The funniest part of Hata no Kokoro is that you’d think she’s emotionless with all that entails, like sweetening up and desfrosting, except this is Touhou and ZUN famously likes thug, brash girls in pretty clothes, so the deal with Kokoro is that she is expressionless, not emotionless, she is actually very emotional and temperamental, and her first instinct is to throw hands with whoever she suspects took her mask (one of 66, which she needs to exist, since she’s a menreiki, ghosts born from masks). She spends the first few storylines picking fights just in case. She looks like this:
So you’re like awww cute pink onion, I wonder if she’s nice! Rookie mistake, she already bashed your brains in with a steel chair. When she finds out who took her mask (Komeiji Koishi), her first instinct is “Oh! Ok, I will kill her”.
Of note, she canonically got beat up by every playable character in her origin game, but after Mamizou beats her, she gives Kokoro a pep talk that amounts to “Kokoro, you are fighting tirelessly because you are desperate to get something back… That’s wrong, you should just fight because it’s FUN. I could see how much you liked it! Do it for fun! Attack! Do spin attacks!” and Kokoro says “actually yeah I LOVE fighting”.
She proceeds to canonically beat Reimu, who also was being assisted by Byakuren and Miko.
Kokoro likes fighting (and dancing, which to her are very alike) SO much that ragdolling Reimu gave her the emotion she was missing: Hope. She didn’t need the Mask of Hope anymore, because attacking girls made her develop the emotion without needing its physical anchor any longer.
Imagine needing a kidney transplant urgently or you’ll die. Imagine your doctor saying “well, actually, if you go and fight lots of girls, and enjoy it, you don’t need the transplant!” and then imagine it actually working out, you don’t need a vital organ anymore because you love fighting girls so much it makes up for its biological functions.
Of note, Miko actually offered Kokoro a new Mask of Hope (Miko was the one that originally ordered for the creation of the masks that would eventually become Kokoro), and she made one for Kokoro. The problem was, it was TOO good, and it filled Kokoro with so much hope it threatened to make her TOO content, thus ‘killing’ her by letting go of attachment to the world and exorcising her. Imagine your doctor gives you a kidney SO good it shuts down the rest of your body. Kokoro almost died. This new Mask of Hope looks like this:
Kokoro doesn’t need the mask anymore as stated, so she doesn’t want to kill Koishi anymore. But, when she sees Koishi, it’s on sight and she will start doing spin kicks at her anyways. Touhou lore rocks.
