Wakana

Wakana Gojo (五(ご)条(じょう) 新(わか)菜(な), Gojō Wakana?) is the main protagonist in the Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo suru series. Wakana is quite tall for his age, standing at least 180 centimeters. When Marin asked him his height, he was interrupted before he could finish saying, meaning that he may be taller than 180cm. He has short, black hair and gray eyes, along with a tiny mole on the outer lower corner of his right eye. Outside of his college uniform, he is always wearing a samue, a general work outfit consisting of a blue suit jacket and pants, with a simple white shirt underneath. He wears wooden sandals and wears a white headband while working. He tends to have it over his shoulders when not wearing his headband. While shopping with Marin during chapter 33, Wakana purchases a jinbei, a summer outfit similar to his samue except for shorter sleeves and pants. It also has a pair of yarn knitting patterns on the sleeves, which are sewn together loosely for ventilation. At the start of the series, Wakana was a withdrawn person in university, having no friends and a secret love and admiration for hina dolls. This stems from his past where a girl angrily told him that boys shouldn’t like dolls and called him a freak, something that clearly affected him very deeply to the point where he closed himself off from everyone and lived his high school life as a recluse. Wakana notes Marin Kitagawa and how she has her own interests in anime and the like, but unlike him, is free to be completely open with them and has many friends. His solitary attitude makes him rather submissive with others, claiming that he doesn’t mind his classmates leaving him to do after class clean up, although Marin correctly pointed out that they were taking advantage of him. Wakana's main goal in life is to become a hina doll craftsman (a kashira-shi - 頭師) like his grandfather. He is very knowledgeable and loving towards the dolls his grandfather’s store makes and sells. He also has his own and cherishes it greatly, to the point where he keeps it on his desk by his bedside and even talks to it. When the doll slipped from his hands, he leaped in order to catch it and frantically asked it if it was hurt. Wakana was completely mesmerized the first time he saw a hina doll, and this memory has remained with him throughout his entire life, to the point where he takes his love for them seriously and doesn’t call anything beautiful unless he means it from the heart. Due to growing up with his grandfather, Wakana has a great knowledge pertaining to outfits and sewing, having pointed out all the blatant flaws in Marin's prototype cosplay outfit, although he profusely apologized when he saw that his harsh criticism hurt her feelings. When Marin neither labels him as a freak nor gets mad at him for criticizing her outfit, he agrees on her request to make her a cosplay outfit for the character Shizuku Kuroe. Wakana is rather shy and modest, not doing well with embarrassing or lewd topics. He was surprised to find out that Shizuku was from an eroge (adult video game) and was reluctant to take Marin’s measurements for the outfit. Whenever flustered, he tends to freak out or freeze up, which has led to Marin gaining a joy in teasing him. After having a certain dream involving Marin, Wakana was completely ashamed to the point where it was difficult for him to look or talk to her. While he does have a natural interest in girls (evident by the dream), he isn’t at all perverted and is very self-conscious, usually apologizing in embarrassing scenarios. This being said, Wakana's shyness doesn't completely dictate him. He was able to play Slippery Girls 1 and 2 to gain a better understanding of Shizuku's outfit, remaining fully observant to the details throughout and later chatted with Marin casually about it while they were out together (to the unease of some bystanders). When excited about something or helping Marin with her cosplay outfits, his shyness can be put on standstill while he's focused. Wakana cares a lot about others, agreeing to run his grandfather's shop after the latter had hurt his back. Furthermore, even when he was completely exhausted from all his responsibilities (studying for his midterm exams, running his grandfather's shop and his other daily duties), he still pulled himself together and worked throughout the night to finish the Shizuku outfit. As further proof of him being a good person, when Marin revealed there was no set time that the outfit had to be done by, Wakana collapsed, but instead of getting upset or angry at her, he was instead relieved that there was more time to finish the outfit. Likewise, Wakana had a bad habit of putting more work on himself than he could realistically manage, wanting to help his classmates out with the school festival renovations on top of making Marin's suit for Rei Kogami. However, after it was pointed out that this was far too much for him, he learned how to rely on others more effectively and not act like he can do everything himself. While initially distant from the rest of his classmates, excluding Marin, the school festival helped him open up and be more comfortable around other people, to the point where he was able to do Marin's makeup with the entire class watching. After the performance, he went a step further by agreeing to join everyone in a class outing to celebrate. Wakana doesn't appear to have much of a life outside of his grandfather's store and helping Marin, as he always wears his work attire outside of his school uniform, and often spends his free time either sewing or painting hina doll faces. Because of this, doing things like going to the beach and watching Summer Festival fireworks with Marin were very new experiences for him. He was upset when he thought that his time and friendship with Marin had reached its end upon the completion of her Shizuku outfit, only to be happy when she decided to continue cosplaying and requested his help with it. Furthermore, Wakana becomes happy when Marin plans for them to go to the festival again in the following years, serving as proof to him that their friendship will remain strong.

**Backstory: As a child, Gojo originally lived with his parents. His life greatly changed after they died in a tragic accident. The loss of his parents greatly affected Wakana: the family of his cousin Miori Gojo took him in and tried their best to care for him, but Wakana greatly struggled to adjust to life without his parents. Depressed and shut-off from the world around him, Wakana would frequently cry in the middle of the night, and during the day would often hide underneath blankets. During this time, Wakana's neighbour and friend Nobara Aoyagi would frequently visit him, trying to coax him out of his shell by asking him to play with her or reading books to him. However, these efforts proved fruitless: Wakana remained reclusive and quiet throughout these visits. Wakana was eventually broken from this stupor after his grandfather Kaoru Gojo, also grieving over the loss of Wakana's parents, brought Wakana on a daytrip to his workshop to see hina dolls which he and colleagues had handcrafted. Wakana immediately fell in love with the beauty and intricacy of the hina dolls, which allowed him to cope with the loss of his parents by giving him an outlet to immerse himself in. After this trip, Wakana asked to live with his grandfather, so that he could always look at hina dolls. The news of Wakana's departure to his grandfather's home greatly upset Nobara, who felt hurt that she couldn't make Wakana happy yet hina dolls could. This hurt caused Nobara to lash out at Wakana after her final failed attempt to ask him to play with her, which he rejected because he wanted to look at hina dolls. Deeply angered and disgusted, Nobara berated Wakana for liking hina dolls, because hina dolls were for girls and he was a boy. Although these words did nothing to sway Wakana from his love for hina dolls, they left him with long-lasting trauma and deep-seated insecurities about his passions: Wakana came to believe that he could never make friends because his hobbies were too different from everyone else's, and would disgust or creep people out. As he grew up, he never made any friends and all of his hobbies were related to hina dolls.