Shinji and Asuka — Ships in the night

 

The page title (browser frame, not the header block just above) is both a nod to the more well known Shinji and Rei: the Unspoken Romance of Evangelion and Shinji and Asuka: the Outspoken Romance of Evangelion sites. The content is directed not at the comparatively superficial analyses in those pages, but at the subtler level of text covered in the massive Shinji and Asuka thread over at the AnimeNation Forums (EvaGeeks mirror).

As an Asuka fan who's an anti-shipper of S/A, and barracked for that on the various fan forums I frequent, it was getting to be time that I put together a serious assessment of the relationship — the interactions, never a romance — between Shinji and Asuka. And that's where the header text (in the page) comes in — it's the digest of the executive summary of my position on the matter.

Two Worlds

To begin at the beginning, which is always a good place to start, let's look at the pilots in isolation, before we try and examine their interactions.

Asuka

The Second Child was, we know, already going through some sort of induction in her earliest childhood. Born on 4^th December 2001, she was chosen — and no coincidence here about the timing — as “an elite pilot” at the time of her mother's death. And we know the latest that that could have been:

So what was her life like, in the years until we next see her, in Evangelion's missing decade?

We know she was trained as a pilot, and that she had already acquired her degree, presumably only a first degree, before we see her on board ship in 2015. She is still not 14 then; so assuming a standard 3-year degree, then she was not quite 11 when she went up to University. And we know that she declared

Asuka : I am not a baby. I will become an adult earlier than

other people.

I look at her mother's surnames, and Asuka's native tongue, and conjecture that her mother was the daughter of Prussian nobility, and that Asuka's childhood, such as it was, was spent at NERV's Second Branch, in Germany, where she was treated as both a prodigy, and a warrior-noble in training, stretched to her limit by training and academic work, and then pampered when she was allowed to rest.

If she had contact with other children of her own age, there would have been barriers between them, both social (her special rôle as the Second Child reinforcing more normal class stratification) and intellectual (finding it more difficult to think down to a childish level in many aspects of life).

Shinji

Shinji is six months older than Asuka (less a couple of days — born 6^th June 2001); but his mother's Contact Experiment (going by the date on her memorial stone) was the previous year.

All we see of his early childhood is that fateful day, where he is witness to her loss; and there he seems much younger than the Asuka who watched her mother's decline. There is no sign then of a ferocious precosity to match hers; and when we see him dealing with his physics homework in episode 10, he is making heavy weather at age 14 of some quite simple material.

The years that intervene between that time and when we see him waiting for Misato's arrival are a blank for him too. The only insight we have is that he apparently lived with his teacher, and was introduced to the 'cello, as part of some quiet routine, drifting from day to day. Anything more unlike Asuka's childhood is hard to imagine.

And these two are then brought together; but not entirely by accident.

The One You're With

?

  

?

Fire and Water

She has found the man she wants now, and he has rejected her. Even the offer of her body has not brought him around. She will just have to work on him until he sees the error of his ways.

Meanwhile, Kaji ha

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