moved.

asuka is a lady of a lesser noble house and studies at kanver university to learn more about magitek and its properties. because she was uninterested in marriage, she was originally to be sent to a convent, as was commonplace for women in the middle ages, but since she was intelligent and curious, and her father caring despite his emotional awkwardness and distance, she was permitted to study abroad instead. she does not speak of her values of the world needing independence from the mothercrystals, she is not a religious person ( which also would have made a convent life torturous ), therefore any spoken normalization of them or reveries for any god is to avoid her family being ostracized due to her beliefs. her ancestors hail from the outer continents back when the tribes still migrated and thus mingled with the people and settled, but she was born sanbrequois.

there is the possibility of fubuki, her brother, to be a 'late-bloomer' bearer, meaning that as a baby he was tested but considered born without magicks, which means he won't be branded and given to slavery, and at some point later in his life it might awaken due to stress or other factors. there is also the possibility for asuka to be like her brother, and if fubuki were to be taken away it would trigger in her, too. fubuki's magicks would be darkness based, while hers would be light based, making her a healer.

friends with the arrogant but charismatic manjome born in a higher noble house ( but one-sided in love with her ), the genius misawa, and the prodigy ryo ( a brother figure with whom she often likes to walk by the sea ). ryo is also close friends with fubuki. unless there is a major for alchemy, judai is probably not an university student lol. but if any of them were to discover the tenjoin siblings as bearers they wouldn't tell a soul. the siblings are popular among nobility and university and a lot of ppl actually want to marry them.

idk she should stab someone with a sword or swing an axe at them, who am i to tell her what to do

yuna and asuka sanbreque childhood friends, despite their differences in religion, they hold different flavors of hope and hide their sorrows

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙵𝚁𝙸𝙴𝙽𝙳 𝚆𝙷𝙾 𝚆𝙰𝚂 𝚃𝙰𝙺𝙴𝙽 𝙰𝚆𝙰𝚈 ( the outer layer ) : within the tale exists a mirror created by the devil, one which " does not reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things, but magnifies their bad and ugly aspects. " the mirror in this case parallels the light of destruction which takes its victims hostage on a mental level and reveals their flawed inner aspects, but in turn, they see the world as tainted and ugly and as one in need of destruction to redeem it, to achieve a perfect world of light. asuka is, in the case of the fairy tale, an equivalent to kai, a friend of the protagonist gerda. after the mirror of the devil shattered into little pieces and scattered around the world, a fragment gets stuck in kai's eye, who then, like asuka, becomes cold and cruel because he has begun to see the world as irredeemably ugly. he is then taken away by the snow queen and gerda ends up looking for her friend, overcoming several hurdles on the way. ( an ironic part of gerda and kai's story, which frankly is somewhat relevant if you consider what happens later in s3, is that at some point before her search, gerda thought kai has died in a river and asked the river to return him in exchange for her favorite red shoes. )

the context and symbolic value between gerda ( judai ) and kai ( asuka ) is simple yet important : they're close playmates who are tied by virtue of neighborhood and they deeply love each other, which makes kai's grotesque changes uncharacteristic. whereas they started as children, time passes in the process of finding kai and saving him from the influences of the mirror shard, and by the end as they return home, they find themselves 'changed' while the world around them didn't ( a parallel about 'changing upon returning home' can be taken into account in context of s2 and s4, too ). because love is a vital component to 'melt the ice around the heart' it's also important to note it is pure and selfless in its nature, which the sacrifice of one's precious possession ( the red shoes ) symbolizes. it is relevant because the connection between judai and asuka is selfless as they've been willing to save each other before without second thought, and pure because they've been looking out for each other without ulterior motives.

within a portion of the story it is revealed that kai can be saved by the very purity gerda possesses :

" i can give her no greater power than she has already, " ( ... ) " don't you see how strong that is ? how men and animals are obliged to serve her, and how well she has got through the world, barefooted as she is. she cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has, which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart. if she cannot herself obtain access to the snow queen, and remove the glass fragments from little kai, we can do nothing to help her ..."

this is what freed asuka, as kai has been warmed by gerda's love when she found him, being purified off the fragment. ( to add to that, judai uses a fire-elementar monster to defeat society-asuka and wake her from her trance ) judai's intentions with asuka were always pure and never otherwise motivated, something that she finds rarely in the world around her. it makes their bond precious and easy to cherish. i will someday talk more about how the sequence of the closure of the duel itself went, but essentially, eye contact and 'seeing the other' seems to have been an underlying element to succeed with that, and ironically it plays into the element of the blinded eye that caught the fragment and changing their perception of the world around them, and eventually seeing clearly again upon receiving love and the faith of the other person.

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙱𝙻𝙰𝙲𝙺 𝚂𝚆𝙰𝙽 ( the inside ) : so with that out of the way, what makes society of light asuka so different from regular asuka, and how does that relate compared to her other society peers ? it was obvious with members like misawa and manjome, as i have mentioned above, that via their brainwashing, their bad and ugly aspects are magnified, their insecurities and their vices externalized. while misawa's fear of falling behind was what made him 'follow the herd' ( re : the increasing amount of students who have been brainwashed into the cult ), manjome's insecurities about his rivalry with judai, and his wounded pride around it that's driven by severe performance pressure, was exploited and twisted. asuka was pulled into the society by neither of those things. she lost a duel and by her loss 'has seen the light', but that doesn't mean she is without her insecurities ready to be exploited and externalized. the thing with her is though, that she embodies a horrid person who seems to be uncharacteristically callous, but what if this is simply what she fears she is ? being worse than what people say she is ? because the reality is that she had an opportunity to show she wasn't all too cold, that she actually was stirred when someone she knew got hurt and humiliated ( junko and momoe ) and protected their pride and honor. even at this stage, she was still defending someone, instead of destroying them.

thus, the apathetic persona society-asuka presents is NOT who she actually is, but an insecurity manifesting as a shadow self.

there is the potential juxtaposition between her idolization, her glorification, and the admiration she is surrounded with vs the pressure of a projected perfection becoming consuming self doubt that makes the inward turmoil and its imperfections seem worse than they are and blowing them out of proportion. so it translates into this macabre display of someone who is awful and unreachable. i could say that asuka 'is strong enough to not care for what other people think so she will express herself freely' but that would be a lie. she does care for how she's perceived, she is just not haughty or self-entitled about it. nonetheless, asuka fakes it till she makes it so much that she believes even her well-meaning actions are an act ( you only teach / want to help and elevate people to satisfy yourself ), which obviously isn't true. how many times has she instinctively acted out of love or tried to uplift someone ? as mentioned above, even in her brainwashed state she selflessly cared. unprompted. in other examples, she didn't give up on fubuki and looked for him without the help of authorities, she reassured hayato in his self-doubt, she looked out for sho when he tried to understand what happened to ryo after his graduation, she was willing to give up her soul to save them, including judai. once again, love is a vital component to her and the resolution of reversing her shadow self into her regular self, the white swan.

yet while out of love she was willing to remove herself, she also does suppress herself when the conversation shifts to how the emotional world inside of her looks. there are at least three times where i noticed that happening so it is a notable behavioral pattern which makes the creation of a manifested 'supposedly repressed self' all too inevitable. vulnerability is complicated. all that is a classic case of self-demonization over the slightest flaw with the suppression of herself, and how that demonization can twist and become a monster of its own that wants to be seen for what it is in stark contrast to superficial admiration, and lashes out. as her teacher says in duel links ( bless ), if there is some room for improvement for her, it would be that she needs to believe in herself a bit more. although it is not so much that she doesn't believe in herself to achieve things, because obviously she actively achieves things, she is a top of class honor student and she came to a boarding school on an island to find her brother. but it's rather that ... she doesn't believe in the version of her which other people see, even if they're right in some cases. but it's okay. for as long as she is working on that, there are some people who believe in her instead.