.ichinose kotomi

OOC INFORMATION;
Player: Noah
Age: 22
Personal Journal: eatme
Contact Info:[plurk] cookierobots
Other Characters: Yang Xiao Long punchdrunklove

IC INFORMATION;
Characters Name: Kotomi Ichinose
Age: 17, birthday is May 17
Canon: Clannad
Canon Point: Episode 11, before the violin concert.
Species: Human
Gender: Female
Orientation: Tomoya Heterosexual, though she is one of the least romantically inclined people you will ever meet due to her severe lack of social skills and innocence.

History:
Wiki is not very useful so…


‘“Those who pursue truth must not be arrogant. Just because it can’t be proven scientifically, you mustn’t laugh at miracles. You must not deny your eyes the beauty of this world.” Those are my father’s words.’

Kotomi, written in three hiragana, was born to two important academics, Koutarou and Mizue Ichinose, who were working to explain the existence of a world separate from their reality, called the Illusionary World. They were busy with their work, but Kotomi was adored by them both and grew up with a lot of love. Intelligent like her parents, Kotomi had started reading advanced books from a young age and took up violin as a hobby, making her very different from other girls her age. She was quiet and reserved, and as a result she didn’t have any friends to speak of, but so long as she had her parents, she really didn’t mind this. She didn’t have many wants, never asking her parents for gifts or anything extravagant.

And then one day, while she was still young, she met a boy in her backyard who had been chasing a butterfly, Tomoya Okazaki. Because Tomoya was different in his kindness to the people she knew at school, Kotomi and her parents took a liking to him and the two became friends and they spent their afternoons together at her house. This is the simple life she led for the longest time.

When she was around 10, Kotomi finally asked for a gift for her birthday, a stuffed bear. Though she didn’t mind what she got as a present, she had read in a book that little girls usually asked for presents like that, so she thought she’d copy that. However, what she really wanted she couldn’t have, as her parents were called away on an important business trip to America. They promised they’d be there for her birthday since Tomoya was bringing friends of his own to celebrate. Kotomi was upset with them, even though they tried to sate her with the promise that they would send her a bear while they were away.

’I don’t need it! I hate you both!’

Those words were the last ones she got to say to them, as both of her parents died in a plane crash. Kotomi had waited all day, but Tomoya and his friends never came. The housekeeper was sick that day as well, so Kotomi was alone when a man in black came knocking at her door. He explained to Kotomi what had happened to her parents and he explained that he was looking for a copy of the important paper her parents had taken with them. Kotomi, still in shock of the news, slammed the door on the man, crying for him to go away. In her mind this person was a bad person, there to take something important away, when in reality he was her legal guardian and a close friend of her father’s. She spent the rest of the day running through her house, looking for her parents. This was punishment, right? She was selfish and she said horrible things, so God was punishing her, right?

’I’ll become a very good girl from now on. I will never say anything selfish anymore. I’ll study a lot too. I’ll read lots of books and become smart too. So dear God, I beg you. Please bring Father and Mother back. Please. Bring them back to me.’

She finally entered her father’s study, the one room she was told never to go into, where she found a large envelope in the middle of the desk. She had assumed it was the copy of the paper the man was looking for, the same paper that made her parents leave her. No matter how important the paper was, to Kotomi, it wasn’t worth her losing the ones she loved most. And so she took out a match and lit the envelope on fire, sobbing as the fire quickly spread out of control throughout the study. It was then that Tomoya had come over, guilty that he couldn’t convince his friends to come to her birthday. He heard her crying, and he found her in the burning room. He tried to help put out the fire, but it was the man in black that managed to smother it entirely. The man explained that Kotomi didn’t burn what she thought she did, but in her current state of mind, she couldn’t comprehend that anyone else had been there, let alone that she didn’t do anything wrong.

After that day, Kotomi locked herself in her house, locked herself away from the rest of the world. She began to do nothing but study and read book after book. She collected scraps of papers ad articles that mentioned her parents or the crash, cutting pages out of textbooks without regard. All of this to find some way to atone for destroying that important paper. She felt that if she didn’t follow in her parent’s footsteps, God would never forgive her. The distance she kept from people grew even more, as she never wanted to feel the pain of losing someone again. And as a result her friendship with Tomoya grew apart, to the point that he forgot he knew her when they meet again years later.

Years passed by, Kotomi’s means of atonement became habit. Her grades placed her in the top ten of the country, her peers revering her as a genius to the point that her teachers would allow her to skip class in order to spend the time in the library. It was in her third year that another class ditcher had found her hidden away in the library, Tomoya Okazaki. He had forgotten their childhood together at this point, and Kotomi quickly recognized this. It was a mixed emotion, as she was happy that he was talking to her again, but at the same time, she had no idea if she wanted him to remember what happened or not. As she had grown to have very little social contact with other people, she comes off as strange and distant, but she was actually comfortable with him around, actually noticing him immediately and not ignoring him like she would with anyone else. And that’s how things were for a little while: he would come see her sometimes when he was ditching class and she would bring an extra pair of chopsticks to share her lunch with him. Tomoya then began insisting that she join Drama Club in order to help out his friend Nagisa Furukawa.

This insistence sparked the initiative to get Kotomi to socialize more, Tomoya setting the goal for her to make 100 friends. The process is very slow and incredibly awkward for mostly everyone, but she gains a small circle of friends including Tomoya, Nagisa, and the twins Kyou and Ryou Fujibayashi.

Appearance:
What a cutie.

Kotomi is a petite girl of 5’3”, with long dark purple hair and matching eyes. She keeps some of her hair up in twin pigtails, with pink beaded barrettes that she’s hardly ever seen without. In school, she wears a Hikarizaka Private High School uniform with a Third Year blue badge. When out of school, she wears very feminine clothes like dresses and ruffled skirts with matching blouse.

Sometimes shoes are optional.

Personality:
‘The important thing is always very simple.’

Put simply, upon initial meeting Kotomi is a very awkward person to be around. She’s quiet, socializes with books far more than with other people, and most times can usually be found in the library, her shoes off and reading a heavy textbook. Getting her attention isn’t easy either, with her full attention fixed on her own tasks and the only way to get a portion of it is to call her “Kotomi-chan.” No suffix, no Kotomi. When her attention is had, her reactions come off as sluggish and methodical, very much like she’s in her own world (aka she’s a hard cloudcuckoolander). This off-timing nature makes her awful at telling jokes. Well, that and her jokes make almost no sense to begin with. She’s recently taken up the violin again, and while she does practice it as much as she can….that practicing can be very dangerous to anyone in the nearby vicinity. But to her, her playing is perfectly fine.

This comes from her socializing with books more than other people. Kotomi reads a lot of books; books ranging from cookbooks to high level sciences to fairy tales to books in other languages. She will read just about anything that she can get her hands on. The pursuit of knowledge is what matters the most to Kotomi, at the expense of everything else. Her introduction to the series and(?) its protagonist was her reading in the library. When Tomoya has to basically force her to make friends, she has a very rough start. What should have been natural conversation started as basically a line reading, stating her name and interests after Tomoya was able to convince her that the person she was talking to wasn’t a bully. She’s gotten better at talking to people, but it’s still pretty awkward for the other party involved.

That said, when Kotomi is social, or rather when Tomoya is forcing her to be social, when she does make friends, she is probably one of the better people to be friends with. Saying that she is a very nice girl when she is friends with the ray of sunshine Nagisa is saying something. Kotomi is very polite and respectful to her friends (their eardrums notwithstanding) and she will most often trust their judgment. This makes her a very lucrative doormat to those who would use her for teasing purposes, as Kyou has no problem taking advantage of. Kotomi’s a bit over innocent in that way, with sexual connotations not even registering a blip on her radar.

So it comes as a genuine shock that this strange girl genius has so much sadness and loneliness built up inside. The death of her parents was the most important piece of her life thus far, as it not only drove her to do so well in academics, but it also locked her emotionally in the past. She avoids talking about her parents with other people. She freezes whenever she hears an airplane passing by overhead. If it has to do with her past, she doesn’t like talking about it and she will try to steer the conversation away from it. She actively avoided any contact with the man in black, despite him being her legal guardian. And even though she knew who Tomoya was before even he remembered, Kotomi doesn’t try to remind him of their childhood. Him forgetting made it easier to continue as she has been.

Before Tomoya forced her, Kotomi didn’t actively seek any friendships, especially deeply connected ones. Kotomi has deeply seeded survivor’s guilt mixed with a heavy amount of inferiority complex. It was her parents that were the important academics. It was her parents that could explain their theories and put them in the most beautiful words. Kotomi was all that was left, as she was the person who destroyed (not really) what was left of their work. She would be punished more if she allowed herself to be happy and let herself forget what she did, and she can’t bring herself to bear the pain of losing someone dear to her again. Later in canon, when she thinks Ryou is in a horrible bus crash, she breaks down and starts screaming in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Even with Ryou standing just fine next to her, the damage has already been done. It takes over a week and some heavy convincing from her friends for her to come back to school.

All in all, Kotomi is a sweetly shy girl with a lot of baggage. Everything with her takes just a little patience.

Abilities:
Super Duper High School Level Girl Genius Kotomi is very smart, in the Top 10 of Japan. She’s absorbed many advanced level books, in Japanese and other languages, and has a bank of knowledge on just about any random subject, making her a walking talking encyclopedia. Her cooking talent is nothing to sneeze at either.

On the other hand, her violin playing is known for causing extreme amounts of pain to anyone within the vicinity. It’s really that bad.

Other: