The third Evangelion movie is coming in a week, so my son and I re-watched the second film to get into the mood. The two main heroines of the second Eva movie are Asuka Shikinami (née Souryu) Langley and Mari Makinami Illustrious, two bad-ass characters who share a common defining trait: they’re both haafu, half Japanese and a quarter each of German and American (in the case of Asuka) and half British (for Mari). The Japanese have a long-standing fascination with haafu, considering them to in many ways to be the perfect blending of hybrid features, and many popular fictional characters feature mixed ancestry to make them more appealing, from Lupin III to Solid Snake to L from Death Note. While Japanese might be whiny and weak like Shinji and true foreigners potentially scary and unstable (remember the Brit who decided to go for a swim in the Imperial Moat in Tokyo in the nude?), characters who are haafu combine the best of both worlds. While the belief that half-Japanese are automatically more talented or assertive than full-blooded Japanese is a myth, it isn’t always. A couple years ago my daughter went to Kamakura with her school and some foreign tourists came over to talk to the students. Every student froze sold, despite the fact that they’d studied three years of English by then, and it was up to my daughter to interpret for everyone.
Asuka and Mari are bad-ass haafu characters.
