Asuka Langley Soryu Quotes

Everything the character has built is stated here as its own negation. The self-reliance that reads as arrogance for twenty episodes turns out to be a line drawn against a specific memory: a mother whose illness replaced her daughter with a doll, and who tried to take the daughter with her. The German, the rank, the refusal to be helped, all of it is the argument she has been having with that room since she was a small child.

Screamed during Arael's mental attack, just after a vision of Kaji tells her she is still a child and a still of Shinji appears beside him, by the pilot whose entire worth is measured in synchronization scores. The Angel then asks whether she is lonely and whether she loves it, and every answer she gives is a refusal to rely on anyone. The scene is a nervous breakdown filmed as a battle, and it is the most honest thing the show does with her.

In the broadcast finale Asuka is the one who gets to tell Shinji that his belief that everyone hates him is imaginary, and the usual reading is that this is a joke: the girl who has spent twenty-five episodes calling him an idiot doing it once more as therapy. It is not a joke, or not only. Episode twenty-two showed what Asuka's imagination did to her, an Angel reading her mind back to her until she screamed, and episode twenty-four opened with her found in a bathtub after that reading turned out to be accurate. Of the whole cast in the therapy circle she is the one person qualified to say that a mind can lie about being hated, because hers did and she has no evidence it was wrong. The insult is her only register for tenderness. The word the English reaches for, 'megadork', is dumb in a way the scene needs, because without it the sentence would be advice, and Asuka does not give advice.

The film finds her in Unit-02 at the bottom of a lake, placed there for her protection, still near-catatonic from the Angel's assault on her mind. The repetition is where it starts and not where it ends. What breaks the loop is not courage but a discovery: her mother is in the Eva, and is looking at her. The girl whose entire personality was built on not being anyone's doll finds out she was never alone in the cockpit, and the fight that follows, nine Mass Production Evas taken apart on an internal battery with the timer running, is the only time in the series Asuka pilots without needing to prove anything. Then they get up again. The film gives her the best sequence in the whole franchise and pays for it with the worst, and this whispered line is the hinge. It is the last time she asks to live rather than to win.

'Kimochi warui' is what Asuka says on the beach, and it does not mean this, or not only. The phrase is what a Japanese speaker says when nauseous, when touched by something clammy, when a situation is off; 'I feel sick' is one honest rendering and 'How disgusting' is another; Wikipedia gives both. The two Englishes put the verdict in different places. One is a girl describing her own body after being strangled by the boy whose face she then caressed. The other is a girl passing judgment on him, or on the world they have been returned to, or on the whole species that just chose separateness over the orange sea. Yuko Miyamura, who voiced her, has said Anno asked how she would feel waking to find a stranger had been touching himself over her, and 'kimochi warui' was her own answer; the film's last line began as an actress's revulsion. That origin favors the plainer translation. The famous one is a reading, and it has been mistaken for the text for decades.