ASUKA.MD

Her Story

Asuka Langley Soryu arrives in the series like a firework — loud, brilliant, impossible to ignore. But the story underneath the noise is one of the saddest in all of Evangelion. This is that story, told with love, from a doll in a German hospital to a beach at the end of the world.

The Doll and the Rope

Before she was the Second Child, before the red Eva, before any of it — Asuka was a little girl in Germany who wanted her mother to look at her.

Her mother, Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu, was a technician and test pilot at NERV's German branch. When Asuka was four, Kyoko took part in a contact experiment with Evangelion Unit-02 — the same kind of experiment that had swallowed Yui Ikari inside Unit-01 — and something went terribly wrong: part of Kyoko's soul was taken into the Eva, and the woman who came back was no longer whole. The Kyoko who survived recognized only one thing as her daughter — a doll she carried everywhere, cradled, and spoke to. The real Asuka, standing right there in the room, became "that girl over there."

During Kyoko's illness, her father began an affair with his wife's doctor, and later married her. Asuka never hated her stepmother — she simply refused to let her take her real mother's place. So Asuka did what desperate, brilliant children do: she decided to become someone no one could ignore. When she was chosen as the Second Child — the designated pilot of Evangelion Unit-02 — she ran home to tell her mother. Finally, surely, mama would look at her now.

"Mama, they chose me! I'm an elite pilot now… Look at me, look at me mama. LOOK MAMA!"

— Asuka, reliving her memories in Episode #22

She opened the door and found her mother dead. Kyoko had hanged herself, with the doll beside her — the doll that had taken Asuka's place, right to the end.

At the funeral, her grandmother took her hand and told her it was all right to cry. Asuka refused. That day she swore she would take care of herself, and never cry again. She folded her grief into steel and built her entire identity, her entire sense of worth, on a single foundation: being the best pilot in the world. Everything she became — the arrogance, the temper, the impossible pride — was a fortress built by a little girl who was never once looked at.

The Best in the World

We meet Asuka properly in Episode #8, "Asuka Strikes!", and she does not exactly sneak into the show. She arrives in Japan escorted by the U.N. Pacific fleet Over the Rainbow, Unit-02 riding aboard its carrier — a fleet that also carried one Ryoji Kaji, smuggling the fossilized embryo of Adam to Gendo Ikari in his hand luggage. She makes her introduction by fighting an Angel — underwater, on her first day, with a very bewildered Shinji Ikari stuffed into her entry plug wearing her spare plug suit.

"This is the designated pilot of Eva Unit 02, the 2nd Child, Asuka Langley Soryu."

— Misato Katsuragi, Episode #8

And here's the thing: she backed it up. Asuka had been identified as a pilot candidate around age seven and trained for years at NERV's 3rd Branch in Germany. She was already a college graduate at fourteen. She held the highest synchronization ratio of all the Children. Unit-02 — the world's first true production-model Evangelion, assembled and activated in Germany — was hers, and heaven help anyone who suggested otherwise. Not long after her debut, she and Shinji took down Israfel — the Angel that splits in two — with a perfectly synchronized dual attack, executed in sixty-two seconds flat.

"Oh no you don't! The only way you're using my Unit-02 is over my dead body!"

— Asuka

What made Asuka special wasn't just talent. Among all the Children, she was the only one who seemed to genuinely enjoy the job. Where Shinji piloted out of obligation and fear, Asuka piloted with joy — the Angel was the enemy, the Eva was her stage, and victory was the applause she'd been starving for her whole life. For a while, it worked. For a while, she really was the best in the world.

The Downfall

Episode #16 is where the crack appears. In the harmonics tests, quiet, reluctant Shinji — the boy who didn't even want to be there — surpasses Asuka's sync ratio. For anyone else it would be a footnote. For Asuka, whose entire self-worth was a tower balanced on the single word "best," it was the foundation giving way.

Then the defeats piled up. Unit-02 was beaten by the Bardiel-possessed Unit-03. Then Zeruel — the Angel that breached the Geofront itself — severed Unit-02's head with a single strike of its ribbon arms. And in Episode #22, the fifteenth Angel — Arael, the one that attacks the mind — caught her in its psychic beam and forced her to relive everything: the hospital, the doll, her mother's swinging shadow, the door she should never have opened. The fortress she'd spent a decade building was torn open in front of an audience of Angels, and something in Asuka simply… broke.

Her sync ratio collapsed below ten percent. Unit-02 — the Eva she loved, the Eva that held her mother's soul — would no longer move for her. The girl who once declared herself the world's elite pilot couldn't even lift its hand.

"Why for her? Am I so worthless you couldn't do this for me?"

— Asuka

"When I didn't win with my Eva, I lost whatever value I might have had… I hate myself the most."

— Asuka

She ran away. In Episode #24 they found her in an abandoned building, her wrists cut — a suicide attempt she was too weak to finish. NERV brought her back catatonic — hollow-eyed, unresponsive, the loudest girl in the world gone silent. The TV series ends with Asuka in a hospital bed, and it is one of the cruelest endings ever given to a character this alive.

End of Evangelion

When the JSSDF comes to destroy NERV — N2 weapons leveling Tokyo-3 above them — the catatonic Asuka is placed inside Unit-02's entry plug and the Eva is sunk to the bottom of the lake beneath headquarters — not to fight, just to keep her safe. Explosions rock the water. Depth charges rain down. And in the dark of the entry plug, drowning in LCL and despair, Asuka finally understands what was there all along.

Her mother never left her. Part of Kyoko's soul had lived inside Unit-02 since the accident — the same accident that took her away. Every battle Asuka ever fought, her mother was fighting beside her. "Mama… you were with me. All this time, you were protecting me."

And Asuka comes back.

It is one of the greatest resurrection scenes in anime. Unit-02 bursts from the lake and Asuka single-handedly annihilates the entire JSSDF assault — tanks, aircraft, everything they throw at her. Then the nine Mass Production Evangelions descend, winged and white and wrong, and she kills all nine of them within Unit-02's remaining power limit. Nine. In under three and a half minutes.

But the Mass Production Evas don't stay dead. Unit-02's power runs out the moment the ninth falls, and a replica Lance of Longinus takes the Eva's eye — then the nine, each carrying its own S² engine, revive around it. What follows is brutal and unbearable: Unit-02 — and Asuka, who feels every sensation her Eva feels — is torn apart. She reaches toward the sky with one last defiant arm before the end. Even disemboweled, even defeated, she never begged.

And then, after everything — after Third Impact, after the end of the world — there is a beach, a red sea, and two children. Shinji, his hands around her throat — and then weeping over her, the grip gone slack. Asuka, bandaged like Unit-02, reaches up and strokes his cheek. The last line of End of Evangelion, and maybe the most debated final line in anime history, belongs to her — delivered with cold disgust:

気持ち悪い。

"Kimochi warui." — "How disgusting."

— Asuka Langley Soryu, End of Evangelion

Disgusting? Maybe. But she's alive. She's looking at him. After everything the world did to her, Asuka Langley Soryu is still there at the end of it, choosing to come back — and for a girl who spent her whole life begging to be seen, that might be the closest thing to a happy ending Evangelion ever offered anyone.