ichtreteihrgesicht | this is not the character essay you are looking for

oh god and it's not the memory writeups i owe either, suck on it i don't want to and this is already keeping me from tagging shit since i can't essay and tag at the same time like everyone else so i'm totally failing at activity today for this i hope you're happy

BULLET POINTS

ASUKA'S TEMPERAMENT: WTF

--so, a thing that happened: Shinji was on hiatus. Asuka gravitated towards the people she carted about and tried to latch onto them instead. She was already kinda dere for Faith - Shinji vanishing and Winter getting booked meant she kinda latching onto Faith a a replacement Winter/Shinji blanket.

--STUFF SHE IS NOT ACTUALLY DEALING WITH as in it's there but it's not present in her interactions because she's compartmentalizing, which is going to blow a gasket later but for now hasn't: FAITH IS AN AUTHORITY FIGURE, for her. there are things she just is not comfortable telling Faith and never will be, like idk but the thing is, she's trying to be SUPER NICE which is something that is hard for her to do when her default response is to be angry an shove things away, and her default response to authority after remembering her mother wasting away is to distrust it, but uh ToS cast kinda topped her so THIS IS CONFUSING - but what it boils down to is that there is some stream-crossing in how Faith is VERY OBVIOUSLY VBROKEN but VERY OBVIOUSLY IN AUTHORITY OVER HER BECUSE KNIGHT an this will have delicious trauma later, but right now she's just slotted Faith into the "right I can't yell at you because I'll break you" camp and this will .... if unaddressed, become resentment. however it will probably get addressed because of one simple fact which i will get to now.

--namely, LLOYD IS HER AATHERDAD. Asuka does not have many male role models in canon - in the TV series she has Kaji but she really treats him more like a tool to abuse, but in Rebuild it's ... just ... her mom and Misato, for parental figures. AND THIS ISN'T REALLY A BAD THING it's just ... Asuka and dads, idk, she doesn't have them. Except in Fred she does?! And it's Lloyd?! SHIT. IDK. But the thing is Lloyd snuck in there during the window of ... about two, three weeks where Asuka was actually someone who was almost a functioning person, and basically just kinda refused to act how she wanted or expected him to act and between him and Faith he gradually topped Asuka into .... being almost a functional teenager, before the memories started giving her too many bad habits. In other words her usual response to people is to be avoidant but ToS cast tops her so hard she doesn't know how to be and then they tell her she shouldn't be avoidant at other people and ....

--what this means is also that ONE THING SHE HAS LEARNED is that if she doesn't get her frustrations out ASAP they just make her incredibly impossible to deal with, which is ... a lesson she never exactly learned! in canon. in canon she just was like repress repress repress. In Fred a combination of KK and Lloyd whacking her with the cluebat has kind of jarred her out of that rhythm before the memories had a chance to really crystallize it as a solid defense mechanism instead of just a tendency. So, you know, in case you were wondering: Asuka's a very physical person, and this is why she hits people a lot. SHE HAS TO GET THE FRUSTRATION OUT. It's a heightened level of physical violence from canon but this is why.

--also yes, KK and Misato kind of share Aathermom duties right now. Invariably Asuka may end up feeling more comfortable around Misato! Something something watching you die makes your authority over me less of a threat idk. But still, KK is her primary Aathermom and her teammate and she basically - Rebuild Asuka just, in general, listens better than canon Asuka, to her parental figures, even if she does the rebellious thing upfront. She may have issues with follow through in the sense of she can't always admit she's wrong, but KK is someone whose opinion she trusts. Sometimes this means she really doesn't want to listen, because she's weird like that and doesn't now what to do with it when someone she respects tells her she's full of shit, so that's a thing, but that doesn't mean she isn't listening, at this point.

ASUKA'S BEHAVIOR: IMMINENT FAILBOMB

--i said in the question meme Asuka doesn't dream. This is a lie, she hasn't slept well for a while but now she's having nightmares about her own death again. Not Misato's death - hers. So she's going to be sleep-avoidant, yaayyyyyy. In general she will be practicing till exhaustion every night - off-screen mostly but some on-screen like the Ruby thing yesterday - and then going home to pass out and hopefully not have any dreams. Sometimes it will work, sometimes not.

--ANOTHER THING and i guess i'll use this as an excuse to talk about off-screen stuff too - this is something I've never mentioned, but it's something I consider intrinsic to Asuka's character, across canons. Asuka's response to grief is never to cry. I don't mean she doesn't sob, but ... when she gets upset, it's never tears. She'll choke back sobs, she'll shake, she'll generally do lots of the usual traumatized or grief-stricken or angry responses, but she. Doesn't. Cry. The only people she might cry around in Aather are mayyybe Faith, probably Shinji, and Lloyd. It might look like she's about to cry, but the tears never actually come - she'll always have an emotional response that short-circuits the opportunity.

--HER THING WITH FAITH IS STILL SUPER WEIRD. i was not planning for it, I was not planning for them to fail themselves into something almost healthy except in all the ways it'll end up super duper unhealthy later - it is SUPER CUTE, but it's something I'm going into with the full awareness that at any moment their memories and Aather in general could tripwire either of them into trainwreck central. I think they both know it, but I don't believe either of them are emotionally mature enough to be able to stop themselves once it happens. I've joked about it in chat that the only way Asuka will not cause it to trainwreck horribly by freaking out and breaking up with Mithos is if Lloyd sits on her first, but it's not a joke - if Asuka can't deal, she will just run away and lash out simultaneously and then feel so guilty about it she'll just assume it can never be fixed and it'll all go to hell ... unless Lloyd is himself at her long enough for her to get the point. THIS IS FUN.

--idk when she'll. actually tell Shinji she's dating Faith. idk if she even thinks of it as "dating Faith". Asuka and compartmentalization, man. She may just not say anything and be super awkward when there's a game with her and Faith and Shinji all in it until someone hits her in the head with logic.

--for the record: she is totally at every practice in the morning, and she also practices at night! She was doing this before anyway, but she's definitely doing it now. I MAY MAKE A POST WITH HER DOING THIS AT SOME POINT.

--this whole "to keep friends I have to be honest" thing she's doing is half out of guilt and it won't last. I MEAN IT MIGHT. But I doubt it, since it's not in Asuka's character to maintain an honest exterior for very long. Rebuild Asuka doesn't lie about it like TV Asuka does, though; she just avoids people. This is next to impossible in Aather, so the whole "honesty" thing is just her trying to make people not feel like she's a burden. This means she kind of feels like other people are a burden, which will ... play out interestingly later, I'm sure.

--oh yeah this is kind of significant: if she ever catches Three out and about she's taking a swing. I mean she's not being nearly as planning about it as KK and she's not nearly as obvious about it as Riku, I think, but the fact remains: if Three shows her face, Asuka will try to shank her, even if it means going into the clearing for a game! IDK if this is feasible, because it would be kind of hilarious to have her try it during a mingle and have the consequences reverberate through the characters during the game but that might be too much of a strain on a gamerunner, but either way. Asuka doesn't care what happens to her anymore, she just wants to flip a finger in Three's face. She already figures Three gets some sort of sick amusement out of killing them all, and she figures it'll be enough of a middle finger to Three's sense of "fairness" to take the chance of killing her in a game away from Three. I did not say her thoughts on this were at all logical.

--SO, UH, YEAH, I GUESS IF ASUKA GETS SHANKED THAT IS A THING THAT WILL HAPPEN. I imagine she's not the only person planning to try something like this.

ASUKA'S RELATIONSHIPS: DERP

--Asuka is attached to her team but not super attached - they work together, they're not ... a family? Like she isn't interested in swapping teammates but at this point I don't think that would upset her if it was a thing. Unless someone tried to swap out KK. Like she is attached to them as individuals and she thinks they all work together well as a team and respects them but it's probably the most mature relationship she has with anyone in Aather, in that she's okay with them going off and doing their own thing and reaching their own conclusions and is also super supportive of their stuff - like with Viridian about Rabbit - but it's ... not like she needs them to keep her stable. Which is funny! Because everyone else on Emerald thinks they're the ones who have to keep her stable, when really her entire support network who she'd have a screaming meltdown about losing is ON OTHER TEAMS.

--there was a brief window of time there where if they'd gotten memories she'd have legit gone and taken them somewhere else, and if she hadn't been exhausted as fuck the entire day after killing the hippo she'd have probably registered they were grounding her and gone running to crash at Turquoise or Amethyst for a few days, but the thing is Asuka needs a place to belong and Emerald is that place for her to belong, even if she's not close to her teammates like other teams think of being close to their team. If she lost her entire team she'd go huddle in Amethyst, I think, but that's not how the games work and that's not how her conception of "team" works. She's accepted the idea that a team is a group of people who work together to make decisions in games - Emerald isn't like some other teams, they don't have a set chore list or a really unified team ethic in the sense of working together, but they work really well together despite all being distinct, and I think Asuka recognizes that. She has aspects of her canon self's need to be independent and self-defining, but unlike canon she doesn't have the same bristly need to be the clear point man in a conflict ...... of course, I say that and yet it's just Asuka's nature to be bossy and demanding, especially when it's something she feels very intensely about, like in traumagame. The key difference here is that Asuka in Aather is willing to back down if people logic at her and she doesn't hold grudges unless someone gets maimed, and she's a lot more willing - because her self-loathing is much more intense - to shoot herself in the foot if she thinks it's for the best, which isn't something she finds impossible to do in canon so much as she just has to nearly risk wiping out Tokyo-3 to get around to thinking of herself so poorly for.

--god her. relationships. idek. In general it boils down to "I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TEAMS, i just like people on the teams" - meaning that outside of Sapphire which she has residual Winter-guilt towards and Peridot who she's kind of like ... outside of games she's not particularly one way or the other on them and in fact feels a little alienated by them but in games she still has that "I WILL SHANK MYSELF OVER THEM" because of being weirdly dere for Gold, she doesn't really think of the teams as discrete units anymore. This is also kind of why she was willing to let Amethyst drop in the ranking game, because ... she thought they could take it, whereas Peridot she wasn't convinced and she couldn't let herself do that to someone she was sort of responsible for. OBVIOUSLY THIS WASN'T HOW IT TURNED OUT. Oooooops.

--but outside of games she doesn't actually think of the teams as groups. this is why when she went to visit Ruby she specifically went looking for Wrath, and was reluctant to tell the rest of the team, because quite honestly the rest of the team isn't ... really who she's there for. She also went to Citrine for Sunny and secondarily Blaze, because she didn't know anyone else there she wasn't really thinking about the others. She also isn't really much invested in Coral outside of Rabbit and sooooort of Hound insofar as residual osmosis from Touchy being fretful about him, so she's just like "... yeah the rest of them are. sure there, yep." (sry Fox she doesn't really have an opinion on you. you're just ... someone she kind of talks to.) TEAMS ARE NOT UNITS SHE REALLY REGISTERS outside of games where she, well, has to. Again, Emerald has a kind of weird team dynamic that fosters this complete blithe disregard for such things.

--in that vein pretty much everyone but Faith and Fetch on Sterling falls under the category of "will talk to you when I need a quest or you do something personally impacts me, otherwise, not necessary" sob. See also Flynn. She's probably going to be pissed at him for saving her life forever! Sry.

--incidentally, I expected Faith to be someone she wouldn't get involved with because of the whole Sterling thing and being an authority figure which while not a big thing in some ways for Asuka is a big thing for her in others - Misato gets around it by being failmom, and Faith gets around it by being a failknight in similar ways - things like camping out on Emerald's roof and shit like that endeared her to him instead of cementing his status as In Charge - but at its core she's with Faith because she wants to try for a fresh start somehow. In a way being a "better person" with Faith is giving her the excuse to be crankier with other people, because she ... doesn't know how to be nice, consistently.

--Asuka in Rebuild is perfectly capable of compassion, it just takes her a while to get there. She'd spent her whole life reeling from her mother's death, more or less? She couldn't trust herself around others and she couldn't trust others period. Unlike TV Asuka who presented masks, this was too much effort for Rebuild Asuka, who chose the option of simply shutting them out instead and reacting angrily when they tried to get in. Without the memory of her mother's death - in fact, in Aather, armed with one of the most physically outgoing and sincere memories in her registry at the start, Asuka was still bossy and argumentative and demanding but she was someone who didn't so much not want to try as fail at it repeatedly. This left her wide open to Lloyd, who failed at it from a completely different direction entirely, and to KK, who failed at it from similar enough directions that she could speak Asuka's language when it was a thing, to actually give her a leg up on not failing at it, or at least wanting not to fail at it. It took a while for her memories to really change that, and when they did they sent her reeling - perhaps a little too strongly, because as of now she's oscillating between outgoing and concerned and prickly and aggressive without much balance, and it's going to get her in trouble eventually.

--The problem is, she doesn't know how to balance this, because both options, in her mind - following Lloyd's method of reaching out to people and giving a shit, and her own memory-encouraged need not to and desire to just drive people away when they're too hard to deal with - seem equally valid to her, and it's going to cause an outburst soon. Probably she's going to break down about it to Faith first, given their relationship, and then Shinji, and then pretend everything's fine around Misato and KK and Lloyd.

--I mean, the other thing is that she's an amnesiac fourteen-year-old with self-loathing and aggressive tendencies who wants to be a good person at her core and doesn't have enough memories to really have internalized the idea that she isn't capable of/worth being one yet who just remembered watching her mom die on her without having any of the closure of an actual death. (It's funny how that closure she so desperately wants is going to fuck her up worse when she gets it, but lol. LOL.) She's overreacting and melodramatically blowing everything out of proportion because it's a tiny child's love and grief for her mother filtered through the confused self-worth and struggle to self-identify of a fourteen-year-old - and even if she knows she was younger in the memory and a lot of the feeling is muted by it coming after the memory of Rei in the elevator so she has enough older-self context to soften the blow and be able to treat it with some distance, for Asuka right now it's as if her mother died yesterday in some ways; she's not really processing the grief functionally. She may never process it functionally.

--uh. I HAVE RUN OUT OF THINGS TO SAY HERE. whups. guess i'll just ... post it ... then ...