in case you missed it: asuka and ritsuko are the same character. i could talk about this for ages, but in the interest of brevity:
- both asuka’s mother and ritsuko’s mother were emotionally distant in life, and compartmentalized upon death - asuka’s mother resides in unit-02, ritsuko’s mother resides in the magi
- both watched their mothers commit suicide
- both have a distant mother-figure - for ritsuko it’s her grandmother, for asuka it’s her stepmother
- both fixated on an older man at a young age - for asuka it was kaji, for ritsuko it was gendo
- both express a desire for never having children
- both stand in opposition to rei/grow to detest rei over time
- their entrance and exit scenes are laterally mirrored - both emerge from water, then die at their mother’s betrayal
- in that same vein, both share in visual imagery: there’s a scene where ritsuko stops to wash her face in the bathroom that asuka goes on to mirror
- this one’s a little more elusive, but all the more fascinating: i need you. gendo’s silent words to ritsuko, shinji’s words to asuka during instrumentality. guess what asuka and ritsuko both respond with? liar.
- take it as you will, but in one of the supplementary games it’s said that asuka wanted to be a scientist after piloting. yeah.
i forgot the best one:
- you know how many of the evangelion characters were named after japanese wwii battleships? battleship akagi and battleship soryu, ritsuko and asuka’s namesakes, were together deployed at the 1942 battle of midway, where they were both subsequently destroyed
