I ended up sitting on this ask for a rly long while because for some reason I was having a really hard time articulating the differences between the two of them - even though they are very different characters in practice, so many things about them are straightforwardly the same that it was hard for me to put a finger on what the specific points of divergence were outside of the fact that Kokoa is obviously more dissociated and bitter. And the more I thought about it, the more I think the major differences between Ai and Kokoa are less to do with the character writing and more to do with how the story surrounding them frames and presents them to the viewer.

The long and the short of it is that OnK is deeply sympathetic towards Ai and builds the story around humanizing her, Killer in Love is wayyyyy less sympathetic towards Kokoa, framing her as an egotistical schemer who constantly plays victim and just kind of makes the men around her go crazy for reasons that are her fault, not theirs!!! Which as you can imagine is a framing I already dislike but find to be actively Problematic when it comes in tandem with the actual text of Kokoa as a lifelong abuse victim - physical, emotional, SA and even implied CSA - who is constantly treated violently by the men around her because they feel entitled to attention, romance and sex from her.

In terms of like, actual, textual similarities in characterization though, Ai and Kokoa are both young women who grew up suffering maternal abuse and neglect in ways that went on to impact their self-image and ability to form relationships with other people. Because of this formative experience of familial abuse and implied neurodivergence, they behave in ways their peers find offputting, which further reinforces their social isolation and inability to form meaningful connections with the people around them. Dysfunctional, premature romances and sexual relationships further exacerbate their sense of abject, inherent wrongness and ultimately lead them to a conclusion that the only way to be loved is to replace this unlovable true self with a more socially desirable - and, importantly, more acceptably feminine - persona.

They are both deeply alienated young women who want to be loved but due to their experiences, have no healthy foundation or understanding of what love is to fall back on. Ultimately, both struggle with the fact that what they want most (to be loved unconditionally) is in direct opposition with what they think they have to do to be loved (be perfect and flawless at all times) and the core of their conflict is an inability to exist as flawed but loveable people without being punished for it by the normative society they occupy. In order to cope with this inability to find love, both of them attempt to make sense of their isolation and abuse by way of narratives that assign said sense to it - Kokoa projects onto and clings to the fairytale of Cinderella and the promised escape from pain and happy ending while Ai comes to normalize her own abuse as the natural result of a non-normative person clashing with normative society and treats it almost as a natural phenomenon that can't be helped.

Past that is where the two of them start more meaningfully diverging and as I said before, I think those divergences are more to do with the ways each respective narrative frames them. In a broad sense, both Ai and Kokoa's characters and positions in their stories are centered around this tension as to whether or not they are truly the people they present themselves as being and if they are misrepresenting themselves, what their motivations might be for doing so - but they differ radically in what their conclusions are in this regard.

OnK uses this tension to present the reader with a number of questions about what it even means to misrepresent yourself and whether or not a constructed mask can ever be truly said to be a disconnected other of the one that created it rather than a facet of an infinitely complicated self. It ultimately comes down, imo, on the side of identity as a thing that is not solely innate or solely constructed but both of these things at once and that the selves we create and the identities we actively choose for ourselves can be just as real and authentic as the ones that emerge from us, unfiltered - and most importantly, that it is not a bad thing to create oneself.

Killer in Love, by contrast, presents inauthenticity as being inherently sinister and inherently unvirtuous, and seems to be of a mind that it is plainly wrong to present oneself as something one is not regardless of your reasoning for doing so. It asserts that it is more ethical or perhaps even righteous to prefer being disliked as your authentic self than to seek being loved as a constructed self. To be clear, this isn't something the manga ever states in text as plainly as I just have - rather it's an unspoken thesis that is emergent from many of the other things the manga does say.

One of Killer on Love's most iterated ideas is the necessity of not running away from reality and of seeing things as they actually are rather than what we would prefer them to be. This by itself is not necessarily a bad idea but where it becomes troubling is where and how the story verbalizes it. Part of what Killer in Love, perhaps even accidentally, asserts as a facet of 'running away from reality' is Suzuki's attempts to reinvent himself when he moves up to college. It shows both that Suzuki is uncomfortable with this constant need to mask and that the social circle he's ended up in as a result is unfulfilling and even hostile towards him. The unspoken implication is that Suzuki's dissatisfaction with himself is at least partially because of the inherent 'wrongness' of trying to be anything other than what he is naturally and that the toxicity of the social circle is a direct result of its members all presenting falsely.

Again, this is not necessarily, like... a bad theme to explore. But the manga never really elaborates on this idea, even when it comes into direct conflict with both lead characters' arcs. In Kokoa in particular, we are directly shown a person whose authentic self has been exploited, rejected, marginalized or even endangered by nearly everyone in her life up to this point and who constructs a new external self, textually and explicitly, so that she might receive the love and kindness that she is otherwise not afforded. Killer in Love shows us this quite plainly but then, for some reason, never pauses to acknowledge that Kokoa does, in fact, have a very good reason for wanting to adopt a more socially acceptable persona - just that her doing so was deceptive and thus, manipulative and wrong and bad. But it also fails to provide any alternate solutions - if your authentic self is socially undesirable but it is unethical to try and appear otherwise, what is there for you to do? The story can never quite resolve this tension and the end result is a work that feels like it's constantly pulling in two different directions, a manga that is at once seemingly sympathetic towards its heroine's struggles while being deeply suspicious of the very mechanisms she uses to survive those struggles.

In direct opposition to Killer in Love, OnK's core thesis is explicitly that there is no sin in wanting to be loved, and that love is not a thing that should need to be earned, proven or justified - that it isn't some moral failing to preserve a division between one's public and private selves and that you do not owe the world unfiltered disclosure in order to deserve the love you receive. While it is critical of the performance of a perfectly sanitized self in exchange for love, this critique is pointed outwards - at the normative society that demands this performance and the people within it who enforce consequences for failing to follow through. In OnK, Ai's dishonesty is presented as a tragic but ultimately understandable coping mechanism developed as a direct result of the environment that she's in, rather than an inherent flaw in her character that must be corrected. On the whole, the story posits that people are allowed to not have the tools they need to survive in the world and that they should not be punished for using the best ones they can find.

For me, I think it really speaks to a greater difference in overall tone and approach: OnK is built on a fundamental, foundational empathy and love for Ai. The story is unflinchingly critical towards society's expectations and the way they have shaped Ai, but it is always, always on her side. Killer in Love, on the other hand, is critical of both society and Kokoa in equal measure - it is constantly interrogating her choices and behaviors, often with a sense of suspicion or mistrust that is simply never leveled at any of the male characters, regardless of how monstrous or abhorrent their actions might be. Her flaws are foregrounded and she is often framed as being complicit in her own suffering, even when the text explicitly shows her being victimized. It frames the method she uses to survive in a world that is hostile to her as being a moral failing but it fails to ever actually provide an alternate solution or even really to disprove any of her conclusions about the ways she must move through life.

The closest the story ever comes to verbalizing an actual meaningful refutation of Kokoa's worldview is through the mouth of Riko, Suzuki's cousin who is in love with him because I guess we're still doing that in big 2022 or whenever that chapter came out. Riko is framed pretty blatantly in the story as being a sort of anti-Kokoa by way of inversion - where Kokoa is demure, feminine and passive, Riko is brash, proactive and, in her own words, tomboyish. Kokoa's supposed affection for Suzuki is presented by the manga as shallow and transactional whereas Riko's feelings are presented as being true and pure and unconditional - and vitally, that the person she loves is Suzuki's 'true self', or at least the self that he was before attending university. In short, Kokoa is the manga's shorthand for fiction, unreality and artificiality while Riko is more or less explicitly its shorthand for reality and she is occasionally used as the mouthpiece through which the manga verbalizes its thesis, such as it is.

The two are pitted against each other the most explicitly in chapter 18, which is also the point at which the two most explicitly lay their opposing ideologies bare. To Kokoa, love is an act of self-censorship - a doctoring of your flaws and a careful curation of your best self for the sake of another. Kokoa believes it is selfish to be loved unconditionally without putting in the effort to be deserving of that love and that transforming yourself into your partner's ideal is the natural thing to do if the self you authentically are does not match their preferences. Riko retorts that she wants to be loved as she is, regardless of if it's selfish, and asks Kokoa if lying to herself to be popular really, meaningfully makes her happy. Kokoa's stunned silence in response seems to imply that Riko has hit a nerve - and indeed, as the moral mouthpiece for 'reality' in this narrative, Riko is more or less presented as being implicitly correct.

The problem here, as you may have noticed, is that Riko, like.... doesn't actually meaningfully refute anything Kokoa says...??? Her response to Kokoa basically boils to down to "be yourself! because... you just should, okay?" but as we see at multiple points in the manga, Kokoa has very much tried to be herself, only to be met with disdain, abandonment and even violence. Again, we return to that question: if your authentic self is socially undesirable but it is unethical to try and appear otherwise, what is there for you to do? It's all well and good to say "be yourself and if people don't like it, that's their problem", but when this results in an isolated and lonely existence, maybe even one that puts you in danger, what then? The answer implied by the manga's internal logic is 'just walk into the ocean about it' I fucking guess.

Contrast this, once again, with OnK; Ai's desire to be loved as she truly is, messy and complicated and imperfect, is one of her most fundamental driving desires - importantly, though, the story never criticizes her for feeling as though she must perform perfection to be deserving of love in other ways. In fact, it very explicitly and unapologetically places the blame on the society and the people around her, culminating in chapter 137 where Gotanda states in no uncertain terms that Ai's tragedy was the fault of all the people around her who failed to accept her as she truly was and love her as she deserved to be.