Character · FLCL
Haruko Haruhara
She hits a twelve-year-old with a Vespa, then with a bass guitar, and files the whole thing under investigation.
In Otakana the clue reads: Vespa-riding woman with a bass guitar
- Type
- Character
- Series
- FLCL
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Haruko Haruhara arrives in Mabase on a yellow Vespa, runs over Naota Nandaba, revives him with mouth to mouth and a blow to the skull from a left-handed Rickenbacker bass, and has moved into his house as the family housekeeper by the following morning. Nobody stops her. She is an alien investigator, she is hunting something, and Naota's forehead is where it keeps coming out.
The comedy runs on how completely she does not care. She flirts with a schoolboy to keep him useful, eats everything in the house, cooks curry nobody can finish, and drops the act only when the thing she wants is close. FLCL is six episodes of a boy trying to seem grown up while an actual adult behaves worse than he does.
Gainax and Production I.G made the series with Kazuya Tsurumaki directing, fresh off Evangelion and clearly wanting to make something faster. The pillows supplied the soundtrack, and the show cuts to their guitars whenever the plot gives up explaining itself. Mayumi Shintani's voice work is half the character: every line sounds like she is enjoying a joke nobody else has been told.
Spelling HARUKO
HARUKO is six letters and the game wants the given name, not Haruhara. Both begin with HARU, which is the joke in the Japanese, where she introduces herself by sliding the same syllables around. Keep the U in the middle and finish on the O. No long vowel, no doubled letter, nothing dropped: HARUKO, four consonants short of trouble.