My journey to falling in love for the leader of HHW's dumb trio

alternately titled: A badly disguised Kokoro appreciation post

(Maybe she is the real Phantom Thief)

(This turned out longer than I meant it to, please forgive me. Kinda makes me wish this were the good old LiveJournal/Dreamwidth or tumblr where you could just hide part of the posts. I hope the images work, too.)

So, I actually have no idea why I feel this constant urge to mention it, but I figured that if there's any place to do so, it would be here. (That, and I don't see myself doing anything other than rambling in my own activities.) I also have actually no idea how (un)popular anyone is, and to be frank I don't care about it either, but an easy way to enjoy a character in a new light is to learn the reasons why someone likes them, at least for me. Therefore, like it or not, here we go.

In all truth, when I started with the global release of Bandori, Kokoro didn't do much for me. I liked her design - she's a damn cute girl - and I absolutely loved the whole "let's make people happy through music" thing, because I have a history with being saved through music in real life and if there is anything I can get behind and firmly believe in, it is the power of music. I liked Orchestra of Smiles well enough in how it was arranged, but didn't really like her voice. However, the title and something else I actually can not quite name reminded me of Mucc's Ame no Orchestra, in a roundabout way that had nothing to do with the themes or even the moods of the songs, and that was enough for me to enjoy the song from the start, even if the band's antics as a whole gave me headaches. Literally. As someone who is usually referred to as a "mind over heart" person, the question of "how would the dumb trio even function if this were not a game" actually bothered me enough to get distracted all the time. It certainly didn't help that what I read in the band story usually focused on how dumb they were. But I also think that Kokoro's VA does a real good job at making her sound like she's smiling while singing in all the songs (this occured to me first in Silhouette), which is something I can get behind on as well. It's hard to stay your broody old self when listening to Orchestra or Goka Gokai... So I took what I could get from HHW - the cute designs of Kokoro and Kaoru as well as the POWER OF HAPPINESS - and focused on the other bands for anything else.

This changed when I scouted Invincible Hero Kokoro. I'm not going to lie, when she did appear, I was disappointed - before that I had only gotten three other 3* cards, two of which were Hagumi (the only HHW member I still can't warm up to), and HHW was still the lowest in my list at that point. When you pine for your best girl or at least a member of her band, there's bound to be a bit of sadness when your least favorite band seems to stalk you. However, I was soothed by the fact that it was the HHW character I liked most for her looks, and that she was my first not-event Scorer. Then I trained her, and absolutely fell in love with her trained art. There's just something about the shading that I really, really like. It somehow reminds me of colored pencil, especially in her hair. Don't ask me why. So at this point, I wasn't exactly sad about scouting Kokoro anymore. If there is beauty around you, you damn better appreciate it.

But what made me care, actually, was the initial card episode. I make it a habit to at least skim them instead of outright skipping, and this one caught me completely off-guard. At that point, I was so stuck on the "moron" image they cultivate with the dumb trio, that witnessing Kokoro pinpointing the inner workings of her band members out of left field was like a slap in the face:

In all honesty, it felt like a fake mirror shattering and suddenly you realize there was something else behind it. Not only did this conversation make me appreciate Kokoro as a character much more in a couple heartbeats, it also made me aware that I hadn't tried to understand the other HHW members before, either. While most of them I still do not particularly care about, this card episode gave me some much needed easier access to them. Kaoru in particular.

In a more dramatically put sense, it also served as a reminder that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I thought I'm not so bad at that, but Bandori gave me reason to re-evaluate that habit again, and it is another reason why I love the game in general and Kokoro in particular. She's still a bit too crazy for me in some regards, especially when combined with the other 2/3 of the trio, but she's also much smarter in an emotional sense than I gave her credit for. It's totally cool if people do not agree with that, but I guess I get a bit tired of her getting reduced to Moron Mode sometimes for the memes.

Anyway, she climbed the Favorites list at high speed since then and is now very comfortable at the top together with Aya. Certainly didn't expect that when I started playing.

This rambling ends now, have a good day (or night) and maybe go look for something that makes you smile before it ends.