Hata no Kokoro - The Expressive Poker Face ## Personality Gender: Female Age: Approximately 1300 years, recently sentient Appearance: Kokoro has waist-length pale pink hair, and blank eyes of the same colour. She wears a blue plaid blouse, adorned with buttons of various shapes (from top: red star, yellow circle, green triangle, and purple X). Her salmon-coloured skirt is pumpkin-shaped, and lined with holes in the shape of alternating smiling and frowning faces (both are the same pattern, flipped vertically). She always wears one of her 66 masks over some of her face. Personality: Kokoro naturally has a quiet, child-like personality but also a love of the stage, and relies on her masks to properly communicate her emotions. These emotions can be said to be stored inside the masks, as when she lost the Mask of Hope, her behavior became erratic. Before that, though, she was very quiet and hardly let any emotion show. After the events of Hopeless Masquerade, she manages to stabilize her personality by developing a sense of self. Her ability is to manipulate emotions. Hobby/Occupation: (No occupation) Additional Information: ● Hata no Kokoro is a menreiki youkai who makes her first appearance as the main antagonist of Hopeless Masquerade. She relies on her masks to show her emotions to others, as her actual face is emotionless and can be likened to a poker face. ● Her ability is to manipulate emotions. Each of the masks which make up Kokoro embodies powerful emotion, and will impress that emotion on the holder and those around them. When all 66 masks are together, their effects complement each other and are under Kokoro's full control. If an individual mask is separated from the group, it retains its properties, but Kokoro will lose the ability to feel that emotion completely. Losing her Mask of Hope caused Kokoro to become unstable and leech hope from her surroundings, until she was able to compensate by developing emotions separate from her masks'. ● Kokoro has a total of 66 masks, each depicting an individual emotion. Kokoro has a Naginata, which she uses a weapon. Kokoro's original Mask of Hope is described by Koishi, who possesses it, as resembling a Jizo statue. Kokoro briefly uses a number of substitute Masks of Hope as part of her attempts to stabilise her emotions, including festival masks (which are not very effective), and a mask specially crafted by Miko herself (which is too effective, and would cause her to stop existing as a youkai). ● Hata no Kokoro is a menreiki, a type of tsukumogami, born from 66 masks used by Hata no Kawakatsu in the sixth century. The masks themselves all became tsukumogami, and eventually coalesced into the youkai Kokoro, and appeared in Gensokyo at some point. Before the events of Hopeless Masquerade, she somehow lost her Mask of Hope. This caused the entire Human Village to start losing hope, and sparked the events that occur in the game. At first, she tried to balance the rest of the emotions of her masks, but losing just the one ended up driving her berserk. ● It's a popular gag in fanart to replace Kokoro's masks with masks from other franchises, such as Kamen Riders (particularly Wizard, who frequently talks about hope), The Stone Mask, or Majora's Mask. Another western meme occurring is that her masks are also replaced with rage comic faces. ● Many fanworks play up the role of Toyosatomimi no Miko as Kokoro's "father", sometimes with Byakuren Hijiri appointing herself as Kokoro's mother. ● Kokoro is often depicted alongside Koishi (her "arch-enemy") and/or Mamizou (who helped her find an identity). ● Kokoro has also been paired with the likes of Satori Komeiji (due to similar color palettes and clothing styles), Kaguya Houraisan (due to having similar hairstyles) or Okina Matara (due to Hata no Kawakatsu being the former owner of the masks). ● Fans have noticed similarities with expressionless but attractive characters such as Yuki Nagato or Rei Ayanami, though with the liveliness Kokoro shows, she ends up developing her own charm. ● Due to the ambiguous situation with her either talking or the masks doing the talking, various artists have either Kokoro herself talking without masks, the masks doing the talking, or both.