Otakana

Character · Kill la Kill

Mako Mankanshoku

The only character in Kill la Kill who can stop the plot dead with a speech about croquettes.

In Otakana the clue reads: Loud best friend who gives speeches from nowhere

Type
Character
Series
Kill la Kill
Letters
4 · Hard

Mako Mankanshoku is the friend who attaches herself to the new transfer student on day one and never detaches. Her family lives in the slums below the academy, where her father runs a back-alley clinic of doubtful legality and the household eats croquettes of unidentified origin. She has no fighting ability worth mentioning and is somehow never absent from a fight.

Her speeches are the show's signature joke. A spotlight arrives from nowhere, the background dissolves into abstract shapes, and she talks at length about something apparently unrelated, usually food. Then it lands. The speech turns out to be exactly the argument the scene needed, delivered by the one person nobody in the room was watching for insight.

Kill la Kill came from Studio Trigger in 2013, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi and written by Kazuki Nakashima, and it moves at a pace that would exhaust most series inside four episodes. Mako is the pressure valve. She also gets a real role in the plot rather than staying comic relief, which the show sets up early and pays off with a straight face.

Spelling MAKO

MAKO is four letters and the game wants the given name, not the family name Mankanshoku. Two syllables, two vowels, nothing hidden: マコ has no long vowels and no doubled consonants. MAKO is also a shark and an ordinary Japanese given name, so the tiles here are doing nothing unusual to you at all.

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