Kosuzu Motoori

NAME: Prof
AGE: 31
CONTACT: ProfessorProf



CHARACTER NAME: Kosuzu Motoori
CANON & HISTORY: Touhou Project
AGE: 14 (estimated)
CANON POINT: Between Chapters 47 and 48 of Forbidden Scrollery
PERSONALITY:

Kosuzu's defining character trait is her love of books. A true born bibliophile, she likes books more than most people. She collects them obsessively; even if she didn't run a bookstore, she'd still be amassing them in droves. The rarer the better, too - not because of the money they're worth or anything along those lines, but just for the exciting prospect of having a book that's hard to find. Of course, the reading as just as important as the collecting, if not more so. She reads voraciously, a habit only encouraged by her ability to read in any language.

A strong motivating force in Kosuzu's reading obsession is her insatiable curiosity. Even aside from her inherent love of all things book, she's always itching to learn more about things. Her favorite kind of books are books from the world beyond Gensokyo, because they're her only way to learn what the outside world is like. Unfortunately, she comes from a place where too much curiosity can lead to getting Disappeared by youkai; even more unfortunately, that doesn't slow her down at all. Kosuzu has almost no sense of danger to speak of. When uncovering dangerous magical artifacts, she just leaves them lying around the store with an attitude of "if this causes a problem later, I'll deal with it then". She's even willing to deliberately unleash potentially deadly youkai for her own benefit, not considering at all that this might backfire. When danger is actually staring her directly in the face, though, it's a different story. Her first reaction to immediate peril is usually fainting on the spot, but aside from that, if something's in her face and she knows for sure that it might kill her, even she'll take the situation a bit seriously.

To put the total disregard for the consequences of her actions in a more charitable light, one might describe Kosuzu as a relentless optimist. She thinks the best of people, including herself (she likes showing off a bit whenever her skills turn out to be useful). She's quite confident that her cool and amazing friends will be able to handle whatever life (or her own lack of forethought) throws their way. She easily and fearlessly lets her guard down even around people she's known for only a short time. Even regarding the big setting-defining question of the relationship between humans and youkai, she's much more charitable than most of her human friends, who tend to take a firm anti-youkai stance. Despite the dangers that such creatures represent, she figures that the few she's interacted with personally seemed slightly creepy but otherwise disinclined to hurt anyone, so surely there must be a way for humans and youkai to coexist peacefully. This relentless positivity is both one of her greatest strengths and one of her greatest vulnerabilities. It allows her to connect with those who might otherwise be shunned or attacked by most humans, but it's also the main reason she eventually wound up getting possessed by a powerful demon sealed in one of the books in her collection.

Added in revision request:
As touched on briefly in the original application, Kosuzu likes to show off when she has skills or knowledge that the people around her don't have. However, beyond that, there's an underlying thought process behind her occasionally slightly self-important interactions with others - she believes very firmly in what her own judgment tells her. If she doesn't know what to think of something at all, she'll happily go to whoever she percieves as experts for advice, but once she forms her own opinion, even the word of more knowledgeable friends won't dissuade her. When trying to figure out how to deal with her accidentally-acquired snake phobia, she ends up unsure of what to do and goes to Sanae for advice, but once she decides that it's a good idea to keep the Youma books in her shop, no amount of warnings from Reimu or Marisa ever dissuade her to part with them - she already came to that conclusion using her own judgment, so she ignores their advice in favor of trusting herself. As the people around her gradually figure out, the easiest way to make her let go of an idea that she decided on herself is to work around her and let her think it was her idea all along - for example, when she becomes convinced that Kokoro's Noh performances are working evil magic, Mamizou just quietly tells Kokoro to change up her act and then pretents that Reimu fought her and forced her to abandon her 'evil' ways. If Mamizou had just told her directly that she was wrong, she probably would have ended up concluding that Mamizou was an accomplice trying to protect Kokoro, not that her initial deductions were mistaken. Once an idea gets into Kosuzu's head, there's almost no uprooting it (the snake phobia incident came from a slightly similar place; try as she did to convince herself that it wasn't a realistic fear, the initial shock from reading the article and learning that giant snakes actually exist wouldn't leave her brain).

This all ties into the gradual evolution of her opinions regarding youkai. As of the later parts of canon, she believes firmly that youkai and humans can be friends, but this wasn't always the case. Kosuzu initially goes along with the idea that youkai are bad in general, thanks to being repeatedly told so by Reimu and Akyu, but only because she hasn't (to her knowledge) interacted with any long enough to form her own opinions. When it does come time for her to decide on her own whether or not youkai can be trusted, it comes with a shocking dose of new information - while everyone was telling her that youkai are always bad, one of her most trusted and helpful 'human' friends was actually a youkai all along, and someone else is warning her that Reimu might be planning to kill her. So, with the people she trusts telling her conflicting things, Kosuzu had no choice but to sit back and look at this issue she felt totally unequipped to deal with, and think it through herself. So, she weighed two viewpoints - one saying that all youkai are evil and that all the friendlier youkai she'd met like Aya and Mamizou were out to kill her, and one saying that there are good and bad youkai, just like humans - and in the end, her optimism about people's best natures won through. She concluded that youkai and humans could be friends after all, and dedicated herself to that conclusion with her usual conviction, ignoring everyone's protests and running off into the wilderness and getting possessed by demons.

So, that one didn't exactly work out for her - as it turns out, she was being conned. One of the downsides of a combination of a relentless faith in other people's good sides and an inflexible persistence in trusting your own judgdment is that one tends to be a really bad judge of character. Mamizou was playing her to get her hands on the Night Parade Scroll from day one, but her first impression of her was so strongly "what a cool and mysterious badass" that she remained oblivious of all of her machinations until she went ahead and revealed her youkai nature directly. Yukari, one of the most suspicious-seeming people in the world, managed to trick Kosuzu into making some really awful decisions with almost no effort. People lie or omit truths around her constantly, and she never picks up on it. The simple fact of the matter is that, while she's not stupid, she lives a lot inside her own head - the ideas she sticks to the hardest are the ones she comes to on her own, and it's easy to trick her because she's focusing more on what she already thinks than trying to puzzle through what other people might be thinking.

POWERS:
Kosuzu has the ability to read any text, regardless of language. This ability later advanced to the point that she can read beyond the text to discern the emotions of the writer when they wrote the text. This ability does not allow her to write in any language - it only works for reading.

OTHER: I'm listing two possible magic abilities below. Option 1 is my preferred choice, but it's also a bit of a murky area in terms of plotting safety, so I provided Option 2 as a backup in case you don't like it.



MAGIC ABILITY:

Option 1: Prophetic dreams. Inconsistent and not always reliable, but sometimes catching vague glimpses of future events. A fun thing to add at the start of events or player plots.

Option 2: Psychometry. The ability to touch an object and learn various things about its past.

PRICE: The Night Parade scroll. (Revised around 8/3 or so)
ACCLIMATION: 6. She's never left her world before, but Gensokyo is full of strange events and creatures capable of such an act, so it won't be a huge shock. Her primary connection to Gensokyo is her book collection, so she'll be more concerned about that being gone than being lost in space.



LINKED SAMPLE: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3