Kabocha

Voice

The loudest voice in the room when a plan comes together, and just as precise when she's giving Kabu a hard time about his height. Gets annoyed fast and forgives just as fast.

The arc

Kabocha grew up in her father's forge, sparring between chores and selling kunai to the adventurers passing through Furumi, and she treats every problem like something that yields if you're precise enough about it. Kabu has looked up to her since they were small, so when the curse sends them out after the seeds, it's natural to her that she's the one drafting the plans, and that the ends will justify whatever means the plan needs. In Chaobe she builds a heist around everyone's strengths, runs it like the team is hers to run, and it works. The cursed seed splinter that lodged in her palm in episode two shows itself mid-fight, when she runs out of kunai and a razor-sharp pumpkin leaf flies out of her hand instead.

Her confidence is fuelled by a fear of failure that was there long before the seed arrived. She grew up with a father who held his high standards just out of reach as a matter of principle, so the habit of measuring the gap between what she does and what gets noticed is older than the splinter by years. In Menpaku she watches a father like hers finally say out loud that he pushed his children because he believed in them, and she tells her noodle mentor things she's never said at home. It helps less than it should. As Kabu grows into the leader of the group and the others start wanting to do things their own way, she finds herself trusted less and heard less, and every skill the team learns without her reads as her own contribution going invisible. Episode nine breaks it twice in one day. At a tea ceremony, Matsu tells a room full of people he'd marry someone like her, and the words won't come, so she leaves. That night, mid-battle, the resentment she's been packing down all season goes off at Kabu, and she walks away from the team and heads for home with the splinter flashing in her hand.

The Crow Witch finds her on the road with an argument that agrees with everything she's been feeling: the team's victories came from her unseen work, and she has every right to resent going unrecognized. What Kabocha doesn't grasp is that she's accepting a narrative handed to her rather than discovering one of her own, and by the time she reaches Furumi the witch has finished what the splinter started.

She faces her own team as a shadow of who she was, ambushing them in Furumi with every weakness she knows by heart. It takes Kabu refusing to fight her at all to stop it, telling her she's his best friend, and Matsu standing beside him, saying what she means to all of them, to turn her back toward the light. She shatters the seed splinter in her own hand, and comes back to her friends understanding that a team is stronger than going it alone, and that being wrong is survivable when the people around you still see the good in you.

The season ends with her walking home beside her best friend, proud of what they've done and less sure than she's ever been of what it's cost. She spent the whole season proving what she's capable of, and it closes by showing her a capability she didn't know to be afraid of: how easily she picked up the witch's argument, and how good it felt while she held it. She's still Kabu's best friend. She just checks her own temper now, the way she used to check her knives.

Relationships