Doctor Who: The Evangelion Error (Book One)

Bonus Material: Mirror Text

Extract from "Whatever happened to Asuka Langley-Soryu?"
Published 6 April 2015, Der Speigel.

... the daughter of famed neuroscientist Dr. Kyoko Langley-Soryu, Asuka seemed to have been tailor-made from the same cloth: a gifted child prodigy, able to effortlessly grasp and memorize concepts far beyond most adults. While confirmed as an Evangelion pilot from an early age, she seemed determined to simultaneously follow her late mother's example. Admitted to the University of Heidelberg's neuroscience program at the record-breaking age of eleven, Asuka's potential appeared to be virtually limitless.

So what happened?

While she graduated from her program late last year (in the almost unprecedented span of two years), the young Ms. Langley-Soryu's academic career appears to have been less than spectacular. Professors and teaching assistants at the university describe her as "a nightmare" and "impossible to work with." A few went so far as to suggest that Asuka's accelerated track to her degree might have been inspired by the faculty's desire to be rid of her more than anything else. "It just goes to show you that raw intelligence is no replacement for emotional maturity," a fellow student who asked to remain anonymous said. "You might be a genius, but guess what? If you can't work with others at this level, you're finished."

Events reportedly came to a head during Ms. Langley-Soryu's final project for her degree. According to sources within the university, she insisted on an "overambitious" study intended to present a new theory regarding how memories are encoded within the human brain -- one which directly contradicted the positions of many of her professors. The challenge did not go unnoticed. A mere month after her thesis presentation, Ms. Langley-Soryu's research was definitively disproven by new data published by a joint Norwegian-Indian team. While the faculty still gave her a passing grade, the blow to her confidence seemed to be more than she could take. Shortly after graduation, Asuka failed to pass the exams necessary to advance to medical school in the United States. She has since vanished entirely from the scientific and academic communities.

Now either thirteen or fourteen years old (reports on her exact date of birth vary), the young Ms. Langley-Soryu appears to have put her disastrous tenure at university behind her. Sources within NERV suggest that she has completely rededicated herself to her military training, with an upcoming deployment to Japan in the near future. Only time will tell if the daughter of Dr. Langley-Soryu will fare better on the battlefield than she did in the classroom. "In the end, I really just feel sorry for her," Jean-Claude Colbert, a twenty-three-year-old Heidelberg neuroscience major who studied with Asuka, said. Colbert cited the psychological toll from an often unforgiving training regimen related to her pilot duties, as well as a strained relationship with her father, as possible factors in her meltdown. "While she's incredibly gifted in terms of mental and intellectual abilities, I get the sense she's never really had the chance to live life as a normal girl. She's been raised with these massive expectations of herself as Dr. Soryu's daughter, but she seems to think she has to handle it all on her own for it to mean anything. I suspect that she's a very lonely person underneath it all. I really hope that, in time, she's able to find a way past all of that."