After 3I, why does Asuka regain life before the others?

[Jornophelanthas]

...where the hell are you getting that idea from? Just because we don't specifically see her interacting with the world doesn't mean she can't.

Arguably, she does interact with the world. Shinji's sees an apparation of Rei just before he notices Asuka.

[Chrad]

The audience has just been told that anyone can return to life should they make the decision to, and we've been shown how this works for Shinji, so it's only logical to assume that the same thing took place with Asuka.

She was clinging on to her life with everything she had left when she was killed in Air, so it makes sense that she'd be one of the first to take up the offer to reclaim it.

[Kendrix]

1. We don't know if she is, in fact, the second person to come back, the Earth is big - She is just the first person Shinji comes across

2. Asuka puts a lot of emphasis on being different from everyone else and tries to keep others away from herself and, most of all, her inner thoughts. She won't stay in a state of being the same soup as everyone else where everybody can read her mind. Also, as many have pointed out before, she has proven to have a very strong will to live, at least post-character-developement. When she fought the harpies, she never thought of surrendering or giving up, she kept kicking and screaming to the very end. That very will to live should make her detang relatively fast.

3. As someone pointed out before, she won't let herself be killed by Shinji.

4. Instrumentality works by all of humanity complementing each other/compensating for each other's weaknesses/erasing the need for others. It doesn't work if one piece of the big puzzle is missing.
Now, given that Rei and Kaworu are special cases/probably not comming back, Asuka would be the people who "misses"/"needs" Shinji the most - (Hence "I Need you") Note the parallelism to episode 9 here - She places herself next to him while he's asleep/unconcious/whatever.

@ Grave marker Question: Shinji has been told that everyone can come back if they want to, but apparently, some time has elapsed between the scene where he undoes Instrumentality and surfaces, where he seems if not hopeful, then at least decided, and the last scene.
Probably, he remained alone for a while and thought no one else was comming back. And well, if they're not comming back, they're gonna need tombstones.

also, I'd like to call your attention to the following: For all we see of Asuka during Instrumentality, she is pissed and keeps insulting Shinji as long as some of her remains as a partially independent entity.
Towards the end of the TI scene, there is that scenes where we hear lots of what can be subsumed as "female rejection", the last being Asuka yelling "I'd rather die than do it with YOU"- Of course, the scene is all but straifghtforward, but I've always interpreted it as Instrumentality taking its course, with some of the people that are subjected to it being less than happy because not all of them wanted to "be one" with Shinji - with Asuka being the most pissed of them all who resisted Instrumentality untill the end.

[Henry Spencer]

For all we see of Asuka during Instrumentality, she is pissed and keeps insulting Shinji as long as some of her remains as a partially independent entity.

It's implied that that isn't the real Asuka at all, so much as Shinji's perspective of her in his psyche putting him down.

That would probably explain why she would carress him in the last scene instead of fighting against him; she didn't see it happen, even though she was a part of the primordial soup that consumed everyone.

[Mr. Tines]

It's implied that that isn't the real Asuka at all, so much as Shinji's perspective of her in his psyche putting him down.

The whole point of Instrumentality is that while it might all be happening in Shinji's mind, that's only because he's sharing it with everyone else at the time -- we don't even need to appeal to Gendo's explanation in episode 25 for that, we can see it happen when everyone starts commenting on Misato's sex life.

It also shows quite how cack-handedly the S/A retcon was managed.

[Kendrix]

I always interpreted it as the merging being in process, so he and Asuka start to see each others thought's and shout into each other's faces what they usually wouldn't say out loud, but they haven't seen every detail of each other yet/ can still interact on some level.

the fact that she secretly has the hots for him has either not been revealed to him yet, or it might have been aknowdledged in the sex pose scene

"Oh, just looking at you makes me angry?"
"Cuz I'm just like you?" -> He can tell why she hates him and the image is perhaps meant to call her out on a certain level of hypocracy/ that she does feel attracted to him despite her claims to the oposite. Could be just a generic instrumentality = sex metaphor, though. Probably, it's both.


Also, there is the possibility that she just touched him cuz she knew that would keep him from snapping her neck for good.

[Bagheera]

...where the hell are you getting that idea from? Just because we don't specifically see her interacting with the world doesn't mean she can't.

But she won't. She's even more of a spineless invertebrate than Shinji is, particularly given the fact that her single moment of agency in the whole damn series was immediately followed by her asking Shinji what he wanted her to do.

"I am not a puppet," she says. To which I say:

"Of course you are, dear. You're just fussy about who's pulling your strings."

As for the rest, Aura's first post nails it. We don't know what's going on in the rest of the world, so we have no particular reason to think she was the first to come back. If she was, I would think it would have more to do with her familiarity with ATFs (being an Eva pilot) and participation in P3II than anything else.

[AuraTwilight]

I just want to reiterate that I totally like to think that everyone is fine but no one wants to spawn within miles of Shinji except Asuka. They're gonna head like 50 miles East and find that everyone's already rebuilding. It'll be great.

[sum_exsanguis]

This kinda hit me while I was laying in bed for awhile watching Epi 25...could the Asuka that comes back from the LCL not be the Asuka from the series? In those final episodes it says that there are numerous versions of us in any one dimension, the we that we percieve ourselves, and then one of us for how each and every person percieves us, or the one of us that lives in other people. Could the Asuka that came back be the one from Shinji's memories which is why she knows of his wank session and all and that is why she says how she is disgusting/disgusted? I know it seems like a real long shot, but it was the only solution I could find in myself to explain how someone who appeared to be clearly dead came back to life.

[Henry Spencer]

I think that she was referring to being disgusted by the thought of Shinji killing her. The original line basically went "I'd never allow myself to be killed by the likes of you!"

[Mr. Tines]

I think that she was referring to being disgusted by the thought of Shinji killing her.

Time for a repost

I had been thinking directors should convey their ideal how the show shold be to us. But Annno pitchs us questions such as “What do you think for yourself if things went on such and such ways to you?”

After recording all lines of the movie, I was called to the studio because the final line needed to be revised. Ogata came there too as it was Asuka and Shinji's scene.

Asuka's final line was “Anta nankani korosareru nowa mappira yo!” in the film scenario. Anno didn't live with my line no matter how many times I tried. Ogata and I were at a loss how we should play what Anno wanted to express; she even tried to ride on me and choke me to meet his demand. He must have been pursuing reality.

Concerning the final line we adopted, I'm not sure whether I should say about it in fact. At last Anno asked me “Miyamura, just imagine you are sleeping in your bed and a stranger sneaks into your room. He can rape you anytime as you are asleep but he doesn't. Instead, he masturbates looking at you, when you wake up and know what he did to you. What do you think you would say?”

I had been thinking he was a strange man, but at that moment I felt disgusting. So I told him that I thought “Disgusting”. And then he sighed and said “… thought as much.” He said. “I thought as much.”

[Drabant]

Could be a lots of things. We can't even say they were the first, although the distinct lack of people and utter silence in the area is suspicious.

Rei's timely appearance and Shinji's subsequent brutal reaction to seeing Asuka could mean it's the first time he meets Asuka after 3I, and that Rei played a part in bringing her there. Of all the people in the world struggling to get back, people with larger drives for living and a more solid psyche, it's not exactly likely or even believable that those two would be the first to return to the real world. Asuka's lines also sound like something that would be said at the first opportunity, especially if you believe it's a comment regarding Shinji's hospital fap session. Waiting with that comment wouldn't make sense. Shinji, if he were the one to erect the graves, seems to believe that they are dead and gone, so that might mean he is not expecting them to come back, and his reaction to Asuka would be more reasonable.

So, to reiterate, one is Rei 'bringing' or 'aiding' Asuka back in a similar way to how Shinji was brought back.

An easy but not solid view is of course, that she "just came back at the right time and place", conveniently like that.

Another is that they've both been there for some time, at least Shinji seems to be at least. They are just chilling on the beach for a few moments trying to process what the fuck just happened, until Shinji hears a splash and sees Rei. So this freaks him out a bit, for all he knows he could still be floating as a soul somewhere, right? After all, you supposedly gain the ability to create or imagine your own reality inside instrumentality, as demonstrated by the TV-series and mentioned by the characters in EoE. He could have imagined doing something he wanted, like overcoming his troubles, effectively "complementing" him.

So he goes for the reality-check, which is choking/attacking Asuka to get a reaction, namely rejection, which isn't possible inside uncontrolled instrumentality. Still, this makes Asuka's lines more puzzling.
Another interesting thing is that Asuka doesn't exactly reject him either, nor does she involuntarily react like a person getting choked would, she just caresses him.

So, the sum of the above would be the possibility that neither of them actually came back.

That's what you get for throwing in a scene with little solid context, a lot of interpretations with no real way to prove any of them without additional material. Just add up the factors and pick whichever sounds most likely.

[bobbyfischer's ghost]

Shinji has a choking fetish, Rei decided to help.

----------
As for my real answer I think it's Asuka's willpower.

[sum_exsanguis]

But if Shinji was still in instrumentality wouldn't he get the answer he wanted? I thought it was a world of whatever you liked to happen to create would so doesn't that make it all null?

[AuraTwilight]

No, it's not any such thing. It's merely a world where the mind, and the minds of others, are all that exist. It's not going to conjure up anything you yourself can't imagine, and it's not just a Lotus Eater Machine.

[EVAJedi]

Could be a lots of things. We can't even say they were the first, although the distinct lack of people and utter silence in the area is suspicious.

Rei's timely appearance and Shinji's subsequent brutal reaction to seeing Asuka could mean it's the first time he meets Asuka after 3I, and that Rei played a part in bringing her there. Of all the people in the world struggling to get back, people with larger drives for living and a more solid psyche, it's not exactly likely or even believable that those two would be the first to return to the real world. Asuka's lines also sound like something that would be said at the first opportunity, especially if you believe it's a comment regarding Shinji's hospital fap session. Waiting with that comment wouldn't make sense. Shinji, if he were the one to erect the graves, seems to believe that they are dead and gone, so that might mean he is not expecting them to come back, and his reaction to Asuka would be more reasonable.

So, to reiterate, one is Rei 'bringing' or 'aiding' Asuka back in a similar way to how Shinji was brought back.

An easy but not solid view is of course, that she "just came back at the right time and place", conveniently like that.

Another is that they've both been there for some time, at least Shinji seems to be at least. They are just chilling on the beach for a few moments trying to process what the fuck just happened, until Shinji hears a splash and sees Rei. So this freaks him out a bit, for all he knows he could still be floating as a soul somewhere, right? After all, you supposedly gain the ability to create or imagine your own reality inside instrumentality, as demonstrated by the TV-series and mentioned by the characters in EoE. He could have imagined doing something he wanted, like overcoming his troubles, effectively "complementing" him.

So he goes for the reality-check, which is choking/attacking Asuka to get a reaction, namely rejection, which isn't possible inside uncontrolled instrumentality. Still, this makes Asuka's lines more puzzling.
Another interesting thing is that Asuka doesn't exactly reject him either, nor does she involuntarily react like a person getting choked would, she just caresses him.

So, the sum of the above would be the possibility that neither of them actually came back.

That's what you get for throwing in a scene with little solid context, a lot of interpretations with no real way to prove any of them without additional material. Just add up the factors and pick whichever sounds most likely.

I like what you stated here and the reasons given.

Upon the first time watching it, which was recently, I took it as Shinji just arriving. It is possible that after coming back, he still had the cross in his hand (although when he was with Rei he let the cross go) so either that was him letting it go in the primordial soup or he really did let it go - so who nailed it the cross as a memorial???

And the fact that we see Rei floating about the water (LCL or soup) - the same ghostly Rei as I liked to call her that we have seen in her school clothes from the 1st time in Episode 1 when Shinji is waiting to be picked up by Misato to parts throughout the series - means that she could have been a conduit of some sorts in getting them back or at least watching over them somehow. -

As for your Shinji trying to see if he is in reality...that is also a possible argument as he is choking her...but she appears to be dead anyway even before he's choking her...so he could be hoping for sometype of reaction.
Remember, when she was in bed, he wanted her to call him an idiot as these types of reactions...whether positive or negative at least give attention to Shinji and would confirm if she was alive.

The fact that she went to caress his face was rather touching and out of Asuka's character...still loved that part though.

As to her response - it could be a joke as to the reference of what happened in the hospital room as you stated, or since she still has pride to her, that this crybaby is now on top of her...

So many ways to look at it. When I see the movie again, I am sure I will gain even more insight.

[esselfortium]

Strangling someone to see if they're real and alive makes about as much sense as throwing someone to the bottom of a lake to see if they're a witch.

[EVAJedi]

Strangling someone to see if they're real and alive makes about as much sense as throwing someone to the bottom of a lake to see if they're a witch.

Very true, but we are talking about Shinji here...and his actions are sometimes intriguing to say the least.

What's funny is that his face did not have the same disdain as when he was first choking her in his 3I motif - and he was not grasping her as hard either.

As I stated, it looked like she was already dead... so him choking her could have been a warped way or seeing she was alive, or choking her for dying on him???

I do agree...if it was me, my first reaction would have been what he did when he first saw her in the hospital - trying to shake her to wake her up.

Which...maybe this was supposed to be an alternative to that first scene - we start with Shinji looking at the water and then going to fainted Asuka...and we end with Shinji looking at the water and strangling a fainted Asuka. - Anno at his best...

[Korgan]

she even tried to ride on me and choke me to meet his demand

/r/ pics pls