Misato Katsuragi

Dark violet hair falls in long waves past Misato's shoulders, with bangs swept apart to either side of a face marked by deep brown eyes. Her usual ensemble pairs a black sleeveless dress with a boldly accented red jacket, green socks tucked into black boots, and a small cross always hangs at her throat, the pendant her dying father placed on her during Second Impact. Her NERV identification lists her at 163 centimeters, and a scar from the Antarctic catastrophe crosses her chest. She drives a blue Renault Alpine A310, an aging sports car rendered with remarkable fidelity to the real vehicle, and carries a Heckler and Koch USP rather than the sidearm issued to other personnel.

Two different women seem to inhabit Misato. On duty she is a sharp, decisive field commander whose tactical instincts repeatedly save Tokyo-3 and earn her a promotion to major. At home she is a disaster: the apartment stayed buried in mess until Shinji moved in, her diet consists of instant meals in combinations that horrify onlookers, and her mornings begin with a can of beer. Series director Hideaki Anno summed her up as a woman who keeps every relationship shallow and runs away, protecting herself from genuine human contact.

That armor traces back to Antarctica. At 14 she accompanied her father's expedition and survived the onset of Second Impact only because Dr. Katsuragi, moments from death, sealed her inside a protective capsule. She spent the following years mute, recovering her voice in college, where Ritsuko Akagi watched her turn talkative as though repaying lost time. Misato admits both hating her father for neglecting his family and loving him for his final act, a contradiction she never resolves; she joins NERV partly to take revenge on the Angels, and she confesses that Kaji's arms were where she went searching for her father. Many read her flirtatious surface, including the uncomfortable overtures toward Shinji, as the only bridge she knows toward intimacy, with sexuality standing in for the deeper connections she cannot risk.

Misato opens the series by collecting Shinji Ikari, talking the reluctant boy into the entry plug of Unit-01, and then taking him into her own home rather than leaving him alone; Asuka later joins the household, with Misato acting as guardian to both pilots and referee to their quarrels. As operations director she leads every engagement against the Angels from the command center, weighing input from Ritsuko and the technicians while defending the children under her command as fiercely as her position allows. Her college romance with Ryoji Kaji reignites amid mutual insults, and through him she begins uncovering what NERV and SEELE have buried; after his murder, his final phone message pushes her fully into investigating the Human Instrumentality Project, and her friendship with the complicit Ritsuko dissolves along the way.

In The End of Evangelion she shoots three JSSDF soldiers to pull Shinji out of the invasion, takes a bullet in the back getting him to Unit-01's launch bay, and spends her last strength shaking him out of his despair. She hangs her bloodied cross around his neck, kisses him with a promise to finish things when he returns, and pushes him through the elevator doors before collapsing. Demolition charges destroy the corridor moments later, though her remains turn to LCL, leaving open the possibility of return through Instrumentality. Shinji carries her pendant from then on.

The manga follows the same broad arc but lets her die detonating a grenade against the invading soldiers in a defiant murder-suicide, after which she reunites with Kaji beyond death. Spin-offs recast her freely, from homeroom teacher at NERV Academy in Petit Eva to an undercover agent posing as a schoolteacher in Gakuen Datenroku. Kotono Mitsuishi voices her in Japanese, a casting that nods to her conception, since Anno imagined Misato partly as a grown-up version of Sailor Moon's heroine; her surname comes from the Japanese aircraft carrier Katsuragi, and early planning documents cast her as an older-sister figure supporting a female protagonist.