Ritsuko Akagi

The blonde hair Ritsuko wears through the series is a lie she tells on purpose. Flashbacks to her student years show the brown hair she was born with, the same shade as her mother's, and the bleach job reads as her most visible attempt to stop resembling Naoko Akagi. At work she is rarely seen out of her lab coat, presiding over NERV's technical floors, and the ashtray on her desk stays crowded with lipstick-marked cigarette butts.

Ritsuko pairs formidable intelligence with an almost surgical detachment. Her fame as a polymath extends beyond NERV, her subordinates follow her without question, and in a crisis her calm plays as the counterweight to Misato Katsuragi's fire; the barbed exchanges between the two supply much of the series' rare comic relief. She dotes on cats, a substitution for human closeness that Misato calls out directly, smokes heavily, and buries herself in work rather than confide in anyone.

The coldness has a darker edge. Where Misato fights for the pilots' lives, Ritsuko treats the children as acceptable losses whenever Project E demands it, even Shinji, toward whom she otherwise shows a measured, almost maternal patience. Her deepest wound is recognizing her own life collapsing into her mother's pattern: the same workaholism, and the same doomed love for Gendo Ikari.

Daughter of MAGI architect Naoko Akagi, Ritsuko inherits both her mother's genius and her unfinished work, taking over Eva development and the supercomputer's continued evolution. She befriends Misato and Kaji at college in the years after Second Impact, and eventually becomes Gendo's lover just as Naoko had been. Alongside Gendo and Fuyutsuki, she is one of only three people at NERV who understand what the Evangelions actually are and what the Human Instrumentality Project intends. That knowledge slowly poisons her friendship with Misato, whose fury at the secrets kept from her collides with Ritsuko's inability to open up; late in the series an angry Misato addresses her only as Dr. Akagi.

Everything ruptures when Gendo surrenders her to SEELE's interrogation to shield Rei instead. Understanding at last that she was always a replaceable stand-in for her mother, Ritsuko drags Misato and Shinji down to Terminal Dogma, shows them the truth behind the Evas, and shatters the tank of soulless Rei clones that feed the Dummy Plug system. Gendo has her locked away in the GeoFront for it. In The End of Evangelion she buys NERV time by walling the MAGI off from SEELE's hackers with her mother's old notes, then confronts Gendo below Terminal Dogma and tries to trigger Tokyo-3's self-destruct. Caspar, the MAGI core modeled on Naoko as a woman, overrides the command, a final betrayal Ritsuko attributes to her mother choosing Gendo one last time. Gendo murmurs something the audience never hears, she answers with a single word, Liar, and he shoots her dead; an apparition of Rei hovers over her body in the LCL below Lilith.

Sadamoto's manga sharpens her resentments. There she watches Naoko strangle the child Rei I and leap to her death, later comes within a breath of strangling Rei herself, and in Volume 13 survives Gendo's bullet long enough to fatally shoot him back, observing as she dies that Yui was the only person he ever loved. Anno named her after a junior-high girlfriend who introduced him to science fiction and shojo manga.