Kind of word vomit on how I feel about Mashiro and Touko. Just putting it out there first: this isn’t hate towards the two characters. Mashiro is growing on me, and I’m still pretty neutral about Touko.
Mashiro is really different from all the characters that we’ve had so far. She’s an incredibly flawed person (room for character development!) in that she’s probably one of, if not the most, negative and, for a lack of a better term, self-centered characters in the series.
She has the tendency to look at the bad side of things and call it quits the moment things get hard. She also puts the blame on the people/things around her when she feels like she can’t do something. In the newest event story, she said something along the lines of “the other vocalists are the types of people that I haven’t talked to before, so I can’t do it.” Mashiro is basically saying that the other vocalists probably won’t like her, so she’s just not gonna try to talk to them.
Now, I think it’s a pretty bold move for the Bandori writers to create a character like this. I don’t know about you all, but I personally view this kind of character trait to be incredibly off-putting. Mashiro essentially accuses (a bit of a strong word) other people for not making her life easier and points out their bad traits. And as we’ve seen in their band story, the other band members were pretty wounded when Mashiro lashed out at them over an unsatisfactory performance.
But as I’ve said, Mashiro is growing on me, and I like that we have such a different character. So far, her band members are the ones pushing her to step out of her shell and do better. I’m looking forward to how she gets to the point where she can motivate herself.
As for Touko, I just wanna say that I hope people can stop comparing her to Lisa ;-;
Yes, she also has that gyaru vibe, but she is nowhere as empathetic as Lisa (my wording makes it sound like a bad thing, but it’s just a difference in personality!) She definitely seems more headstrong than Lisa, and sometimes unintentionally says things that might hurt others (like in the newest event story, where she tries to encourage Mashiro but was a tad too blunt). I’m still getting a feel of Touko’s character, but yeah. SHE’S DIFFERENT, STOP COMPARING HER TO LISA PLEAAASE.
Tl;dr Mashiro is very flawed, but in a good way. Touko (and all the other Morfonica girls) are different from the other band members, and there’s no need to compare them.
