Tōji Suzuhara

A black tracksuit with a white stripe running down it is Tōji's uniform of choice, worn in open defiance of the dress code while everyone else in Shinji's class sticks to standard school clothes; the actual uniform touches his shoulders exactly once, in the ninth episode. Cropped dark hair completes a look the show plays as textbook delinquent.

Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's manga lightens the palette, trading the anime's black hair for a dirty blond, light brown shade.

Loyalty and temper share equal space in Tōji. He answers his little sister's injury by ambushing Shinji with his fists, then reverses completely after seeing firsthand what piloting costs the boy during the Shamshel battle; from then on he counts among Shinji's few genuine friends. Kensuke Aida is his constant companion, while Asuka Langley Soryu is his permanent opponent in shouting matches.

His appetite is legendary enough that Kensuke dubs him "Tōji the Stomach", and class representative Hikari Horaki hides a crush on him behind bossiness before graduating to enormous homemade lunches, affection he eventually seems to return. Hailing from Osaka, he speaks with a Kansai accent in Japanese; the English dub skips the regional flavor and simply makes him sound more casual than his classmates. The Dark Horse translation of the manga goes further, giving him a New York gangster cadence, and that version of Tōji runs hotter overall, quicker to explode and far cruder toward Asuka, yet also honest enough to confess to Shinji how terrified he is of piloting and how ashamed he feels about their first meeting.

Collateral damage defines Tōji's introduction: his younger sister is hurt during the fight between Sachiel and Unit-01, and once he learns Shinji sat in the pilot seat, he takes his payback in punches. Respect replaces the grudge after Shamshel, and the two become friends.

NERV later designates him the Fourth Child. He agrees on one condition, that his sister be transferred into NERV's medical facilities. The posting destroys him. Bardiel infects Unit-03 in transit, seizes control the moment Tōji's entry plug activates, and sends the Eva on a rampage. Unit-00 and Unit-02 fall quickly, Shinji refuses orders to destroy a machine with a person trapped inside, and Gendo answers by engaging Unit-01's Dummy Plug. The autopilot tears Unit-03 apart and crushes its entry plug. In the anime Tōji survives minus his left leg and is evacuated from Tokyo-3 with his classmates, surfacing one last time inside Shinji's subconscious in the final episode. The manga plays it darker: Shinji learns who the pilot is before the fight rather than after, and the crushed plug kills Tōji outright.

Spinoffs treat him more gently. Shinji Ikari Raising Project keeps him close to his anime self while adding a fascination with Rei, Angelic Days folds him into NERV from early on, and Battle Orchestra offers Unit-03 with Tōji as an unlockable fighter with a story arc of his own. Tomokazu Seki voices him in Japanese; the ADV English dub cycled through three actors before Johnny Yong Bosch took the Netflix role. His name honors a lead character from Ryu Murakami's novel The Fascism of Love and Fantasy, and the lost leg echoes the amputation Hideaki Anno's own father suffered; a producer's ban on killing children is the stated reason the anime let him live.