"i cannot be defeated! mama is watching after me!"
in case you missed it: asuka and ritsuko are the same character. i could talk about this for ages, but in the interest of brevity:
- both asuka’s mother and ritsuko’s mother were emotionally distant in life, and compartmentalized upon death - asuka’s mother resides in unit-02, ritsuko’s mother resides in the magi
- both watched their mothers commit suicide
- both have a distant mother-figure - for ritsuko it’s her grandmother, for asuka it’s her stepmother
- both fixated on an older man at a young age - for asuka it was kaji, for ritsuko it was gendo
- both express a desire for never having children
- both stand in opposition to rei/grow to detest rei over time
- their entrance and exit scenes are laterally mirrored - both emerge from water, then die at their mother’s betrayal
- in that same vein, both share in visual imagery: there’s a scene where ritsuko stops to wash her face in the bathroom that asuka goes on to mirror
- this one’s a little more elusive, but all the more fascinating: i need you. gendo’s silent words to ritsuko, shinji’s words to asuka during instrumentality. guess what asuka and ritsuko both respond with? liar.
- take it as you will, but in one of the supplementary games it’s said that asuka wanted to be a scientist after piloting. yeah.
