Kotone Suzunami

Kotone is fourteen and attends Class 2-A of Tokyo-3 First Municipal Junior High School. The game presents her in three official renders: her school uniform, an early test plugsuit, and the revised plugsuit issued later in her candidacy.

Her official profile leads with "bright and happy", and the description fits her public face: an expressive, borderline excitable girl whose warmth made her a big-sister figure at the orphanage where she was raised and earned her videos a sizable audience. She pours effort into everything, classwork, training, and video making alike, though piloting keeps losing the priority contest to her channel, which goes some way toward explaining her stubbornly flat synchronization results.

Fragility sits underneath the cheer. She overworks herself, sacrifices sleep to keep her competing lives running, and slides into self-doubt whenever something goes wrong. Naive by nature, she never notices NERV tampering with her online presence or grasps what her monitoring assignments actually amount to. She hops between fixations, latches onto any scrap of encouragement even against others' advice, and around NERV itself turns shy and avoidant, mostly keeping her own company.

In the game's Case:01, Kotone grows up in an orphanage never knowing what became of her parents, whom she believes still live. NERV scouts her, moves her to Tokyo-3, and formally appoints her a pilot candidate once she starts school alongside Shinji, Asuka, Rei, and later Kaworu, who also oversees her training. Gendo Ikari quietly hands her a second job, watching the other pilots' daily lives and reporting back, and that surveillance soon becomes her real function while weak sync numbers keep her out of actual combat. Online she posts original songs and dance choreography, earning the label of "internet idol" among classmates, and she clings to the hope that her parents might someday find the videos. When NERV covertly restricts her channel to a pre-approved audience and her viewership stalls, she is devastated, until advice from Hitomi Amagi and Kaworu persuades her that the drive to create has to come from within.

Case:02 leaps fourteen years ahead into a timeline running parallel to Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo. She lives at the NERV base with the other pilots and Hitomi, arriving before Shinji's retrieval, and finds the training-only routine draining; Gendo again uses her as a monitor. Case:03 relocates her and Hitomi to the AAA Wunder under WILLE. There she recounts losing her parents as a small child in the aftermath of Near Third Impact and growing up in a survivor village, drawn toward piloting by stories that Eva pilots could roam the core-transformed planet freely. Discouraged by poor training performance, she weighs becoming an operator instead, and she pores over animal photographs in the ship's pre-Impact encyclopedias, fascinated by creatures her ruined world no longer holds. She keeps filming in every timeline, swapping dance numbers for vlogs of daily life. Out of respect she attaches the senpai honorific to every fellow pilot despite sharing their grade; Mari nicknames her Junior, while Asuka briefly tags her Chameleon for how quickly her moods and motives turn.