Ikari, Yui

碇ユイ

Yui is Shinji Ikari's mother and Gendo Ikari's wife. She was a brilliant bioengineer who worked for Project E at Gehirn. Additionally, she is the daughter of a prominent member of Seele.
Yui Ikari is one of the more powerful presences in the series. She is shown to be kind, optimistic, and motherly. Her faith in humanity and belief that it is worth preserving and remembering stand out when compared to the more cynical characters on the rest of the cast.
Yui became romantically involved with a mysterious man, several years older than herself, named Gendo Rokubungi. He was constantly the source of shady rumors among them that Gendo had approached Yui for nothing but her talent and her affiliation with Seele. Regardless, in Yui's own words, he was "quite a sweet person. It's just that no one knows it."
In the rebuild film series she's referred to as Ayanami Yui instead of Ikari Yui.
[him] the bright future". The experiment, ostensibly, was part of Gehirn's research into the creation of artificial souls, but it resulted in a "freak accident" instead, wherein her soul was absorbed into the Eva's core and her body reverted to LCL. Gendo subsequently undertook a "Salvage Operation" that attempted to recreate Yui's body and fix her soul back into it, but this failed, instead resulting in the creation of the first Rei Ayanami.[/spoiler]

Spoiler

After Yui (presumably) graduated, she married Gendo, and the latter took on her surname. He became involved with Seele, joining the Katsuragi Expedition to serve as an auditor, although it is not revealed what Yui was doing during this time. After Gendo returned, they had a child together, Shinji who, if a girl, would have been named Rei.

Spoiler

[spoiler]Yui took up work at the Artificial Evolution Laboratory in Hakone, Japan, which was really a front for Seele's secret research organization, Gehirn. Her skills in bioengineering went towards the "Adam Revival Project", more commonly called "Project E". In 2004, Yui volunteered herself as the test subject for the Contact Experiment with the incomplete Eva-01 (a decision she had made by autumn of the previous year). She brought the 4-year-old Shinji to the site of the experiment so that she could "show