#cinna insert

For the most part Mineko is a very normal teenager. She is sweet, kind, and friendly towards others, and tries to do what she can to help her friends. Her polite nature makes her easy to speak with, but likewise her quietness tends to keep people from approaching her directly. She is very studious in class subjects that she enjoys, but has trouble engaging in topics that don’t interest her. Overall, she prefers laborious or active hobbies like cooking and baking, though she also enjoys video games, television, and anime and manga.

However, Mineko is a mild “yandere” archetype character. Her mental illness growing up caused her to develop an insecure personality and a naturally shy nature. The loneliness caused by her shyness made her very introspective and she eventually developed an “outside looking in” view of the world around her, never feeling completely involved in it.

To overcome her shyness of being around others as a child, she was taught the idiom of writing the kanji for “人” (“people”) on her palm with her finger and pretending to eat it. This symbolizes the idea of swallowing a crowd before you yourself are swallowed by them (due to your anxiety). In her young mind, Mineko believed the metaphor was meant in a literal sense, and often imagined herself biting people, or otherwise eating them would help her overcome her shyness. Despite learning the true meaning behind the idiom once she got older, her habit of picturing herself biting into others to overcome her anxiety and insecurities never wavered, and in fact the fantasies became more violent as time went on as her mental illness let her be soothed by the thought of vicious cannibalism. If she gets too drawn out in her fantasy, she starts chewing and biting on her fingers. She hides this habit from others, or at least she tries to, but sometimes subtle traces of her “yandere” tendencies spill out. This is evident when if she smells a person’s scent or touches their skin/muscles, it might make her curious about what they taste like. If she feels particularly insecure regarding someone (liking them or disliking them too much in either direction), she will get lost in fantasizing about biting them and eating them alive. She is aware this train of thought isn’t healthy and tries to keep it to herself, but she isn’t exactly ashamed of it since it’s her coping mechanism and makes her “feel strong”, and believes it’s fine as long as she doesn’t actually act on the impulses she has.

In the series, if Mineko became involved in any of the cycling clubs, it wouldn’t be of her own volition at first. It would be likely that she’d only go to the club because either: she met someone in the club and became friendly with them and they convinced her stop by, her friends/teachers/family encouraged her to become a manager of a team (for whatever reason) and she chose a sports team that had few or no managers so there’d be “less people” to deal with, or her older brother was in the cycling club (him graduating before her freshman year) and he brought and introduced her to the team so she decided to become a manager to be around people she “knew” during high school. The third is the most likely option, as she might be more comfortable around the team if her brother introduced her and would bring teammates to hang out at their house occasionally so she would be used to some of the people, but if she was completely left to her own devices it would not cross her mind to ever be involved in the cycling club as she had no prior interest in the sport.

Trivia

Her first name is Mineko, written as 美猫, which is translated to “beautiful cat”. Manami writes her name as 峰子, which means “beautiful peak”. Teshima and Ashikiba write her name as 美音子, which means “beautiful sound child”.

Her last name is Juzomori (Juuzoumori), written as 十三森, which is translated as “thirteen forest”.

As a kid (and sometimes currently) she gets teased for her name having “thirteen”, an unlucky number (albeit a Western-originated one), in it. She was also teased for her freckles, weight, and long nose.

Has a cupid’s bow lip.

Has been described as “sisterly/motherly” by her friends and classmates for her polite, friendly, and responsible personality.