Neon Genesis Evangelion : Asuka In Depth

**NOTE: SPOILERS WARNING, SPOILERS WARNING!**

A Sort of Introduction

Most people see Asuka Langley Sohryu exactly how she wants to be seen: an intelligent, self-
confident and annoying bitch who cares about nothing and nobody, save herself. Yet, maybe
that's not exactly what she is. Maybe if people chipped away at her exterior they'd find an
insecure young girl who has nothing to give her an identity, nothing except her pride. Asuka is
someone who felt that the world had rejected her, but wanted something better badly enough to
keep going. Therefore, she told herself that she was better than everyone else, and that she didn't
need their love or their attention - when, in fact, that was precisely what she wanted. She tried to
convince herself that she could live without other people, and that she only needed her own
approval to live happily. But it wasn't true. She hated everyone else, and yet she did not want to
be alone. But, of course, the fact that she hated everyone (because she thought they hated her)
kept her separate from others, and her pride kept her from truly communicating with anyone or
admitting her own weaknesses. Ultimately, her pride was a defensive mechanism that ended up
destroying her. The delicate bubble world she had created around herself shattered to pieces.
Read all that I could find out about Asuka, and you'll understand why she is the way she is.

Asuka Langley Sohryu

Asuka Langley Sohryu is a primary character in Neon Genesis Evangelion, best known for her
outgoing and abrasive personality, as well as her need to be independent. She is "The Second Child" and was chosen as an EVA pilot at a young age, the second to qualify for the important position. Unlike the other pilots, the blood running through her veins is not purely Japanese, in fact she is ž German, ź Japanese, and has an American citizenship. Her leadership skills are superb, but her teamwork skills are less than stellar.

Asuka was raised in Germany, where both her parents were scientists with the German branch of GEHIRN. They devoted their energies to the development of the EVA series during Asuka's childhood. Sadly, her parents divorced when she was still very young. Asuka went to live with her mother, Kyoko Zepplin Sohryu, while her father remarried. During this time, Asuka's mother was too busy to pay attention to her daughter, as she was attempting to synchronize with the EVA. However, her attempt failed and she went insane, due to mental contamination from the initial test with EVA-02. She was institutionalized, having become oblivious to the presence of all around her, including that of her daughter. At the hospital, the guilt over neglecting Asuka caught up with Kyoko. All her attention went to a doll she called "Asuka" and, in her condition, Kyoko most likely thought this doll was her daughter. She called the real Asuka "that girl over there," and always instructed the doll not to be picky, or the "that girl over there" would laugh at her. Perhaps Kyoko's mental capacity wouldn't permit her to love a real child, although there is no doubt that she did love her daughter very much. She was just so insane that she could not show it. This ripped the real Asuka apart, after all she was being ignored even more than before her mother's accident. In her mother's twisted thoughts, she was caring for and loving her daughter everyday, but in reality Asuka stood alone, coldly watching a doll receive all of her mother's affection. As Kyoko's health and mind continued to decline, Asuka began going through a series of tests and observations and, before long, was selected as the pilot of EVA Unit-02. She was proud of herself and ran to the hospital to tell her mother the good news. She was elated because the dream her mother had worked so hard to achieve had become a reality for her daughter. This was a reason for her mother to pay attention to her now, instead of the doll, she was sure of it. When Asuka tore into her mother's hospital room, she yelled joyfully of her achievement. "Mama, they chose me! I'm an elite pilot now. I am the best in the whole world! I must keep this a secret, but I'll only tell you mama. Everybody's so nice to me now. I don't feel lonely anymore. I'm okay now, even without papa. Look at me, look at me mama. LOOK MAMA!"

But her mother could not hear. Kyoko Zepplin Sohryu had commited suicide by hanging, the doll she had called her daughter was ripped to shreds. She had realized that she wanted to die with Asuka, so her child could leave the harsh world for that of Heaven. Little Asuka was amazed and aghast at how happy her mother looked. She hated how her mother looked.

                                             At this point, Asuka could have succumbed to depression as most people would. She knew
                                             her mother had hoped they could die together, yet she didn't want to. No, Asuka wanted a
                                             mind of her own, unlike the little doll that had saved Asuka's life. It was disturbing that the
                                             inanimate object had saved her life, and she decided then that she hated dolls. At her mother's
                                             funeral she didn't cry, in fact she resolved to depend on no one but herself and to never cry
                                             again. Basically, Asuka was forced to mature at an early age. After the funeral she went home
                                             with her father and his new wife. In truth, Asuka's stepmother was scared of the little girl's
                                             adult-like attitude, and told her new husband so. When forced to pick between his wife and
                                             daughter, Asuka's father picked his wife. Once again Asuka had been overlooked, and for her
                                             it became a way of life. She was never very close to her father, and she felt alienated by her new stepmother, who didn't understand her. Faced with the perception that no one loved her, Asuka told herself that she didn't need anyone else's love; that she could live by and for herself. In other words, she would reject them instead. But in truth, all she had ever wanted was their love - something she'd always felt she'd been denied.

From then on Asuka strived to be the best and brightest. And with her above-average intelligence and skills, that's exactly what she became. As she grew older, she hid her loneliness behind an enormous and overbearing outer ego, telling herself, and others, that she was worth more than they were because of her accomplishments. She tried to make herself look and feel special by shouting to the world that she was special. She subconsciously believed that if she tried hard enough she could erase
all of her heartache, and the idea that she wasn't wanted. The effort must have been exhausting for
her. She threw her whole being into her work and became a child progidy, deserving of the title
wunderkind. Asuka finished college in Germany at the age of fourteen, and she is able to speak at
least three languages fluently: German, Japanese, and English. After graduating from college, Asuka
was off to the U.S.A. Here she met Kaji Ryouji and soon developed a rather large crush on him.
During this time, Asuka trained to be the best EVA pilot in the world. She had the highest synch ratio
of the three children with her EVA (until Shinji surpassed her). When piloting EVA-02, her
movements were always flashy and impressive. Asuka took great pride in her achievements because
they were her singular source of worth - especially the EVA. Since being an EVA pilot made her more
unique in the world than anything else she'd done, it was the thing she took the most pride in. Proof of this is the fact that she always wears the interface objects in her hair (Those little red objects in her hair. Shinji and Rei both have similar ones which are white and are shaped more like lenses from eye glasses). Like the other Children, the EVA became her only real source of value.

When the anticipated enemy attacks began happening in 2015, Asuka and Unit-02 were transferred to Japan. There Asuka met the other EVA pilots. Asuka prided herself with having the highest synch ratio with her EVA than any of the other pilots. It was clear that Asuka was the only one who enjoyed her work, and considering the burden of being a pilot, this was a bit perplexing to those not familiar with Asuka's past. She was a happy girl and was always optimistic. She hid her past not only from the people around her, but from herself as well. Not long after her move to Tokyo-03, Asuka moved into Misato's apartment. After spending so much time in the U.S.A and Germany, she was not used to the small rooms, lack of privacy, and sleeping on the floor. She often had Shinji make her breakfast and lunch, becoming angry when he didn't have the time. With Misato's cooking and cleaning habits and Asuka's dislike for doing household chores, Shinji was often stuck with the domestic duties. When Asuka discovered that Misato was Kaji's ex-lover, she immediately thought of Misato as the enemy. She couldn't understand why Kaji would like Misato, who acted like a child, while she saw herself as rather mature person.

Kaji represented many things from Asuka's perspective. He was a familiar figure with NERV, having been involved in her training at the German branch, and also having escorted and accompanied her from Germany to Japan. In that sense, he was a friend to her, someone she thought she could confide in, while everyone else in Japan, with the exception of Misato, was a relative stranger to her. He was also an older, attractive man, and an unattainable dream for the teenage girl, but one she held onto nonetheless. Of all people, she particularly craved his attention. But the only relationship Kaji was really interested in was one with Misato, and that realization crushed Asuka's spirit. It established a boundary, and forcefully showed her that she was only a child trying to intrude in adult territory, someplace where she really wasn't wanted. She was left with nothing else to fall back on; no one she'd ever cared about had ever returned her feelings. Not her parents, not Kaji, no one. The only one who really cared about Asuka was Asuka, and she could only sustain herself that way for so long. Even her EVA couldn't make up for it, which may be why her synch ratio eventually dropped. She hated everyone in the world for rejecting her, or so she perceived, and she couldn't understand why someone like Misato deserved to find happiness when she couldn't. This is what ultimately caused her to gradually withdraw, and to finally give up on her own life. Because she simply ran out of reasons not to.

Like Kaji, Misato was a familiar face in NERV for Asuka, having been a part of the German branch before her transfer to Tokyo-03. However, there was never much between them, except for casual familiarity. When Asuka ended up living at Misato's apartment with her and Shinji, she was none too pleased about it, though primarily because of Shinji's presence. However, Asuka's "authoritarian" side led to her clashing with Misato quite frequently, and once she learned of her reunion with Kaji, any civility between them all but vanished. Asuka tried to cover her own pain by heaping as much judgment and criticism on Misato as she possibly could, instinctively trying to "spread the misery" and make everyone else feel as bad as she did.

As mentioned above, Asuka's greatest source of pride is her EVA. It is the one thing in the world that she had which nobody else did. She centered her entire identity around being a "great EVA pilot". Therefore, when she heard praise being showered on Shinji for his success with EVA-01, he immediately became a threat to her greatest source of pride and a rival to be overcome, in her eyes. She spent their initial battles against the Angels going to great lengths to show off, in order to prove to everyone that she was better than their "hero" Shinji. Of course, this only resulted in humiliation when they were both initially defeated by the Seventh
                                            Angel. After that, she was forced to cooperate with Shinji, and even lived under the same roof
                                            with him. Asuka objected loudly to this, but ultimately the two learned to work together, in a
                                            way, and more or less get along. Once she even asked him to kiss her, but only because she
                                            was bored. He complied, but she pinched his nose during the kiss, because she was afraid his
                                            breath would tickle her (the poor boy almost suffocated!). It's possible that she also had
                                            good intentions towards him, expressed in that "Asuka-sort-of-way". She wanted him to think
                                            for himself and to stop saying sorry for everything. She helped him with his work, giving him
                                            the answer in seconds, although she had failed the test at school herself (this is due to the fact
                                            that she had trouble reading Japanese). However, she continued to view Shinji as a pitiful weakling and delighted in tormenting him, which only made matters worse as his EVA synch ratio caught up to, and then surpassed, hers. As Shinji's achievements grew, Asuka's perceived self-worth shrank proportionately, and her own synch ratio with EVA-02 eventually began to drop. Both Shinji and Rei expressed empathy toward her, which she interpreted as pity and which consequently made her feel even worse, a victim of her own pride. After being easily defeated by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Angels, all of her pride and perception of worth were completely shattered. She lost that which determined her identity: EVA-02. There was no one left who cared about her, so she hated everyone else... But in the end, she hated herself the most. She hated herself for losing, and for being beaten by a "weakling" such as Shinji, so she spiraled downward until she was little more than a corpse, barely clinging to life without any real reason to do so. She sank to a lower place than even Shinji had ever reached, and then everything ended.

Asuka hated Rei, there's no other way to say it. When they first met, Rei displayed a total lack of interest when faced with Asuka's offer of friendship. Asuka took this rejection as an indication of egotism on Rei's part, although in truth it was exactly the opposite, and regarded her with a jaded eye from that moment forward. As she got to know the pilot of Unit-00 better, she realized that Rei reminded her of the doll she was replaced with as a child. She hated Rei even more, and feared that Rei would somehow replace her in the future. Toward the end of the series she began calling Rei a "wind-up doll", implying that she had no will or identity of her own. When Rei "rescued" her from the Fifteenth Angel, it was the final nail in the coffin of Asuka's self-worth. She would literally have preferred death, than to have let her pride and dignity suffer such a fatal blow.

Asuka became fast friends with classmate, and class representative, Hikari. Although the extent of their
friendship was not explored very thoroughly, it probably started as a friendship of "convenience" like the
one Asuka initially offered to Rei. They did support and help each other out on a number of occasions,
though it seems that however their friendship may have begun, they ended up becoming fairly close.
Asuka's relationship with Hikari is actually very sweet. She listens to her problems and tries to help with
Hikari's love for Toji. She trusts Hikari to show her the worst, and is not ashamed to cry in front of her.
When Asuka ran away from Misato's house, she stayed with Hikari for a time, and even admitted her
feelings of self-loathing to her. But then Tokyo-03 was destroyed by EVA-00's explosion. After that,
Hikari's family finally moved away, and Asuka had nowhere left to go, which is precisely where she
went, in both a figurative and literal sense.

Although Asuka could be cruel to the fellow children, she was very popular among the other students.
Her strong attitude and her listening ear made her a great friend, but it was the fact that she was an EVA
pilot that ruined this. Around the other children she didn't care who did what as long as she was known
as the one in charge, the one who has the situation under control. She loved the glory of dong a job well done and would kill for the feeling. Asuka used to be the best pilot. Her skill, her ideas, and her evasive abilities shone above all others. However, Shinji slowly became the best EVA pilot, his synch ratio surpassing hers. Asuka could not stand the fact that he was better. Her synch ratio started to go down as the other children's went up. She was ruined by the Fifteenth Angel, which used a mental attack to break into Asuka's mind and flood her with memories she had blocked so long ago. Literally, the Fifteenth Angel "raped" her mind. The private thoughts of her mother ignoring her, and then finding her dead body brought Asuka's trauma into the light for all to see. But Asuka didn't want others to know of her troubles, because then she wouldn't be as perfect as she wanted to be seen. She didn't want others to see her pain. During this battle, Gendo Ikari refused to send Unit-01 out to save Asuka, despite Shinji's pleadings, for fear of the enemy getting a hold of Unit-01 as well. In the end, Asuka was saved yet again by a doll when Rei threw the Lance of Longinus, destroying the Angel. This was almost unbearable for Asuka. When Shinji attempted to comfort her, she only replied icily that she hated him, everyone, and most especially Rei. She lost almost all sense of self-worth. "I'm in EVA without wanting to be. I'm forced to be here. This junk won't move! Oh, no, it's me who's junk. I'm useless. No one needs me. No one needs a pilot who cannot pilot EVA."

After her defeat at the hands of the Fifteenth Angel, Asuka made one last attempt at life, as well as being an Evangelion pilot.
                                                    After all, she has been training for the position since she was a child, and being an
                                                    Evangelion pilot defined her; she had made it the focus of her life. Asuka would probably
                                                    have bounced back from her traumatic experience in the end, had it not been for two
                                                    more events that sent her plummeting over the edge. When Asuka was called back to pilot
                                                    Unit-02, she could not synch with it. It turned out that her synch ratio had dropped below
                                                    10%, and she could no longer make her prized EVA move. This was like rubbing salt into
                                                    the wound. But the final blow came when Gendo ordered Unit-01 to help Rei in a
                                                    battle situation, when he had insisted that Unit-01 remain on stand-by when Asuka's mind
                                                    was raped by the Angel. That was all she could take, and it succeeded in driving home all
                                                    her resentment against Gendo, and especially against Rei. "Why for her? Am I so worthless you couldn't do this for me?"

She was afraid of the others now, since she saw herself as a failure and assumed everyone else would see her the same way. She was at the point where she no longer cared about anyone or anything. She wouldn't even show her face in the same apartment as the other EVA pilots, instead she went to Hikari's house after school and played video games all day. Asuka eventually became even more unstable as memories of her past begin to haunt her. She became mentally unstable, much like her mother. Finally, Asuka wandered off, found an abandoned house, and crawled into the bathtub. It took the NERV agents some time to find her. Asuka had hoped to die, but had slipped into a coma instead, probably because her mind could not accept the trauma. Her mind and body shut down. Because of Asuka's mental condition, she was replaced by the Fifth Child, Kaworu Nagisa.

Even though she had screamed that she hated everyone, the truth was that she hated herself the most. If she couldn't even love herself, how could she even begin to care much about anyone else? The reason she was so loud and had the "Look at me!" attitude was because she didn't have anyone's full attention.

Asuka's role in the series is very important. She felt, like those that were neglected, that any act of kindness must be repaid in full in order to be even. This is shown when Shinji saved her from an Angel. She nearly killed herself to be able to say, "Now we're even." It's hard not to feel sorry for Asuka. She's always had everything so hard, and she's stayed strong through all of it, only to finally give in at a less significant moment. She had held everything inside for too long, and she was beyond any point of turning back by the time she joins the NERV team. Her insanity was inevitable, given the personalities of those she worked with and her own inability to trust. Asuka's life had always been ruled by loneliness: her father abandoned their family, her mother killed herself, and the other kids always thought her too boastful. Finally, the loneliness got to be too much and she gave in to insanity and the freedom of not thinking ever again.

mikomi's Opinion

*sigh* I just have to say that this bio could have been so much better, had
the site "Saffron" not disappeared off the net =*( And it was such a great
Asuka site too, it was incredible! Anyway, I scraped together what
information I could find, and I hope this bio isn't too horrible o_O, Asuka is
one of my favourite anime characters after all! Well, on with the opinion: I
believe Asuka is a strong character. Many will probably disagree with me,
after all she hid her vulnerability behind a tough exterior. But I am willing to
admit that if I had gone through what she did as a child, I wouldn't have
wanted to try to live. In fact, I would've just curled up into a little ball in the
corner and just huddled there for pretty much the rest of my life. After
Asuka had been refused love from both her parents, she continued wanting
to live, even with the knowledge that her mother had wished for her to die.
Not an easy thing to do when you're a little kid. She repressed her memories
and squashed her emotions, allowing her to be the best that she could be.
So she worked hard, and I mean damn hard. She threw everything of
herself into succeeding. She wanted to be the best, she dreamed about being
the best, and so she became the best. With the knowledge that she was one
of the world's brightest and that she had the honour of piloting an EVA,
Asuka finally believed that she deserved some pride. So she used that pride
to make herself feel special and worthy of attention. But then, the very
person she deemed as a fool, Shinji, surpassed her skills. Imagine you met a boy, thought him to be pathetic, and openly called him so. He cares nothing about all that you've worked so hard to achieve in your life, he just mopes around (by the way, this is not anti-Shinji. I luv Shinji!). Then, all of a sudden that "pathetic" boy smashes your world to fragments. You sit there, watching the delicate bubble world you have worked so hard to construct from scratch, crumble to pieces around you. This happens all because he exceeds the skills that you trained so hard to obtain, and he takes away your single source of pride: being the best. Asuka must have lost every single ounce of self-worth she had worked so hard to achieve, and the part that must have hurt the most was that Shinji didn't care about being the best. If I were her, I would have already succumbed to depression. I can only say that I'm extremely happy that I'm not Asuka, and I think she deserves praise for continuing the fight to live when so many would have submitted to defeat. However, she overcame her feelings of inferiority so many times that it's no wonder in the end that she finally gave in. But nonetheless, I admire her.