Hey there! I noticed your thoughts on my Asuka analysis. I wanted to clarify: As I said, I would never use something like that to label/diagnose a person in real life, but considering her personality, root issues, and major conflicts fitting in majorly with HPD (just as Shinji's fit with AvPD and Rei's with SPD, down to agoraphobia), we can 'diagnose' a fictional character. If you disagree I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much in advance if you do decide to respond!
All of the specifics you pulled out are on point, I just have two fundamental issues with diagnosing fictional characters with mental illnesses without any specific prompting from the author. The first problem is that there is such a massive amount of overlap of symptoms within the field of psychiatry. The issues this presents are multitudinous, including things like how/when a symptom presents in different circumstances and why being very hard to assess with the very limited view a work of fiction gives us of a character's life. Eva fleshes the characters out more than most, but you can't deny that we haven't seen Asuka interact with adult males outside of coworkers, and can't ask the clarifying battery of questions that professionals would ask when forming a tentative diagnosis. As an extension of that, I don't see anything in your analysis that denies the possibility that Asuka's schizo-typal or has a manic disorder, albeit with the specific trauma in her past to flavor things. Yeah, you can come to the point where you can speculate that maybe a character might fit the archetype for a disorder, but trying to actually come to a firm diagnosis makes very little sense in my opinion with how much is left in the air.
The second problem that I have is that I just don't see the need to diagnose. The whole point of labels is to simplify things so that you don't have to start from square one when discussing. Especially when it comes to Eva where it's a huge sprawling abstract emotional autobiographical piece that wants to speak to issues on the human condition, I think that all of the details you brought together are much much more valuable than handing people "Asuka is HPD" so they don't have to think or talk about the specifics. Beyond the unhelpfulness of the label, I don't really see that there's a need for her issues to boil down to a disorder rather than "She's still an adolescent and in the age range where she's trying to find her identity while surrounded by a bunch of bullshit stressful apocalyptic situations and has severe trauma in her past." That goes back to the "what we don't know" thing, because who knows how she copes with everything once she actually IS an adult.
It just seems like a lot of trying to make pieces fit for little or not gain imo.
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