Naoko Akagi

Naoko is seen almost entirely in retrospect; Episode 21 of the anime carries most of her scenes, and franchise illustrations of her include artwork by Youichi Fukano. The series grants her one indelible visual moment, the horror that overtakes her face after she strangles the first Rei, an expression that foreshadows her death moments later.

Warmth and distance coexist in Naoko much as they later do in her daughter. She concedes that she left Ritsuko alone far too often, admits she played the mother only when it suited her, and traces Ritsuko's later difficulty with men back to that neglect, yet nothing suggests she ever tried to change any of it.

Her attachment to Gendo Ikari runs deeper than she lets on. She privately welcomed Yui Ikari's disappearance, calling it just what she had wished for, and seemed resigned to Gendo never truly letting go of his wife. Even so, when the first Rei Ayanami repeated his private dismissal of her as a useless old hag, Naoko strangled the child in a fury; wounded love and rage at being cast aside are both plausible engines for the act. Rei's resemblance to Yui, whose voice is heard and whose face overlaps Rei's during the scene, may have fed it too.

She regarded the Magi as a threefold self-portrait: Melchior-1 held her side as a scientist, Balthasar-2 her side as a mother, and Casper-3 her side as a woman. When Ritsuko later tried to self-destruct the system, Casper-3 alone refused the order, which the shaken Ritsuko took as her mother siding with Gendo over her own child.

Naoko led the science division of Gehirn, the organization that came before NERV, and worked with Gendo and Yui Ikari on developing the first Evangelion. Her crowning achievement was the Magi, a trio of supercomputers patterned on her own thought processes; she documented the machines exhaustively, knew them completely, and their judgments came to steer much of Japan's governance.

After Yui vanished, Naoko entered a brief affair with Gendo. It ended at the top of Central Dogma, where the first Rei relayed Gendo's contempt for her. Naoko killed the girl, then fell to her death onto the Magi computer blocks below. The anime never confirms whether the fall was suicide, though nothing points to an assassination, and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's manga adaptation depicts the suicide outright.

Her influence outlasts her. The Magi anchor major storylines long after her death, from the Angel Ireul's invasion of the system to the events of The End of Evangelion, and they shadow Ritsuko's arc across the entire series.