ichtreteihrgesicht | SO. ESSAY. YES.

Iiiiii am not going to deal with Asuka's next memory yet because a) headcanon and b) I still have no fucking IDEA if she'll be calm and congenial enough to even take it for .... at least a few in-game days. (I am not convinced she will, like, actually throw it against a wall and break it like I was pretty sure she was going to for a while there, but. But.)

SO ANYWAY. We'll get to this game in a bit! But first. Let's backtrack aaaaalll the way back to Snow's game. And the memory she got there. Because yes, that's a Sig Neu memory, but it ... wasn't exactly a good memory. It just wasn't a horrifically trauma one - and it had a good ending! However, it kind of was for Ginger! Because she is someone who genuinely wants everyone to like her! And the thing is, she picks up on how people treat her and how her people act. This means Emerald, and all her outside friends. She is someone who is intensely socially aware; this is just an Asuka thing, it's not something she picks up from memories, it's always there. You can see this in Aather in how she will often change her conversation approach mid-stream, if she picks up on the sliiightest shift in tack, and how her approach to people is not standard across the board - some people she's more brusque with, some people she's very open to, some people she'll just textwall at for fucking ever unless they want her to shut up.

So the fact that she's been, for the most part, trying to push can we get along so hard is because ... because everyone else is! And it does feel good to make friends! But there's ... also that sense, in the back of her mind, a kind of nagging guilt, that she might just only be doing this because it makes people like her. She's not sure she really means it.

Because deep down, every Asuka, ever, hates herself, even if she doesn't know why, and even if she doesn't have a reason. I mentioned last time that she may not have the memories, but she has the tendencies? This is one she's always had. One she always will have. She will find that chink in her own armor. She will make it wider. And then that chink in her armor will become her armor.

And the thing about the memory that she got from Snow is that - yes, the moral of the story was it's good to make friends with people but the context was you aren't capable of making friends with people and that just. See, Asuka doesn't ... have any reason to doubt her own memories are true or question their relevance to her, so ... she just ... she took that lesson, and her first thoughtt really was "so does that make everything I've been doing a lie?" because she was already half-thinking it, even if she didn't know it. She just puts up walls even without meaning to and then she doesn't know how to break them down; other people have to start to break them down for her before she can figure it out herself.

So this gave her a healthy dose of paranoia; it also made her incredibly possessive of basically everyone important to her ever. This is something that's going to probs have some very long-term effects; in a sense, anyone who's even halfway close to Ginger or going to be, you are now her people. And part of this is because of refraction from her first memory, which she already internalized as, partly, "I am someone who will do strange and unusual things that I don't like if it means I can make people like me". And because of her second memory that is amplified into "I will do anything so I don't lose anybody".

In case you were curious about why Ginger flipped out and killed a lion with a shield, that's, uh. THAT WOULD BE WHY, because she faced that lion and the fact that it was about to eat her teammates and her brain had a complete fucking meltdown over the thought of "I CANNOT LOSE MY TEAM I CANNOT LOSE THEM CAN'T" and stomped hard on the "REJECT THE WORLD" button that's aaalways lurking on the sidelines for basically every Eva character whose name isn't Kaworu or Rei. She was ready to die if it meant she never had to see anyone she needed go away. She was ready to murder people.

And I think the thing that scared her most about that is that she isn't scared of it, she just accepted that as soon as she had to do it. She's scared, because ... she isn't scared of herself. She can see exactly how she got to the point she was in that second memory and why she has a gaping hole where her ability to interact with others without being afraid of hurt came from and the worst part is that she isn't sure she wants not to be that person.

Asuka ... does not trust herself. She trusts in things outside herself. In canon, she got around this and created a sense of self-confidence by throwing everything into her cred as an Eva pilot! Which worked for a while. The problem with using anything like that in Aather is ... she already got the memory back where they kicked her out of being an Eva pilot because she wasn't important enough. So she already knows that nothing she can actually see the results of with her own hands is ever going to be reliable as a way to justify her self-worth. But the thing about Asuka is that she doesn't give up and she needs that provable content. And she knows she can do it, so maybe this time--! Maybe this time she can beat herself. Maybe this time she can reach that point before anybody can come to their senses and realize she doesn't belong here.

Because Asuka may not be self-confident, but she is arrogant, and overbearing, and driven, even to her own destruction if that's where she has to go to be worth something. if she has to die to be worth something then she will. She just doesn't want to face the aftermath, in that case; she doesn't want to have to wake up and realize - oh! I died, and nobody came to save me.

One of the reasons Riku's argument got to her is because .... even if she hadn't seen the lion respond to her creating the shield, she would have assumed it was her fault anyway, for having said right off the bat "let's not go into the desert". But the thing with the lion meant that she also attacked the lion because its attacking them made it her fault and it would've been her stupid decision that meant she lost somebody and so the lion killing her would've at least meant nobody else would die because of her stupid actions, it would have been her death fulfilling her responsibility for the lion trying to kill them in the first place. She doesn't really blame Coyote for that, although she acts like she does because she doesn't want to face the guilt. She's almost started to a few times - and then backed off as soon as anybody gave her the slightest out, and it's not because she believes them, but because it's a good way to avoid having to deal with those feelings.

Along with that comes the fact that in her memory, it was the people in authority, the people with control who she most wanted to keep pleased with her, who took the only thing that made her worth anything away from her. When she arrived, she kind of immediately didn't like having control taken away so she was questioning of the Personae and not entirely trustful, but she was ... you know, she didn't have a reason not to take what some of the Knights were saying at face value! If she could make a difference, then why not! What does it matter if they're lying, I can still be important to things! I mean, she wanted to know, and she wanted to ask, because as mentioned Asuka likes to feel on top of things, and she likes to push at others, and she's very aggressive by inclination if not always by nature. But it wasn't a super priority as long as she felt like she was achieving something. She could afford to put it off. Also, the Personae weren't really around, and they didn't seem to be doing much. They just were kind of ... there. Existing. Being annoying in control and occasionally invading her personal space because they were lonely.

(She will never, entirely, be able to hate Coyote because this is how she still thinks of him - she still sees his eyes when she kicked him out of the bed and she felt like she recognized that need for companionship in them, and ... she might yell and scream and want to hit him and assorted other things, but she will never actually be able to outright reject him because he did that before she started being able to shut other people out that way. She thinks he's a liar, she thinks he's manipulative, she thinks he has no concept of what's good for other people - but this is how she thinks of herself too, especially now, and so she can't stop stupidly wanting him not to hate her.)

But, and now we can finally delve into the 3of3 fallout, this is the second game in a row where the Personae did something that traumatized her "for her own good", more or less, and at this point she's on the verge of deciding that nothing they do will ever make sense to her and the only thing worth accomplishing in their interactions is to treat them antagonistically because she cannot understand them. They have no hope of reconciliation because they are incomprehensible to her and the only reason they are in any way "better" than the monsters is because they, at least, are intelligent and can talk. She does not think there is any benefit in trying to understand their actions anymore. Why would she? Even if they had "good reasons", those good reasons still ended in killing her - and she hasn't forgotten either Coyote thinking of the game as "fun", and laughing when they left the area, and she definitely won't forget - due to trauma association - the way the door licked its lips and smiled before punching a hole in her everything. She doesn't have any reason to assume that the Persona who ran that game is actually different people as it claims, and she's perfectly willing to believe it would lie about not enjoying itself, because she would lie about not enjoying herself at the thought of causing other people pain if she didn't like them, and everything she knows of the Personae - and especially thanks to Madame White's treatment of her upon arrival - suggests to her that the Personae exist in a state of barely tolerating their existence by necessity, so obviously she's acting under the assumption that there's only a few Personae who actually really give a shit, and even those Personae - say, Beauty and Coyote - don't think like people do so even their "favors" will still hurt her, so ... she's still going to want answers, but now she's mostly asking because she wants to yell at them. It's a way of expressing to them that she hates them and fears them, it's not really about actually wanting to know anymore. They're monsters. Some of them are sympathetic monsters. But they're monsters anyway, and someday she's going to find a way to kill one of them and then she won't need to take this anymore. Until then she will play every game she can, do every quest she can, kill every monster she can, do everything she can, and she will use the system until she can use it no longer and then she will hit them back like they've already hit her and she doesn't care that they won't understand how she feels because obviously her feelings don't matter. Until then she will just calmly do it all.

Because she doesn't honestly believe they'll let her go anymore, either. Why? They're having too much fun. She's given up expecting to go home. She's given up expecting a reward. She's ... basically given up expecting anything good will ever happen to her that won't immediately be taken away or proven to be pointless, at this point.

Hating people is probably pointless too, in her mind. I'd said in chat that she might hate Riku forever after talking with Shinji, but the more I played her reactions out the more I realized she's just too ... tired to, and she doesn't have that necessary manic need to blame everyone else for her problems like she does in canon, and - actually, for that matter, Rebuild Asuka isn't capable of holding onto that kind of emotion the way NGE Asuka is anyway, I will get into this at a later point (I say that a lot, sob, and then never do) - but it's just ... I honestly can't tell if she'll hold a grudge or not. I expect she will, but ... I can't say for sure. It depends a lot on how her team talks her out of this, and if they even can. But she does still have that second memory in her mind. She remembers the cost of trying to blame other people for her problems. If she tries to take any of her feelings out on other people, what's the use? They'll just backfire on her anyway, and nobody deserves it either. It's too much effort to deal with that on top of everything, so right now she's just dulling everything and trying to make it all go away because it's too much work to care about any of it.

I don't know what she'll do when she realizes they won that game. I'm still post-gaming. When I said she'd throw the memory against the wall, I said that because she'd immediately assume it's the Persona's way of mocking her for failure. She'd need someone to tell her that she earned it and won it because they were compassionate. That it was a genuine reward.

And I honestly don't know what she'll do with that information yet, because ... she just died. And the thing is, the worst part is, that first round, nobody attacked Emerald. Nobody! They got defended. And so she allowed herself that brief moment of hope, she'd fooled herself into thinking maybe they'd get out okay - and then she died.

And she died painfully. And that's - well, Asuka doesn't deal very well with pain. In any context. She has two responses to it - either she numbs herself to it and pretends it doesn't affect her, or it utterly fucking breaks her and she starts assuming everything is going to hurt her because she doesn't know how to make it stop hurting, she doesn't let go. Actually, these probably aren't mutually exclusive. Rebuild Asuka has a generally better recovery rate, but still - she is afraid of pain, does not know how to process pain, and generally when she is hurt it terrifies her.

To extrapolate from Rebuild canon, she loses her mother and starts assuming everyone will leave and then everyone does, thereby feeding her perception of reality; Misato, the only person that mattered to her as anything like family after her mother, relocates to Tokyo-3 and leaves, and this is out of her control so of course Asuka assumes that even when it's not her fault, the universe will just take and take and take away.

(The key part here that makes Rebuild healthier than NGE is that she is capable of recognizing that losing someone is not automatically her fault. This is not something NGE version is capable of comprehending. Ever. This is one of the reasons I have hope Asuka's team can pull her out of this! Because of that simple fact. Unfortunately, hahaha, the fact that Rebuild does recognize this means that she often just. doesn't ... bother connecting with people because they will go away and be replaced and so she's learned to pretend she's not there as a defense mechanism instead.)

And in keeping with this, Asuka does not process radical restructuring of her worldview very well. This wasn't a problem when she arrived in Aather, because ... well, she didn't remember anything of what her worldview was! But as she's regained her memories, she's been defining herself in large part either in opposition to what they tell her or in embrace of what they tell her and in the case of her second memory sometimes both at once. Having thirty-three points tallied against her team in the final round and then dying after having spent all that time deliberating abut how careful they had to be not to spend all their points on one team to spread out the damage was just a violent shock to her system and also a violent refutation of what she'd been trying to put into practice!

And she'd been trying to put it into practice because she didn't really believe in it! She was trying to do it because she wanted to get away from the person in her memory who did things because she wanted to keep herself safe, she was trying to prove to herself that she could be a better person than she thought she was, and in the end ...!

In the end, the other teams voted the way she was trying not to vote. They told her, more or less, that her memory was right, and that she would always lose, and that nothing she would ever do would be enough to avoid being punished for it anyway. She mentioned to someone - I think it was Ginshu - in between games that she'd hoped nobody would punish Lloyd for being nice to everyone. This is what she was getting at: right now she honestly believes, deep down, that the price of being good enough is that the world will find a way to take it away from you, and the only way to achieve anything is to be better before the world notices, so that you can be good enough when the world takes it away, so at least then you know it wasn't your fault.

And the problem is, she just knows that if she'd tried harder - and she hasn't even really processed this thought, so unfortunately it's not even conscious enough for anyone to dismantle in time for it not to take root, but maybe if she'd pushed for them to destroy another team completely beforehand, they wouldn't have had so many points thrown at them in the last round - then they would have won and then it wouldn't have been their fault when they died, but because she didn't help out enough they died. So she died and she wasn't good enough to make it worth anything and nobody spared her.

She wanted somebody to recognize that she was doing good, and nobody did. They punished her for it. They killed her for daring to hope she could be better than she was.

So what's she going to do about it? She can't blame anyone else for this.

She's gone too far down the road of trying to believe people are worth risking your neck to care about to blame them for it, and anyway her team probably won't let her and she's so afraid of losing them she won't be able to blame people for it if it'll go against what they want her to do. And besides, she isn't capable of denying her team.

She can hate the Personae for it, but her hate won't accomplish anything and they won't care anyway and at the end of the day she can't do anything to stop them so what's the use. And besides, it's "for her own good".

Well, she obviously can't fix it, so she's just going to continue going through the motions. She will accost people, she will interact with people, she will express opinions and explain things and generally be a brat who intends to force herself into the lives of other people, but the only people she'll really show much emotion to or interest in beyond "person, you are in my way/person, I need something from you" are the people she's already close to: her team, Winter, Brace, Fetch, Faith, and Rabbit. She will express her feelings if she thinks it will accomplish something, maybe get people closer to her so they're more favorable to her, but for the most part she won't care. If someone's in her space and trying to talk to her and interact and she doesn't want them there, she will kick them and shove them out of the way and outright move if they won't leave her alone. THIS IS NOT QUITE HOW I EXPECTED HER CANONICAL TENDENCIES TO RESURFACE, BUT. THERE YOU GO.

Her interactivity probably isn't going anywhere. She will still probably pry into other people's business is because she doesn't have a video game to teach her how to suitably isolate herself and also because ... if she sees something that interests her she will poke at it. This doesn't mean she cares. It's just there. It's something to do. You're something to do. ~~Your mom is something to do OH WAIT NO WRONG EVA PILOT orz~~ She wants to care, to be honest; it's why she'll still seek people out, try to shove her way into their lives, but ... if she doesn't let herself worry, or be invested, or anything like that, then next time, when she dies, it won't hurt so much, because it won't be a betrayal next time. It'll just be what happens.

Because this is what happens. And you can't stop it. You can only endure it, because there will never be a point where anyone expects you to be able not to take it anymore. Everyone expects you to get over dying, as far as Asuka's been able to piece together from people's responses so far. But Asuka can't. (Maybe she will if she dies enough times, but that is .... going to be a while yet. So that is just purely speculation! Right now it is still fresh and dying in a game again will only reinforce these feelings.) So she's just going to cope!

Which in this case is going to mean a lot of ... abruptness in a different way than she usually manages to be abrupt. And probably a lot of days where she goes out at dusk and stays outside until morning and sleeps through dawn and then spends the rest of the day running around existing at people and just running on less sleep than she should be, lather, rinse, repeat. Because you don't need people to like you to be provably good at killing things and the monster killing has no influence on the Personae or the games in any way shape or form and it also has no bearing on her personal self-worth except as a thing she can actually improve at, tangibly and so it's something she doesn't need to care about, and also if she does it then nobody will be surprised when she gets killed and so if she dies doing it nobody will care. It won't put a strain on anybody that she's doing it and she won't be a burden anymore, so!!

I am actually not sure even if/when she does get her memory that this would change things much, because it's just such an overpowering reaction; it would change how she acts towards the people closest to her, and maybe make her more receptive to letting other people in, but it wouldn't really change how she acts around anyone who isn't already inside her circle of $PEOPLEWHOMATTER, at this point.

So ... yeah. THIS IS THE STATE OF THE ASUKA RIGHT NOW. En...joy ... that.