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dedederedeconstructivist · 5 days ago

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Food and Nurture 2: Melons

Every Eva fan knows Kaji grows watermelons. But what if a watermelon was also a metaphor for family? This week on Food and Nurture: Melons for Misato (or; Why a sexually aggressive drifter represents the Hope of Familial Love.) Heads up - this one is long and a bit of a ramble, and the footnotes include a brief discussion of depression.

Kaji’s association with the nurturing role in Evangelion is pretty clearcut, and it even has a core motif: His melon patch. The first time we see it is in Episode 17 of the series, placing it right after Shinji’s experience inside Leliel (which will have a post some time) and its commentary on depression, and right before the Bardiel horror-show. So contextually, this is Shinji on the upswing of one of those strange depressive episodes that are both traumatic and cathartic, at the end of which he – I think quite genuinely – says he’s feeling fine now.* Enter Kaji taking him to see the melons, though not without a stop for a can of tea first where there's some important dialogue:

(The ADV dub here plays up Kaji's flippancy - his response is instead 'You're saying that to someone as straight arrow and reliable as me, Mr. Ikari?' It's one of their bigger departures, but as is often the case with Kaji's lines, it works.)

This, I think, tells us we should put great stock in the scene that follows in a fairly blunt way: Kaji is asserting that he is not, in fact, a purely flippant fuckboy spy, but a human being - one who, contextually, understands what it's like to be in pain but has fought his way to a place where he's able to keep it from being his only understanding of the world. The way he does that is through nurturing plants, and by extension, others. That’s text, but the particular choice of plant gives us a wealth of subtext to look at.

The melon is, as I understand it, a historical symbol of luxury and prosperity in Japan – though I must emphasize I’m not Japanese and, unfortunately, can’t read Japanese texts, so I wouldn’t put too much reliance on what I’m saying here. I don’t just mean the more modern culture of the Luxury Melon, as fun as that can be to look at, but also an older tendency that helped pave the way for the modern one. This makes sense, since that’s the case for, well, most fruits in human history – they’re delicious, they’re seasonal, they only grow in the right places, and unless you live in those places, getting one is a treat until pretty recently. But the melons, in Japan, became one of the iconic Gift Fruits, and I think that produces an interesting subtext here, because it means Kaji’s growing a small luxury that makes a great gift.

He could grow anything he wants – if he wants a plot of cabbages or leeks, he could do those. He’s chosen melons. Just as significantly, he’s growing them inside the Geofront. Kaji has chosen to grow gifts of luxury and joy in the middle of what he knows is a battlefield, and even – in the series – to go out there and water it during an active battle that probably should kill him. His dialogue during the scene in Episode 19 about that is iconic:

(The default text is the old Platinum subtitles, with subsequent text marked out to show if its from Netflix’s ‘more accurate’ subs or dubs (NF-S/NF-D) or the ADV Dub (Dub), though I’ve only included those where I think there’s something interesting. A | in a line indicates that the prior dialogue is the same or close to the same, and everything after diverges between translations.)

Kaji: Well, if it isn’t Shinji!

Shinji: Mr. Kaji? What are you doing here?

K: That’s my line! What are -you- doing here?

S: I… I’m never going to pilot an Eva again. And since I decided that…

K: I see. Well, since my moonlighting came out into the open, I’m not welcome on the combat roster.

So, here I am – watering the plants./So here I am, sprinkling. (Dub)/I’ve been stuck watering my plants ever since. (NF-S)

S: At a time like this?

K: It’s because it’s a time like this./What better time? (Dub)

Between Katsuragi’s breasts is nice too, but in the end, I want to be here when I die./Although I’d rather be between Misato’s melons, this is the place I’d like to be when I die. (Dub)*

S: Die?

K: [Kaji explains the whole ‘Angels + Adam = Third Impact’ problem and how only an Eva can stop it, while Rei tries and fails to do so.]

[The two experience an N2 mine going off right near them, but not near enough to damage the garden. We don’t see Kaji’s reaction but do see Shinji brace against the winds and heat, which is a nice touch that lets us imagine Kaji ignoring it completely to keep watering without the silliness of illustrating that. Shinji is facing away for the remaining dialogue, staring at the remains of Unit-00 and Unit-02, and to a degree Kaji is almost talking to himself.]

K: Shinji, the only thing I can do is stand here and water. But you?

You have something that you can do, that only you can do.

Nobody is forcing you.

Think for yourself, and make the decision by yourself.

Think about what you ought to do now…

You know, so you don’t have any regrets./Think about no longer having any regrets.(Dub)/So you don’t have any regrets later, you know? (NF)

(It’s subjective but I do think the lines ADV gave him here are perfect for the character, in that he’s flippantly dismissing things – with the line about Misato, its with a sexualized joke that conceals a deep sincerity, while with his sardonic ‘sprinkling’ he’s very clearly poking fun at himself.)

Taken as a whole, that’s some solid dialogue! A bit infodumpy in the middle where I clipped it, but solid. And when we look at it in the context of the theme we’re unpicked here, Kaji’s dialogue is as much with himself as with Shinji. He can’t fight, but he can do something that matters – two somethings, in fact. One he achieves, which is to nurture living things even when it looks like the world is about to end (which gets turned into outright text in the rebuilds in a big way – more on that later), and the other… The other, he unfortunately, fails at. It hinges on the last line. What should he do in that moment so he has no regrets?

Tell Misato he loves her. Say the words. Call her and say them, even if she doesn’t hear them until after, if ever, because at least he can die knowing he said them.

But Kaji isn’t capable of doing that, for whatever reason.** So he goes on sprinkling and being flippant, and has a win in motivating Shinji to avoid the pain he himself feels in that moment. As he says himself: ‘the only thing I can do is stand here and water’, though he could in fact take out his phone and call Katsuragi - the same way Katsuragi called him on it in Episode 17. And yes, the lines are probably down, and she's busy, and on and on and on go the possible excuses, but the symbolism of the two scenes is what matters here, since they're close mirrors - in both, it's twilight; in 17, Shinji is on the way Up, in 19, he is firmly on the way Down, in both, Shinji's off to the left and Kaji's off to the right. But in 17, Misato reaches out to Kaji... and in 19, as he speaks of regrets, he can't reach out to her.

Instead, all he can do is stand there and water those melons – the same ones that he explicitly links to Katsuragi. Water those expensive, luxurious gifts so that he can give them to her – quite expressly as a surprise, since he asks Shinji not to tell anyone about the garden the first time he shares it with him. He can't bring himself to reach out to her, but he can stand there and stubbornly keep the dream he's nurturing of creating a family with her and Shinji alive. When he finally does call her right before his death in Episode 21, he creates another link between the garden and the words he cannot find the courage to say:

K: …Also, since I’ve troubled you so much anyway, there’s this flower*** I’ve been growing. It’d make me happy if you’d water it for me. Shinji knows where it is. Katsuragi, the truth is with you – go forward without any hesitation. If I ever get to see you again, I’ll say those words I wasn’t able to say eight years ago.

This repeats the same structure of thought: ‘I have a garden, and it matters. > Shinji’s in the mix, and so is how we should live as human beings. > I know I’m about to die and I wish I was strong enough to say I love you, but I’m not, and I am filled with regret and shame about that.’

If we return to the introduction of the melons, the groundwork for this is laid out for us when Kaji lays out a crucial part of the entire thesis statement of Evangelion for Shinji:

K: Making something, nurturing something, is really great.

You can see and learn so many things from the process| – like what’s enjoyable./| It also brings pleasure. (Dub)

S: And about suffering too, right?

K: Do you… hate suffering?

S: I don’t like it. (I mean yeah fair enough bud that’s kind of what makes suffering suffering)

K: Have you found anything you do enjoy?

[silence]

That’s fine too – but knowledge of suffering makes you all the more capable of kindness to others. Because that’s [being kind] different from being weak.

That’s really what the underlying thesis boils down to: Suffering isn’t great, but finding the things that give you joy – and those things will involve human connection, which is at its best when its kind – is worthwhile despite the risk of pain. And there’s Kaji just casually dumping it on Shinji like some kind of dysfunctional monk. But again, we can look a little closer and drill into the specific character dynamic on display.

Kaji, we may safely assume, has experienced a great deal of suffering – some of it at Misato’s hands during their breakup, since she created the illusion of emotional infidelity to drive him away – and has chosen to nurture living things as a way of processing it. Here, he’s sharing that practice with Shinji and explaining why he does it. He knows Shinji’s just come out of a major depressive episode, and this is him trying to hand a young man he hopes to be a father to a tool with which to keep himself from going back to that place. This is him saying ‘you are worthy of love, because you can choose to be worthy of love by nurturing things. That’s what makes a great man.’ He may even have noticed that Shinji, though he has the capacity for kindness, is torn between it and a reflexive rage at a world that both hurts him and that celebrates his capacity for violence - and rather than let that play out unhindered, he's taken him somewhere to remind him of the importance of gentleness and care.

When we look at it through this lens, Kaji’s melons aren’t just ‘gardening is a nice hobby that teaches you about life’. Kaji’s melons are his own personal hope of redemption and restoration to being worthy of love. They’re the way he’s going to create a family, and the proof to himself that he is actually deserving of having one, and he’s brought Shinji to share in that wish as essentially a piece of ersatz fatherly bonding and advice, because Shinji is Misato’s ersatz son and so he becomes Kaji’s ersatz son in turn in his dream of family. Even his desire to be there among the melons when he dies is a sublimation of the impossible actual wish – to be with Misato and, contextually, Shinji (and maybe Asuka) when they all die – that hinges on being a man worthy of love and kindness, of family.****

Briefly, on Asuka - other people have already written about Asuka as a kind of red-headed stepchild (specifically Rei-Mary, here), and I think it’s safe to say her presence in his imaginary family is a tricky one – one I’ll go into in another post some time if life permits. The short version: Kaji doesn’t actually know how to navigate Asuka’s behaviours towards him or her despair, so he sort of… gives up, unfortunately. She isn’t necessarily out of the potential picture, but the focus of his scenes and nurture are very much transferred to Misato and Shinji once he arrives in Japan, and he quite actively pushes Asuka away. And honestly… That’s not necessarily a terrible decision, even if it isn’t a perfect one, because Asuka is projecting some very unhealthy things onto him that, if he doesn’t navigate them very carefully, are going to cause serious psychological damage to everyone involved. The execution of his withdrawal ends up inflicting a different kind of harm, but as an instinct, I can’t fault ‘No, I probably shouldn’t spend a lot of one-on-one time with an emotionally traumatized and unevenly developed teenager who exposed herself to me and continues to have serious boundary issues’. However, not modifying that instinct when she’s part of an existing ersatz family with the one you want to start one up from is pretty shitty, so that's another one for the 'adults who did Asuka wrong' list.

In any case – back to melons. The Rebuilds take this same theme and run with it, though in a way that at once strips away subtext and then refuses to make it text until it’s suddenly background context. There’s probably a metaphor to be drawn in there about the Rebuilds as a whole, but rather than digress onto that… Kaji in the Rebuilds has a very explicit connection with the use of food and gardening as a means of connecting with and nurturing others, and even with Connection as a general motif – in fact, the first time Shinji sees him, he’s standing in front of a transit line map (a very literal map of connections):

This isn’t his first appearance, as he’s there during the whole Bethany Base intro. Unlike the usual case where introducing Mari throws off the order of scenes, this shot of him is something added in for 2.22, so this was never going to be his actual first appearance either way. It’s a bit of a weird scene either way, for reasons I go into down in the notes,***** but it does highlight just how central the motif of connection is with Kaji's character in the rebuilds.

His melon patch motif returns from the series, but he also gives the all-important field trip of the oceanic restoration project, which I’m going to call the Unforgettable Luncheon because I can, and which I’ve shoved into its own post since this one’s getting way too long as is. 2.0 reprises the Melon Patch scene - it begins with Kaji jokingly hitting on Shinji (ah, there’s the sexually aggressive and poorly shaven drifter I know and love!) and buying his time with a can of coffee. (Yes, we’ll get to the coffee soon… in another post.) in a scene that again seems to play with the right-left dynamic, then cuts to the melon patch. Its pretty well identical to the one in Episode 17* except it isn’t set at twilight, but in the day, and Kaji has a sign. His garden isn’t secret, and he asks Shinji to take care of Misato, since only he can. This scene was, in the storyboards, placed right after the Fucked Up Dinner from part 1 of these posts, creating a tighter narrative through-line that Mari disrupts by parachuting in.

This is, on a subjective level, a huge misstep in the Rebuild - both breaking the through-line between the FUD and the Melon Party, and compressing the two Melon Scenes into one. The Kaji Dialogues during them work best as a duology, and here, they’re compressed so Mari can take over the second… But by doing so, we lose Kaji’s regrets over never telling Misato he loves her, and the tragedy that he never will. The melons remain a general metaphor for personal growth but lose the bittersweet personal metaphor. That extends on through where the melon patch’s second appearance is to be blasted by the N2 warhead with Shinji falling among them, which creates a connection to the first dialogue and the request to protect Misato, but not to the heavy air of gentle sorrow that hangs over Kaji’s dialogue in 19 as the world ends in front of him and he remains a coward. In part, that fits with the decision to more-or-less sideline Kaji… But then the choice to place him at the heart of 3.0+1.0 undercuts that decision in turn! It’s quite infuriating, but at least it produces a segue to 3.0+1.0 where the subtext becomes text and loses its magic.

The melons only play a background role in 3.0+1.0. They appear in the redraw sequence of Kaji with Kaworu that we see during Instrumentality, with an explicit invitation to ‘work the fields with me and Katsuragi’- repeating the motif of Kaji seeking to create a family unit through the melons. The other is as a life’s work – the grand evacuation of seeds and embryos from earth via the Wunder was his plan, and it’s… an interesting interpretation and clear marker of the difference in what we could say Kaji’s Will is between both films and series, though not one I personally like.

Still, there’s something to be said about his lasting legacy here: where NERV built battleships to erase humanity, Kaji stole one to keep everything else alive. That’s not a bad goal, and its refreshing to see a character who outright rejects anthropocentrism, but it doesn’t feel earned. It’s the same problem that hangs over Kaji as the ghost haunting 3.0+1.0 – he… isn’t, really. It’s like they remembered ‘oh yeah! Kaji!’ and threw him in the blender with everything else to wrap up the quadrilogy with. It doesn’t cohere. It’s nice seeing his personal watermelon seeds are going to be saved:

But is it earned? Not really. Does it carry the same weight as the melon-as-hope-of-family? No – no it does not… and in that sense, it’s made all the sadder, because Kaji and Misato have a son in 3.0+1.0 but there is no family there. Like the watermelon seeds, Kaji Junior is hermetically sealed off from connection to that motif that was so sweetly layered into the series. We’re now firmly into the territory of personal opinion, but placing watermelons in the mix would have been a way to create a greater sense that rather than being forgotten, Kaji’s ghost haunts 3.33 and 3.0+1.0 in a way that makes the pain of his absence undeniable for Misato, without having to come right out and shout it at the audience as 3.0+1.0 does. Just a few melons being picked or eaten during the farming montage in the village in 3.0+1.0; a slice of it in the otherwise sterile food served on the Wunder in 3.33. The Melons were a symbolic thread that was brutally cut and then, very crudely, spliced back together for the finale – and it didn’t need to be cut in the first place.

That’s not the cheeriest place to leave off, but such is life. I’ve still got to do the one about Kaji and Coffee, the Unforgettable Luncheon, Rei’s Farm Life Montage, and another big one, the Asuka-Food Nexus in both series and films. Plus, that one Ramen scene that tells us that Original Rei knows what’s up, that Asuka definitely has a heart, and that Misato's credit card debts must be through the roof. And of course... what does Misato's diet of microwave cookery tell us about her inability to construct a healthy family life?

*: And he will be. For a while. I have a good dose of double depression – a Tumblr user with depression? Unheard of, right? – and that’s a pattern I recognize. You sit for a while in a generalized dysthymic state that doesn’t quite destroy your ability to exist, then something hits you and you spiral down, eventually you hit a plateau, something happens that pushes you that little bit further off the plateau and into a hole, and then suddenly: you genuinely are doing better… for a while. You climb out of the hole, but unless you fix the conditions that got you in there in the first place (to the degree they can be fixed), you will end up in there again.

**: Misato’s not the only one who doesn’t feel like they deserves to be loved. Both of them experienced an apocalypse, in different modes – Misato’s was personal and direct, but Kaji’s was indirect and impersonal. The difference is that for Misato, it was one sharp, hyper-traumatic break from everything she knew – for Kaji… We don’t know his experiences in the anime or the film, but we can infer them reasonably well, and they probably match with the manga: years of extreme hardship and deprivation, and doing whatever was necessary to survive the starving years after Second Impact. My headcanon (and in the manga, its just canon) is that Kaji did things that inflicted a severe moral injury on him that he spends the rest of his life trying to heal from – whether that’s murder or abandoning someone important to him – and because he never heals until, if we’re optimistic, his last moments alive, he never feels like he deserves to be loved and so cannot bring himself to say the words that would allow it. It also makes his choice of luxurious fruits all the more significant: he’s a man who has probably experienced true hunger, and his decision on what matters is not bare subsistence, but joy and pleasure. Station Eleven’s ‘survival is insufficient’ stuck with me as a line and I think it applies here as an explanation for so much of Kaji’s life. I also mentioned above that his desire to be among the melons when he dies is a sublimation of a wish to be with his desired family when they all die – we never hear anything of Kaji’s parents or siblings. He is, to all appearances, a man adrift in the world, with no real connections to anyone but Ritsuko and Misato, who he met much later – it’s not a stretch to assume he is an orphan, and that one of his wounds is survivor’s guilt at living while everyone else who mattered to him died, so that wish to be with his loved ones when the next impact comes isn't just 'I don't want to die alone', but a quiet statement of fear of it happening to him again - that he will, again, be left to grieve his family alone.

***: Over the years, this line has led to a lot of speculation. Watermelons, afterall, are not flowers… Except of course, like most fruit, they sort of are – that’s how fruit work: they come from flowers that are fertilized, and the very first time we see them, they are in fact still flowering. But obviously, that’s a bit of a technical reading, so what else can we read here? What are the flowers? The usual answers are: Shinji, Misato herself, or Asuka, or any combination thereof, because he has been watering and fertilizing all of them in different ways. My preferred answer? The flowers are Kaji and the family he hoped to create. That they are now edible melons, the gifts he’d planned to use to create that family, is important to the symbolism: he has nurtured something from seed to lay down roots, with the goal of producing something sweet and precious, and now he wants Misato to finish it for him – take the fruits of his labor, since he can’t give them to her, and see the love he poured into them and please, please, please understand what he’s trying to say in the form of a delicious melon. Fuck flowers - he's giving her his desperate hopes that she'll understand him at the end and look after herself and Shinji and, hopefully, Asuka, and since we've already considered them as a tool for fighting back against despair... the gift isn't just those hopes, but the quiet invitation to take up the same tool he wielded and that kept him sane, or close to sane, if she needs it.

****: This is also part of why Kaji and Gendo are interesting in juxtaposition. Both are afraid of hurting others and of being unworthy of love, but where Gendo flees into cruelty, Kaji sits down, says ‘I guess I’m going to plant some melons now’, and tries to be a human being despite the pain. Both see a boy who is scared and alone, and Gendo says ‘nope, not going there, my son sucks’, while Kaji rolls up his sleeves and wades right in with the admittedly somewhat questionable advice he has to offer. I don’t think its coincidental Kaji prefers coffee to alcohol in half his appearances – he isn’t trying to numb the pain: he’s prepared to exist with it as long as he can in the hopes of something better.

*****: This incarnation of Kaji lacks some of the rakish charm of the series Kaji but is still prone to what can only be described as deeply inappropriate remarks. His first comments to Shinji boil down to ‘Hey Kid, thanks for pointing me to the right bus, now let’s get to it: I secretly know who you are and your name, and as a complete stranger, want to know if you’re banging my ex’, which… Okay. Creepy. I referred to him in part 1 of these Food and Nurture posts as being a Mysterious, Sexually Aggressive Drifter and that really is the vibe right here between the stubble and the commentary. The rest of the film strikes a slightly better balance, but this whole bit is basically the ‘hello human resources’ meme in how tonally off it is without the charm in the delivery.

#neon genesis evangelion #evangelion #shinji ikari #ryoji kaji #rebuild of evangelion #eva analysis

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savior-of-humanity · 8 months ago

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(I'm curious to hear about your TTRPG characters 👀)

YESSSSS... HAHAHAH.... YESSSSSSSS

I'm gonna be putting this under a read-more because this might get long (and there's also pictures) but anyways!! (also pinging @hymns-across-the-stars and @cursedfortune since they also expressed interest for me yapping about my emotional punching bags)

SILAS W. RODRIGUES & CAILEAN EVANGELION UNIT-07

I've been fucking DYING to play an Adeptus Evangelion campaign ever since I found out it existed, and I'm still really happy that I found a game at all because the subreddit for AdEVA is dead (though you can find a link to an active-ish AdEVA discord server in there if you dig deep enough). ANYWAYS!!!

Silas isn't really a sopping wet poor little meow meow like some of my other muses (i.e Shinji) but he is definitely just as fucked up. Basic TL;DR of his backstory is that he lived w/ his extended family in Brazil as a baby, with his older brother Cailean largely being the one to raise him, while his parents were off doing shit related to the Katsuragi Expedition that would eventually lead to Second Impact. Given that Second Impact is a global apocalypse, obviously his country gets fucked over and a lot of his immediate family either dies or gets lost among the chaos of that and the immediately ensuing Impact Wars.

Fast forward about a decade, and his older brother goes off to work for NERV after managing to get some good higher education. All's well since Cailean's largely giving what he makes back to his family to help support them, until he suddenly and unexpectedly dies in some kind of accident. The reality is that Cailean actually signed up for a Contact Experiment w/ an EVA in exchange for a large bump in pay, which resulted in his soul becoming assimilated into the EVA. Silas, obviously, doesn't know this, and is incredibly distraught as he and Cailean had a very close sibling relationship.

Eventually Silas gets approached by NERV with the offer to become an EVA Pilot in exchange for training, housing, and payment - and seeing how lucrative the money is, Silas accepts.

For the actual campaign in particular, the basic plot premise is pretty simple; What if Shinji never got in the EVA when Zeruel attacked the Geofront?

A simple question like this, apparently, has some pretty significant answers. To put it simply; with no Unit-01 to stop it, Zeruel managed to reach Terminal Dogma, (presumably) fuse with Lilith, and basically become a god-like being through which it would initiate Third Impact. I'm not sure what the full effects of Third Impact upon the world are yet, but I'm assuming it resulted in a lot of global damage, on top of Zeruel now starting to spawn its own Angels (Zerulim) to target and destroy humanity.

A bunch of canon characters are dead as well; Asuka is presumed KIA (there's some stuff in the plot that implies she could be alive but We Don't Know Yet™), Rei II is dead (though another (adult) clone of her now acts as the Commander of what remains of NERV, now known as WILLE), as well as Mari, Toji, and a lot of other characters such as Gendo and Misato. Shinji's fate is unknown but he was offered as a playable character so I'm guessing he's alive, just not (currently) relevant to the plot.

Anyways. Silas.

He has some pretty complicated feelings about his fellow pilots, because he's personally watched two of them die in incredibly horrific and traumatizing ways. He's afraid of forming friendships and similar meaningful relationships with other people, because he's afraid of going through that feeling of loss; something that's heavily impacted him ever since Cailean "died". And yet paradoxically he won't hesitate to put himself in harm's way so that they don't have to suffer as much. I'm really hoping to flesh him out as a character as the campaign progresses since I've been thinking of implementing him and Cailean/his EVA as muses (though there's like. only one other person I know of on Tumblr that actually has Evangelion muses he could interact with 😭)

KHARIAS (also cw for mentions of child death)

So, Kharias is basically just my fursona that I adapted for a homebrew Lancer campaign hosted by a friend of mine. I don't remember the full details of the story because it's been a while since the campaign's on a hiatus atm but basically, she's a Wildkin (furry race) who had a very rough childhood.

She was raised by her father Perristona, who I believe was a former general of the Wildkin army. Perristona is Not A Good Person. Like. Not even in the emotionally complicated way that makes you even sorta sympathetic but in the way that makes you go "what the fuck, is this guy insane?" And for good reason!!

Because when Kharias and her brother were about 6 years old, he made them fight each other to the death. With axes. It was as horrific, violent, and traumatizing as you can imagine.

And then years later he made a clone army of her dead brother for the sake of basically helping some very misguided people cause a global apocalypse that may or may not involve firing the in-universe equivalent of a Halo ring.

Fun stuff! Basically she's a big shark lady who kicks ass and pilots a fucking badass magical mech. I might bring her around again for another campaign my friend is planning on doing, though I have some other more appealing character ideas since, to be honest, a lot of her backstory in the Lancer campaign was actually cooked up by the GM, so I'm not really sure how to apply her without just going through the same backstory stuff.

#ooc #my art #child death cw #child death tw #I LOVE PSYCHOLOGICALLY TORMENTING MY CHARACTERS RAHHHHHH!!!!!

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brokenrealitylooper · 1 month ago

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Writing challenge

Prompt #86 Maybe I am a monster. I don’t think I’d know if I were one.

From This List.

This one made me think for a bit.

Roman is well aware he is viewed as a monster by some, and he acknowledges it and even embraces it in some fics. But Weiss isn't, and neither is Shinji, and both would be aware if they crossed that line. Well, maybe Weiss could be, she just very carefully chooses not to be.

But Asuka... She had no issue killing the JSSDF forces when they attacked her and NERV. I don't know if, in canon, she's really aware of the lives she's taking by scrapping the attack ships and crushing tanks. But in my headcanon for her, she is very aware. Asuka knows and doesn't care, they attacked first. But she doesn't consider herself a monster for the bloodshed.

So we'll have a conversation between her and Roman, somewhere in the Loops both are trapped in.

o0o0o0o

Asuka stepped into what was normally Gendo's office, but for this Loop it was the den of one Roman Torchwick, of Remnant.

It wasn't often that Asuka met one of Weiss' Loopers; in fact, so far it had been just Ruby Rose and the Heiress and Anchor herself. So getting to meet a new person was interesting.

Especially as she'd felt him Wake Up right after the last battle.

"And the lion prowls into the wolf's den."

Roman's low voice, tinged with amusement, easily carried across the large and empty room while he faced the large window overlooking the Geofront, making the hairs on Asuka's neck stand on end.

Stepping up to the desk, the redhead scoffed, "Two predators finally meeting, hm?"

"You could say that." He spun his chair to face her, leaning onto the desk with his gloved hands flat on the surface, "More like two monsters sizing each other up. Like knows like, after all."

She shook her head, frowning at him, "Oh? You really think that, do you?"

He smirked, "Your Highness, don't you know? You're the queen of monsters."

"Maybe I am." she shrugged, moving to sit in the single chair facing the desk, "I wouldn't know."

"I recognize it. The beast chained in your soul, the freedom in violence?" Roman chuckled, "Oh, yes. I can see why Sextant kept you where he did, when he could've put another puppet in your chariot. The perfect blade, aimed just as much at the enemy as at those pawns he needs constantly on edge so they'll dance to his tune."

He paused, watching how she tensed but kept her silence. She knew he wasn't done, she could feel him testing her out with his Aura. The interaction between AT-Field and Aura was still a novel one, though he felt more... settled, than she expected, from what little Ruby and Weiss had told her.

"But that was the old you. I imagine he's had a much harder time working around your own machinations." His smirk dropped, his expression going blank as he leaned back, "I think you know the monster you can be. I've heard about the hundreds of troops you buried in your final fight."

"Pawns in my way, ones that should know better than to face me." Asuka scoffed, but in her mind she knew he wasn't really wrong. She knew very well how she gloried in her fights. "Maybe you're right, and I am a monster. But only to my enemies. But you-" she leaned forward, watching him, "-you're a very different monster."

"Indeed I am." He smirked again, but it was... softer, somehow, "Or I would still be, if not for Red and our Bond."

"I don't know if I'm really surprised or not by that." Asuka admits, leaning back as she recalls the Loop with Ruby in Rei's place, "I remember how bright she was. Even Kaworu was nearly blinded by her Soul. If someone was going to tame you, it would be her."

"Red is... unique." he agrees, "I'm free to do as I like, so long as it doesn't harm the innocent. An easy rule to follow, and it helps she has so few. But us-" Roman leans forward again, head canted so only one eye is visible, "-we end up with a lot of rules, don't we?"

Asuka is silent for a moment, giving his words some thought. Yes, she did have quite a few, didn't she? Don't do one thing, or check with one of her fellows for if an idea is good. She could probably come up with a dozen if she really sat down to think on it...

"There was a quote I heard a few Loops back," her voice was low, soft, "from a show Touji found once. 'Good men don't need rules, you don't want to find out why I have so many'."

"I think you'll have a good conversation with Ice Queen when next you meet." Roman chuckles, turning back to face the window, "She has a few rules herself. If I recall what I've heard correctly, we have a few days before the next one, and then Tabris. Spend the time with your husband, the net will be down around you two for a couple days."

Taking the dismissal for what it was—permission, not that she needed it, to ignore the world and relax—she stood and left the room.

Wolf's Den indeed, she thought, stepping out of the room, but wolves don't hunt alone, and you are very alone while you're here in my lands. "I hope it doesn't break you"

o0o0o0o

I don't know when this would fall in Fruit Loops and Instrumentality Loopers, but likely after Gendo starts looping and—obviously—after Ruby and Roman have formed their Bond.

Roman knows, as I said above, that he can easily be a monster if not for the rules he has for himself, and the few rules Ruby imposes by her presence and attention.

But Asuka had not ever put thought into it before now. She can easily be a monster, though a very different one from Gendo or Roman. Where those two would manipulate others to their own ends, Asuka would use brute force. She would easily choose violence over words if pressed, only stopping because she cares how her family—her husband, Touji, and her... siblings? Best Friends? in Rei and Shinji—view her.

Weiss—in the Loops, not in Tarnished Silver—also is aware of how easy it would be to use her horded knowledge of those around her to force the world to be what she wants. Not that it lasts, as the few times she did make the SDC and Atlas bend to her will she was assassinated. And yes, I know I back-tracked from what I said above.

Weiss in Tarnished Silver and Weiss in Fruit Loops are very different, having experienced very different lives.

#rwby #neon genesis evangelion #rwby au #neon genesis evangelion au #writing challenge #asuka langley sohryu #roman torchwick

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