Yui Ikari

Direct looks at Yui are rare. The series shows her human form almost exclusively in flashbacks, chiefly her university years and the morning of the Contact Experiment, because from 2004 onward that body no longer exists; it reverted to LCL when her soul was drawn into the Eva's core.

After that point, Unit-01 itself becomes her visible presence. The End of Evangelion makes the identification literal, sending the Eva drifting into space bearing her hair, a lasting image of the woman inside the machine.

Those who knew Yui remember warmth. In her human moments she comes across as kind, optimistic, and steadily maternal, but the trait the series leans on hardest is her conviction that humanity deserves to survive and be remembered. She tells Gendo that a person with the will to live can find Heaven anywhere and be happy simply because they are alive, a belief her son ultimately inherits when he turns down Instrumentality and chooses embodied life.

She also sees what others miss, insisting Gendo is a genuinely sweet man whom nobody understands. Yet warmth never made her transparent: Yui pursues an agenda of her own, distinct from SEELE's plan and from her husband's, and she keeps portions of it secret even from him. Whether Gendo courted her for love or for her SEELE connections stays deliberately ambiguous, and the same question can be turned back on her.

At Kyoto University Yui studies bioengineering and grows close to Kozo Fuyutsuki, whose specialty of metaphysical biology sits far from her own field; she treats her sensei as friend and confidant all the same. Daughter of a prominent SEELE member, she becomes involved with an older, rumor-shadowed man named Gendo Rokubungi, marries him, and watches him take the Ikari name. After Gendo returns from auditing the Katsuragi Expedition, they have a son, Shinji; a daughter would have been named Rei.

Yui takes up work at the Artificial Evolution Laboratory in Hakone, the public face of SEELE's covert organization Gehirn, applying her talents to Project E. In 2004 she volunteers as test subject for the Contact Experiment with the incomplete Unit-01, bringing four-year-old Shinji to watch so she can show him the bright future. Instead the test absorbs her soul into the Eva's core and reduces her body to LCL. Gendo's salvage operation to restore her fails, yielding the first Rei Ayanami.

From inside Unit-01 she guards her son for the rest of the series. Whenever Shinji faces death her soul overrides NERV's restraints and drives the Eva berserk: shielding him from falling debris in the first episode, finishing Sachiel after the unit shuts down, breaking out of Leliel, and demolishing Zeruel before ingesting its S² Engine. During Third Impact, once Rei III rejects Gendo, the decision over humanity passes through Shinji and finally to Yui. When he refuses Instrumentality, she carries the Spear of Longinus into space, leaving Unit-01 adrift forever as eternal proof that humanity existed.

Spinoffs remix her fate. Shinji Ikari Raising Project keeps her alive as a comic force who firmly outranks her husband at home. Gakuen Datenroku first reports her dead in a lab accident, then reveals she was absorbed into the Tree of Y'ggdrasil that stabilizes reality; she kills Gendo to stop him from feeding Shinji to the tree, dies in the act, and is replaced by a self-sacrificing Kaworu Nagisa. Megumi Hayashibara voices her in Japanese, with Kim Sevier in the series and Amanda Winn-Lee in the films for English.