Postby Kendrix » Mon Oct 28, 2013 12:32 pm
I guess you could also see the heavy PoV use as making a choice and having the streght to stick with it
I have a very hard time using 1st person narration for that reason _ i just end up ranging within the limits of just one person and everything that gets missed, so even if I at times get very, very close to the individual perception of one character/their stream of conciousness, I'm not comfortable switching out of 3rd person PoV.
What this did alert me of, even though I have a very different interpretation of Asuka (mainly, that extreme brilliance is something she forces herself to do; and it hurts her; She's actually deathly afraid of the very idea of someone with "actual talent"; She needs to be somewhat above-average to do what she did, but she's not aware of that because it doesn't meet her impossibly high standarts ), was that there's really few depictions of "Asuka linking with EVA 02 and what it feels like".
Even I had completely overlooked it, and I was intending to give some time to "what linking with an EVA actually feel like" (The episode 2 berserk and my interpretation of what it was like for Shinji is already available), I had some sort of fixed idea for Mari that I already wrote down, and planned ideas about Rei and Kaworu, the former of which were already kinda implied, though I was planning to give it more detail later, but Asuka?
All I had was Shinji thinking that being inside unit two feels "colder and less inviting" and briefly wondering what it feels like for Asuka, but I had never intended to deliver on it.
If it was just me, I'd think it was me just not getting Asuka, but it doesn't get done much, and hardly ever beyond reiteration of the "Shit, it no longer works" already sufficiently implied in the series.
Maybe because she's sort of percieved as "the average case of a pilot", being basically a normal human and not the main character.
I'd be weird if I just shoehorned it in on the next possible occasion, so I'm saving the introduction of it for the oncomming "Asuka Gaiden", which I might get to once I stop being stuck in that episode 11 arc that I've been at, like, forever... It'll make for a nice parallelism when I get to that Zerogoki thing I have planned...
Or another aspect that I didn't notice, not just fanfic wise but in terms of general interpretation is... also the way Asuka's relationship with unit two is handed, but really the actual psychosocial relationship this time. The author had her think of it as something like an animal and even worry that it may have "died", but then, she's like "It's just a doll" like in episode 22. At first, I felt this was a bit of Sadamoto-esque switching back to Status Quo for Statu's Quo's sake, but then, I got it, the mechanics behind that paradox.
When you think about it, that's also in the series, with the way she talks to it in ep 10, this "seeing it as a living being", which is a tad more than an unanimated "doll".
Like a pet animal, or a cute interactive toy robot.
Maybe there was this acceptance curve reaching the point just before the uncanny valley... and then slipping right inside with a slight push. It's kinda fun to play pretend that something is alive, if it's a personalitiless blank slate, because it can become your dream, it doesn't talk back - and you don't have to respect it like a human, whom you can't mold however you want because it's a human.
It's this weird relationship that perople have with -near human objects, first, of course, the uncanny valley/"Frankenstein-Komplex", but there's also this opposing force that creates fascination. Everybody loves fictional artificial humans! Especially the sort you can mold to be anything. This opposing force, that you might, in analogy to Asimov's term, name for one of the oldest examples, "Galatea-Complex." To create something in your image, but in your exact image, not something that grows up and talks back to you (See also that old lady from GitS 2. I think it's possible for a parent to let go of that idea they want their kid to become and love them as a growing 3D person, tho. But parents DO have these ideas. )
You can also see this to an extent with Rei, who was made to take the shape of Gendo's dream. Or even the Evangelion's themselves - An EVA 02 that doesn't demand equal treatment can become Asuka's dream; One that does demand things demands she concede things. It owns her.
a lot of Asuka's inner monologue, for example during the mindrape, is also a refusal to let either of her mother figures "mold" her into their Galatea.
But it's not just unit two Asuka has this problem with. It's a general thingThat's the true meaning of the Alt Life-Action scene's "Like keeping a dog".
She sees most people like she sees unit two, really, as filling fixed cardboard roles in her world, that are mostly defined by whatever aspects of herself that she doesn't like she prefers to project onto them.
For most of the action arc... yeah, she and Shinji argued a lot, but they were able to work together and initially, Asuka was actually showing sighs of defrostment. That is because while she may deny it (allthough there are things she has much stronger dinial going on with), she actually liked to have someone to support her and fight with her, because, duh, people seek company, and it's tiring to always bear the load yourself, even if she forces herself to. so far, Shinji's existence was a relief... but only as long as he was this flailing nervous wreck of a rookie who tried hard to keep up with her, but could never actually manage to. Ideally, he would be just a little below her skil level. Once he starts getting close to surpassing her, he's scary. Suddenly, he's making her look like fake cardboard. Asuka, at least before the finale, isn't really capable of doing "equal" - the slippery slope to "superior" is too scary, so they must be inferiors.
She says that she wants an equal, but she never really meant it; She only wants to want one. She tells herself she wants one from Kaji, too, but she's actually looking for a replacement daddy.
This explains why she superficially "likes" EVA 02 while seeing it as a "doll" object in a way more elaborate that simple pretense/denial as well as the mechanics between her decreasing synch rate, and why it suddenly sparked again in EoE. She realized that EVA 02 was not a scary thing with a diffuse "will", but that there's a bit of a human in there - Her beloved mommy, whom she can cooperate with as a human, and even wants to cooperate with.
/fanwank.
Something else that was unique about this thing, however flawed it may be, is that they had the "boring random episode 15 date guy" turn out to be just genuinely boring.
most ppl either completely drop the incident, or have him turn out to be some sort of perv, presumably to downplay how Asuka really could've been less crude about dumping him, or to give the hormone-driven infatuation between her and Shinji an "Only one" status it never had.
It's very possible that the dude was a) actually just boring or b) Asuka got cold feet when she actually got close to getting older dude or c) She found she couldn't really enjoy this because older dude is not really what she wanted or d) she felt she was just "settling for less" instead of having the dude of her choice (be it Kaji or Shinji), and couldn't stand the thought.
Especially since we're not really told anything other than, "He's boring, so I left him at the rolercoaster" - The whole moment is probably meant to say something about Asuka more than anything else; if anything dramatic in a relevant way would have happened, we would have seen it.
I wanted to try harvesting the rice
I wanted to hold Tsubame more
I wanted to stay together forever with the boy I like
Gob Hobblin wrote:GreggHL: When you say that you're taking the Ree's powers from the charmtrees, does that mean the Ree have all the same powers, or each has moved into their own 'specialty?' If that's a spoiler you don't want to reveal, then that's bene, but it got me curious.
