, real name , is a fictional character from the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, created by animation studio Gainax. In the original television series, he is the pilot of a giant mecha named Evangelion Unit 02 for the special agency Nerv, as well as the seventeenth and final member of the Angels that threaten humanity and that Nerv is meant to fight. When he arrives at Nerv, he meets Eva-01 pilot Shinji Ikari, showing great affection towards him. After revealing his nature as an Angel to Shinji, he asks him to kill him to allow humanity to survive.
The character, originally conceived by Gainax as a cat controlling a boy, was supposed to appear in the series' twenty-second episode. After several changes, director Hideaki Anno and screenwriter Akio Satsukawa decided on him being the last Angel, and he was included in the twenty-fourth episode, "The Beginning and the End, or "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"". He later re-appears in subsequent works in the franchise, including the Rebuild of Evangelion films, video games, the original net animation Petit Eva: Evangelion@School, and the manga adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. His role is notably significantly expanded in Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, the third film of the Rebuild saga.
Although he only appears in a single episode of the original series, Kaworu significantly alters the narrative, in particular Shinji's character, and proved popular with audiences and animation enthusiasts, topping popularity polls. An ambiguous character by design, Kaworu's nature both narratively and thematically has been widely debated, and he polarized critics, with some disliking his ambiguity and the romantic undertones of his relationship with Shinji, while others praised his personality, finding him to be open, affectionate, and sociable. His prominent role in Evangelion 3.0 also attracted attention, with reviewers generally appreciating his relationship with Shinji. Merchandise based on Kaworu has been released, particularly action figures.
Conception
Akio Satsukawa, a screenwriter who contributed to writing for the series' twenty-fourth episode, "The Beginning and the End, or "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"", chose Kaworu's name. The production staff asked him to use something related to water or the sea. He opted for the surname Nagisa (Japanese for "shore") as a homage to Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima. The choice of a term related to the sea allowed him to connect to the names of other series' characters inspired by Imperial Japanese Navy ships and in the surname of Rei Ayanami. The name Kaworu was not written with the contemporary spelling with the katakana , but with the archaic character . The kanji was chosen for its connection with the katakana and the kanji , a detail referring to the Japanese title of the episode: . Satsukawa then created a pun with the phoneme shisha, which can mean or . Writer Alexandre Marine interpreted Kaworu's name as a possible reference to Kaoru Orihara, also known as Kaoru-no-kimi ("Prince Kaoru"), the androgynous girl from Dear Brother by Osamu Dezaki. Marine also connected the archaic spelling Kaworu with , a character from Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji. Critic Ryōta Fujitsu noted that Kaworu's name is gender-neutral, linking the choice to the androgynous portrayal of Satan in Devilman. The series' director Hideaki Anno reiterated in an interview that he instead associated the name with Kaworu's role as an ideal boy and an idealized version of Shinji, arguing that "there's no feminine sense whatsoever".
The staff had already planned to introduce Kaworu Nagisa during the earliest stages of development. Two years before the series began broadcasting, Gainax published a presentation about the series entitled . Kaworu was originally going to appear in the twenty-second episode of the series, , as a "bishōnen constantly accompanied by a cat". Nerv would have allowed the boy to enter its laboratories and, after a clash in which his fellow pilot Shinji Ikari found himself "in the dilemma of having to fight against an anthropomorphic enemy", "the greatest secret of the organization" would be revealed. In the first drafts, the Angel would have been a cat controlling a boy; however, this idea was abandoned, and elements of it were merged into Kaworu. In preliminary proposals, he had an organ characteristic of Angels named core and the ability to modify his appearance through metamorphosis. Sadamoto identified the Return of Ultraman episode "The Monster Tamer and the Boy" as a possible source of inspiration, since it features a lonely, ostracized boy named Ryō who shares a connection with a monster called Muruchi. The Angel was also originally intended to attend Tokyo-3 school alongside the other main characters, but Anno later discarded the idea as the story had by then moved beyond its original school-based premise. To avoid drawing complex scenes of the cat walking alongside him, the staff instead planned for Kaworu to carry it under his arm. Other proposals envisioned the Angel as the boy himself, while others portrayed it as a shapeshifter capable of assuming the form of either the boy or the cat, like a bakeneko, a shape-shifting cat yōkai from Japanese folklore. The staff ultimately abandoned the concept for practical reasons, since animating the cat would still have proved difficult. They also felt that the idea of a cat Angel manipulating a human puppet too closely resembled earlier works, like the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
In the sixteenth episode, "Splitting of the Breast", the Angel Leliel comes into contact with Shinji Ikari. In the original screenplay, after experimenting with various human voices and languages, Leliel would ultimately have chosen Japanese to communicate with Shinji. Because Anno had already planned to introduce a human-looking enemy in the form of Kaworu, however, he revised the script so that Kaworu, rather than Leliel, became the first Angel to speak a human language. In the broadcast version, Kaworu speaks almost exclusively with Shinji and has only a brief exchange with Rei, as Anno felt there was no need for him to interact with the other characters. He later decided, however, to add a scene between Kaworu and Misato Katsuragi in the home video extended version. In an interview conducted before the release of the home video version, Anno said that he could not imagine what such a scene would even look like. Sadamoto recalled that Evangelion scripts were generally written with enough material for roughly two episodes before Anno condensed them, and believed that several scenes involving Kaworu were consequently discarded. Additional suggestions came from Mitsuo Iso, who previously wrote the thirteenth episode, "Lilliputian Hitcher". Iso's proposal introduced Eva-05, described as an Evangelion of roughly human size. Like the Kikakusho document, Iso's draft portrayed Kaworu as a cat Angel; in Iso's idea, Kaworu was able to attack through psychokinesis and a dynamo, the astrophysical mechanism by which a celestial body generates an electromagnetic field. The cat would have attacked Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida before being pursued by a female Terminator and a male Terminator who fought using ninja-like techniques. Kaworu would then have spoken with Rei while standing atop a utility pole in a scene inspired by Kenji Miyazawa's Kaze no Matasaburo. The episode's overall surreal atmosphere would also have recalled by Taku Mayumura. Iso further proposed introducing rainbows as a religious symbol in the episode, reflecting their longstanding association with the covenant between God and humanity; the rainbow religious symbolism was ultimately incorporated into the fifth episode of the series, "Rei I".
Anno conceived him as an idealized version of Shinji, someone everyone would fall in love with. Like other characters in the series, Anno conceived Kaworu based on his own personality. He described Rei and Kaworu as part of his unconscious, and Kaworu specifically as his shadow—the dark and unconscious side of the psyche. According to him, "The plan was that the 'unconscious Shinji' would be Ayanami Rei, the Shinji who appears on the surface would be Ikari Shinji, and the 'ideal Shinji' would be Nagisa Kaworu". The series' staff also described Kaworu as an embodiment of Anno's "death wish". Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto conceived him as "more elegant and more refined" than Shinji, and compared to him he would be "taller, thinner and with a smaller face". For the somatic features of his face, he decided to combine those of Rei, Shinji, and Asuka Langley Soryu, and took inspiration from the boys of the Japanese idol company Johnny's Jr., known for their youthful, androgynous facial features. Sadamoto himself had the opportunity to meet several members of Johnny's Jr. backstage. While designing him, Sadamoto envisioned him with a "younger" voice than in the final version. One of the drafts of the twenty-fourth episode described him as a blond-haired boy, but during production staff decided to change his hair colour to white. Following a personal request from the director, colorist Harumi Takaboshi made his eyes red to be analogous with Rei's and give him "a distinct impression". Although he was conceived to appear only in the final episodes, during the making of the opening theme the main staff decided to depict him with a sketch by Sadamoto; in the editing phase, the sketch was inserted before a frame depicting Rei Ayanami and the caption "Angels". Kaworu's role remained largely unchanged in the final version of the series since then. According to Sadamoto, however, Kaworu was not originally meant to be the last Angel. Instead, the staff simply envisioned that, after presenting Angels with widely different forms and abilities, one of them would eventually assume a human appearance.
Development Hideaki Anno entrusted the screenplay for the episode to Akio Satsukawa. As with the rest of the series, Anno provided only a general outline of the plot, which Satsukawa then developed into a draft for Anno and the rest of the staff to review. In Satsukawa's early drafts, Kaworu served as the pilot of a new miniature Evangelion called αーTYPEーEVA000. His beauty immediately attracted Shinji's attention, prompting rumors among their classmates that the two were dating. In another scene from the draft, Kaworu would have played the piano. Satsukawa also envisioned Kaworu and Shinji swimming naked in a river at night, talking about one day playing the cello and piano together, and kissing each other on the lips. Although Satsukawa's screenplay contained strong homoerotic overtones, Anno did not discourage his colleague from pursuing the idea. Anno ultimately considered the drafts to have exceeded his tolerance level, however, and revised them while preserving their overall atmosphere. The Evangelion staff rejected several elements of the original screenplay. Satsukawa's original river scene carried much stronger erotic overtones than the final version and resembled scenes from films starring River Phoenix. Episode director Masayuki even threatened to leave the production after reading Satsukawa's homoerotic script.From the interview in The series' producer also rejected the river scene, prompting Anno to replace it with the sequence in which Shinji and Kaworu relax together in Nerv's communal baths. According to Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Anno developed Satsukawa's image of the two boys in the river in his own way, lending the scene in Nerv's public baths what he described as "a decadent" atmosphere.