Neon Genesis Evangelion

Asuka definitely counts, maybe Rei from a certain point of view but not Shinji.

Shinji's piloting compatability was engineered, too. He was the most successful example really, since he made it through all of the angels.

That doesn't really explain anything, to be honest. I'm asking "How/Why are they an example?" more than "Are they or are they not an example?"

But that's not what Tyke Bomb is about. It's about taking someone from their very birth/creation or early infancy and raising them into a loyal minion / Living Weapon.

That Shinji has an unusually good synch rate with his Evangelion despite a complete lack of training in no way relates to the idea behind the Tyke Bomb trope; synch rate doesn't correlate to combat effectiveness, and this shows itself well with Shinji, as barring Shamshel (which was barely a victory, and he simply went berserk and ditched all sense of defense in favor of near-suicidal offense) and Kaworu/Tabris (who pretty much let him win), his most notable solo Angel kills (Sachiel, Leliel, and Zeruel^note Bardiel doesn't count because he refused to fight back, and it was Unit 01 under the control of the Dummy Plug that went berserk and killed the Angel.) involved the Eva going berserk on its own after Shinji either fell unconscious or was in so much distress that Unit 01's resident soul was roused temporarily.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 12th 2018 at 5:49:23 PM

Asuka literally has trained her entire life to be an Eva pilot, to the point that it's integral to her mental health that she keeps being the top dog in piloting. Rei, while not given the same focus as Asuka, still has been conditioned to see herself as expendable and to have only one purpose in life: to execute Gendo's plans.

Shinji is the only one to not have been conditioned into piloting the Eva at an early age, in fact part the first episodes are him getting accustomed to be a soldier in this conflict.

Edited by raziel365 on Nov 12th 2018 at 10:37:38 AM

Well, I can give you Rei, but Asuka definitely lacks those traits that sets apart a Tyke Bomb from a mere Child Soldier:

1. She willingly undertook the Eva pilot training. A proper Tyke Bomb never has any say in the matter, due to being too young to have anything remotely resembling comprehension of anything of the sort.

2. She was not raised to have Undying Loyalty to anyone; the training she had was simply for performance as a pilot, nothing more. That hogging the status of Ace Pilot among her peers is integral to her mental health has no bearing on this; that's just an aspect of the Inferiority Superiority Complex that she developed on her own, rather than something other people had cultivated purposefully to ensure her dependency on and thus loyalty to them.

3. She only started the training well after she had advanced beyond the infancy stage^note typically defined to be the first year or so of one's life, with the most commonly used milestone being learning how to walk, which is the oldest that a character can be for their loyalty-upbringing to start in order for them to qualify as a Tyke Bomb; she was only picked as a pilot sometime in 2005, i.e. a little over age 3^note being born in December 2001.

What makes you think Rei was conditioned to think of herself as expendable? She actively wants to die.

1. I believe he meant that Gendou conditioned Rei into having the mentality that she has by the time of her debut.

2. She is famous for the line "If I die, I can be replaced." Originally fans assumed she meant that another kid would be recruited as an Eva pilot to replace her, but then her backstory revealed that she was obliquely referring to the fact that she's just one of a whole series of identical clones, is actually the second clone to be "activated", and routinely has her memories copied to create a backup "image" that a newly activated clone would have implanted into her blank slate of a mind after soul transfer (apparently memories don't get transferred with said soul).

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 13th 2018 at 8:51:02 PM

On a different note, I'm trying to write Sanity Slippage entries for Shinji and Asuka, since they're the primary subjects of this trope in NGE. Any suggestions for what to put in them would be appreciated, because both NGE's entry on Sanity Slippage's Anime and Manga subpage and the Sanity Slippage entry on NGE's page are not helpful at all.

Both of their respective Sanity Slippage processes started at the Descent arc (episodes 14-20, I think). The fight with Leliel was definitely the moment when things started going downhill for Shinji, though it's hard to pinpoint when it did for Asuka. I actually don't think the latter qualifies at all, since the loss of sanity wasn't gradual: she was relatively stable and sane up to her encounter with Arael, which broke her, completely and utterly.

I hadn't watched the show for quite a long time, so I might not remember things clearly, though. Take this with a grain of salt.

Leliel is also the part when things start to go bad for Asuka. After her botched kiss with Shinji (taking it the worst way), not only does Kaji get back together with Misato around that time but Shinji manages to beat her for the first time. Bardiel and Zeruel are sore points as well since she couldn't manage to do anything against both, with the latter being the worst case of the two.

Then there's Shinji reaching 400% and saving the day, which probably broke her even more since that was a score she would never reach, followed shortly by Kaji's death, which she comes to learn via a discussion with Shinji (this one was a deleted scene but it's supposed to happen before Arael); finally, Arael does its thing and becomes the starting point for her downward spiral with Armisael being the last straw as she misinterprets Shinji's intervention as proof that he abandoned her in favour of Rei.

EDIT: Was Asuka's synch ratio dropping before the Mind Rape? It could be used as a sign of Sanity Slippage when writing an example.

Edited by Millership on Nov 14th 2018 at 1:21:45 AM

It was. She was already having trouble before Arael and Misato pitched the idea that it might be her period, but Ritsuko shot that idea down immediately and stated that the problem is in her subconscious. Then the very next day, Asuka's score dropped even more and Ritsuko verbally ripped into her in front of everyone, which definitely did not help.

Edited by amitakartok on Nov 14th 2018 at 10:24:40 AM

So for Asuka, her Sanity Slippage had no overtly clear signs until Arael's Mind Rape forcibly exhumed all the memories that she had been trying to escape from, right?

How does this look for Asuka's Sanity Slippage entry?

EDIT: On second thought, perhaps the bulk of the entry should be split into a Trauma Conga Line entry.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 14th 2018 at 12:09:43 PM

Sanity Slippage's good, though Trauma Conga Line's probably too long (pun not intended). Are two-paragraph entries allowed on the wiki?

EDIT: I believe distilling the latter down to the Zeruel and Arael battle aftermaths and including Kyoko's suicide would be sufficient.

Edited by Millership on Nov 15th 2018 at 1:04:47 AM

I've seen some pretty long trope entries before, including some that were split into two or more paragraphs like the one I've written. It's unavoidable when some instances of a trope take it to the Logical Extreme of Exaggerated Trope in terms of sheer length/amount of events involved. And I'm very loathe to cut down the entry.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 15th 2018 at 5:15:48 PM

I think I would add that an integral part of Asuka's downwards journey was definitely losing the leading sync score to Shinji in Episode 16.

Edited by TheAmazingBlachman on Nov 15th 2018 at 5:27:55 PM

So, I'm no Eva fan and thus you are free to correct me if I'm fundamentally mistaken here.

But wasn't rejecting Human Instrumentality all about how "sure Shinji's life is Hell and everyone he cares about is dead, but he gets to live"? As our viewpoint character, the show is thus saying to us that even the most awful state of life is better than....what, being part of a collective?

Yes, living as a miserable, broken shell all alone in a post-apocalyptic world is something to desire. It's better than being reunited with everyone you ever cared about because muh Individualism.

Gendo tried for Instrumentality to be with Yui which means it overcomes the bonds of death as well as the limits of being individuals and thus incapable of truly understanding another human being.

And didn't the lore essentially say humans aere fucked up and broken? We were a mistake the way we are now.

I think the idea was more "life can only get better if you continue to live it".

It's not that humans were developed wrong. It's just that humans weren't what were originally meant to live on Earth. Adam and Lilith accidentally landed on the same planet. The life Adam would have seeded was sealed away while Lilith's Angel's, humanity, took dominance instead.

I think.

Edited by Zeromaeus on Nov 17th 2018 at 9:43:22 AM

Yeah, more or less what Zeromaeus said. Instrumentality isn't truly living in a collective, as it's heavily implied if not outright stated that each individual in this "collective" exists in a self-contained Mental World where they're the only real person, and all others are merely their "mental images" of the people they're based on. It's basically a form of escapism.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 17th 2018 at 9:29:42 PM

You can't get any more subtle with the whole "escapism is bad and you must fully embrace reality" message any more than that. Yep, even if the more humane thing to do for someone like Shinji is to put him out of his misery or something else, the only correct thing for him to do is to live, as death via Heroic Sacrifice or Mercy Kill is just the act of a coward, and the only thing one should try to do is living at all costs. Same thing goes for relationships. The best ones for him are the ones with people like Asuka and not people like Rei or Kaworu, because while the former is severely more screwed up, she represents what reality is truly like, and being with her is indicative of picking the real world over an escapist and overly comforting fantasy.

...................Can you start to see why I have issues with Anno's philosophy yet? I mean, I guess it worked in the original series to a degree, but when he tries to pull off the same thing in Rebuild, it starts to fall apart.

Edited by LDragon2 on Nov 18th 2018 at 2:33:37 AM

Yeah, Anno does technically make a good point with the "braving through reality is better than escapism" aesop, but the execution makes it a Broken Aesop.

On a different note, am I the only one who thinks the fact that Asuka is the only one with a WW 2 ship-based name whose ship-based name (well, one of them) is only phonetically identical to her namesake (Souryuu the ship's name is written 蒼龍, while Asuka's uses completely different kanji) is a foreshadowing of her prideful and glory-seeking personality being a mask for her abysmal self-esteem and starvation for affection, and thus merits a Meaningful Name entry for her?

I don't quite get the connection...

Do you mean that since her name only mimics the real name of the real battleship it symbolizes Asuka putting on the air of superiority? If it is, I think that's stretching the definition of Meaningful Name a bit, especially since we don't know whether the use of different kanji by the writers was deliberate and aimed specifically at that. And, if Souryuu the battleship performed poorly IRL, it wouldn't work as an example at all.

Concerning rejecting the Instrumentality, it is implied that Shinji and Asuka are only the first two people who had done that, and eventually the rest of humanity will follow through, leaving SEELE alone with each other in the void for eternity. So Shinji is not really alone in the end and has some hope for obtaining happiness.

Edited by Millership on Nov 19th 2018 at 1:16:21 AM

For a comparable narrative, you could watch Planet With. It tackles the same idea, but its filtered through a significantly less dour point of view.

The kanji choice has to be deliberate, because not only is Asuka the only one among several characters whose IJN ship-based name does not use any of her namesake's kanji, but it should be trivially easy for Gainax to know what the kanji of IJN Souryuu's name are, given that the studio is made by Japanese people who live in Japan and have already found out the kanji used in the other IJN ships they've used as namesakes. And Tropes Are Flexible; "stretching the definition a bit" isn't a convincing argument against it being an example of the trope.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 19th 2018 at 6:11:37 PM