App for thevelvetkey
Player Info:
Nickname: Nerdo
Age: 24
Personal LJ: Nerdorama09
Method of Contact: AIM Nerdorama09
Characters Played: I'm new
Character Info:
Name: Asuka Langley Soryu
Age: 14
Canon: Neon Genesis Evangelion (TV anime + sequel movie)
Pull Point: Just before her first appearance in the show (episode 8), en route to Japan.
Background Info:
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_%28anime%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asuka_Langley_Soryu
Asuka has a longer wiki page than many Nobel laureates, but here's the fan wiki just in case
http://evangelion.wikia.com/wiki/Asuka_Langley_Soryu
Personality: Asuka Langley Soryu is a person who, under normal circumstances, focuses entirely outward - every part of her personality demands attention and expects praise from others. She is loud, outspoken, opinionated, domineering, and proud. She demands from both others and herself to be completely in charge of any situation she's in, pushing herself to impossibly ambitious heights and expectations. She is an impatient perfectionist, and freely imposes that on herself and everyone around her. She is, in four words, kind of a bitch.
To start with in terms of specifics, Asuka is an incredibly gifted person and she knows it. She has genius level intelligence (at 14, she's already graduated college), laser-like focus on achieving her goals, and is probably the most physically skilled of any of her child-giant-robot-pilot peers. She will never, ever hesitate to remind anyone of any of this, especially of their own stupidity relative to herself. While easy to anger and wrathful towards any backtalk or perceived slights, Asuka's greatest sin on the traditional list is quite clearly pride. She is so self-confident it's practically crippling, used to seeing everyone else as a potential rival or beneath her, and (though she truly is quite gifted), frequently overestimating how far simple natural talent and drive will get her.
In social interaction, Asuka always makes herself the center of attention and takes control of the situation as best she possibly can, because to her, every conversation and every relationship is a contest she wants to win. Not even her first kiss is immune to her taking charge so violently the guy comes closer to suffocating than pleasure. This even translates to her job as an Evangelion pilot, where it frequently gets her in trouble - she's often the first person disabled by an enemy simply because she engages it first, without prior planning, because she wants to show she can handle the situation. When she's shown up by somebody, or people ignore her or contradict her, Asuka is quick to get angry, pouty, or whiny - though she's a brilliant person and thinks of herself as an adult, her reaction to not getting her way is inevitably childish, and often filled with comedic (or not so comedic) violence. Sometimes this develops into rivalries that almost seem good-natured or healthy, if a little rough - she develops a confused friendship of sorts with Shinji despite looking down on him for his low self-esteem and being jealous of his inexplicable winning record in combat. The important thing is that she approves of him and other people when they have the guts to stand up to her, even if she might seem to prefer people just going along with her whims. In general, though, Asuka is a steamroller - she's going to get her way, and if she doesn't, it's going to cause her to overheat and blow a gasket.
All of that, of course, is only Asuka's outward, projected personality. The reason she's so outwardly focused is, of course, because she doesn't want to think introspectively. Asuka's self-image was shattered and ground into dust by a horribly traumatic experience when she was only four years old and reinforced by a total lack of filial affection. In the ten years since then, she's thrown herself doggedly into anything and everything she can to ignore her creeping, festering self-loathing. She wants to prove that it doesn't matter, that she's the best, that she doesn't need love or affection even though she craves and is addicted to praise and adulation. It is this tension, this disregarded and ignored feeling of inadequacy within Asuka that drives everything she does. At least until the shell is cracked and Asuka is forced to illfacemyself.mp3 by an Angel, which results in a downward spiral of depression and apathy until she slips into a coma from sheer lack of will to live. But that could never happen in a Persona game, right?
As with anyone with such a massive underlying psychological disorder, Asuka has a few personality quirks to keep in mind as well. First and foremost is her absolute phobia of dolls, extending back to her childhood trauma. This fear and revulsion even extends to humans that she considers too "doll-like" and docile, like her fellow Evangelion pilot, Rei Ayanami. As a teenager and a rather stereotypical foreigner (despite being at least 1/4 Japanese, she considers herself culturally German and acts like a clichéd American), Asuka's manners are awful by Japanese standards. She constantly complains about having to live in such a reserved and different culture, mostly because it impinges on her getting her way. She's also terrible at written Japanese and more or less refuses to ask for help with it (or anything else), despite the fact that she's fluent in the spoken language. She's multi-talented and a very gifted learner, skilled at just about any mental or physical exercise, though she seems either incapable of or uninterested in traditional domestic things, preferring to let Shinji handle them when they're living together. Either she's not interested in "girly" things that aren't about making herself look more attractive, or she learned housekeeping from Misato. Probably both.
Game Specific:
Arcana: Chariot
Justification: If the personality didn't cover it, here's a summary. Asuka's life to her is one big contest that she has to win for her own personal glory and satisfaction. She pushes herself to the limits of human ability and beyond solely for the sake of victory - she does not rest or relent until she is at the very least acknowledged as 'special'. However, this competitiveness and her own inner self-loathing poisons her ability to relate to people, causing her to instinctively treat everyone as a rival or lesser. Her victories are all hollow because, ultimately, she cannot handle it when she DOES lose due to the aforementioned lack of self-regard. Her lack of control of her emotions causes these inevitable losses, and she cannot handle them because she demands of herself she be the very best at everything she tries.
Samples:
First Person Sample: Okay, okay, hold the phone here.
I've read Jung. I've read Freud too (pervert), but all these words...'Persona' and whatnot...they're metaphors, not literal freaking projected images. I mean yeah, fiery lady on a horse, nice lightshow, but this is just...what the hell is going on? I spend ten years of my life learning to fight using one insane school of psychology and then suddenly, 'magically', I appear somewhere else where this crap is even more supernatural and literal, not to mention based on a completely different idiom?
It's...it's just...unscientific! Someone had better explain this crap now.
...and also why I have to go to school again, as long as I'm asking questions.
Third Person Sample: When not backed up by 40 meters of synthetically engineered muscle, this kind of axe gets damn heavy.
Asuka isn't complaining, though. She will later, sure, when there are people around who'll be impressed with her dedication to swing around a fifteen pound implement of death at arms length for an hour at a time - they'd better be, anyway. Right now, though, she was training. Asuka knows she's the best fighter in the world in her Evangelion, but this is a new situation, and she has to use her amazing talents to adapt to it. Whatever those things at midnight really are, it is clearly her job as mankind's heroine to smack them the hell down, and for that, she needs a weapon.
She's just beginning to maybe have second thoughts about picking an axe instead of a spear or even a knife (could you get machine guns here? This is America after all) after an hour of working, then decides to take a break. She tosses her long hair, still held in A10 nerve clips despite apparently being several dimensions away from her precious Evangelion, artfully back in case any of the guys that had been dragged here were paying attention. The civilians in this town were trash, even more lame and complacent than the civilians had been back home, but several of her fellow 'visitors' were very interesting, and if nothing else, she had no compunction against putting on a little show while she's sweating in workout clothes anyway. If she could catch one of the men's attention, great, but even if it was just a perverted boy, she could get in some more exercise chasing him off. Asuka judges the scenario in her head, finds it good, and stretches her skinny - no, athletic! There's a difference! - frame a little more than needed.
When she looks up and sees she's still alone here, she pouts for a bit at the waste of looking this good when no one's around to admire her and then gets back to work.