Misato Katsuragi

Misato is a young woman with long dark violet hair that is wavy with bangs parted to the sides and dark brown eyes. She wears a sleeveless black flapper dress with a cross necklace, a fancy red jacket with stylized accents, green socks, and black boots, but she wears more outfits throughout the series. Misato is known to be a very attractive woman, as she has been cited multiple times throughout the entire series to be a "babe", by Ikari's male classmates.

While on the job, Misato is very professional and capable, in stark contrast to her life at home. Until Shinji Ikari's arrival, her living space was a complete mess. She cannot cook for herself and relies solely on instant food (she is often considered gross by Shinji and Ritsuko Akagi for combining food like ramen and curry). She also drinks copious quantities of beer, and drinks one first thing in the morning to get her day started (later in the series she apparently switches to canned coffee as a supplement). She also smokes, though only occasionally and only during chaotic events. Misato's father also had a great effect on her personality. Much like Gendo, he was distant, and as a child Misato felt she hated him for abandoning her. Dr. Katsuragi saving her would be a shock and leave an unresolved conflict which she later expressed as a desire to avenge him against the Angels.

Her experiences and trauma during the Katsuragi expedition had a profound effect on her mental state, the biggest one being the loss of her father. Her father's priority with work over her and her mother left her with the belief that her father did not care or love her. However, his last action before his death was an act of proof of his love for her; despite being battered, broken and inches from death he pushed himself forward in a desperate attempt to save her and sacrificed his own life for hers by placing her in the only escape pod. This left her with a lot of complex feelings towards her father, as she had new found love and appreciation for him but father's death deprived of the opportunity to direct those feelings at him. As a result she avoided making true emotional connections by only having surface level relationships and developed a not so subtle electra complex.

For most of the series, Misato has no apparent issues with displaying and emphasizing her femininity, and enjoys the attention this gains her. She enclosed a picture of herself in the NERV materials sent to Shinji when he was summoned to Tokyo-3. In the picture, she is wearing a skimpy outfit with an arrow pointing to her breasts and a caption which is translated in English as "Pay attention" in the Platinum Edition subtitles and "note the cleavage" in the manga. In volume 2 of the manga, Shinji returns home from school to find the apartment unlocked and Misato in the shower; he thinks to himself, "That's not safe...anyone could walk in!" Kensuke Aida and Toji Suzuhara (Shinji's friend) develop crushes on Misato with the attention she appears to enjoy. First Lieutenant Makoto Hyuga (Misato's subordinate) also falls in love with her (though as opposed to Toji and Kensuke, his feelings are sincere, as shown in The End of Evangelion). He often risks his life and job by providing sensitive information to Misato, and agrees to set NERV HQ to self-destruct when Tabris attacks.

Series director Hideaki Anno described Misato as "...a woman, twenty-nine, who lives life so lightly as to barely allow the possibility of human touch. She protects herself by keeping relationships on the surface, and by running away." The disparity between her professionalism on the job and her slovenliness at home, as well as her issues in her relationships with Dr. Katsuragi (Misato's father) and Ryoji Kaji and the ambiguous nature of her relationship with Shinji, ties into her psychological issues. While grateful to her father for saving her life, she also admits to hating him, as he devoted his life to his work and neglected her and her mother. Her reason for joining NERV (and later, her drive to fight the Angels) is related to her issues with her father. Kaji implies in one discussion that Misato suffers from nightmares about her past, as he describes her as "sleeping uncomfortably." Also, Misato admits "seeking her father in Kaji's embrace."[18]

Many have speculated that Misato uses her sexuality as substitute for true intimate connections with people, a theory that would align with Anno's quote about Misato maintaining surface-level relationships and avoiding emotional attachments in order to protect herself; She longs to connect with people but cannot bear to take on any real attachment towards someone that could lead to pain, while simultaneously wanting to avoid addressing or dealing with her emotional problems. Her trauma from the Katsuragi experiment and her complex emotions towards her father, she believed her father didn't care for her at all only to have irrefutable proof of his love and devotion in his dying moments leaving her limbo as she was left with a desire to know and love her father (in a healthy way) but unable to express it to him, caused a profound damage on her psyche resulting in her using sex as a way for her to have an intimate connection with people, particularly men, but keep things distant and "light" enough so as to avoid the risk of being hurt.

This has been used as an explanation for Misato's inappropriate sexual overtures towards Shinji; Misato doesn't necessarily have a REAL romantic or sexual attraction to Shinji, she simply doesn't know of a way to connect with a male outside of sex. Her actions such as kissing him and a highly suggestive scene in episode 23 where she tries to comfort him, with the implication that she was willing to offer her body to him, come from a more wholesome intent of comforting and supporting him as a mother, but the only way she knows how to connect or comfort is through sex.