Mr. Langley

The anime grants Langley only a fleeting flashback appearance, holding Asuka as a small child. What little can be seen suggests blond hair of medium length, a trait apparently shared with Asuka's grandmother. Supplementary material identifies him as a Caucasian American; Asuka holds American citizenship and draws her quarter-Japanese ancestry through her mother Kyoko, herself half-German and half-Japanese. Since Asuka speaks German with her stepmother by phone and lived in Germany before coming to Japan, Langley most plausibly resides there and speaks the language, even though Kaji serves as her guardian.

Langley, whose given name is never revealed, remains an emotionally ambiguous figure. He voices sorrow that Kyoko had abandoned their daughter even before her breakdown, yet his own infidelity opened the rift between him and Asuka, and later scenes show him oblivious or indifferent toward the girl. His attempts to reconnect meet flat rejection. The most charitable reading, and the one the series hints at, is that both he and his second wife genuinely loved Asuka but were steadily shut out by the wall of self-reliance the child raised around herself.

Around 2005, the young Asuka watches her mother Kyoko, mentally broken after the contact experiment, pour affection into a doll she believes is her daughter while insisting that Langley hates her and never loved her at all. Asuka also overhears her father with Kyoko's physician, a woman supplementary materials label his mistress. The pair discuss Kyoko's absorption in her research, her guilt toward Asuka, and how thin the line between people and dolls can be, a conversation that slides into lovemaking while the child listens in sorrow. After Kyoko's death the doctor becomes Asuka's stepmother; Asuka shreds the monkey doll offered as a gift, declares she will live on her own, and later overhears the couple admitting how difficult the fiercely independent girl is to approach. When his new wife confesses her unease, Langley denies sharing it, accepting with forbearance her observation that marriage merely made her a mother while he will always be the father.

Other continuities reshape him considerably. In the manga he and Kyoko prove unable to conceive and divorce after his affair; he remarries and fathers a daughter while Kyoko is impregnated through an anonymous elite sperm donor, and mourners at her funeral point to the affair as the driving cause of her suicide. He and his wife adopt Asuka despite sharing no blood with her there. Angelic Days instead keeps him happily married to Kyoko, on good terms with Asuka, and holding a job likened to Kaji's. In Gakuen Datenroku, both parents belonged to the same organization as Shemhazai; Asuka's birth served an experiment comparing natural children against artificial ones, and Asuka herself killed her parents after they turned into Angels, a trauma the Angel Ireul later weaponizes through accusing visions until Shinji pulls her free. His surname, like his daughter's, honors the USS Langley, the first aircraft carrier fielded by the US Navy.