Asuka Langley Sōryū

Asuka Langley Sōryū (惣流・アスカ・ラングレー< span class="t_nihongo_comma" style="display:none">, Sōryū Asuka Rangurē< sup>?) is a fictional character created by Gainax studios and designed by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, belonging to the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise. Asuka is the pilot of Evangelion unit 02 being at the same time called the second child.

Origin

Fourteen-year-old, born December 4, 2001 with American nationality but raised in Germany manufacturing site of unit 02 before being shipped to Japan. Her primary language is German. On her mother's side she is one-fourth Japanese and one-fourth German. Her mother, Kyōko Zeppelin Sōryū, was a test pilot for the German branch of Gehirn on Project E. When Asuka was four years old, her mother participated in a contact experiment with Eva-02 (similar to the experiment conducted by Yui Ikari with unit 01). Although she physically survived the test, Kyōko was left mentally damaged, going into a severe schizophrenic state believing that a doll was her daughter, while only referring to her real daughter as "that girl", and even going so far as to slit the doll's throat before hanging herself, saying 'die with me'. Asuka found her mother's body when she was going to tell him that she had been selected to be an EVA pilot.

The scene where Asuka's mother denies knowing her and recognizes a doll as her daughter is from Hayao Miyazaki's manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Anno worked on the film version, and expressed interest in creating a story centered around one of the supporting characters, Kushana, but Miyazaki rejected the idea.

Her father quickly remarries, though Asuka's defensiveness quickly repels her new stepmother, but the two learn to tolerate each other, maintaining a cheerful facade of a normal family. Asuka proves to be a child prodigy, earning a university degree in an unspecified field while still a teenager and becoming fluent in Japanese (albeit with difficulty reading and writing kanji). her A10 clips which she wears all the time and her blue eyes. Her best friend is her classmate and class representative, Hikari Horaki, whom she came to live with when she couldn't stand living in Misato's apartment anymore.

Conception

Their last names derive from the warships of the same name that participated in World War II, the Japanese aircraft carrier Sōryū and the American aircraft carrier USS Langley.

She was named after Asuka Saki (砂姫 明日香, Saki Asuka^? ), the main character of the manga SuperGirl Asuka ( 超少女明日香, Cho-Shojo Asuka ^?), written by Shinji Wada.

Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto has said that "I initially designed Asuka as the type of girl lead", but also explained that he felt that character might be too similar to other anime he and Anno had previously worked on., such as Top wo nerae! Gunbuster and Fushigi no Umi no Nadia. Sadamoto then suggested to Anno that they change the main character to a boy, which would be more in keeping with the mecha genre.

Yūko Miyamura, Asuka's voice actress, has said that "Asuka wasn't the most sincere character I've ever met...I always tried to get in sync with her, but Asuka would never allow herself to get in sync with 'me';... One day, I realized that there was a barrier in Asuka's heart." Miyamura would later state that his work on the series was "very hard"; and that she sometimes wished to "eliminate Evangelion." Asuka's English-language actress Tiffany Grant has commented that playing Asuka was "refreshing", as she "says the most horrible things to people, things people would like to say but can't get away with."

Hideaki Anno considers her his favorite Evangelion character.

Appearances

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Asuka is first introduced in episode 8, with the arrival of unit 02 and the battle with Gaghiel, Asuka is shown to have high timing and exceptional skills as an EVA pilot, being very aggressive and confident in battle.. After being defeated in battle by Zeruel, Asuka's self-confidence (and consequently her timing and effectiveness as a pilot) begins to wane. This culminates in episode 22, when Arael shows up and Asuka, weighed down by the increasingly poor results on the synchronization tests, is enraged at being ordered to serve as Rei's backup. She defies orders and tries to attack the angel alone, but is overwhelmed by a psychological attack from it that forces her to relive her painful memories and results in a nervous breakdown. Asuka loses the will to live and becomes unable to pilot. unit 02, spending much of the last few episodes of the series in a hospital bed in a catatonic state.

The End of Evangelion

In The End of Evangelion, when the JSDF invades NERV HQ, Asuka is placed still comatose inside unit 02 and submerged in a lake inside the Geo-Front for remediation. protection. When she is bombarded by depth charges, Asuka awakens and declares that she does not want to die and, in a moment of clarity, she realizes that her mother's soul was always inside the EVA and always has been. protecting. With her own identity regained, she goes out and defeats the JSSDF forces before being confronted by the mass production units. He apparently successfully defeats all nine opponents, but at the last moment one of Longinus' spear replicas easily pierces unit 02's AT shield and pierces two of its eyes, coinciding with the completion of unit 02's internal battery. unit. Mass production units manage to get up again thanks to their S2 engines which allow them to keep running despite being badly damaged or maimed. They eventually gut and dismember Unit 02 using their replicas of Longinus's spear. After Shinji rejects the Instrumentality, Asuka appears at Shinji's side in the final scene of the film.

Personality

Asuka is proud, strong, and has great self-confidence, which could be characterized as a superiority complex. She is often violent and offensive towards other people, especially Shinji. She suppresses her feelings for him and nullifies him in front of other people, but sexually teases him at the same time. For example, in chapter 9 Asuka locks herself in a room to sleep, forbidding Shinji to enter it, although later she herself breaks the isolation to lie next to Shinji and almost unknowingly causing a kiss between the two, although Shinji later walks away from her.

In the training to fight Israfel, given their failures, Misato proposes to put Rei in Asuka's place, causing her to look dismayed at the idea that she is the detested "Model Girl" the one to take her place, and above all that it be Rei, and not her, the one who works with Shinji. However, her relationship with Shinji is complicated due to her violent nature.

Asuka acts this way because she needs to feed her more unstable voracious ego. This is also her way of shutting out her past life from others, often using her self-confidence as a strong AT field when she is in her EVA. Her personality could also be marked as a kind of "identity reinforcement": she constantly boasts that she is the hope of NERV and that no one will forget her or mistake her for something she is not, which would be interpreted as as his way of making sure that what he experienced with his mother in his childhood never happened again and to justify his own existence. Asuka's voice actress, Yuko Miyamura, wrote about her experiences playing Asuka:

"I want to know that Asuka was not the most open-hearted character I've ever known... Every time I tried to synchronize with myself, Asuka would never allow synchronization with me. Even in the end, Asuka would never come near me. The last scene was made in The End of Gospeln, but I didn't think Asuka's personality would have advanced. One day I thought there was a wall in her heart.

Asuka is an exceptional Evangelion pilot. Similar in level to Shinji, she boasts of being an EVA pilot. She has a high level of synchronization, surpassing Shinji's until episode 16. This is possibly because her mother's soul exists inside the EVA, and given their relationship there is a certain subconscious rejection towards Shinji's mother. she.

Asuka suffers from a mental problem after being forced to relive painful memories of her past by the fifteenth Angel, Arael. She loses the will to live and is unable to lead EVA-02 again until The End of Evangelion, in which she fights against the Serial EVAs. In that fight she had the battle almost won seconds before depleting her Eva's energy, but an EVA Series unit threw a SEELE-created imitation of Longinus's spear at her. With the damage, EVA-02 is annihilated along with Asuka (although the destruction of the Entry Plug is never expressly shown, besides that when it reappears it still has the wounds from the synchronization, bandaged, so it is logical to think that it did not die); she however reappears when Shinji rejects the Human Instrumentation Project.

Asuka Langley Shikinami

In the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, Asuka is the character that receives the most changes compared to her counterpart in the original anime and manga. Her maternal surname changes to Shikinami, as her hair color changes to a reddish blonde. She is a captain in the European air force, so in this universe she is not a college graduate. Shikinami has German nationality and not American like Sōryū.

Like Rei Ayanami, Shikinami belongs to a series of clones, the Shikinami series. She is one of the only two survivors of said series, which is characterized by not needing any type of maintenance unlike the Ayanami series.

Psychologically she is very similar to Sōryū showing aggressiveness, petulance, high energy and a superiority complex with the difference that Shikinami shows her feelings for Shinji Ikari more quickly and obviously, as well as the null existence of her crush on Ryoji Kaji. When she alone talks to a small rag doll in the form of a puppet to cheer herself up, an important change with respect to Sōryū since the latter showed a dislike for her dolls. Unlike Sōryū, she does not dislike Rei Ayanami for her behavior as a "doll", however she does see her as competition, both as an EVA pilot, and as the feelings of she by Shinji Ikari. Her relationship with Misato Katsuragi is at first very similar to the anime, after the third impact she becomes very distant, cold and purely professional. The closest thing Shikinami has to a friend is unit 08 pilot Mari Illustrious Makinami who always refers to Shikinami as "Highness" or "Princess" Shikinami refers to her as "four eyes" or "glasses". After the third impact she has a father-daughter relationship with Kensuke Aida with whom she lives when she is not on a mission, he is the closest thing to a family she has had in her life, Shikinami refers to him as "Ken". -Ken" and he refers to her only as Shikinami.

In the second movie, in addition to being the pilot of unit 2, she offers to be the test pilot of unit 3, a unit which, as in the anime, is contaminated by the angel Bardiel. Unit 3 is destroyed by Unit 1 as the simulation pod is activated after Shinji Ikari refused to fight for fear of hurting Shikinami. Shikinami survives the unit 1 attack and the only aftermath of the attack is his wearing a patch over her left eye which he actually wears to contain the angel Bardiel, which is still inside of her.

Like most of the last names of the characters in the saga, the last name Shikinami comes from a warship of the Second World War. The Shikinami Type II Fubuki-class destroyer that participated in the Pacific theater and sunk in 1944.

Reception

In a March 2010 Newtype magazine poll, Asuka was voted the third most popular female anime character of the 1990s. In June 2010, Newtype ranked Asuka #8 in their monthly Top 10 Characters poll. Critic Kenneth Lee has said that Asuka's fatal flaw is her "excessive pride", noting that her mother went insane after taking part in an experimental test pilot, just as Asuka suffers a mental breakdown. or contamination by challenging the 16th angel herself. Pete Harcoff of Anime Critic described Asuka as the series' source of humor, while also being an "annoying brat" 34;. IGN ranked her as the 13th most popular anime character of all time, commenting that: "On the outside, [Asuka] is a simple character... But as the series progresses we see that her pride is just a cover to cover your deepest emotions, your deepest psychological problems".

Asuka's fight sequence against the Evangelion in The End of Evangelion, was particularly well received by critics, who felt that this was her defining moment, otherwise it remains static. in most of the film. Praise was also given to Tiffany Grant for her role as the English actress Asuka. Mike Crandol of Anime News Network stated that Grant "returned to her old role as Asuka."

Bibliography

• Fujie, Kazuhisa (2004). Neon Genesis Gospeln: The Unofficial Guide. Tokyo, Japan; printed in the USA: DH Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-9745961-4-0.