Analysis / Manga Time Kirara

The Manga Time Kirara^*  "twinkling" Star System

"It's supposed to be a compilation, but all the main female characters look the same."

— Tooru Ichii, A Channel

Although Manga Time Kirara series are ostensibly created by different authors, its editors have a lot of control over the content of the manga they publish — something the author of Urara Meirocho lampshaded in her author notes when she discussed how the main character evolved (or de-volved) into a half-naked touchy-feely dog-girl. As such, it's possible to get a very good idea of the editorial staff's "preferences" by the constant reuse of certain character designs and motifs. Since Kirara ruthlessly abuses Only Six Faces, this manifests as a correlation between hair-cut/color, story role, and personality, often aligned with the Red Oni, Blue Oni aesthetic prevalent in Japanese media. The correlation of haircut and personality also helps readers instantly peg who they're looking at, since (aside from occasional color pages) Mirara manga are printed in black and white.

Note: Some series (such as Love Lab) are from other members of the Manga Time publishing family instead of the Kirara brand specifically. However, they're included here for completeness.

Red Oni

The Fair-Haired Protagonist

The Fair-Haired Protagonist is generally enthusiastic and good-natured, but also kind of dumb. However, she's (usually) not too dumb. She often has a modicum of self-awareness and gets embarrassed about her stupid actions rather than blithely continuing doing them. This serves to highlight and embody the modesty and humility the Japanese pride themselves on, without straying into Yamato Nadeshiko (a love interest) territory. In other words, the perfect audience viewpoint character. She has blonde or light auburn hair done in a short, shaggy bob haircut, to symbolize her "messy" personality, or wears her hair tied up in such a way that it looks like a bob from the front. Playful short side-tails with hair clips are also common, symbolizing the fact that while she may be a little scatter-brained, she isn't as totally unhinged as some other archetypes and maintains a bit of self-control.

A variant, the Pink-Haired Protagonist, has a similar hairstyle and personality but often more exaggerated. She tends to have less self-awareness and a more extreme attitude, befitting her unrealistic hair color. (Ironically, an inversion of Dumb Blonde.) That said, there are a lot of Fair-Haired Protagonists who are dumb as rocks, so the only real differentiating factor here is just the color of her hair.

The Fair-Haired Protagonist

• Yuno from Hidamari Sketch. Shoulder-length light brown hair. A polite and friendly art student who tends towards self-doubt and embarrassment. Given the manga's enormous popularity, it's a fair bet half (or more) of the other characters on this list are expies of her.
• Suzu from Shiawase Tori-mingu. Shoulder-length light blonde shaggy hair with a playful little side-tail. A ditzy art student trying to find her spark. She tends to get loud and not think things through when she's excited.
• Hana from Slow Start. Shoulder-length auburn hair, with a little bow. Quieter and meeker than most, Hana is nonetheless the most "normal" of her friends and deals with "main character" problems like social faux pas and trying not to stand out too much.
• Mira Konohata from Asteroid in Love. Shoulder-length auburn hair with a star-shaped hair clip. An energetic astronomer who has a quasi-yuri relationship with an aloof blue-haired beauty.
• Nene Sakura from New Game!. Shoulder-length blonde hair with side plaits. Unusually, she is not the main protagonist, her friend Aoba (a twin-tailed girl with purple hair) is. However, once she begins working at Eagle Jump and becomes the protagonist of the programmer side of the story, she and Aoba match the typical representation of the Kirara protagonist duo perfectly.
• Yui Hirasawa from K-On!. Shoulder-length light brown hair. A spacey, ditzy Genki Girl who bungles her way through learning guitar. In the original manga, she was closer to the "Hobunsha classic" archetype of other Fair-Haired Protagonists on this list. However, the Audience-Coloring Adaptation by Kyoto Animation played up her ditziness to the point she seems to have an actual mental disability.
• Anne Hanakoizumi from Anne Happy. Shoulder-length auburn hair with a bun and a bow on top. She has the worst luck in the world, but she never lets it bother her and she maintains a happy-go-lucky disposition towards life.
• Cocoa Hoto from Is the Order a Rabbit?. Shoulder-length auburn hair with a little flower clip. A cheerful baker who moves to the Half-Timbered Town to attend high school and is constantly on the prowl for little sisters to mofu mofu with.
• Kana Nakamachi from Kanamemo. Shoulder-length light brown hair. An orphaned high schooler who gets taken in by the quirky members of a newspaper delivery company. Shy and awkward and prone to misunderstandings, she nonetheless tries to do the best she can.
• Nono Natsume from Urara Meirocho. Although not the central character (that's Chiya), her short auburn hair and meek personality mark her as the closest to a quintessential Kirara protagonist.

The Pink-Haired Protagonist

• Kohone Hatoya from Anima Yell!. Pink sidetails and a shoulder-length ponytail. She is determined to enliven everybody else's life with cheerleading, and she's often oblivious to how annoying her enthusiasm is.
• Kaoruko Moeta from Comic Girls. A shaggy mess of pink hair. It's actually quite long but she regularly wears it up in odango buns or two thin plaits so it resembles an average Kirara protagonist. Introverted and awkward, Kaosu-chan evokes Yuno (another artist protagonist) from Hidamari Sketch, but over-exaggerated into a stuttering mess of a crybaby for comedic effect.
• Yuzuko Nonohara from Yuyushiki. Shoulder-length pink hair with a cowlick. A cheerful, yet obnoxious ditz who teases and toys with her straight-laced friend Yui for kicks.
• Yuki Takeya from School-Live!. Shoulder-length pink hair with a childish hair clip of a bear. Yuki takes the ditzy streak of your average Kirara protagonist and drives it to a ludicrous extreme, as she is oblivious to the zombie apocalypse that's befallen Japan. At least until it's revealed she is aware, and is just playing the role of a Kirara protagonist for the benefit of her friends.

The Fair-Haired Deuteragonist

The Fair-Haired Deuteragonist, like her protagonist cousin, has a very strong Red Oni vibe. She's cheerful and enthusiastic, a real Genki Girl. However, as she's not the protagonist, she often lacks interiority — although we may access her thoughts from time to time, it's not her story. She comes across as more unhinged and out-of-control when she storms into the life of the buttoned-up protagonist. For visual contrast with the protagonist's traditionally-Japanese straight black hair, the Fair-Haired Deuteragonist's golden (or occasionally pink) mane will be long and flowing, usually with twintails. But unlike the dark-haired twintailed character type, who tries to give off a Blue Oni air of maturity and decorum, the Fair-Haired Deuteragonist has no such pretensions. Her wild, carefree hair indicates her wild, carefree personality.

Unlike the Other Blonde character type, the Fair-Haired deuteragonist is unquestionably the second lead, and her relationship with the protagonist drives the story itself. She may even give off Manic Pixie Dream Girl vibes, for being a great big question mark who seemingly appears from nowhere to liven up the mundane protagonist's humdrum life.

• Hannah N. Fountainstand from Hanayamata. A tiny American girl with long, flowing blonde hair done up in two twintails. She's come to Japan due to her love of Yosokoi dancing, and when dark-haired protagonist Naru shows the slightest bit of interest in it too, Hannah hounds her across school trying to harass her into joining the Yosokoi team she's just founded.
• Yuu Akeuchi from Stardust Telepath. A spacy girl who claims to be an alien, with long flowing pink hair done up in twintails hanging from odango buns. She barges into the life of protagonist Umika Konohoshi and tries to break her out of her insular shell.
• Chiya from Urara Meirocho. Long, flowing, ash-blonde hair. Despite being the central protagonist, her long hair, feral upbringing, and penchant for teasing Kon give her more in common with the Fair-Haired Deuteragonist character type than Nono Natsume, who fits the traditional Kirara protagonist role to a T.
• Koharu Minagi from Slow Loop. She has long blonde hair done up in twintails, to contrast her stepsister Hoyori's short, black bob cut. A slightly stupid girl whose father remarries and moves to a quaint seaside town and learns to fish, even though her exuberant personality is a poor fit for such a relaxing pasttime.

The Other Blonde

The lesser-known Yellow Oni. As her name implies, the Other Blonde will have a shade of hair similar to the Fair-Haired Protagonist and functions as the tritagonist. Since she exists to contrast with the protagonist, the Other Blonde can go in several different directions according to the needs of the manga. Her personality can be identified by her hairstyle; as with the other characters, the length and straightness of her hair serve to identify how pleasant she is — but she will never be outright hostile, since ultimately she is friends with the others.

If a manga has only three main characters, or it follows the "Red Oni, Blue Oni + Other Blonde + Funny Wildcard" quartet dynamic, this character will usually stand just outside the Red Oni, Blue Oni protagonist duo as an eternal third wheel in the power trio. The manga will typically choose one flavor of Other Blonde or mix several together to preserve the power trio. However, if a work has a balanced quartet, then it's common to have the Other Blonde be the closest friend of a Fair-Haired Protagonist, in a Red Oni vs. Blue Oni team. If a series has five or more, then different flavors of Other Blonde will almost inevitably be split apart and assigned to different characters.

The Other Blonde (Sweet)

Identified by her long, straight blonde hair. Sometimes tied up, sometimes free-flowing. Along with her demure, soft-spoken demeanor, it gives her the air of classical Japanese femininity, but never to the point she becomes a Yamato Nadeshiko. As such, she often evokes a familial air, either matronly or little sister-like. Endlessly compassionate and supportive, though she's not above teasing and can be something of a ditz, but never so extreme she becomes one of the other flavors of Other Blonde.

• Botan Kumegawa from Anne Happy. Long, flowing ash-blonde hair. A rich girl with a frail body, she is constantly getting beat up by the world, which has made her an expert in administering first-aid, a skill she uses to help her friends out. She is the third part of the power trio in a "power trio + two more" dynamic with Ruri and Anne.
• Mai Inose and Mari Marino from Asteroid in Love. Mari has long, matronly ash-gray hair and, as club leader, tries to help nurture her kohais as best she can. Mai has blonde twintails and a ponytail, and is a sweet and soft-spoken girl who loves exploring and has a little sister-type air. When Mari graduates and Mai becomes head of the Earth Sciences Club, Mai also "graduates" to form the third part of a "power trio + two more" dynamic with Mira and Ao and the Earth Sciences club's two new kohai.
• Tsumugi Kotobuki from K-On!. Long flowing blonde hair. A spacey rich girl who is eternally pleasant and helpful, even as she seems clueless and completely out of place among the poor people.
• Haruno Takaragi and Kei Akuzuki from Stardust Telepath. Haruno has short blonde hair and is both a troll/tease and likes to act silly, so she overlaps with all the different flavors of Other Blonde, but (as evidenced by her straight hair) she is primarily a sweet and tender Team Mom. Before the fourth member Matataki Raimon joined, she formed a power trio with Red Oni, Blue Oni protagonists Umika and Yuu. The manga also has a more traditional sweet-flavored Other Blonde with much longer golden hair, Kei Akuzuki. Kei is (unusually) the rival character, but she is so sweet-flavored that she's just as caring and empathetic towards our heroines despite competing against them.
• Hina from Shiawase Tori-mingu. A girl with long blonde hair and a feminine braid behind her ear. Even though she's super-rich, she's endlessly polite and acts as casual as her friends, aside from unintentionally flaunting her ability to buy stupidly expensive equipment.
• Ko Hayame from Three Leaves, Three Colors. She has long, bright blonde hair and is gentle, caring, and empathetic. Unfortunately, part of her "caring" nature is that she likes to cook meals for the others, and they're too polite to tell her that her cooking is inedible.
• Eiko Tokura from Slow Start. Eiko has long auburn hair, but since she's a bit of a tease it's shorter, redder, and curlier than the average sweet-flavored Other Blonde. Despite her flirting ways, in the manga she is a confident, dependable big sister that our Fair-Haired Protagonist Hana can rely on.

The Other Blonde (Spicy)

Whereas the sweet variant is defined by being, well, sweet, the spicy Other Blonde generally has short, shaggy hair, sometimes done up in Girlish Pigtails. She has a sharp and sarcastic tongue, and is either too tightly wound or enjoys stringing other people along, or sometimes both.

• Uki Sawatari from Anima Yell!. A tall girl with shaggy blonde hair and a sidetail, she is the Pink-Haired Protagonist's best friend and voice of reason, which means she gets extremely exasperated whenever Kohone starts acting stupid. Which is most of the time.
• Koi Yoshinaga from Slow Loop. The third wheel to stepsisters Koharu and Hiyori, Koi has ash-blonde pigtails and generally acts as a cat-smiled sarcastic counterpart to Hiyori in explaining the basics of fishing to Koharu. However, she is also prone to flipping into a dismal tsundere whenever her absent-minded father is concerned.
• Yun Iijima from New Game!. A girl with short, messy blonde hair who works on the art team at Eagle Jump. Although she is generally friendly and well-meaning, she's also the first to shoot off a sarcastic insult or to sulk in depression (usually about her weight).
• Ritsu Tainaka from K-On!. Short light-brown hair, often done up with a hairband. The light music club's resident joker, she's always clowning around and coming up with ideas and schemes that inevitably fall apart.
• Syaro Kirima from Is the Order a Rabbit?. Short, messy blond hair. Syaro is generally uptight and sarcastic, always loudly berating others for being silly while just as often setting herself up for embarrassment whenever her crush Rize enters the picture.
• Teru Hayame from Three Leaves, Three Colors. She is blonde like her sister Ko, but her hair is much shorter and she is scheming, two-faced, and sharp-tongued.
• Yui Ichii from Yuyushiki. Short, messy blonde hair with very thin twintails. The sarcastic Only Sane Man and attempted voice of reason to her very two dumb friends, she is often the target of their pranks — and often the source of the large lumps on their heads.

The Other Blonde (Stupid)

The third and final major flavor of Other Blonde, the stupid version is often an exuberant Genki Girl who annoys other people by simply getting out of hand. Her blonde hair is usually long and messy, to symbolize her uncontrollable personality, but it tends to be in an updo or pigtails rather than cut short like a standard Fair- or Pink-Haired Protagonist.

• Miyako from Hidamari Sketch. An ace art student with long blonde hair done up in a ponytail who takes everything in stride, although (despite her telling everybody she "came in through the back door") she just does it for the laughs and is actually quite intelligent, if easily distracted.
• Koyume Koizuka from Comic Girls. An Expy of Miyako from Hidamari Sketch, she is a scatterbrained shoujo manga artist with long blonde hair, although hers sticks out to the side to indicate she's more childish instead of a hidden genius like Miyako.
• Yume Kitaoka from Kanamemo. One-half of a couple with Yuuki, she's generally a clueless moron with an impish cat smile and short blonde hair buns, to complement main character Kana's more reserved, nervous personality.

The Flame-Haired Firebrand

The Flame-Haired Firebrand evokes the Fair-Haired Protagonist's short blonde hair and warm hues. However, as evidenced by her bright red hair, she takes the red oni personality to the max. She is abrasive, sharp-tongued, and passive-aggressive, and easily out-tsunderes everybody else in the manga. While the Fair-Haired Protagonist often has messy bangs to symbolize her slightly-messy personality, the Firebrand has perfectly cut bangs to emphasize her uptight, dictatorial personality. However, just as the Fair-Haired Protagonist mixes her ditziness with embarrassing social faux pas, the Firebrand's tempestuous personality will inevitably set her up for extremely humiliating failure that makes her cheeks glow as red as her hair.

Since she is a more extreme Red Oni mirror of the main character, she tends to fulfill the position of rival. In a school club story, this will manifest as her being an unreasonable authority figure or a hardass technician who berates the others for not doing whatever activity the manga revolves around "the right way". In a slice-of-life manga, her position as rival will instead manifest as an implicit romantic rival with somebody else she has a crush on — which sometimes includes the protagonist herself.

A variant of the Flame-Haired Firebrand is the Tempered Firebrand. Unlike the regular Firebrand, the Tempered Firebrand has longer hair which lends her a more feminine and/or regal vibe. As such, she is more aloof, haughty, and condescending than the active contempt of shorter-haired, shorter-tempered Firebrands, who typically behave like they want to have an aneurysm before their twentieth birthday.

The Flame-Haired Firebrand

• Matataki Raimon from Stardust Telepath. Shoulder-length red hair with perfectly even bangs. Sarcastic, dismissive, and rude, she is the technical backbone of the Rocketry Research Association. However, she is (at first) only in it for herself and she brusquely pushes everybody else away for not being any good at her hobby, model rockets.
• Kana Ushiku from Anima Yell!. Shoulder-length red hair with perfectly even bangs. A Stalker with a Crush on former cheerleading prodigy Hizume Arima, she is introduced stalking the Cheer Association from afar and glaring tsundere daggers at them from around corners. When she joins, she berates the "lesser" members of the association for dragging Arima-senpai down to their level.
• Mikage Sakurai from Asteroid in Love. Shoulder-length red hair with perfectly even bangs. The former president of the Geology Club (before it was merged with the Astronomy Club to form the Earth Sciences Club), Mikage is a sullen, bitter hardass with a conniving streak who always tries to get one over on the astronomy students, such as bribing people by giving them lucky rocks.
• Hibiki Hagyuu from Anne Happy. Shoulder-length red hair with perfectly even bangs. Hibiki leads the "two more" duo of a "power trio + two more" dynamic. She has an awful sense of direction and often leads her friend/crush Ren astray on their way to school, where she inevitably runs into the power trio. She berates anybody who gets close to her crush and is generally hypercompetitive with the power trio (and everybody else) to compensate for her shortcomings.
• Momiji Mochizuki from New Game!. Shoulder-length red hair with perfectly even bangs (and a little part). Momo joins the Eagle Jump team as an artist and throws shade at protagonist Aoba Suzukaze after she's promoted to character designer, since they're both vying to be their senpai Ko Yagami's "successor" as an accomplished character designer.

The Tempered Firebrand

• Serina Nishiyama from Three Leaves, Three Colors. Long, flowing red-pink hair. A brash girl who constantly tries to upstage cunning protagonist Teru, only for the conniving Teru to undercut her effortlessly and leave her on the verge of tears.
• Mika from Kanamemo. Long, flowing red hair. A haughty, condescending girl who regularly encounters protagonist Kana since they work for rival newspaper delivery companies and keep crossing paths on their respective routes. However, despite her tsundere bluster, it's clear she has a crush on Kana and her condescension routinely leads to her blushing with embarrassment.
• Yuiko Enamoto from Love Lab. Long, flowing red hair. First seen stalking the titular "love lab" from a nearby rooftop, she holds a grudge against the current student council president, Maki, for being so good at her job that she made Yuiko redundant. Despite that, she's rather incompetent and her plans are prone to failure, leading to her embarrassment.

The Brown-Haired Butt Monkey

Often a side character who rounds out a larger ensemble, the Brown-Haired Butt-Monkey has short, dull brown hair (the dullest possible shade in anime) and is generally hapless. Whether it's self-imposed due to a lack of confidence, external due to a general lack of respect from her peers, or both, you can score her scenes with a slide whistle and it wouldn't feel out of place.

The Brown-Haired Butt-Monkey

• Hajime Shinoda from New Game!. A Genki Girl and otaku with a boyish brown haircut (and boyish attitude) who gets zero respect from her peers, with them going so far as to say they'll quit en masse if she becomes their boss.
• Kotetsu Tatejima from Anima Yell!. A girl with short, disheveled brown hair. Plagued by confidence issues, she resists the cheerleading Call to Adventure due to her belief she'll screw everything up, and she generally spends every waking minute looking like she wants somebody to put her out of her misery.
• Hinata Azuma from Kanamemo. A young woman with short brown hair and a Money Fetish who never wins big.
• Futaba Odigiri from Three Leaves, Three Colors. A girl with short brown hair who tries to remain cheerful, even though she routinely gets banned from restaurants for winning food competitions due to her massive appetite. When she says she's an excellent cook, her friends dismiss her and assume she meant she's excellent at eating.
• Ayame Seki from Magic of Stella. Short, shaggy brown hair (changed to bright orange in the anime). Ayame is the game's head writer, and she gets zero respect from the others for being a melodramatic drama queen who used to write embarrassingly bad doujin.

Blue Oni

The Dark-Haired Protagonist

The Dark-Haired Protagonist

A brooding girl who is insular and reserved, with short, straight blue or black hair to match her straight-laced personality. This personality type is how Japanese people tend to be in real life — a reserved personality and short, straight black hair. Although long dark hair is common in Japanese women, this protagonist archetype does not have it since long dark hair is used to single out the "beautiful" female character, which is distinct from the "plain" protagonist the reader is supposed to identify with. Since manga (especially Kirara manga) are an escape from reality, this type isn't used as a protagonist very often. Her Blue Oni vibe implies a certain level of drama or mundanity that's often out of place in your typical Kirara manga, so the Blue Oni tends to be a secondary protagonist (with long hair) to play off/contrast with the more free-spirited short-haired Red Oni protagonist. On the rare occasions we do see a Dark-Haired Protagonist, it's just as common to see the Red Oni deuteragonist have long blonde/auburn hair (to the point she bleeds together with the Other Blonde type) just to preserve the visual contrast.

• Naru Sekiya from Hanayamata. Straight, shoulder-length black hair and sharp bangs hanging over one eye, indicating her messy emotional state. Naru is a middle schooler who angsts about how she can't stand out at anything. Her stereotypically Japanese appearance also serves as a contrast against the very blonde western deuteragonist, Hannah M. Fountainstead. In a good example of why we don't see this character design too often, Hanayamata got criticism from Kirara readers for having too much drama, despite it being in Forward (which doesn't necessarily stick to Lighter and Fluffier) and being partly an idol series (those tend to get very dramatic).
• Hiyori Minami from Slow Loop. Straight, shoulder-length black hair with even bangs to demonstrate her technical expertise at fishing and her being a stickler for order and rules when fishing, in contrast to her blonde, long-haired step-sister's freeform chaos.
• Toru Ichii from A Channel. Straight, shoulder-length black hair with sharp bangs hanging over one eye, sharp enough to indicate her caustic, prickly personality. She is an insular, petulant wild child obsessed with her blonde-haired friend Run, to the point she routinely rushes to her side with a baseball bat, ready to beat back anybody she sees as a "threat".
• Chiya from Urara Meirocho. In the afterward to volume 1, the author reveals Chiya's original design was a Dark-Haired Protagonist with short, straight black hair and even bangs, and she was "more calm and mellow". That version of the manga was, in the author's own words, "unceremoniously scrapped".
• Shinobu Oomiya from Kiniro Mosaic. Short, straight black hair with even bangs. Even though she has Red Oni vibes, since the deuteragonist is an actual blonde western girl, Shinobu is given a stereotypically Japanese look for contrast despite being the main character.

The Pigtailed Deutagonist

The Twin-Tailed Deuteragonist

The Twin-Tailed Deuteragonist is usually the second half of a main protagonist duo. She is tall, mature, and serious. Yet, as a mirror of her fair-haired counterpart, she will sometimes act so sternly that it backfires and she ends up flustered and embarrassed. Her design often contrasts the Fair-Haired Protagonist — she often has Tsurime Eyes instead of Tareme Eyes and long, straight, dark blue/purple hair often done in a ponytail or twintails. In addition, if the work revolves around a school club activity, then she'll usually act as a mentor/senpai who instructs the main character (and the audience) about it. Even if that's not the case, then she is often some flavor of otaku. In 2015, the Chinese fandom nicknamed this character type the "Famous Actress from Hobunsha" after three successive seasons had Kirara adaptations with identical-looking twin-tailed characters, Aya, Rize, and Kurumi.

• Aya Komichi from Kiniro Mosaic, an uptight tsundere girl who ties her blue hair in pigtails. Unlike the latter examples, though, she tends to be conventionally girly.
• Rize Tedeza from Is the Order a Rabbit?, an uptight Tomboy with a Girly Streak who wears her purple hair in pigtails. Due to her Military Brat background, she's a military otaku, up to and including carrying a model Glock on her at all times.
• Kurumi Ebisuzuwa from School-Live!.
• Ruri Hibarigaoka from Anne Happy, a somewhat shy girl with long blue hair. She acts as the Only Sane Man of the core cast despite her Perverse Sexual Lust for a construction sign.
• Ruki Irokawa from Comic Girls, a somewhat uptight girl with long purple hair. The "easily flustered" part comes from the fact that she's also a Sequential Artist for the "Teens Love" subgenre of Shōjo, which is not only racy but it's not what she wanted to draw in the first place.
• Hizume Arima from Anima Yell!, an archetypical Aloof Dark-Haired Girl with blue hair, but softens a lot when it comes to cheerleading. She still acts as the stern trainer, though.
• Ao Manaka from Asteroid in Love, a Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak who is uncomfortable speaking to others and wears her blue hair in pigtails. On the other hand, she's a big astronomy geek and often acts as the Only Sane Man.
• Tsubasa Tokiniwa from Shiawase Tori-mingu is an uptight and mildly shy college student who's a birdwatching otaku, and wears her blue hair in a ponytail.
• Asuza Nakano from K-On!. A rare example of a younger deuteragonist, yet she is unquestionably a more experienced guitar player and a more mature character than Yui. She wears her hair in twintails, but since K-On! does not have technicolor hair she lacks the trademark blue/purple coloration.
• Aoba Suzukaze from New Game!. Unusually, despite having purple twintails and being a naive newcomer, she is the protagonist instead of the deuteragonist. However, as mentioned above, when her best friend Nene Sakura — a quintessential fair-haired protagonist — becomes her co-protagonist, they fit the typical Red Oni, Blue Oni dynamic exactly.
• Koume Yukimi from Urara Meirocho.
• Tamate Momochi from Slow Start. Although her hair is mainly brown, it has purple shading and she also has purple eyes. She generally fits the archetype of the Twin-Tailed Deuteragonist when compared to Fair-Haired Protagonist Hana Ichinose. Although she can be fairly goofy, she gets extremely serious — borderline tsundere — when it comes to her beloved gal games.

The Yamato Nadeshiko

This character is known for being extremely Japanese and embodying the ideal Japanese wife. Because of this, if a work has heavy yuri subtext, she may take the place of the Twin-Tailed Deuteragonist completely, but if not than it's common for both to coexist within the same ensemble. As with the Yamato Nadeshiko trope in general, the Nadeshiko can invariably be identified by her traditional Hime Cut, and (less often) by her penchant for traditional Japanese attire. Despite being a blue oni with a characteristically-reserved personality, it's common for her hair to be a shade of brown simply because it's closer to real hair, and is thus "more Japanese". On the other hand, it's also common for her to have bright purple Hime Cut and function as a funny (to us, the audience, not necessarily her friends) rich girl (if the Other Blonde isn't the manga's token rich girl, that is). This works under the impression that being filthy rich is the 21st-century equivalent of being a princess.

The Yamato Nadeshiko (Classic)

• Mio Akiyama from K-On!.
• Chiya Ujimatsu from Is the Order a Rabbit?.
• Hifume Takimoto from New Game!.
• Yuuki Minami
• Kon Tatsumi from Urara Meirochou. A prim and proper young woman with a black Hime Cut and a mature, reserved bearing. Although she's not strictly an aristocrat, her mother is a well-respected fortune teller and she is overly mannered and concerned with propriety.

The Yamato Nadeshiko (Funny Rich Girl)

• Youko Nishikawa from Three Leaves, Three Colors. A rare example of a Nadeshiko leading the story rather than being a side character. Youko has a bright purple hime cut and was formerly rich, and she retains her aristocratic behavior despite now being dirt-poor.
• Yukari Hinata from Yuyushiki. A rich girl with a purple hime cut, she is generally spacey and prone to following her friend Yukari's bizarre train of thought.

The Platinum-Haired Token Mini-Moe

The Platinum-Haired Token Mini-Moe

A diminutive girl who's either much younger than the others or just looks that way. Often her attitude will usually be as icy as her hair color. A mix of childish and wise beyond her years, she tends to be in positions of authority. Although Non Non Biyori is not a Kirara manga, due to its popularity it's reasonable to assume Renge was a Fountain of Expies for these characters.

• Chino Kafuu from Is the Order a Rabbit?.
• Saki Amano
• Kamuri Sengoku from Slow Start.
• Tsumiki Miniwa from Place to Place.

The Kaguya

The Kaguya

No, not that Kaguya. The Kaguya is a girl who often sports ethereally pale blue or purple hair, who seems so detached from whatever is going on that she resembles an alien (hence the name, after the moon princess from Japanese folklore). Like Rei Ayanami Expy (which it can overlap with), her unearthly hair is used to signify her alien-ness and her strange thought patterns.

• Ren Ekoda from Anne Happy
• Tsubasa Katsuki from Comic Girls.
• Omi Nijou from Urara Meirochou.