Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu

The anime depicts Kyoko with short hair in a reddish shade, a scientist of thirty-one seen only in flashback. Sadamoto's manga redraws her entirely, giving her long blonde hair, a design the Shinji Ikari Raising Project manga borrows in turn.

The series shows Kyoko almost exclusively through the wreckage of her mind. After the Contact Experiment she can no longer recognize her daughter, lavishing a doll with the affection meant for Asuka and begging the child she mistakes for the real one to die alongside her.

Yet the portion of her drawn into Unit-02 preserves something gentler. When Asuka finally finds her mother inside the Eva, the voice urging her to live is threaded through with the old madness, the plea for a shared death surfacing twice among the words of encouragement, evidence that the maternal Kyoko and the broken one were sealed in together.

Kyoko works as a leading scientist in Gehirn's German division, the future Third Branch of NERV, where she helps create Unit-02, the first of the Production Type Evangelions. She serves as the subject of the unit's Contact Experiment, and the test destroys her: part of her soul bonds to the Eva, and the woman who survives is mentally shattered. Committed to an institution, she fixates on a doll as her true daughter while the real Asuka watches through the hospital glass. Her husband begins an affair with Kyoko's own doctor, carried on with so little discretion that the pair are already married by the funeral, and mourners hint the infidelity drove what followed: in 2005 Kyoko hangs herself alongside the doll in a staged double suicide, a sight the young Asuka has the misfortune of finding.

The fragment inside Unit-02 endures. Asuka senses her mother watching over her only at the very end, rallying against the JSSDF assault in The End of Evangelion before the Mass Production Evangelions tear Unit-02 apart, killing mother and daughter together.

Sadamoto's manga rewrites her background. Unable to conceive with Langley, Kyoko has Asuka through an elite sperm bank after his affair, raises the girl to outdo her ex-husband's new child, and proposes the Contact Experiment herself; during her hospitalization she even tries to strangle Asuka. Other spin-offs scatter further variations: the Raising Project manga plays her as a drowsy, clumsy mother who embarrasses Asuka by imagining her married to Shinji, Angelic Days implies she and Langley remain alive and happily wed, and Gakuen Datenroku makes both parents Shemhazai whom Asuka must kill after they become Angels, though a flashback shows Kyoko holding her daughter and urging her to trust her own talent. Her given name comes from a character by manga artist Shinji Wada, while Zeppelin and Sohryu both trace to aircraft carriers, one German, one Japanese.