The scene from above. Misato puffs out her cheeks. When Kaji's name comes up she quickly becomes angry.
MISATO:“That leads him to want to make a few sarcastic remarks.”
SHINJI:“He's an interesting person, full of life. Kaji-san, I mean.”
MISATO:“He's always been like that, the idiot.”
Kendrix: Aaand Asuka can’t tolerate Kaji's praise even for a moment & must immediately assert her dominance. People with that sort of narcisisstic and/or domineering streak can be extremely predictable in that sense. Note how she avoids using his name, putting the emphasis on his title instead.
It kinda goes with how she tends to assign people predetermined roles in her own narrative, projecting stuff onto them (ep 25: “You are looking for yourself in others”) more than she really gets to know them. So she calls them their titles or mean nicknames (“Honor student”, “Baka”) more often than their names cause she’s literally seeing them as caricatures (D& R booklet “those two must be beneath her”)
Additional Commentary
Kendrix: Of course this is because all her life, she’s been preparing for this, training & exercising while most other kids were playing outside, & now comes the time that is supposed to justify all of this, make it so her suffering & deprivation wasn’t in vain, to give her life value & meaning, so she’s very invested in seeing it all go like the narrative in her head.
At first, she appears to love the job & be proud of it in total contrast to Shinji, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t suffer. She may not complain like Shinji does but that’s only cause she doesn’t want to see herself as a victim or otherwise helpless (like a child) even when she objectively is.
We don’t get a pilot who actually likes it until the Rebuilds.
In Shinji’s case she sort of starts to use his name after Misato makes them move in (though it’s often part of mockery – “bake Shinji”, “invincible Shinji-sama” etc.) - by contrast I don’t think Asuka and Rei ever use each other’s names outside of some spinoff video games that weren’t consistent with this. Rei calls her “the pilot of unit two” which doesn’t quite have the same vibe as citing the Marduk designation like a title/identity, but it suggests a cool, purely professional relation & no interest in changing that which Asuka tends to parse as deliberate diss or superiority, a very common introvert/extrovert misunderstanding especially among young ppl with limited experience or social skill.
