Rei Ayanami

Crimson eyes beneath a pale blue bob give Rei one of the most instantly recognizable faces in anime. Her bangs part at the center of her forehead, her build is slight, and her skin carries an almost bloodless pallor. When Shinji first encounters her she is freshly injured, one arm in a cast and one eye hidden under bandages, an image that became iconic in its own right.

At school she dresses in the standard uniform but swaps in white loafers over black ankle socks, small quirks that distinguish her from her classmates. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto drew her red eyes and blue hair deliberately as the chromatic inverse of Asuka.

Rei begins the series so withdrawn that classmates cannot read her at all. She speaks rarely, displays almost no visible emotion, and lives alone in a bleak, barely furnished Tokyo-3 apartment whose emptiness mirrors her inner life. The one person she initially shows any devotion to is Gendo Ikari, though even that bond stays cold and distant. Her bookshelf hints at a private curiosity, holding tagged medical texts on psychology and genetics, including one she reads in German.

Underneath the blankness sits a corrosive fatalism. Convinced she is disposable, she states plainly that a replacement exists if she dies. Hideaki Anno instructed that she be understood as a bitterly unhappy girl with almost no sense of her own presence, and her voice actresses played her not as emotionless but as someone who never learned what emotion is. Contact with Shinji slowly changes her. She smiles genuinely for the first time after the Ramiel battle, later weeps without understanding why, and by the finale has begun choosing her own attachments over the purpose she was built for.

The series keeps Rei's origins deliberately murky. Ritsuko reveals only that she came into being in a hidden chamber far below NERV headquarters, while supplementary material explains she was grown from what could be salvaged of Yui Ikari after Yui vanished into Unit-01 in 2004. Gendo presents the small child to his staff in 2010 as the daughter of an acquaintance, and Naoko Akagi remarks on how much the girl resembles Yui. Kaworu Nagisa later tells her they are alike, both human shells carrying inhuman souls: his holding Adam's, hers holding Lilith's. A tank beneath the Dummy System chamber holds rows of soulless spare bodies, and each time Rei dies her soul moves into a fresh one, its memories arriving blurred.

Three incarnations carry the name. The first, still a child, is strangled by Naoko Akagi in 2010. The second is the Rei of most of the television series, who ends her own life detonating Unit-00 with the Angel Armisael caught in the blast. The third awakens afterward and persists through The End of Evangelion, where she abandons Gendo's script for Third Impact and instead gives control of the event to Shinji. Ghostly images of her appear over the dying during the film, and a final spectral Rei watches Shinji and Asuka on the shore in its closing shot. The series finale also imagines an alternate world where she is an ordinary, expressive schoolgirl, a version later explored in the spin-off Angelic Days.

Sadamoto's manga warms her considerably, strongly implying she falls in love with Shinji and framing her as a maternal presence in his life. Other spin-offs push further: Gakuen Datenroku arms her with the Lance of Longinus as a secret Angel-hunter, while Shinji Ikari Raising Project recasts her as a bright, teasing relative of Shinji's. Her cultural footprint is enormous; critics credit her with launching an industry-wide wave of quiet, pale-haired heroines, and merchandise of the bandaged Rei outsold everything else in the franchise's early boom.