Here's the thing that you need to realise up front.
For all that I answer general questions related to legal matters on a regular basis (IANAL, just FYI), I wasn't talking about any sort of legal definition of consent.
I was merely talking about the normal colloquial definition, the one where "consent" means both parties choose to engage in an action out of their own free will without somehow being compelled to do it. "Forced" to me is a synonym of "compelled", asking someone to act or to tolerate an act against their free will or against their better judgment.
Asuka taunting Shinji about his lack of manliness and daring him to kiss her on the day of his mother's death, using her taunts to get his verbal agreement, and then kissing and holding his nose shut until he can no longer breathe properly...
...is actually still compelling him to tolerate an action that he is not at all comfortable with.
It's not an action that'll win a legal case. It doesn't have to be. It's still unethical, cruel, and quite awful.
Girls using their sexuality and shy boys' awkwardness about the topic to bully them, to embarrass them, and to hurt them is not at all uncommon.
My point is not that Asuka is, like, genuinely a bad person or evil or something equally ridiculous like that. Nah. She's just as broken as all folks in Evangelion are.
But I wanted to counteract the idea that one can compare the relationships in NGE and call one "more" or "less" toxic than the other.
In some ways, Kaworu was kinder and in others yet more cruel to Shinji, and so was Asuka. Both relationships in canon were toxic. Comparisons are pointless.
Let's be frank: @Strypgia has written a genuinely compelling (hah, puns!) story, but he chose to begin it at a point where the characters were kinder to each other, still had far less baggage with each other, and changed a few things around, thus allowing their relationship to develop into a far healthier one.
That's fine. I applaud it. But when talking about canon, let's please not whitewash bad behaviour that we see there because we like A&T!Asuka.
And yes, a lot of the conventions of the romantic genre are quite poisonous. But that's a topic for another thread.
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