material for creating new characters. Therefore, each time a popular character appeared, the moe-element database changed accordingly, and as a result, in the next season there were heated battles among the new generation of characters featuring new moe-elements.
Azuma, Hiroki. Japan's Database Animals. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.