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savetheearth
May. 13th, 2013 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soulsborderlineOOC Information:
Name: Nerdo
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Nerdorama AIM: Nerdorama09
IC Information:
Name: Asuka Langley Soryu (same as preincarnation)
Canon: Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series and End of Evangelion)
Age: 13-14 (depending if you believe series text or supplemental materials); 14 reincarnated
Preincarnation Appearance: http://static.akiba101.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/moe-85360-bodysuit-neon_genesis_evangelion-souryuu_asuka_langley-wallpaper.png
Any differences: Other than spending more time in dresses than skintight jumpsuits or middle school uniforms, no. She used to wear her hair down, but has been rocking the twintails since her first Echo.
Preincarnated History: Detailed wiki article can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex
Wait, no, here. It turns out I tl;dred this history anyway but the wiki article has more details and less of a timeline.
Asuka Langley Soryu was born December 4, 2001, a year and three months after the end of the world. A mass extinction event called Second Impact had destroyed the Antarctic ice cap and wiped out about half of the human population in the ensuing flooding and chaos, but it turned out that was only the first step of a complicated plan to determine the future of Earth and the human race, with several competing factions within an ancient conspiracy manipulating the foreordained events for their own purposes.
Asuka became involved when her mother, Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu, did. Kyoko was part of a series of experiments with giant artificial humanoids called Evangelions that were designed to fight the giant monsters (called Angels) that were predicted to rise up and finish off humanity within about fifteen years. A scientist with the scientific organization GEHIRN, Kyoko volunteered for an experiment in mentally connecting with an Evangelion. Something went wrong (or possibly everything went according to someone's plan, it's a conspiracy after all) and Kyoko wound up "losing" a part of her personality or soul to the Evangelion - Unit 02 - leaving her irretrievably insane. She displaced her feelings toward her adoring young daughter onto a doll and began abusively ignoring the real Asuka (who was still allowed to interact with a committed mental patient because this is anime). After an indeterminate amount of time in this terrible situation, Asuka came to tell her mama that she'd been identified as a possible Evangelion pilot, hoping that would get Kyoko to pay attention to her again. She found that Kyoko had hung herself...alongside the doll Kyoko had believed to be Asuka.
Needless to say, Asuka took this poorly. She also completely repressed the memory of the event.
Fast forward ten years. Asuka has been largely absent of her father's influence because he was busy with Asuka's stepmother, who had been one of Kyoko's nurses at the hospital (stay classy, Mr. Soryu). Instead, she was largely raised by NERV, the organization designated to fight the Angels when they appeared, training to be a pilot and also somehow earning a college degree at the same time, probably thanks to her obsessive drive to impress people. She was the best possible pilot of the best possible weapon to defeat Angels. Then some idiot off the street (Shinji Ikari) and a test pilot (Rei Ayanami) took down the first three Angels in a row because it turned out Asuka and Unit 02 were on the wrong side of the planet. Lame.
Asuka eventually arrived in Japan (after killing an Angel in the Pacific Ocean with the help of the aforementioned idiot and several battleships) with an understandably enormous chip on her shoulder. She integrated (poorly) into Japanese school life while getting to know (and antagonize) her fellow pilots, defeating several more Angels around Japan with their help, all the while dealing with conflicting feelings toward pretty much everyone, but especially Shinji Ikari.
All in all, things were going pretty well until a series of defeats started throwing everything into chaos. Most of it happened to Shinji and would take far too long to explain here, but of note was that the Angels started getting too strong or too bizarre for anything but Deus Ex Machina to handle. Since DXM was Shinji and Rei's department, Asuka suffered nasty (and quick) defeats at the hands of three Angels in a row while the guy she was both intensely jealous of and oddly sympathetic toward got more and more useless with the psychological aftermath of each of his "victories".
The worst event was her fourth "loss" in a row - an angry, depressed Asuka attempted to take down an Angel that was attacking from orbit, only for it to launch a psychic attack that violently dragged all her repressed trauma from childhood out to the front of her mind, resulting in a major psychological breakdown. After that, things went from bad to worse (this being Evangelion); with Asuka too depressed and lacking identity to even get her Evangelion to move, Rei sacrificed herself (and was replaced by a clone) and Asuka was taken off pilot duty, only to slip into a catatonic stupor while her replacement turned out to be the last Angel and hijacked Unit 02 to almost succeed in wiping out humanity. Way to vet your pilots, NERV.
Anyway, with all the Angels dead, the different factions of the conspiracy behind Second Impact and the Evas made their moves and End of Evangelion happened. Asuka woke up inside Unit 02 as the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Force started shelling it as part of their takedown attempt on NERV. Asuka woke up, and with some encouragement from the fragment of her mother left inside Unit 02, was able to stand back up and wipe out almost all of the JSSDF forces single-handedly. She did pretty well against SEELE's final trump card, the Mass-Production Evangelions, for a while too, but eventually ran out of power and fell to their mass-produced anti-AT Field weapons because nothing good happens in this movie. With Shinji unable to get his Eva out of containment in time to back her up, Asuka ended up dying in agony as she tried to force her Eva to get back up and fight. A lot of arguments with Shinji that may have been inside humanity's collective consciousness or may have just been his hallucinations followed, until finally, after everybody died, Asuka somehow woke up in bandages on a beach next to Shinji. After he gave up halfway through trying to throttle her, she was cryptic one last time and then the movie ended.
If you find all that rambling, incoherent, and unsatisfying, you should try actually watching the show.
Reincarnated HistoryAsuka - this Asuka - was born fourteen years ago alongside an identical twin. The parents - a Mr. and Mrs. Shikinami - were barely able to care for one child, let alone two, and so one of the daughters was immediately put up for a closed adoption. Thanks to a hospital clerical error with their birth certificates, both twins wound up officially named "Asuka Langley", although thankfully they didn't end up with duplicate social security numbers.
NOTE: This paragraph was an agreement between myself and the original player of Asuka Langley Shikinami. As of my re-app, she's no longer at the game and this plot point is moot. If anyone should re-app Asuka Shikinami in the future, I'd be happy to revisit this idea or ignore it completely, but as I don't have an RP partner arranged for the role, consider it removed from my re-app. I will, however, be keeping Asuka as unknowingly adopted, as the theme of parental distance is very relevant to her character.
This Asuka was adopted as an infant by a wealthy Japanese-American couple called the Soryus. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted Asuka rather than let yet another abandoned child become a ward of the state. They never told the girl she was adopted, instead opting to raise her completely as her own - after all, it was obvious her biological parents had no interest in her, so why bother her with extra details?
Mr. and Mrs. Soryu are very good providers and love their daughter, but they are just by nature very distant, unemotional people. Asuka's parents raised her off-handedly, almost clinically, offering little guidance other than encouraging (some would say forcing) their daughter to excel academically and at whatever else she put her mind to. They're busy, successful people, after all, and they want their daughter to be a busy, successful person herself. Asuka took all this - and the succession of nannies and tutors responsible for her day to day living...mostly in stride. She's never complained to her parents about a single thing, and only seeks to impress them and earn praise from them, no matter how faint it might be.
It's that obsessive drive that's lead her to excel academically so much she's been enrolled at a special program for gifted youth and Locke City University and effectively starting a hybrid college/high school curriculum. If she follows the program, she'll have a college degree at 18. She's aiming for 16.
After her original experience with an Echo during her first stint at the game, Asuka tried out the string of numbers on her head due to a vague rumor she'd heard, stumbling upon the strange world of the reincarnated. She learned a little bit about the apparent conspiracy - enough to keep her mouth relatively shut - and encountered a few people, including her near-identical doppelganger. She hadn't really formed an opinion on the Network, other than that this was freaky and therefore interesting. The last thing that happened before she left town for the summer was an encounter with a Vermedi that triggered her second Echo and panicked flight.
First Echo: Asuka found herself on the beach outside of the city doing a field study for her marine biology class at school. She was there to look at a red tide and found herself staring out to sea for a long, long time with a disturbing sense of deja vu. When she came out of her fugue, she found a pair of spiffy red hair clips in her pocket that she's taken to wearing like barrettes.
During her original stint in this game, Asuka gained one additional Echo - her phobia of dolls without the memory of why she has one (since she was repressing that anyway). No other major changes happened.
Preincarnation Personality: Asuka Langley Soryu is a person who, under normal circumstances, focuses entirely outward - every part of her personality demands attention and expects praise from others. She is loud, outspoken, opinionated, domineering, and proud. She demands from both others and herself to be completely in charge of any situation she's in, pushing herself to impossibly ambitious heights and expectations. She is an impatient perfectionist, and freely imposes that on herself and everyone around her. She is, in four words, kind of a bitch.
To start with in terms of specifics, Asuka is an incredibly gifted person and she knows it. She has genius level intelligence (at 14, she's already graduated college), laser-like focus on achieving her goals, and is probably the most physically skilled of any of her child-giant-robot-pilot peers. She will never, ever hesitate to remind anyone of any of this, especially of their own stupidity relative to herself. While easy to anger and wrathful towards any backtalk or perceived slights, Asuka's greatest sin on the traditional list is quite clearly pride. She is so self-confident it's practically crippling, used to seeing everyone else as a potential rival or beneath her, and (though she truly is quite gifted), frequently overestimating how far simple natural talent and drive will get her.
In social interaction, Asuka always makes herself the center of attention and takes control of the situation as best she possibly can, because to her, every conversation and every relationship is a contest she wants to win. Not even her first kiss is immune to her taking charge so violently the guy comes closer to suffocating than pleasure. This even translates to her job as an Evangelion pilot, where it frequently gets her in trouble - she's often the first person disabled by an enemy simply because she engages it first, without prior planning, because she wants to show she can handle the situation. When she's shown up by somebody, or people ignore her or contradict her, Asuka is quick to get angry, pouty, or whiny - though she's a brilliant person and thinks of herself as an adult, her reaction to not getting her way is inevitably childish, and often filled with comedic (or not so comedic) violence. Sometimes this develops into rivalries that almost seem good-natured or healthy, if a little rough - she develops a confused friendship of sorts with Shinji despite looking down on him for his low self-esteem and being jealous of his inexplicable winning record in combat. The important thing is that she approves of him and other people when they have the guts to stand up to her, even if she might seem to prefer people just going along with her whims. In general, though, Asuka is a steamroller - she's going to get her way, and if she doesn't, it's going to cause her to overheat and blow a gasket.
All of that, of course, is only Asuka's outward, projected personality. The reason she's so outwardly focused is, of course, because she doesn't want to think introspectively. Asuka's self-image was shattered and ground into dust by a horribly traumatic experience when she was only four years old and reinforced by a total lack of filial affection. For ten years after that, she threw herself doggedly into anything and everything she can to ignore her creeping, festering self-loathing. She wanted to prove that it doesn't matter, that she's the best, that she doesn't need love or affection even though she craves and is addicted to praise and adulation. It was this tension, this disregarded and ignored feeling of inadequacy within Asuka that drove everything she did, and why she demanded adoration even while steadfastly shoving everyone who showed interest in her on a personal level away.
Until an Angel invaded her mind and dragged her suppressed memories and sense of total lack of self-worth to the forefront. Faced with the truth of herself, Asuka broke. With her facade shattered and all pretenses of not still being a scared little four-year-old gone from her mind, the audience can see that underneath that Asuka is cripplingly depressed, listless, and just as willing to let the world and herself go to hell as Shinji is. The whole persona was a fake, a shell surrounding Asuka's complete absence of self-worth, and she gradually withdraws more and more from the world until she's basically comatose.
And then, as one final twist at the end, it turns out her survival instinct (and the encouragement from what's left of her mother) is enough to get her to keep going for just a little while longer, taking her 'fake' persona of hers and making it her own self, turning into a self-avenging engine of destruction...at least for the last few minutes of her life. Even a little bit of honest validation was enough to get her to embrace her supposedly artificial self again, which just goes to show how much she deeply depends on others in spite of all attempts to pretend otherwise.
Asuka is abrasive, aggressive, arrogant, intentionally off-putting, and would almost rather die than ask for help. Her temper is violent and explosive and she's got an eclectic collection of neuroses like a violent phobia of dolls from her repressed memories or a tendency to loudly and obnoxiously pursue older/more mature/more paternal men (I wasn't actually joking when I linked "Electra complex" earlier). She's managed to wall herself off from the world through sheer aggression just so people don't see how vulnerable and desperate for any validation whatsoever she is underneath, and that conflict drives her whole character to extreme highs and extreme lows in distressingly rapid succession.
Any differences: In real life, of course, your parents don't try to disintegrate themselves into giant robots and end up with homicidal displacement issues to inflict on you. Reincarnated Asuka's underlying parent issues are different. Her outward affect - hyperactive attempts at achieving success and a superiority complex the size of New Hampshire - remains the same, but the underlying neuroses it covers are a fear of failing to live up to her parents' expectations. She doesn't even have any plans for a career after getting a college degree; she's just hoping her insane pace impresses her mother and father enough to get something other than a half-hearted "Good job, Asuka" out of them. Maybe a hug, even. Or at least a "congratulations".
When the stress of her breakneck academic life starts to overwhelm her, Asuka just takes on more work (or worklike hobbies) to distract herself from it, putting her on the edge of a stress-induced mental breakdown almost constantly. She allows herself only small, regimented hobbies outside of schoolwork, so she's going to have to cut significantly into either her video game time, her workout time, or her shopping-for-expensive-hair-products time to investigate this Network thing. This also leaves her prone to the same tendency toward violent or erratic outbursts at people (other than her parents) as her preincarnation, just for different underlying reasons.
She's also had a significantly privileged upbringing, so she's more than a little bit of a classist and snotty rich kid on top of being a snotty know-it-all. Needless to say, this and her obsessive studying means she has one less friend than her preincarnation (that is, zero). Asuka is concerned about herself and making herself awesome above all else, and other people should just bow down and tell her how awesome she is.Please? Honestly, she'll settle for catcalls at this point, just give her a genuine compliment or praise.
Abilities: Asuka's most prominent ability was the ability to synchronize herself with a giant (inconsistently-sized in animation) biomechanical monstrosity called Evangelion Unit 02 and pilot it as if it were an extension of her own body. Controlled by her brainwaves from inside the unit's torso, Eva 02 was meant to fight giant monsters called Angels and could be equipped with numerous giant-sized guns or melee weapons and physically project an AT Field - normally a metaphor for the psychological border between one's "self" and everything else, Evangelions and Angels could use them as actual physical barriers or as counters to another Eva/Angel's barriers (in one notable instance, Asuka also used hers as a bashing weapon). The synchronization process also requires a degree of mental coherence, with "sync ratio" performance appearing to depend approximately on both the pilot's sense of self and emotional connection with the Eva.
tl;dr it's a giant red fighting robot Asuka pilots with her brain and a couple fashion accessories. Also it's made out of cloned Angel and part of her (preincarnated) mother's soul, and it runs on an external power feed in case that ever comes up.
Due to how the Eva was piloted, preincarnated Asuka also has some muscle memory training of how to fight in close combat. She has no actual experience fighting without feeling 40 meters tall and wouldn't necessarily know how to use guns (those were controlled differently), but she at least has a general idea of how to CQC.
Asuka's natural genius in academic subjects carried over to her reincarnation, as did her ability to kick your ass at Street Fighter. On the intelligence, she has a huge aptitude for abstract thought and sciences: in her original incarnation, she actually graduated college with an unspecified degree by the time she was 14, in addition for having time for hobbies like SCUBA diving, chasing older men, maining Chun Li, and training to save the world. However, as her frequent ass-kickings in canon demonstrate, this is mostly book smarts and capacity for learning rather than common sense or situational awareness. Max INT, min WIS.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person: Wake up, go to school. Save the world?
Asuka was working on that last part, but right now she really needed to get where she was going, which is why she was running down the streets of Locke City. She was no parkour trekker, certainly, but running down a crowded sidewalk wasn't much different from her usual morning run, especially not when she'd just charge through or dodge around the various faceless suits in the way of her morning commute.
She earned a few choice shouts and swears as she bullied her way toward the subway station, which she returned with cheerful smiles or waves. Not like any of these schmucks could catch her anyway.
Her mistake came when she she turned around to give a particularly irate banker (or something?) a particularly smarmy look when she was rudely (so rudely) shoved off of her carefully planned course by someone who came up behind her. She stumbled over some loose packing crates and wound up in an alley, thankfully managing to catch herself before faceplanting.
"Christ, watch where you're going!" she shouted shrilly, almost going into a rant. "Some of us have places to be and you're gonna owe me if I'm--"
She cut herself off, not because she noticed no one was paying attention to her (she never did), but because she heard a strange sound behind her, jarring against the familiar sounds of the city and her own raised voice. A kind of chittering sound.
"And now there's a rat. Just perfect," she complained. For a moment, she paused, having difficulty deciding between the importance of getting to class on time and morbid scientific curiosity/the possibility of taking her anger out on a rat via her running boots.
In the end, she left, complaining. "I swear to God that's what's wrong with this country. People just leaving their garbage lying around for animals..."
The rat, thankfully, was run over by a bicycle as the vermini controlling it tried to use it to follow her. It'd have to attach to something less out of place to continue.
Roleplay Sample - Network: this is actually actionspam but
Any Questions? What are you, stupid?
Name: Nerdo
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact:
IC Information:
Name: Asuka Langley Soryu (same as preincarnation)
Canon: Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series and End of Evangelion)
Age: 13-14 (depending if you believe series text or supplemental materials); 14 reincarnated
Preincarnation Appearance: http://static.akiba101.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/moe-85360-bodysuit-neon_genesis_evangelion-souryuu_asuka_langley-wallpaper.png
Any differences: Other than spending more time in dresses than skintight jumpsuits or middle school uniforms, no. She used to wear her hair down, but has been rocking the twintails since her first Echo.
Preincarnated History: Detailed wiki article can be found here:
Wait, no, here. It turns out I tl;dred this history anyway but the wiki article has more details and less of a timeline.
Asuka Langley Soryu was born December 4, 2001, a year and three months after the end of the world. A mass extinction event called Second Impact had destroyed the Antarctic ice cap and wiped out about half of the human population in the ensuing flooding and chaos, but it turned out that was only the first step of a complicated plan to determine the future of Earth and the human race, with several competing factions within an ancient conspiracy manipulating the foreordained events for their own purposes.
Asuka became involved when her mother, Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu, did. Kyoko was part of a series of experiments with giant artificial humanoids called Evangelions that were designed to fight the giant monsters (called Angels) that were predicted to rise up and finish off humanity within about fifteen years. A scientist with the scientific organization GEHIRN, Kyoko volunteered for an experiment in mentally connecting with an Evangelion. Something went wrong (or possibly everything went according to someone's plan, it's a conspiracy after all) and Kyoko wound up "losing" a part of her personality or soul to the Evangelion - Unit 02 - leaving her irretrievably insane. She displaced her feelings toward her adoring young daughter onto a doll and began abusively ignoring the real Asuka (who was still allowed to interact with a committed mental patient because this is anime). After an indeterminate amount of time in this terrible situation, Asuka came to tell her mama that she'd been identified as a possible Evangelion pilot, hoping that would get Kyoko to pay attention to her again. She found that Kyoko had hung herself...alongside the doll Kyoko had believed to be Asuka.
Needless to say, Asuka took this poorly. She also completely repressed the memory of the event.
Fast forward ten years. Asuka has been largely absent of her father's influence because he was busy with Asuka's stepmother, who had been one of Kyoko's nurses at the hospital (stay classy, Mr. Soryu). Instead, she was largely raised by NERV, the organization designated to fight the Angels when they appeared, training to be a pilot and also somehow earning a college degree at the same time, probably thanks to her obsessive drive to impress people. She was the best possible pilot of the best possible weapon to defeat Angels. Then some idiot off the street (Shinji Ikari) and a test pilot (Rei Ayanami) took down the first three Angels in a row because it turned out Asuka and Unit 02 were on the wrong side of the planet. Lame.
Asuka eventually arrived in Japan (after killing an Angel in the Pacific Ocean with the help of the aforementioned idiot and several battleships) with an understandably enormous chip on her shoulder. She integrated (poorly) into Japanese school life while getting to know (and antagonize) her fellow pilots, defeating several more Angels around Japan with their help, all the while dealing with conflicting feelings toward pretty much everyone, but especially Shinji Ikari.
All in all, things were going pretty well until a series of defeats started throwing everything into chaos. Most of it happened to Shinji and would take far too long to explain here, but of note was that the Angels started getting too strong or too bizarre for anything but Deus Ex Machina to handle. Since DXM was Shinji and Rei's department, Asuka suffered nasty (and quick) defeats at the hands of three Angels in a row while the guy she was both intensely jealous of and oddly sympathetic toward got more and more useless with the psychological aftermath of each of his "victories".
The worst event was her fourth "loss" in a row - an angry, depressed Asuka attempted to take down an Angel that was attacking from orbit, only for it to launch a psychic attack that violently dragged all her repressed trauma from childhood out to the front of her mind, resulting in a major psychological breakdown. After that, things went from bad to worse (this being Evangelion); with Asuka too depressed and lacking identity to even get her Evangelion to move, Rei sacrificed herself (and was replaced by a clone) and Asuka was taken off pilot duty, only to slip into a catatonic stupor while her replacement turned out to be the last Angel and hijacked Unit 02 to almost succeed in wiping out humanity. Way to vet your pilots, NERV.
Anyway, with all the Angels dead, the different factions of the conspiracy behind Second Impact and the Evas made their moves and End of Evangelion happened. Asuka woke up inside Unit 02 as the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Force started shelling it as part of their takedown attempt on NERV. Asuka woke up, and with some encouragement from the fragment of her mother left inside Unit 02, was able to stand back up and wipe out almost all of the JSSDF forces single-handedly. She did pretty well against SEELE's final trump card, the Mass-Production Evangelions, for a while too, but eventually ran out of power and fell to their mass-produced anti-AT Field weapons because nothing good happens in this movie. With Shinji unable to get his Eva out of containment in time to back her up, Asuka ended up dying in agony as she tried to force her Eva to get back up and fight. A lot of arguments with Shinji that may have been inside humanity's collective consciousness or may have just been his hallucinations followed, until finally, after everybody died, Asuka somehow woke up in bandages on a beach next to Shinji. After he gave up halfway through trying to throttle her, she was cryptic one last time and then the movie ended.
If you find all that rambling, incoherent, and unsatisfying, you should try actually watching the show.
Reincarnated History
NOTE: This paragraph was an agreement between myself and the original player of Asuka Langley Shikinami. As of my re-app, she's no longer at the game and this plot point is moot. If anyone should re-app Asuka Shikinami in the future, I'd be happy to revisit this idea or ignore it completely, but as I don't have an RP partner arranged for the role, consider it removed from my re-app. I will, however, be keeping Asuka as unknowingly adopted, as the theme of parental distance is very relevant to her character.
This Asuka was adopted as an infant by a wealthy Japanese-American couple called the Soryus. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted Asuka rather than let yet another abandoned child become a ward of the state. They never told the girl she was adopted, instead opting to raise her completely as her own - after all, it was obvious her biological parents had no interest in her, so why bother her with extra details?
Mr. and Mrs. Soryu are very good providers and love their daughter, but they are just by nature very distant, unemotional people. Asuka's parents raised her off-handedly, almost clinically, offering little guidance other than encouraging (some would say forcing) their daughter to excel academically and at whatever else she put her mind to. They're busy, successful people, after all, and they want their daughter to be a busy, successful person herself. Asuka took all this - and the succession of nannies and tutors responsible for her day to day living...mostly in stride. She's never complained to her parents about a single thing, and only seeks to impress them and earn praise from them, no matter how faint it might be.
It's that obsessive drive that's lead her to excel academically so much she's been enrolled at a special program for gifted youth and Locke City University and effectively starting a hybrid college/high school curriculum. If she follows the program, she'll have a college degree at 18. She's aiming for 16.
After her original experience with an Echo during her first stint at the game, Asuka tried out the string of numbers on her head due to a vague rumor she'd heard, stumbling upon the strange world of the reincarnated. She learned a little bit about the apparent conspiracy - enough to keep her mouth relatively shut - and encountered a few people, including her near-identical doppelganger. She hadn't really formed an opinion on the Network, other than that this was freaky and therefore interesting. The last thing that happened before she left town for the summer was an encounter with a Vermedi that triggered her second Echo and panicked flight.
First Echo: Asuka found herself on the beach outside of the city doing a field study for her marine biology class at school. She was there to look at a red tide and found herself staring out to sea for a long, long time with a disturbing sense of deja vu. When she came out of her fugue, she found a pair of spiffy red hair clips in her pocket that she's taken to wearing like barrettes.
During her original stint in this game, Asuka gained one additional Echo - her phobia of dolls without the memory of why she has one (since she was repressing that anyway). No other major changes happened.
Preincarnation Personality: Asuka Langley Soryu is a person who, under normal circumstances, focuses entirely outward - every part of her personality demands attention and expects praise from others. She is loud, outspoken, opinionated, domineering, and proud. She demands from both others and herself to be completely in charge of any situation she's in, pushing herself to impossibly ambitious heights and expectations. She is an impatient perfectionist, and freely imposes that on herself and everyone around her. She is, in four words, kind of a bitch.
To start with in terms of specifics, Asuka is an incredibly gifted person and she knows it. She has genius level intelligence (at 14, she's already graduated college), laser-like focus on achieving her goals, and is probably the most physically skilled of any of her child-giant-robot-pilot peers. She will never, ever hesitate to remind anyone of any of this, especially of their own stupidity relative to herself. While easy to anger and wrathful towards any backtalk or perceived slights, Asuka's greatest sin on the traditional list is quite clearly pride. She is so self-confident it's practically crippling, used to seeing everyone else as a potential rival or beneath her, and (though she truly is quite gifted), frequently overestimating how far simple natural talent and drive will get her.
In social interaction, Asuka always makes herself the center of attention and takes control of the situation as best she possibly can, because to her, every conversation and every relationship is a contest she wants to win. Not even her first kiss is immune to her taking charge so violently the guy comes closer to suffocating than pleasure. This even translates to her job as an Evangelion pilot, where it frequently gets her in trouble - she's often the first person disabled by an enemy simply because she engages it first, without prior planning, because she wants to show she can handle the situation. When she's shown up by somebody, or people ignore her or contradict her, Asuka is quick to get angry, pouty, or whiny - though she's a brilliant person and thinks of herself as an adult, her reaction to not getting her way is inevitably childish, and often filled with comedic (or not so comedic) violence. Sometimes this develops into rivalries that almost seem good-natured or healthy, if a little rough - she develops a confused friendship of sorts with Shinji despite looking down on him for his low self-esteem and being jealous of his inexplicable winning record in combat. The important thing is that she approves of him and other people when they have the guts to stand up to her, even if she might seem to prefer people just going along with her whims. In general, though, Asuka is a steamroller - she's going to get her way, and if she doesn't, it's going to cause her to overheat and blow a gasket.
All of that, of course, is only Asuka's outward, projected personality. The reason she's so outwardly focused is, of course, because she doesn't want to think introspectively. Asuka's self-image was shattered and ground into dust by a horribly traumatic experience when she was only four years old and reinforced by a total lack of filial affection. For ten years after that, she threw herself doggedly into anything and everything she can to ignore her creeping, festering self-loathing. She wanted to prove that it doesn't matter, that she's the best, that she doesn't need love or affection even though she craves and is addicted to praise and adulation. It was this tension, this disregarded and ignored feeling of inadequacy within Asuka that drove everything she did, and why she demanded adoration even while steadfastly shoving everyone who showed interest in her on a personal level away.
Until an Angel invaded her mind and dragged her suppressed memories and sense of total lack of self-worth to the forefront. Faced with the truth of herself, Asuka broke. With her facade shattered and all pretenses of not still being a scared little four-year-old gone from her mind, the audience can see that underneath that Asuka is cripplingly depressed, listless, and just as willing to let the world and herself go to hell as Shinji is. The whole persona was a fake, a shell surrounding Asuka's complete absence of self-worth, and she gradually withdraws more and more from the world until she's basically comatose.
And then, as one final twist at the end, it turns out her survival instinct (and the encouragement from what's left of her mother) is enough to get her to keep going for just a little while longer, taking her 'fake' persona of hers and making it her own self, turning into a self-avenging engine of destruction...at least for the last few minutes of her life. Even a little bit of honest validation was enough to get her to embrace her supposedly artificial self again, which just goes to show how much she deeply depends on others in spite of all attempts to pretend otherwise.
Asuka is abrasive, aggressive, arrogant, intentionally off-putting, and would almost rather die than ask for help. Her temper is violent and explosive and she's got an eclectic collection of neuroses like a violent phobia of dolls from her repressed memories or a tendency to loudly and obnoxiously pursue older/more mature/more paternal men (I wasn't actually joking when I linked "Electra complex" earlier). She's managed to wall herself off from the world through sheer aggression just so people don't see how vulnerable and desperate for any validation whatsoever she is underneath, and that conflict drives her whole character to extreme highs and extreme lows in distressingly rapid succession.
Any differences: In real life, of course, your parents don't try to disintegrate themselves into giant robots and end up with homicidal displacement issues to inflict on you. Reincarnated Asuka's underlying parent issues are different. Her outward affect - hyperactive attempts at achieving success and a superiority complex the size of New Hampshire - remains the same, but the underlying neuroses it covers are a fear of failing to live up to her parents' expectations. She doesn't even have any plans for a career after getting a college degree; she's just hoping her insane pace impresses her mother and father enough to get something other than a half-hearted "Good job, Asuka" out of them. Maybe a hug, even. Or at least a "congratulations".
When the stress of her breakneck academic life starts to overwhelm her, Asuka just takes on more work (or worklike hobbies) to distract herself from it, putting her on the edge of a stress-induced mental breakdown almost constantly. She allows herself only small, regimented hobbies outside of schoolwork, so she's going to have to cut significantly into either her video game time, her workout time, or her shopping-for-expensive-hair-products time to investigate this Network thing. This also leaves her prone to the same tendency toward violent or erratic outbursts at people (other than her parents) as her preincarnation, just for different underlying reasons.
She's also had a significantly privileged upbringing, so she's more than a little bit of a classist and snotty rich kid on top of being a snotty know-it-all. Needless to say, this and her obsessive studying means she has one less friend than her preincarnation (that is, zero). Asuka is concerned about herself and making herself awesome above all else, and other people should just bow down and tell her how awesome she is.
Abilities: Asuka's most prominent ability was the ability to synchronize herself with a giant (inconsistently-sized in animation) biomechanical monstrosity called Evangelion Unit 02 and pilot it as if it were an extension of her own body. Controlled by her brainwaves from inside the unit's torso, Eva 02 was meant to fight giant monsters called Angels and could be equipped with numerous giant-sized guns or melee weapons and physically project an AT Field - normally a metaphor for the psychological border between one's "self" and everything else, Evangelions and Angels could use them as actual physical barriers or as counters to another Eva/Angel's barriers (in one notable instance, Asuka also used hers as a bashing weapon). The synchronization process also requires a degree of mental coherence, with "sync ratio" performance appearing to depend approximately on both the pilot's sense of self and emotional connection with the Eva.
tl;dr it's a giant red fighting robot Asuka pilots with her brain and a couple fashion accessories. Also it's made out of cloned Angel and part of her (preincarnated) mother's soul, and it runs on an external power feed in case that ever comes up.
Due to how the Eva was piloted, preincarnated Asuka also has some muscle memory training of how to fight in close combat. She has no actual experience fighting without feeling 40 meters tall and wouldn't necessarily know how to use guns (those were controlled differently), but she at least has a general idea of how to CQC.
Asuka's natural genius in academic subjects carried over to her reincarnation, as did her ability to kick your ass at Street Fighter. On the intelligence, she has a huge aptitude for abstract thought and sciences: in her original incarnation, she actually graduated college with an unspecified degree by the time she was 14, in addition for having time for hobbies like SCUBA diving, chasing older men, maining Chun Li, and training to save the world. However, as her frequent ass-kickings in canon demonstrate, this is mostly book smarts and capacity for learning rather than common sense or situational awareness. Max INT, min WIS.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person: Wake up, go to school. Save the world?
Asuka was working on that last part, but right now she really needed to get where she was going, which is why she was running down the streets of Locke City. She was no parkour trekker, certainly, but running down a crowded sidewalk wasn't much different from her usual morning run, especially not when she'd just charge through or dodge around the various faceless suits in the way of her morning commute.
She earned a few choice shouts and swears as she bullied her way toward the subway station, which she returned with cheerful smiles or waves. Not like any of these schmucks could catch her anyway.
Her mistake came when she she turned around to give a particularly irate banker (or something?) a particularly smarmy look when she was rudely (so rudely) shoved off of her carefully planned course by someone who came up behind her. She stumbled over some loose packing crates and wound up in an alley, thankfully managing to catch herself before faceplanting.
"Christ, watch where you're going!" she shouted shrilly, almost going into a rant. "Some of us have places to be and you're gonna owe me if I'm--"
She cut herself off, not because she noticed no one was paying attention to her (she never did), but because she heard a strange sound behind her, jarring against the familiar sounds of the city and her own raised voice. A kind of chittering sound.
"And now there's a rat. Just perfect," she complained. For a moment, she paused, having difficulty deciding between the importance of getting to class on time and morbid scientific curiosity/the possibility of taking her anger out on a rat via her running boots.
In the end, she left, complaining. "I swear to God that's what's wrong with this country. People just leaving their garbage lying around for animals..."
The rat, thankfully, was run over by a bicycle as the vermini controlling it tried to use it to follow her. It'd have to attach to something less out of place to continue.
Roleplay Sample - Network: this is actually actionspam but
Any Questions? What are you, stupid?
