Kaworu Nagisa

Nothing in Kaworu's build betrays his nature at a glance. He inhabits a Lilin body shaped like any teenager's, and only the details give him away: skin drained of nearly all color, hair a pale ash grey, and irises the color of blood. Born on 13 September 2000, the day of Second Impact, he presents as a boy of fifteen.

He is also the only Angel who dresses like a person. His usual outfit pairs a plain white shirt with high-waisted trousers in the style Shinji favors, finished with white high-top sneakers. Whether a core or an S² Engine hides somewhere within him has never been established, though his flesh is presumed to share the particle-wave matter composing Rei and the other Angels.

Where Rei seems unsettled by her own existence, Kaworu wears his identity easily. He is warm, curious, and startlingly direct, yet he hovers outside human convention, speaking in sweeping universal terms and calling humanity "the Lilin" as though narrating a species he does not belong to. Music fascinates him: he hums the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which becomes his personal leitmotif, and he names song the finest thing Lilin civilization has produced.

Supplemental material styles him the Angel of free will. Though SEELE sends him with a mission, he follows an agenda of his own, and his indifference to social boundaries proves strangely disarming; he carries no defensive walls himself, so he slides past other people's without noticing they exist. His philosophy weighs living and dying equally, and he calls a death chosen freely the single absolute freedom available to anyone.

Kaworu's body originates in the Contact Experiment, when genetic material from an unidentified human donor merged with Adam's flesh. SEELE later recovered Adam's disembodied soul and sealed it inside him, making him in effect the First Angel reborn in human shape, and he spends the years before the series under the committee's watch. Once Asuka can no longer pilot, SEELE hands him over as the replacement Fifth Child, and he stuns NERV's staff by posting whatever synchronization score he pleases with Unit-02, whose resident soul has withdrawn.

He finds Shinji at his lowest, alone by a lake after the battle with Armisael, and friendship follows with unnatural speed: a shared bath, an open declaration of liking him, a night spent talking in his apartment. The next day, alarms flag Unit-02 moving without a pilot while Kaworu descends toward Terminal Dogma, and NERV identifies him as the seventeenth Angel. Shinji gives chase in Unit-01, forced to fight the hijacked Unit-02 on the way down. At the bottom, Kaworu discovers that the crucified giant is Lilith rather than Adam, understands his purpose has collapsed, and surrenders. Held in Unit-01's fist, he tells Shinji that meeting him gave his life meaning, then asks to die. After a long, motionless silence, Shinji complies.

In The End of Evangelion, dummy plugs stamped KAWORU drive SEELE's Mass Production Evas, implying he was cloned much as Rei was. During Instrumentality he appears beside Rei to ask Shinji whether humanity should accept the merging of all souls; Shinji chooses imperfect reality instead. Sadamoto's manga states his origin outright and plays him as comic yet unsettling: ignorant of taboos, he kills a stray kitten out of pragmatic mercy, pilots Unit-02 beside Rei against Armisael, weeps on feeling Rei's love for Shinji through the Angel's connection, and dies by Shinji's hand in a scene close to the anime's. Spin-offs from Gakuen Datenroku to Angelic Days keep recasting him, usually as a mysterious transfer student whose bond with Shinji ends in sacrifice. Early drafts imagined him very differently, as a boy puppeted by an Angelic pet cat, before the character was compressed into a single episode.