Yuri Nakamura (仲村 ゆり, Nakamura Yuri) is the founder and leader of the Afterlife-based school organization Afterlife War Front. She leads the campaign of a number of students who fight against God, whom they blame for their cruel fates. Yuri is the main heroine of Angel Beats! and Angel Beats! Heaven's Door.
Appearance
Yuri is very happy in this picture.
Yuri is a 160 cm tall (5'3) girl with magenta-purple colored hair and sea-green eyes.
In the events prior to founding of the SSS, she wears the default school uniform, consisting of a white polo shirt under a sandy brown blazer and a short black pleated skirt along with black shoes. After she founded the SSS, she issues a different uniform to its members including herself, with features similar to a typical sailor fuku uniform. The uniform has a blue collar, skirt and a dark pink ribbon for girls. Yuri often holds a pistol (typically a 9mm Beretta M9, which is silver) in the anime.
She also wears black thigh-high socks and adorns her hair with a hairband with a yellow/green ribbon dangling on the right side. At times, she wears a white beret, most usually in operation briefings, as well as glasses when she is using a computer.
As long as the SSS are gathered in the Anti-Angel Headquarters, Yuri will be seen either on the principal's seat, or standing by the window. It isn't said how long she has been in the afterlife, however in the special episode "Hell's Kitchen" Yusa told her she would be a grandma if she were still alive. Indicating she could have been in this afterlife for over 40 years because she is quite young.
Personality
Yuri possesses the traits of a charismatic leader, as her determination and her ability to stay calm even in difficult situations always earns her the respect of the rest of the SSS at the end of the day. She is very intelligent and able to understand situations and think on her feet. However, she can be somewhat scatterbrained at times, as she once involved newly-recruited Yuzuru Otonashi in a conference on whether the name of their club is to be changed. Occasionally, she lets out a large haughty, ojou-sama-esque laugh whenever events go her way. Yusa once comments she sounds like a villain.
Her nickname is "Yurippe", a nickname suggested by Hinata because his mother has the same name and he felt strange calling her that. Almost all of the known SSS members only call her by her nickname (except Otonashi, Shiina and Iwasawa). Despite being the leader, Yuri gives full respect to her other members as well. This is seen when Yuri calls Iwasawa and Shiina with "-san" at the end of their names, acknowledging their strengths and capabilities.
Also, she is not afraid to make necessary sacrifices, usually involving her subordinates' deaths since she is fully aware that they will recover from being "dead." Despite this, she feels responsible for the lives of her subordinates and is badly affected by their loss.[1] When it becomes obvious that a situation has arisen where death (or conditions similar to death) is permanent, she assumes the burden of fighting alone and attempts to ensure everyone else is safe [2] even if she knows that it is pretty much suicide.
Similar to how the anime stress on Angel loves for Mapo Tofu, in Heaven's Door and the 4-koma, it is heavily stressed that Yuri HATES nattō (even in her child days).
Background
A young Yuri with her parents and siblings.
This section contains content from the Angel Beats! anime series.
Yuri is the oldest of four siblings, with two younger sisters and one younger brother. They lived with their parents in a middle-class residence, and were described as being very well off in life.
When their parents left the house one day for personal business, a group of robbers broke in and attempted to rob the house. Unfortunately, they couldn't find where the family's valuables were, so they turned to Yuri, the eldest, to take them to the family's prized possessions. They required she bring them valuables or else they would kill off her siblings at ten-minute intervals. Yuri wasn't sure which items were particularily valuable, and fell while carrying a large vase down a flight of stairs. She wasted too much time and the robbers ended up murdering all her siblings. She had never been told by her parents where in the house the expensive items were kept. The way her siblings were murdered is never clear, but images of blood splashed onto the walls shows that the robbers may have killed them brutally.
After that, she began to question life in a deeper manner. Why did her siblings have to die when they were just innocent children? How could she have lost everything within 30 minutes? Her failure to save her siblings became her inspiration to incite a rebellion against the "higher being" who looks after the afterlife (who she assumes is God) and those who work for Him. She assumed Kanade to be an angel who worked for God upon meeting her, due to her position in the school as a regulator and disciplinary. Her initial viewing of her Hand Sonic ability also served to mark her, in Yuri's mind, as something supernatural or extraordinary (This is later disproved in episodes 3-12, where it is revealed Angel had been crafting her own abilities using a computer program called Angel Player).
The circumstances of how she died and ended up in the Afterlife are left unclear. She was incredibly defensive when suicide came into conversation. She denies killing herself, but this validity is never explained. Yuri explained to Otonashi that the police arrived thirty minutes after her last sibling had been killed, but how the police knew about the murders is also unclear.
Plot
Yuri drags Hinata into a commotion inside the school.
Yuri, like all teenagers admitted to the school, is a student who is to undergo the curriculum designed to help them move on from regrets in their life. However, her past causes her to turn against the school, and this starts her founding of the Shinda Sekai Sensen (Afterlife War Front).
The Spark of the Rebellion
This section contains content from Angel Beats! Track Zero.
Yuri drags Hinata, a newly-admitted student to the Afterlife School, to her plans of luring God, which is her primary mission. Although she presents an inhumane approach to attain what she wants, she reconsiders her plans by Hinata's request.
Eventually, Yuri and Hinata become involved with an incident that causes them to discover the nature of the Student Council President's ability. She describes it as supernatural and thinks that she might be linked with God somehow. This marks the start of Yuri's attacks on the Student Council President, now refered to as "Angel".
The First Gunshots
This section contains content from Angel Beats! Track Zero.
Their first encounter with modern weapons such as guns turned out to be a genuine experience for Yuri. Despite Hinata's warnings and her personal experiences with having someone injured by a gunshot, she still pursued the source of the gunshots — a fellow student named Chaa — culminating in a duel which Angel abruptly ended.
Chaa later agrees to join her mission, largely due to how much Yuri reminded him of his wife, and there Yuri learns from him how to create things in the afterlife from dirt. However, they are still unable to learn how to craft weapons, and so upon their descent to the underground tunnels Chaa discovered, they are unable to prepare themselves from the dangerous being that lived in its bottommost level: a mysterious girl named C7.
A Need to Join Forces
This section contains content from Angel Beats! Track Zero.
Yuri and Hinata — away from their companions Chaa and a new recruit named Ooyama — unexpectedly face Shiina on their quest to find another student named Noda, whom they just found wandering around in the underground. Since they are lacking vital weapons to defend themselves against Shiina, Yuri and Hinata retreat, with Hinata suffering terrible injuries from being a decoy. They later regroup with Chaa and Ooyama, and after barely managing to restrain Shiina, they head back to the surface to plan a follow-up attack against Shiina.
Although initially they were surprised by Shiina's emergence on the surface, Yuri successfully pulls off a team maneuver, defeating Shiina with some help from Hinata.
Later, with Noda tagging along with them, Yuri asks Shiina to join her crusade against God, which she agrees to hesitantly, and it is there that the Afterlife War Front is officially formed.
The Rebellion Resumes
This section contains content from the Angel Beats! anime series.
An unknown period of time has passed since the first day of the Afterlife War Front, and Yuri's assault against Angel continues, although it has become such a chore to the point that even Yuri has experienced lack of interest in taking it seriously at times.
In one of her operations to assassinate the Student Council President, Yuri stumbles upon a boy named Otonashi, who like many of the students in the Afterlife have no idea about the current conflict. She witnesses Otonashi's "death" in the hands of Angel and brings him to the infirmary, where he eventually recovers. She then acts as Otonashi's guide in the afterlife before he decides to join the Afterlife War Front.
Operation Descent
One of the primary concerns of Yuri involves the safety of the students who work under Chaa and the weaponry specialists in the Guild, a subdivision of the Afterlife War Front. In one of their routine trips to restock supplies, she initiates Operation Descent.
Guild discovers that due to the presence of Angel inside the Guild's compound, and Yuri must lead the SSS into the lowermost level of the Guild while surviving the traps laid for Angel. Only Yuri and Otonashi are left standing after Operation Descent, and they made it out alive, with Angel buried along with the entire base of the Guild. Yuri later oversees Guild's migration back into the Guild's old headquarters.
The Angel's True Nature
Yuri soon pushes through plans to know more about their enemy. She orders SSS's computer hacker Takeyama to extract information from Angel's computer, but Iwasawa's disappearance in one of Girls Dead Monster's performances also unlocks a bigger revelation: that students of the afterlife can disappear on their own, even without Angel's direct intervention. Takeyama eventually reports his findings to Yuri, and the SSS discovers that their enemy is in fact gifted with powers that she herself crafted.
With this new insight on their enemy's nature, Yuri plans on dethroning Angel from her position as Student Council President by sabotaging her test papers. It turned out a success, with Angel's failures in all subjects enough grounds for dismissal from her position. However, it caused an unexpected turn of events to take the SSS by surprise.
Ayato Naoi, the Rebellion's Nemesis
By orders of the faculty, Ayato Naoi replaces his superior Angel (whose real name is Kanade Tachibana) as the Student Council President and immediately presents himself as a leader with an iron fist. He orders all of the members of the SSS to serve detention time, but this does not faze Yuri and the SSS. In fact, Yuri plans to test the limits of Naoi's intervention while trying to find out more about Naoi himself.
A battle soon broke out between the SSS (except for Otonashi, who is detained with Kanade due to an unrelated event) and Naoi and his personal army of NPCs that he hypnotized to do his bidding. The battle ended with the blood of the Afterlife Battlefront soaking the sports field, but Otonashi manages to rescue everyone by confronting Naoi face-to-face.
The Kanade Rescue Mission
Without the duties of a Student Council President, Kanade becomes a simple part of the entire school body. While Yuri is still uncomfortable with Kanade's presence, she allows her to join the SSS in some of its activities. In one of those activities, Kanade displayed the ability to produces clones of herself, a mysterious new ability called "Harmonics" that none has witnessed before.
The SSS later discover that the clone that Kanade created who had saved the battlefront from being killed by the Monster Stream, has gone rogue, and has abducted her after an intense battle that severely injured the original. Yuri soon realizes that the Harmonics Skill that Kanade created was mysteriously bugged — allowing clones to multiply itself indefinitely — so she is forced to rescue Kanade and fix the problem before it makes the Afterlife a dangerous place for the SSS.
The rescue mission brings them back again to the Guild headquarters recently destroyed and with the help of Yuri's previous tweaking with Kanade's computer, the Harmonics clones were reintegrated, leaving Kanade to a battle that only she must face. The SSS soon performs additional fixes to Kanade's computer under Yuri's orders.
Shadows in the Afterlife
Yuri's secretary Yusa reports of an unusual object that attacked Ooyama inside the school grounds. Described as a "Shadow", it begins to attack members of the SSS and was initially suspected to be Kanade's doing. However, Yuri later finds out that even NPCs are also vulnerable to their newest foe.
In order to warn everyone about the new threat to the SSS, Yuri organizes a meeting for all of the members of SSS. There, she exposes that Otonashi is planning with Kanade behind her back, but she now considers moving on an option, realizing that being devoured by the Shadows is a worse fate than disappearing. While she leaves everyone to think about what they need to do, she moves alone in finding out the culprit behind the existence of the Shadows.
Yuri's Greatest Encounter
Yuri returns to the old base of the Guild, and finds herself overrun by a massive number of Shadows. Although she fought to the end, she eventually becomes an NPC for a short period by a Shadow, only to fight her way back into her old self with the help of Otonashi, Kanade, Hinata and Naoi. Yuri soon continues on her march towards the computer room where the Shadows originate, and she finds an NPC who talks about the computer program Angel Player and its creator. When the AI offers her the chance to become God herself, she violently refuses by destroying all of the computers in the room, and after feeling fulfilled for the first time in her life, she loses her consciousness.
Final Days
Three days after the Shadows have finally disappeared, Yuri joins Otonashi, Kanade, Hinata and Naoi in a makeshift Graduation Ceremony after waking up from a long sleep. After a short period of antics between the last five humans in the afterlife, Yuri laments having treated Kanade badly throughout her stay in the Afterlife and wishes that she had more time to be with her as a friend.
As a last gesture for Kanade, she embraces her and turns to everyone else with a wave before disappearing.
Abilities
- She carries a stainless steel Beretta 92 as her general weapon but uses a CheyTac M200 for sniping in episode 1 and a TDI KRISS Super V Vector submachine gun in episode 12 initially but switches to a M4-A1 Carbine with a Beta C-Mag, and Mk 18 SBR after receiving it from Chaa. Besides using firearms, she also excels in hand-to-hand combat, carrying at least 2 short knives at the back of her belt and is able to fight on par in melee combat against Kanade.
Quotes
- (From the English dub version of "Knocking on Heaven's Door") -- "This is really wonderful. This is such a happy environment. It's too dazzling for me. This is the way people live their lives. Isn't it just beautiful? I'm envious. If I vanish now, could I start over anew? Could I accept normal happiness? If I lost my memories, and got a different personality, I might be able to. But then, what does it mean to be reborn? That isn't the life I had anymore. It's someone else's life. Everyone only gets to live life one time, and it's right here. I only get it once. This is my life. I can't entrust it to someone. I can't steal a new one. I can't force it on others. I can't forget it, or erase it. I can't stomp over it, laugh it off, or beautify it. I can't anything, I'd have to- I'd have to accept my one shot at life no matter how cruel or merciless or unfair I thought it was. Sir, don't you understand? That is why I must fight. I must keep on fighting, because- because I could never accept that kind of life!"
- (To The AI when he said she has all the time in the world to think) -- " Let me tell you something. Humans don't even have the patience to wait even ten minutes for something! "
- (Remembering about her siblings) -- " Either way, I'm a failure. I ended up loving them just as much as I loved you. I wanted to be a sister that loved only you, so much that you could be proud. What's this feeling? What's happened? Everything that's kept me going is fading away ... And if it all fades away ... I'll disappear. Even though life took you away so unreasonably, but the time I spent with everyone is just irreplaceable. And now ... I want to follow them ..."
- (Yuri's sibling to Yuri) -- " Thank You. You've done enough. Sis, you don't have to suffer alone anymore. You've worked so very hard. For a long time Sis."
Trivia
- In the Heaven's Door manga, she was more violent than in the anime. She was kicking Hinata out of the roof, poking his eye ball with chopstick, stabbing his head with a hoe, and shooting Chaa in the head with an arrow. (most of this became a joke, as she will answer "We are immortal though")
- In the manga, Yuri and Hinata are often mistaken for a couple.
- In the manga, Yuri and Hinata have romantic tendencies, not evident in the anime.
- She was a bassist once and played with Shiina as Hisako and Iwasawa's first bandmates. However after their first gig she and Shiina were kicked out much to her disappointment.
- Her main character design is inspired by Yukiko Amagi from the game Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4. Yukiko is Jun Maeda's favorite character in the said game.
- Yuri looks very similar to Haruhi Suzumiya, a similarity that raised criticisms with many fans of Haruhi at the release of the series. The two also share many similar character traits.
- She is the only SSS member that is able to match Kanade in close combat. In the manga, Yuri acknowledges Shiina's fighting skills, even pitting her against Kanade in a plan to bring Kanade out.
- It seems that she always insults Hinata, or hits him.
- Yuri was a contestant of the voting contest Anime Saimoe Tournament 2010 but lost to Shana in the first round of the main tournament.
- To see her other result, visit here
- She 'borrows' an archery club uniform and equipment, and fires an arrow with a challenge letter to Chaa, but due to her inexperience with the bow, the arrow lodges in Chaa's forehead.
- In the manga, her first suspicion of the source of Angel's power was Angel's bikini.
- Aside from Otonashi, Yuri was the only one who has seen Shiina's true character over cute things. (In the OVA, Angel was learned of this as well.)
- "Yuri" means "lily" in Japanese, and "Nakamura" means "middle village".
- During her confrontation with The AI, it is revealed that the source of the high amount of love that existed in the Afterlife (which causes the Shadow Conversion Program to activate), was no other than Yuri herself. Her love for all SSS members is revealed to be the cause; possibly soaring up after the misunderstanding with Kanade has been resolved, thus making her feel responsible for everyone.
- She shares the same English voice actor as Ryou Fujibayashi from Clannad, Ayu Tsukimiya from Kanon, and Rin Natsume from Little Busters, all titles from Key, despite having completely different personalities from each other.
- In the manga, she seems to dislike Natto calling something that "reeks like a jock's week-old gym socks."
References
Gallery
