Neon Genesis Evangelion

And this is where I have to stop you and bring out this important line from the very beginning of Tomboy's description: "A tomboy is a girl who has tastes and behaviors usually associated with boys. Because these associations are culture-dependent and tend to change, what exactly constitutes a "Tomboy" is subjective."

This is one of my biggest peeves with this discussion: The insistence on judging a character's qualification for Tomboy from a purely Western perspective, even though the trope itself emphasizes cultural relativism as a crucial element in its own definition.

... OK, I take back my accusation of you ignoring the cultural relativism aspect. You could've worded the previous part of your post better, though.

You're basically dismissing the entire concept of Tomboy and Girly Girl duos, of which there are many examples. Hell, even Tomboy's description notes it:

While Tomboys are subject to Flanderization, according to which they all hate "girly things" (like the color pink, dressing up, playing house, shopping), many in real life simply happen to fall outside of gender norms in a few respects; aside from these "quirks", a Tomboy might also have "feminine" interests. Even if she doesn't, she need not have any antipathy toward those who do. Indeed her best friend may be a Girly Girl.

Also, I do not see where you're getting the idea that having a strong interest in fashion and prefering feminine styles of clothing disqualifies Asuka from being a Tomboy with a Girly Streak rather than a Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak. There are more than a few examples of the former that by your logic should be disqualified, chief among them being Makoto Kino, who is the closest thing to the Trope Codifier of Tomboy with a Girly Streak in the manga/anime world if she's isn't that already. Makoto's wardrobe is practically no less feminine than that of her Sailor Senshi comrades, with the sole exception of Haruka Ten'oh (and even that is more so with Haruka's anime version; the manga one wears clearly feminine outfits significantly more frequently).

OK, now you're just grasping at straws by using the abundance of Alternate Character Interpretation among the cast as "arguments" for whether Asuka is a Tomboy first or a Girly Girl first. Alternate Character Interpretation is a Subjective Trope for a very damn good reason, and using it to question the applicability of a non-subjective trope is not arguing in good faith.

edited 22nd Nov '17 5:58:10 PM by MarqFJA

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Asuka just wants to be noticed as the best at everything so she'll be payed attention to.

You gotta start somewhere.

... How is this pertinent to the current line of discussion? That came straight of out left field, even though it's 100% true.

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She wants to be the best at EVERYTHING. That includes activities that are traditionally feminine or manly.

I don't really see this as Asuka being a Tomboy or a Girly Girl, its just another layer of her being an attention whore.

You gotta start somewhere.

... You do realize that what intentions or motivations are possessed by a Tomboy that cause her to be a Tomboy are irrelavant by the trope's definition, right? Conversely, it seems perfectly plausible to assume that the same thing goes for a Girly Girl.

In other words, it doesn't matter whether or not Asuka having a mix of feminine and masculine traits is related to her being an Attention Whore. What matters is that she has a mix of those traits, and which of the two are at the forefront of her character (and thus the "dominant" aspect, so to speak).

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... While I wait for any further responses regarding the Tomboy with a Girly Streak issue (if there are any) as well as the Anima-related question here, I bring up something that I noticed just now.

See, in reading the Hot Blooded Sideburns entry for Asuka in Evangelion 303's character sheet, I looked at the cited visual example, and it just struck me with a strong sense of deja vu. Some googling later enlightened me as to the cause: Evangelion 303 Asuka's sideburns are more or less lifted directly from how canon!Asuka looks in the anime the few times she wears her hair down.

Evidence:

• Exhibit A: Episode 9, when Asuka makes her first appearance in Misato's apartment.◊
• Exhibit B: Episode 22, when Asuka is talking to herself in the shower.◊

In hindsight, this actually makes a lot of sense if you remember how Asuka's hair normally looks from the side: Right from her debut episode◊, you can see that there's a large lock of hair pulled back from just above and in front of her ear, to be fixed in place at the back where her interface headset slash hairclips are, and logic dictates that another such lock exists on the other side. They seem perfectly placed candidates for being the above depicted sidelocks.

So... Since Asuka is already an example of Hot-Blooded, this makes Asuka also an example of Hot Blooded Sideburns, right?

edited 26th Nov '17 3:26:39 PM by MarqFJA

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Ehhhh...I honestly think that entry and the trope itself stretch the definition of “sideburns”, as both Merriam-Webster and the Wikipedia article specifically define them as facial hair.

Sorry, busy with Thanksgiving, and then reading the new Brandon Sanderson book.

I'll try and get around to the Tomboy issue later.

As for the Sideburns - Asuka cannot qualify because she's female, and so does not have sideburns.

Additionally, the sidelocks that Asuka has are completely different from the Hot Blooded Sideburns trope. They are more closely related to the Hime Cut sidelocks, which is a completely different hair trope.

Considering Asuka's other traits, it most likely a way to reference Lady of War or possibly a female Samurai. (Note hairstyles are another thing that signal Asuka being girly girl and Rei being tomboy).

Maybe there should be an additional hair trope for the "Hime Cut but with carefree bangs" as during some of the discussions on the Hime Cut we noted that there are quite a few characters who have the Hime Cut but without the straight cut bangs (usually feathered or windblown look for the bangs) these usually being characters who are loud and break free from traditional feminine restraints, but are also sources of authority (class presidents, etc). Kaname Chidori from Full Metal Panic is an example of the hairstyle.

According to the description, it's not limited to actual sideburns.

What Asuka has counts as earlocks, AFAIU.

OK, for literal sideburns, I agree with you. But the trope itself being Always Male? We have a few female examples on it, foremost among them being the eponymous heroine of Cutey Honey.

They don't look that different to me. Well, aside from not being "wild"-looking, like the article image is.

... Dude, canon!Rei is much more "does not act like a normal human" than "does not act like a girly girl". She's neither a tomboy nor a girly girl, she's an introvert who lacks most if not social skills, period.

People here are trying to cut down on superfluous appearance tropes. I doubt they'd be happy with someone suggesting the creation of another hairstyle-centric trope.

edited 29th Nov '17 5:59:02 AM by MarqFJA

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At the very least, the trope description probably needs a rewrite to stipulate that women can have sidelocks that resemble sideburns, but the point still stands. I wonder if this is worth a TRS thread...

Something else. I recently had a short argument with Marq over whether Mana can be described as a redhead, considering that she's got a hair color that's a mix between brown and red, coupled with the fact that Asuka is often erroneously called a redhead too despite having a similarly mixed hair color.

What do you guys think?

edited 29th Nov '17 9:57:26 AM by amitakartok

I think both are on the opposite extremes of what counts as a "redhead" but I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the label. If I had to choose one of them to call that, it'd be Asuka, as Mana's hair is more brown with a reddish tint while Asuka's various colors consistently have red as a primary part of the mix.

edited 29th Nov '17 2:36:01 PM by Willbyr

Sorry for the late reply. Had a second relapse of a nasty common flu infection that I caught three weeks ago, and been putting off checking up this thread ever since due to a hectic schedule and general malaise.

~Willbyr: If it's a description rewrite, would it not be sufficient to put it through the Trope Description Improvement Drive?

FWIW, I did tell Amita that Mana's hair color seems to put her in the auburn hair category, which per the article is literally composed of high brown pigment with a degree of red pigment in the hair follicles.

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Sounds good to me.

Done.

Can someone check the Child Prodigy entry that I added to Asuka in Characters.Neon Genesis Evangelion The Children? I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but I'm not sure how to improve it either.

edited 8th Dec '17 5:42:49 AM by MarqFJA

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It's good man, don't sweat it, though I do wonder how involved was Nerv in Asuka's education so that she managed to finish university at age 12.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, maybe we should try to find the absolutes that tie us.

You think Asuka would actually stand for that? (Well, not if they did it under the table... which may be just the right kind of Fanfic Fuel for a cruel form of The Reveal to further compound her Humiliation Conga.)

On a different note, I noticed that Asuka is mentioned in NGE's entry on Freak Out's list of examples, but without any context aside from "in Episode 22 and after her Mind Rape". The "after her Mind Rape" I get, but the preceding "and" confuses me; did she have an earlier Freak Out in the episode?

Either way, I'm trying figure out how to write a Freak Out entry for Asuka to add to her character sheet profile.

• Freak Out: After she was mentally violated by Arael and had to be rescued by Rei of all people, Asuka's sanity hits such a low that she makes a point of avoiding Misato's apartment (and thus Shinji and Misato) as much as possible, staying over at Hikari's instead, where she just played video games all day in a (probably futile) attempt to distract herself from everything that could remind her of what the Mind Rape has forced her to remember. Two episodes later, when she's told of Kaji's murder, she breaks completely and runs away from the apartment, to be later found naked and starving in an abandoned apartment's dirty bathtub, with the implication that she made a failed attempt at suicide. From that point, she's stuck in a hospital under sedation until well into the events of The End of Evangelion.

Does this look decent?

edited 13th Dec '17 8:40:56 AM by MarqFJA

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I’m good with that, but you need to fix the Escapism pothole.

Whoops. Fixed that pothole. Thanks for pointing it out.

On second thought, I think I should replace "everything that could remind her of what the Mind Rape has forced her to remember" with "remembering her traumatic past that Arael's psychic invasion forcibly dug out from where it was buried and forgotten in the darkest recesses of her mind". Thoughts?

And on a different note, the link in the Tastes Like Diabetes entry on YMMV.Neon Genesis Evangelion is broken, and there doesn't appear to be any archived cache version. Does anyone know what "Asuka's singing voice" is referring to? I don't remember if she had ever sung anything during the anime, and I can't seem to find if any character Image Songs exist for NGE, let alone one for Asuka herself.

edited 13th Dec '17 6:29:58 PM by MarqFJA

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Always Someone Better seems to be applicable to how Asuka's status as the #1 Ace Pilot is repeatedly challenged and eventually disproven, whether by Rei effortlessly one-upping her when paired with Shinji in the pilot synchronization training in Episode 9, Shinji one-upping her several times in several ways despite lacking her many years of intensive training ^note she's shocked at how high his first synch rate was, he beats her top synch score within a few months, he manages to always prevail when she fails, the Commander for some reason sees fit to let Asuka be mind-raped by Arael rather than risk sending Shinji to rescue her, only to send Shinji to aid Rei when Armisael similarly threatens her (i.e. Asuka is not worth saving, unlike "the doll")., or having to be saved from an Angel by Rei not once, but twice. Heck, Gendo leaving Asuka at Arael's mercies while refusing to let Rei at Armisael's own is basically Rei getting something that Asuka really wants: someone caring about her as a person.

The trope is certainly brought up in a few fanfics, such as Ghosts Of Evangelion. What do you guys think?

edited 15th Dec '17 4:17:48 AM by MarqFJA

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Congratulations in many, many languages. Watch out for Italian!!

There is one image song for Asuka called Shiawase no Betsumei in the CR Evangelion 7th theme song single, though you won't find it in Youtube anymore.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, maybe we should try to find the absolutes that tie us.

Why?

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DMCA. Why else?

Well, that begs the question of why the same hasn't happened to, like, every other NGE music track. In my experience, it should be practically impossible to wipe out an anime music track so completely from Youtube. It's not just that someone somewhere would upload the offending track sooner or later, it's that several such people will do so, apparently without any coordination between them whatsoever.

On a different note, I just made a startling discovery that I'm flabbergasted at how I never noticed beforehand: Mayumi Yamagishi is the only fully named NGE character with a major role in the original TV anime/manga storyline ^note thus excluding Sakura Mogami, the protagonist from this weird spin-off where, IIRC, NGE is as fictional as it is in our world... yet there's a Kaworu Nagisa lookalike whose name has nothing to do with either Japanese WW 2 warships or naval terminology.

EDIT: No, wait, the second kanji in her surname (岸) means "beach, coast". Still, this makes her the only female Love Interest of Shinji who isn't named after a WW 2 warship (Japanese or otherwise).

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 9th 2019 at 4:31:58 PM

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