Personally, "done dirty" is not the term I would use on Shikinami, but rather "wasted potential".
Back when 2.0 was released, the "dumbing down" of her character arc looked like either a simplification of her character arc due to the time constraints of the movie format and/or an effect if Anno making the movie more "fanservicy", then the timeskip made many people think that this simplification was because the real "meat" of her character will be after said timeskip, but with the revelations of her past in Thrice, it completely recontextualizes her entire behavior in 2.0: not only her faster crush on Shinji (implied in the movies and confirmed in the manga to be because Shinji treated her like a person with her own value instead of a weapon and brought a sense of normalcy in her fucked up life), but also her much more introvert behavior in school and the "cooking war" (both because of her lack of social skill, again due to her upbringing) and why did she seemingly changed her competitive nature to accept help from others and having friends to rely on (due to her longing of partners after her training/upbringing forced her in a battle royal against her "sisters", unlike Soryu whose competitive nature was about her desire to be the number one pilot by fear of being abandoned due to her mother's insanity and suicide, in short more "self-imposed" while in Shikinami's case it was a literal question of life or death).
This revealed backstory showed that there was much more than meet the eye with Shikinami, that she was a very different character than Soryu, justifying the name change beyond just a question of theme naming, and that said character could be brought to completely new directions than Soryu or even NGE, on top of the things that happened with the timeskip that added even more to her character (the years of battle, the Curse of Eva and Angel infection) also shows potential for further character arcs to explore (the most obvious one being her feeling of not being human and thus not needing/deserving anything that humans enjoy, such as being around them or even
having clothes), and as BernardoCairo notes in a previous post... it amounts to basically nothing.
Rather than having a character progression, she's basically stuck as a living symbol of Shinji's failure that he must fix as a payoff of his character development.
And this I think, is a consequence of both the runtime limitations movie format that prevents her character to be properly explored in one movie, not with all the other things it already has to tackle, and the fact that the writers didn't wanted to have her relegated as secondary character, due to the importance that the character historically has in the franchise.
Archer wrote at the beginning of this thread about a scenario where Asuka physically grew up to 28 years old, and indeed, that would had been a perfect way to "relegate" here to secondary character: after the ship teasing in 2.0, do like in the anime
, with Shinji in a coma, Asuka grew up and moved on in her life with new responsibilities and got her character arc offscreen and now is more or less in peace with herself, maybe have even her hooked with Kensuke, the opportunity was there but it passed due to tragic circumstances, it's a little sad but such is life, time to move on. Maybe take the opportunity to expand on other characters that are new, like Sakura, Kaji Jr... or maybe Mari.
But Anno and the rest of Khara didn't do that, instead they kept her at a physical age of 14 and mentally not much more (despite what several members wrote on the subject, from my POV she doesn't act at all like an adult) and with her issues and new ones, to keep with the dynamic of her and Shinji being two faces of the same coin, but instead of being about being two lonely people who can't open themselves to others as it was in NGE, this time its more about being people groomed for a role their whole life and who somehow managed to outlive their usefulness and now try to find out where to go from here (with the twist that Shinji doesn't have any use for the bad guys, unlike Asuka), on top of coming to grips with their perceived inhumanity (due to the Curse for both, as well as his guilt for Shinji and her Angel infection for Asuka): as masterfully noted by another member in the thread about Shinji and Asuka's relationship in Thrice, this theme of them being the two faces of the same coin is conveyed through visual language in the movies (instead of dialogues and monologues such as in NGE and EoE), with several parallel shot of them unwittingly having the same poses and reactions at different points of time, and especially in how the beginning of Shinji living in Kensuke's house is basically a mirror of Asuka barging in Shinji's live in Misato's apartment at the beginning of 2.0, but with Shinji and Asuka's role reversed - up to a (dark) redo of the incident of him walking on her being naked - and with her Wonderswann, which was implied in 2.0 and pretty much confirmed in Thrice to be her equivalent of Shinji's SDAT as a tool to isolate herself from the world.
Except that, as noted before, it doesn't really go anywhere: the first half of Thrice already having its hands full with Shinji going back from cuckoo town and Rei Q's Harvest Moon adventure, so there are no place left for a character arc for Asuka, who thus stay stuck between observing Shinji from afar and playing her console alone in her room, and by the time both arcs are finished, it's already time for the final battle. Even the confession in his cell feels more like Asuka putting her affairs in order before going to die rather than the culmination of a character arc.
Then there's the revelation of her past and origins, the key that make all the pieces of her character fit together and reveal her character as being a different one than Soryu and not just because of the timeskip, that explains her entire behavior in 2.0, why she fell in love for Shinji so fast and why she kept that love for 14 years (because he was the first person that treated her and made her feel like a human being in her entire life, by the time Kensuke entered her life there was the Curse and the Angel that put a wall for him to have the same effect as Shinji), and put a new context on the relationship between her and Kensuke... and it happens in the few minutes before her last scene, so there's nothing the story can do with it as it's already time to wrap up her story, so in the end this plot bomb only serve to retroactively show that her behavior in 2.0 wasn't random or a "dumbing down", which is nice yes, but I feel that there was so much more they could had done with it.
The most frustrating is that there was a build up to a character arc... or rather a "retroactive build-up": it was not subtly teased during the Village 3 half of Thrice that she hated her body and that she thought herself as not human and unable (or rather unwilling) to relate and mingle with them, then the hair cutting scene with Mari and manga prequel put that in words, but the former happens near the final act of movie, after the half where such a character arc could happen, and the latter was released after the movie itself, so again, there's nothing that the story can do with it except giving some more context to her past actions.
As noted previously in this thread, the writers said in the 2.0 CRC that they had a very hard time determining what to do with Asuka in the compressed runtime of that movie, and I'm curious to see what they have to say in the Thrice CRC, because I have the feeling that they ran upon the same problem there, and that the hair-cutting scene and manga was them throwing in what they potentially wanted to do with her character. I don't think it's a coincidence that she was completely absent from Village 3 in the initial draft of 3.0 (present as a bonus in the 3.333 BR), back when the time at the village was supposed to be the second half of the movie, and teased in the last page that the last movie will be more centered on her.
Then there's the deal with her love of Shinji. Putting aside the shipping wars, I can understand why some people feel that it holds back her character, even with the revelations on her past and origins giving some context on
why does she still have said feelings, not helping is the fact that of her outside of battle interactions with Mari (by far the character she's seen interacting the more with post-timeskip), prequel manga included, only
one is not about her feelings for him (again the hairdressing scene). Not helping is that while she and Shinji talk
to the other in several scenes in Thrice, they seldom talk to
each other, the closest to an actual conversation is the scene in Shinji's cell, and even it's limited to Shinji answering to one question from Asuka before she spills the beans on her feelings (while never looking at each other the whole time), even their last scene on the beach is Shinji being the one spilling the beans on his feelings while Asuka doesn't say anything.
So yeah, "wasted opportunities" resume my feelings on Asuka in Rebuild, I feel that there was a lot that the story could had done with her character, notably on the theme of humanity and what it means to be human (which was build up as being one of the big themes of Rebuild, between the Curse of Eva, the Angel infection, all those clones, and Gendo's roboticization and then transformation) and self-imposed barriers towards others, but in the end her character issues were reduced to being something for Shinji to fix as a milestone of his character arc. At least there's her relationship with Kensuke which was something really original, even if I would had liked to see how such a peculiar relationship came to be.
kuribo-04 wrote:As described above I don't see any regression. The manga definitely felt pretty haremy, which is fine with me. It's a spin-off not even written by Anno, and I enjoyed it for what it was.
IIRC the manga's story was written by Anno, and is canon to Rebuild.