Asuka Langley Soryu
"Neon Genesis Evangelion" director Hideaki Anno was depressed for four years before the series production. After the failure of the "" sequel "Aoki Uru", Gainax began planning a new series. According to Gainax co-founder Yasuhiro Takeda, ideas from "Aoki Uru" were borrowed for the new project, including the concept of "not running away"; for Takeda the passage was "something more than just transposing one show's theme onto another... Anno inherited something from "Aoki Uru" — the determination not to run away from problems — and what we saw in "Evangelion" was maybe just a reflection of those feelings". Anno chose "It's ok to run away" as the main theme for the series, with the idea that "it's perfectly fine" to run away sometimes and that "There are things that you gain and things that you lose running away, after all". He reflected his depression in the series, conceiving a world "drenched in a vision of pessimism"; he began production "with the wish that once the production complete, the world and the heroes would change". He originally proposed a character similar to Asuka Langley Soryu as the protagonist, following the Gainax tradition of a female protagonist in "Gunbuster" and "The Secret of Blue Water". Sadamoto objected to a new female protagonist, saying that "a robot should be piloted by a trained person, and if that person just happens to be a girl then that is fine"; however, he did not understand why a young girl "would pilot a robot". He eventually suggested a boy as the main character; his relationship with Asuka, who became another primary character, was modelled after Nadia's relationship with Jean, her love interest and eventual husband in the series.