Here is a list of characters from the manga Appleseed.
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Deunan Knute
''Even if we've been kicked out of Eden, we have to try to survive! We have to believe the future is what we make of it!"
Voiced by: Masako Katsuki (JP OVA), Ai Kobayashi (JP films), Maaya Sakamoto (JP XIII series), Yuka Komatsu (JP Alpha), Larissa Murray (OVA dub), Jessica Straus (Geneon Entertainment dub), Luci Christian (Sentai Filmworks dub & all appearances thereafter)
The fiery one of the main duo, she is the best at what she does.
- Action Girl: Zigzagged. While Deunan is not defined by victimhood but by agency and competence, owns extensive combat knowledge and is perfectly capable of taking decisions on her own she still needs Briareos from time to time to reassure her and may sometimes throw a hissy fit if things get too out of hand, especially at the beginning of the series.
- Adaptational Curves: Her appearance in Alpha is noticeably more buxom than her other animated incarnations.
- Ambiguously Brown: Deunan is often depicted with fairly dark skin and platinum blonde hair and has a Sudanese mother in one continuity.
- Badass Normal: Briaeros is a cyborg using an extremely rare system. Deunan is only a very, very good soldier. Though she is said in All There in the Manual to have some implants for dealing with poisons and regulating hormones such as adrenaline.
- Battle Couple: With Briareos.
- Cleavage Window: Her outfit in Alpha certainly shows off her chest more than in other incarnations. She's also considerably more buxom than in her other film appearances.
- Cowboy Cop: Especially in Ex Machina, when she starts an assault on a hostage situation before her commander gives the go order.
- Hard-Drinking Party Girl: In XIII (sometime, when she's mad at her boyfriend, sometime for fun with her boyfriend). Has some shades in the original manga as well, though it's not quite at the levels of XIII.
- Harmful to Minors: In XIII, Deunan's mother was murdered by a sniper right before her eyes (her mother was African in that continuity, she ran afoul of Apartheidesque legislation when crossing a road reserved for whites and was shot by a sniper).
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The tiny girl to Briareos's huge guy.
- Lethal Chef: She's a pretty terrible cook in the manga. Briareos briefly ribs her about this in Alpha.
- Meaningful Appearance: In the original manga, Deunan is drawn as a blonde with bronze skin. She explains to Hitomi at one point that her mother was Sudanese, stating her skin tone is something she inherited. Hitomi herself even comments before hand that she felt that Deunan's skin was darker compared to most Caucasians. Her skin color is invariably lightened in the various adaptations, though her mother being African is mentioned by Briareos in XIII (she was murdered by a soldier for violating a racial segregation law).
- Never a Self-Made Woman: Defied. Briareos tells her time and again that she shouldn't depend on him but rather become strong enough to stand on her own without him.
- Omniglot: Volume 3 shows Deunan to be able to speak a great deal of languages.
- Prefers Rocks to Pillows: After living for so long in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, Deunan just cannot sleep in a bed. Instead, she does a pillow dummy to distract anybody who gets inside her bedroom (like potential assasins) and sleeps on the floor near it, where she can draw a bead on the feet of said hostiles.
- Red Oni: Deunan is quite impulsive and hot-blooded compared to her partner. It get's to the point that Briareos sometimes has to chide her for being too caught up in her emotions and letting them affect her work.
- Robosexual: For Briareos. Technically, he's a cyborg (e.g. his legs are biological, so we can make an educated guess, that his..."entertainment and production facility" wasn't replaced with electronic prostheses).
Briareos Hecatonchires
''It has its own heartbeat... Just like I do."
Voiced by: Yoshisada Sakaguchi (JP OVA), Jurota Kosugi (JP 2004 film), Kōichi Yamadera (JP Ex Machina & XIII), Jun'ichi Suwabe (JP Alpha), William Roberts (OVA dub), Jamieson Price (Geneon Entertainment dub), David Matranga (Sentai Filmworks dub & all appearances thereafter)
A Cyborg who is not only the mentor of his partner, but also her lover.
- Battle Couple: With Deunan.
- Blue Oni: Briareos is a lot more calm and cautious compared to his partner. This is especially shown in how he takes to Olympus with a more frigid and suspicious reservation compared to her.
- Cold Sniper: His weapon of choice in Alpha is a heavy anti-materiel sniper rifle, and he's pretty brusque and harsh towards everyone. Unless you're Deunan.
- Coup de Grâce: In the 2004 film, finishes off one of the fembot assassins with a pistol shot to the head after it has taken a disabling hit from his assault rifle. In Alpha, he mercilessly crushes Nyx's head, her one remaining organic part after blowing apart the body in half with his gun.
- Cyber Cyclops: Subverted. The big round thing in nthe center of his face is actually his nose, not an eye. His eyes are the four little round bits on either side of the nose (he also has two more on the backs of those antannae, to allow him to peek around corners).
- Cyborg: A very advanced kind of cyborg.
- Declaration of Protection: Although sometime, it's too much for Deunan and she thinks he's nannying and coddling her.
- The Dreaded: His cyborg model got signaled out during a sting in Volume 3 for dismantlement by perps in a hostage siutation as his brains combined with his physical ability make him particularly dangerous.
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The huge guy to Deunan's tiny girl.
- In a Single Bound: He can leap some pretty outrageously huge distances.
- Meaningful Name: In Greek mythology, Briareos was the leader of the three Hecatonchires, the hundred-armed giants who helped the gods overthrow the Titans and cement their rule of the world from Mount Olympus. In this version, Briareos is a full-body cyborg in an enormous experimental Hecatonchires-class chassis that has no upper limits on the size and number of weapons it can operate at once other than what he can physically carry, and works to protect the city-state of Olympus on behalf of Athena and her bioroid council.
- Mentor Archetype
- Race Lift: In the 2004 film, he has a light skin tone and East Asian features, instead of the Scary Black Man he was in the manga, when we see him pre-surgery.
- Scary Black Man: Averted. Though Briareos was in fact North African before his surgery, he wasn't especially menacing. Apparently, he WAS that big, however.
- Super-Strength: In the second movie, after his cyborgization, he destroyed one of the assassin-droids by punching through her, ripping her in half. In Alpha, when he's back to full strength, he can easily flip over an overturned Hummvee with no effort at all.
- Supporting Protagonist: At least in XIII, while he's nominally the main character along with Deunan, he mostly plays second fiddle to her.
- Worf Had the Flu: In the beginning of Alpha, his systems are glitched and draining his internal power at a wasteful rate, which forces him to operate with reduced strength and diminished awareness.
Hitomi
Voiced by: Mayumi Sho (JP OVA), Yuki Matsuoka (JP films), Mikako Takahashi (JP XIII series), Aoi Yūki (JP Alpha), Julia Brahms (OVA dub), Karen Strassman (Geneon Entertainment dub), Hilary Haag (Sentai Filmworks dub), Emily Neves (EN XIII series), Brina Palencia (EN Alpha)
A bioroid who brought our heroes to the utopian city of Olympus.
- Barrier Maiden: In order to access the inner most levels of the Gaia supercomputer that runs much of Olympus, Hitomi's DNA is needed as a sort of keycard. Thus she is the subject of a kidnapping plot in the OVA and is needed to shut down Olympus' out of control defense system in the second volume, seeing as how that system is being run by Gaia.
- Butt-Monkey: Hitomi doesn't have the best luck in the series.
- In the first volume she ends up being captured by Deunan and Briareos who are initially don't trust her, with the former in particular being quite rude to her at times.
- Hitomi also tends to suffer from being neglected by her love interest, Yoshi, as he pays much more attention to machines than he does to her.
- Than in Volume 2, Hitomi ends up getting into trouble with E-SWAT, including Deunan, when she is manipulated by her bosses to commit a crime for them.
- Demoted to Extra: Hitomi plays a large role in the plots of Volumes 1 and 2 in the manga. But in Volumes 3 and 4, she only appears for a few scenes and has increasingly little with the plot, with her appearance in Volume 4 being only a little better than a cameo.
- Genki Girl: Due to her bioroid nature, Hitomi has a somewhat more limited range of emotions compared to humans, and as a result tends to be highly spunky and energetic.
- Older Than They Look: While Hitomi acts and looks younger then Deunan, she's actually much older then both her and Briareos, as she is more then 50 years old by the time of the first volume.
- Omniglot: Like Deunan, Hitomi can also speak many languages, but to an even larger degree than her.
- Platonic Co-Parenting: It's not seen much due to the manga series being left unfinished, but Hitomi ends up becoming something of a second mother to Artemis' children, after the latter moves into her house and reproduces. Hitomi is seen having to cook for them, though that doesn't go well for various reasons, and expresses frustration at how they don't appreciate her efforts in a more or less motherly way.
