Nia Teppelin

Cross-shaped pink pupils, drawn to suggest flower petals, make Nia's blue eyes unlike anyone else's, and her hair is stranger still: pale blue-blonde curls that drift and shift as though made of vapor, a quality shared only with her father in his youth. She dresses mostly in pinks and whites. Her hair initially reaches far down her back until battlefield gunfire ruins it, after which she asks Yoko to cut it just above the shoulders.

The timeskip matures her figure and restores her hair's old length, now straighter, and she pairs a white and pink dress with the ring from Simon's proposal. Activation of the Human Extermination System rewrites her body: red circuitry crawls across her skin, her eyes flatten and darken, and a black skintight suit traced with red lines and turquoise highlights replaces her dress. When Team Dai-Gurren frees her the suit dissolves, and she spends the closing battle wrapped in Simon's long coat. At her wedding she wears a veiled white gown sewn by Old Coco.

Warmth defines Nia. Soft-spoken and endlessly considerate, she wants the people around her to be happy and reads their feelings with rare sensitivity, Simon's above all. Shortly after Kamina's death she tries to console the grieving boy by telling him he need not lean on anyone, words so bluntly honest they drive a heartbroken Yoko to shout at her and storm off. Malice is simply absent from her; she keeps smiling even as her body fades away on her wedding day.

Traveling with the team reshapes her. She absorbs Kamina's philosophy secondhand, stakes everything on her faith in Simon, and reveals both a level-headed streak reminiscent of Yoko and a reckless one, repeatedly placing herself between armies to reason with an enemy. A sheltered upbringing leaves holes in her common knowledge: she misreads much of what Kittan says while questioning her and later turns down Simon's proposal because no one has explained what marriage is. As the Anti-Spiral's Messenger she inverts entirely, cold and dismissive, declaring her human past a fiction even while the ring on her finger argues otherwise.

Nia spends her childhood inside Teppelin as Lordgenome's favored daughter, until she grows self-aware enough to question her own existence. Her father's answer is a sealed pod dropped into a canyon littered with the caskets of his earlier children and mistresses.

Simon finds that pod after Lagann detaches itself mid-battle and opens it with the Core Drill. The girl inside has never met a human besides her father. Team Dai-Gurren wants nothing to do with the Spiral King's daughter at first, but Adiane's arrival proves Nia has been cast out, and Guame later spells out why: Lordgenome treats his offspring as dolls, discarded the instant they develop a will. Nia joins the team as its cook, though only Simon and Boota can stomach her food, and rides in Lagann for the assault on her father. When Simon falters against Lordgenome, she vows to believe in him with everything she has, the push that carries him to victory. She reaches for her falling father and misses, then chooses to face tomorrow anyway.

Seven years later Simon proposes. Her tangled logic makes her refuse at first, until Kiyoh and Kiyal explain what the question actually meant. Then the population crosses its threshold and the identity buried in her genes wakes. As the Anti-Spiral's Messenger she seizes every screen on the planet to announce the Human Extermination System and a moon that will fall within three weeks, and she confronts Simon repeatedly to insist resistance is pointless, even while admitting her memories remain. Yet she never removes his ring. Cornered as the living key to the moon's control systems, she hears Simon insist that her appearances before him were her true self surfacing and her trial a device to forge humanity's resistance. The old Nia claws her way back and shuts the Extermination System down, only for the Antispiral to snatch her away to its home star and strip her memories for data on the team.

She survives the extraction through sheer will, regenerating as her body dissolves piece by piece, and calmly informs her captor that Simon will win. He does, tearing her free and catching her in his jacket. From the head of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann she helps destroy the Antispiral, then apologizes for the terror the Messenger inflicted. Seven days after the return to Earth she marries Simon, already fading before the crowd. Her last words are of love; his answer, a promise to remember her until the universe ends; her correction, that it will never end, and that this is what they fought for. Her memorial stands near Kamina's grave, a white cross holding her wedding flowers and her ring.