Asuka Langley Sohryu

Loose auburn hair spills past Asuka's shoulders, its side sections pinned up by the red Interface Headset she wears near-constantly; the A10 nerve clips double as an announcement to everyone she meets that she pilots an Eva. Deep blue eyes complete the look. Her most recognizable clothing is the Tokyo-3 school uniform: a dark pleated jumper over a puff-sleeved white blouse, a red ribbon at the collar, striped knee socks and black Mary Janes. A pale yellow dress paired with a lavender choker serves as a frequent off-duty outfit. Her pilot suit matches her machine, red with layered ornamental accents and the number 02 printed across it. Sadamoto's manga recolors her hair blonde.

Pride defines Asuka's public face. She rates her looks and her piloting enormously highly, bristles at being treated as a child, and answers most situations with aggression, loud opinions, and her trademark jab at Shinji, "anta baka?!". Beneath the swagger sits a badly wounded girl. Her mother, Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu, mentally broken by a contact experiment involving Unit-02, spent her last years doting on a doll she believed was her daughter while refusing to acknowledge the real one, then hanged herself; Asuka discovered the body on the very day she was chosen to pilot. At the funeral she swore off crying forever, and that vow hardened into a refusal to expose weakness of any kind. Dolls and passivity disgust her because both drag her back to that trauma.

A certified prodigy, she finishes a university degree in her early teens, speaks fluent Japanese alongside her native German, and still stumbles over written kanji. Her closest friend is class representative Hikari Horaki. Toward Rei she nurses an antipathy sharpened by envy, dismissing her as the Commander's doll; toward Ryoji Kaji, her guardian after her mother's death, she directs an unreciprocated infatuation; toward Misato she feels rivalry once Misato and Kaji rekindle their old romance. Her bond with Shinji swings between flirtation, contempt, and unspoken longing. She kisses him in Episode 15 and then hides behind the excuse of boredom, and his passivity, which she reads as conscious rejection, feeds a spiral of resentment neither of them knows how to break.

Asuka is born on 4 December 2001 to the American Mr. Langley and the German-Japanese scientist Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu, grows up in Germany, and trains from early childhood for the Evangelion Project as its Second Child. She reaches Japan alongside Unit-02 and debuts in the anime's eighth episode. Early on her synchronization scores and combat instincts are exceptional: she and Shinji bring down Israfel with a choreographed joint attack after days of sync training, and in Episode 10 he saves her from a volcano. The slide begins when Zeruel crushes her in battle. Her ratio sinks, and when Arael appears she launches against orders, only for the Angel's psychic beam to force her back through her mother's suicide and every buried humiliation. The breakdown that follows leaves her unable to activate her Eva at all; she runs away and is eventually found starving in a bathtub, convinced that without piloting she has nothing left to live for.

In The End of Evangelion, NERV hides the shattered Asuka inside Unit-02 at the bottom of a lake. As JSSDF depth charges rain down she grasps that Kyoko's soul has inhabited the Eva all along, shielding her. Restored, she wipes out the invading forces and then disables all nine Mass Production Evangelions, but Unit-02's power expires while their S² Engines keep them functional through any mutilation. The white Evas butcher her machine with replicas of the Spear of Longinus, the wounds carrying over to her body, and she apparently dies whispering, over and over, that she will kill them. Within Instrumentality she rejects Shinji's desperate plea to stay together forever, telling him he only wants her as an escape, and he strangles her. Yet on the beach after he refuses Instrumentality, she is the first person besides him to return. He begins choking her again; she lifts a hand and strokes his face, and he collapses in tears as she pronounces her famous closing line, "kimochi warui".

Spinoffs reshape her freely. Sadamoto's manga makes her a test-tube child with an adoptive sister, spares Unit-02 its grisly fate, and closes with the two teenagers meeting as apparent strangers at a train station in a rebuilt world. Shinji Ikari Raising Project, Angelic Days, and Petit Eva all recast her as Shinji's childhood friend, while Gakuen Datenroku turns her into an artificially created girl who once had to kill her Angel-possessed mother. She remains a fixture of the Super Robot Wars games, consistently tops Evangelion merchandise polls, and is widely credited with cementing the tsundere archetype in later anime.