Kotone Suzunami

Kotone Suzunami (涼波コトネ) is an original character from Evangelion Battlefields, introduced in Season 2 of the game. She is a newly-appointed Evangelion pilot, and popular content creator for an unnamed video streaming platform in-universe.

In Case:01
Kotone grew up in an orphanage, often looking after children younger than her. As a result of never having her parents in her life, she is easily made to feel unwanted. It is unknown what happened to her parents, but Kotone believes that they are still alive.

She initially transferred to Tokyo-3 while NERV was scouting her out as a pilot candidate, being appointed to the role officially after she started attending school. She attends Class 2-A of the Tokyo-3 First Municipal Junior High School, with fellow Evangelion pilots Shinji Ikari, Asuka Shikinami Langley, Rei Ayanami and later Kaworu Nagisa, who she also trains under. Shortly after her arrival at NERV, Gendo Ikari entrusts her with additional surveillance work, which involves her monitoring, and reporting to him, on the daily lives of the other pilots. Her pilot work soon becomes a cover for her "real role". Kotone demonstrates significant problems with her synchronization rate that prevent her from being appointed as a pilot in actual battle.

In her spare time, she creates videos to post online, which usually involve her singing and performing original dance choreography. Her popularity in this sphere of content creation has earned her the title of an "internet idol", which she is sometimes referred to as by the other students, even before her introduction in Season 2. She believes that continuing to make videos may lead to her parents finding them and getting into contact with her. This hobby proves to be a security risk as far as NERV is concerned, and following her accounts being brought to the attention of Gendo, her channel is altered without her knowledge to restrict viewership to a pre-approved group. Kotone notices the stagnation in her viewership and becomes distraught, as she fears it may mean her parents will never come across her videos, but advice sought from Hitomi Amagi and Kaworu eventually convinces her that her motivation to create should come from within instead.

In Case:02 and Case:03
In "Case:02" of the game, a separate timeline set 14 years in the future, around the same time as Evangelion 3.0, she lives at the NERV base with the other pilots and Hitomi. She arrived there sometime prior to Shinji's retrieval operation. She finds life at NERV to be draining, with most of her days consisting only of training and little else. She is asked by Gendo to monitor the other pilots in this timeline as well.

In "Case:03", another universe set in the 3.0 timeline, she and Hitomi instead reside on the AAA Wunder. Little information on Kotone's history is presented in Case:02, however, in Case:03, she tells Hitomi about how she was separated from her parents as a young child after the Near Third Impact, and grew up in a surviving village without them. Her desire to become a pilot was motivated by hearing stories about Eva pilots being able to roam the core-ized Earth without restriction. She struggles with poor performance in her training sessions, and considers becoming an operator instead of a pilot. This version of Kotone grew up in a world with little in the way of animal life, and finds herself fascinated with the photos of animal families in pre-Third Impact encyclopedias kept in the Wunder's library. She's still a video creator in both Case:02 and Case:03, though in these timelines she records snippets of her daily life in the form of vlogs, rather than dance videos.

Personality
Kotone's official character profile describes her as being "bright and happy", her positive personality having attracted a large amount of attention to the videos she posts online. The children at her orphanage also considered her to be like a big sister to them. She's moderately extroverted; while she is generally very friendly, open to expressing her feelings and can border on excitable at times, she mostly keeps herself company and her affability gives way to a defeated mentality whenever something goes wrong.

She puts forth a ton of effort in her work, not just in her video making, but her classwork and training as an Eva pilot as well. She stays determined during her training, despite her synchronization rate being slow to improve, a problem that is related to her hobbies as a video creator being her main priority, rather than piloting. Kotone is also rather naïve, seemingly unaware of both the nature of her monitoring work, and the NERV staff tampering with her online presence.

In spite of her outgoing and dedicated demeanor, she's quite shy and avoidant when it comes to her daily life at NERV and struggles with overworking herself. She regularly loses sleep trying to balance training with homework and her personal life, and also goes through significant bouts of low self-esteem whenever she fails at something. She has a tendency to become fixated on seeing through many different ideas and interests, and will latch on to any encouragement she's given, even when others disapprove.

Trivia

 * Suzunami is the name of the Yūgumo-class destroyer of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
 * Despite being the same age and in the same class as them (with the exception of Mari), Kotone refers to all other Evangelion pilots with the "-senpai" honorific, normally reserved for students in higher grade levels. She does this to indicate her respect for them as her senior pilots.
 * In turn, Mari gives her the nickname of "Junior" in Case:03, and Asuka briefly nicknames her "Chameleon" (カゼミドリ, literally "weather vane") in Case:01, the latter in reference to Asuka's perception of Kotone as someone who changes her attitude and motivation frequently.