Kotonoha Kanade (奏 言葉 Kanade Kotonoha) is one of the supporting-main characters in all incarnations of Rikei ga Koi ni Ochita no de Shōmei Shite Mita. She is a 4th-year undergraduate at Saitama University who helps Ayame Himuro and Shinya Yukimura. While she often has no idea what’s going on with them or why they’re acting so strangely, she's usually happy to help. She tends to seesaw between excited and insanely frustrated based on how much normal emotions and rationale versus convoluted “logic” are favored in the situation that she happens to be in.
Kotonoha is a young sweet woman with shoulder-length light rose hair that is tied in a ponytail with a gold flower hairpin on the left side and blue eyes.
She usually wears a lab coat and school uniform-like skirt.
Kotonoha's love for mathematics and puzzles made her develop feelings for her teacher in high school, compelling her to study even hard to get his attention. Following her math love, she decided to continue studying in the Information section at Saitama University's Science and Research department.
She often can't understand what Shinya Yukimura and Ayame Himuro (Kotonoha's co-workers) are doing and they usually get mixed in their love experiment. But as they misjudge/misinterpret situations and fail to see the obvious, she will use the moment to sneak out and not get caught up in their arguments and thoughts. Even though she often can't understand them, she would be happy to help them if they need her.
Although this changes later, at the start of the series she has a very strong need to "be normal" or to be at least seen as normal by the people around her. This goes to the point where she will hide her true feelings and opinions to please the people around her. As such she has gained the ability to "read the room" very well and can adapt to how she feels like she has to behave, very well. This facade does occasionally slip though, usually when she is with people that she trusts like Ayame Himuro and Shinya Yukimura although she will try to behave normal immediately afterwards. This is implied to be the case because she has been an outcast in High school and an incident regarding her teacher Keisuke Takahashi has been explicitly shown as an example of her feeling that way, as well as her parents and classmates reinforcing certain stereotypes on how to be normal and ridiculing her and others for not conforming to those stereotypes.
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