Kawaiiko

Wait until you hear her talk...

Apollo: Isn't she a little old for cute?
Trucy: Apollo! Shame on you! Cute is eternal! Cute is timeless!

— Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney ^note  "She" is anything but kawaiiko

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In Japanese, kawaii means "cute", but the concept has far more overtones than it does in English — and far more power. For many Japanese schoolgirls (and some women), being kawaii is kind of like being sexy for Western women: it means that they are desirable, attractive and wanted. It becomes a primary goal in their social lives, and success, as measured in the reactions of their peers, is practically an affirmation of their worth as a female.

As always, whenever there is a goal like this, there is always someone who overdoes it. The kawaiiko (literally "cute child"), or burikko ("fake child" or "pretend(ing) child"), is the case in point. She takes being kawaii to an almost unhealthy extreme by making it the sole focus of her life. In clothing and fashion, this manifests in frilly, flouncy outfits, often with ribbons and lace. In behavior it appears as a tendency to act childishly "young", particularly in speech — she may speak entirely in baby talk, giggle mindlessly, habitually refer to herself in the third person, and/or use nicknames as well as the -chan Honorific for virtually everyone she encounters. In short, the difference between kawaii and kawaiiko is the difference between "cute" and "cutesy". (The difference between kawaiiko and burikko, however, is the difference between "cutesy" and "obnoxious.")

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In some cases, the decision to go kawaiiko is a not a desperate plea for social acceptance but a calculated step intended to further a career goal as an Idol Singer — for which lacy, frilly cutesiness appears to be required by the Japanese music industry.

Compare Animesque, Deliberately Cute Child, Manchild (similar trope for men that could also apply to the worst of these cases), and The Fake Cutie. The horrific offspring of Tastes Like Diabetes and Moe. Contrast Rated M for Manly and Testosterone Poisoning.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Azusa Shiratori from Ranma ½.
  • Female Ranma sometimes acts like this deliberately when in disguise to fool Ryoga.
  • Tsubasa tries for this, but tends more towards You Were Trying Too Hard. But, of course he's a he and has slightly warped ideas of what's cute.
• Tamama from Sgt. Frog ... just don't get him mad.
• Hikaru "Rabi~en~Rose" Usada from Di Gi Charat is a subversion — like other Di Gi Charat characters, she's sweet on the outside, but petty and overbearing on the inside (not to discount her moments of genuine niceness; those happen too).
• Ran from Urusei Yatsura is a Yandere who acts like a Kawaiiko when she's trying to look good.
• Mimete of the Witches 5 arc in Sailor Moon has Kawaiiko traits. She has aspirations of being an Idol Singer, often wears flouncy dresses when outside the lab (even when trying to fight the Senshi), mostly targets famous and attractive men for stealing heart crystals (and in at least one instance bakes a cake for one of them) and almost always talks with a Baby Talk tone of voice.
• An overbearing agent attempts to force tough-girl thrash rocker Priss Asagiri into going kawaiiko in an attempt to sell her as an idol singer in Bubblegum Crash. It doesn't work.
• Lillith from Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito.
• Ropponmatsu II (the Catgirl robot, not the adult robot) in Excel Saga.
• Paranoia Agent: Anything kawaii turns out to be life-threatening, and anything that is merely sweet turns out to be merely dangerous.
• Amane Misa from Death Note, who is also a psychotic killer. Who kills for love. Although, being an idol and all, she has an excuse.
• Mai-HiME: Munakata Shiho is very cute and cheery, but when she gets angry, she gets angry.
• Akira Kogami in Lucky Star's Lucky Channel is a cutesy, sugary Genki Girl to the public, and when she gets tired of it, she reverts back to her true personality of a jaded, bitter entertainment industry veteran.
• A challenge for fans of Cardcaptor Sakura: Find one of Sakura's Tomoyo-designed costumes, even one, that doesn't push the Kawaiiko content to Glurge-worthy proportions. To be fair, though, Sakura doesn't seem any happier about wearing them.
• Similar to Nermal, Chi from Chi's Sweet Home. She's more of a kawaiiko, though, because she's naive about it.
• Both Suzu Sakuma and Miki Koishikawa in Marmalade Boy.
• Quattro of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Strikers, a Meganekko who looks all cutesy, speaks all cutesy, and acts all cutesy. Naturally, she's turns out to be the evil, nasty one of the Numbers.
• C-ko Kotobuki from Project Ako.
• Choco is downright adorable.
• Marilyn from Pokémon, except that she's more obsessed with cute Pokémon.

• Yugi Mutou in the English dub anime of Yu-Gi-Oh! has traits of this. He is fifteen year old, but acts like a seven-year old sometimes. In season 0, his eyes are bigger and he's voiced by a girl...
  • Also in season 0, Miho was this to burikko extents.
• Natsuru Senou from Kämpfer, when in female form.
• Eco from Plus-Si is a male example.
• LLENN from Sword Art Online: Alternative Gun Gale Online, who started playing GGO specifically because she was given a short and cute avatar. She then goes out of her way to act cute in-game, customizing all of her clothes to that of pink.

Live Action TV

• Lampshaded in Engine Sentai Go-onger, with a character called Bukkorin. She may walk around in a fluffy dress and act all cutesy, but she's the daughter of an alien mob boss, and tough enough to catch a blade with her bare hands.
• Wakana Sonozaki from Kamen Rider Double in her DJ job.
  • Himeka from the Nightmare Dopant arc.
• Kelly Kapoor from The Office (US) seems to have a large dose of this in her character makeup.
• Saito Ayaka. Anything she does. Apparently, her voice is soft and high-pitched even for a female seiyuu. Her voice is like nails on a chalkboard to Westerners.
• The dubbing of Iron Chef had a lot of the young actresses on the tasting panel sound like this, earning them the Fan Nickname "bimbos du jour".
• Traci Van Horn of Hannah Montana, at least in the episode "No Sugar Sugar", in which she hosts a sweet sixteen birthday party ("emphasis on sweet") despite being two years past the deadline. She seems to be pushing herself as some childish brand of trying really-too-hard to be sexy, as she proceeds to simper about in a saccharine, disturbingly coquettish manner, waving an oversized rainbow lollipop in Oliver's face while flirting with him. He's more interested in the lollipop, but who could blame the guy?
• Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory wears floral skirts, has an adorable squeaky voice, and could provide a page image for Fun Size; it's easy to forget she's a freaking genius microbiologist with an interest physics, Cute, but Cacophonic, and a Covert Pervert. While a lot of the cuteness is genuine, she's a Raised Catholic Cultural Rebel and thus a bit of a Seemingly Wholesome '50s Girl.

Video Games

• Lina, the yellow archer from Riviera: The Promised Land, is concentrated Kawaiiko.
• Alice from Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, who is also a sadist and even has an overly cutesy looking riding crop.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All has, in the third case "Turnabout Big Top" a 16 year old girl with big eyes and blonde hair.. Who is so cute she's gotten several marriage proposals (one by a 36 year old!), and has the titular Phoenix Wright and his plucky sidekick powerless to decline a request of finding her outfit (as shown in the But Thou Must! page). ... Err, her other outfit.
• Nao in The World Ends with You. She even asks you to call her Nao-Nao. For short.
• Momo from Rival Schools. To the point of intentional parody.
• Desco from Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten. She always refers to herself in the third person, refers to another character exclusively as "Big Sis", and is such an adorable ultimate killing machine you can't help but love her.

Viusal Novels

• Grisaia no Kajitsu: Makina not only looks a lot younger than she is, but she also has a very cutesy way of speaking. Yuuji suspects she deliberately plays up the moe part of her personality.

Webcomics

• Candi Shugari in Angel Moxie, pictured above.
• Joan in Namir Deiter.
• Rumy in Fans! originally dressed in a Japanese anime-style schoolgirl uniform and wore bangs over her eyes—until she realized that people could see her underwear whenever she went into battle, or grab her hair in a fight. She has since cut her hair short and started wearing karate gi in the field. T. Campbell wrote in response to fans who were upset at her new look:
  On the day Rumy changed her hairstyle to something that wouldn't present such a tactical weakness, she was a little sad, feeling like something was lost. And she imagined her mother— whom she hasn't spoken to for longer than ten minutes in years— saying, "But dear, your hair looks so kawaii!" And then, the anger of a misspent childhood renewed in her heart, Rumy replied to her imagination, "Kawaii is for the lazy."
• Duchess Lettie in A Magical Roommate. The fans honestly can't decide whether she's kawaiiko or burikko. All we know is that she thinks she's living Happily Ever After, despite having a daughter who hates her and another everybody hates.
• Take a look at the character "Kawaii" in Errant Story, then decide for yourself whether she's a deconstruction, subversion, inversion, perversion, or simply so weird that you can't describe her. Yeah, that last one fits.

Western Animation

• Nermal from Garfield and the animated series Garfield and Friends is a Western "burikko" example, in that he (yes, Nermal is male) calls himself the "World's Cutest Kitten" and forever annoys Garfield with his antics, and is often shipped off to Abu Dhabi — but somehow always finds his way back.
  • Nermal is also much Older Than He Looks and deliberately drinks ridiculous amounts of coffee to stunt his growth.
• Dot Warner might be a Western example of a kawaiiko, as she constantly brags about her cuteness to the point of having an entire song titled "I'm Cute", and being referred to in the theme song as the "cute" one.
• The Brain, of all characters, assumes a kawaiiko persona in the Pinky and the Brain episode "Whatever Happened to Baby Brain?" He accomplishes this by wearing contact lenses, fake dimples, and long curls. It's a Paper-Thin Disguise.
• South Park has Kenny, already in endearingly poor princess drag, turn into an obnoxiously cute Animesque Japanese princess whose cuteness is his/her superpower.
• One episode of Danny Phantom had the Alpha Bitch Paulina declaring she wants to be as cute as the Kawaiiko Sayonara Pussycat. She gets her wish... and is dolled up in the cutest, chibiest look ever when Desiree grants her wish in the episode "What You Want". The ghost possessing Paulina also makes her bigger and stronger the more people that pay attention to her as well as hypnotizing people to force them to love her (though it doesn't go very far).
  Paulina (under Desiree's spell): Hi, I'm Paulina! I'm adorable and swell and full of big-headed anime goodness!

• The titular character of SpongeBob SquarePants can be considered a Western "burriko" example, as he has feminine-looking eyelashes, tends to annoy Squidward with his antics, loves animals, and acts generally cheerful all-around. This was taken Up to Eleven in the Season 4-9 episodes.
• The ditzy, genki, and constantly squeeing Katie and Sadie from Total Drama.
• Kaeloo: The title character is obsessed with cuteness and puts a lot of emphasis on being "cute", and being seen as such.

Real Life

• Spoofed by Japanese porn star Kikouden Misa, who frequently appears on TV as a Kawaiiko parody — a ditzy, cosplay-loving, squeaky-voiced Genki Girl burikko called Hakyuun, whose speech is absolutely full of Verbal Tics.
• Idol Singer Matsuura Aya used to affect a kawaiiko stage persona called "Ayaya" (which made her convincing portrayal of surly and violent near-delinquent Saki in the 2006 Sukeban Deka film a major surprise for her fans). In the last couple of years, however, she seems to have gone from Ayaya to just Aya, releasing more mature songs and acting less cute.
• This trope appears in Taiwan as well as Japan.
  • This is the primary schtick of Taiwan's Regine Lee, host of Diamond Club, despite the fact that her voice is very far from squeaky.
  • Guo Shuyao aka YaoYao, is closer to the intended age. Maybe too close.
  • The soft-spoken and equally leggy model Lin Chiling (of Red Cliff fame) was often accused of this, but actually fits a completely different Japanese demographic.
• The perceived relationship between Lolicon and Shotacon and Kawaiiko is undermined by Elegant Gothic Lolita style. While it does appear to Western sensibilities to incorporate some measure of Lolicon and Shotacon, the style, along with most other Lolita styles (Sweet Lolita, Classic Lolita, Punk Lolita, Trash Lolita, etc.) intentionally de-emphasizes sexuality in opposition to the perceived over-emphasis on Lolicon trends in Japanese culture. Only one style, Erololi, consciously combines cuteness and sensuality; and that was a Western-originated style that was based on a misunderstanding of the original Lolita Fashion which was later adopted back into Japan. While a related and very deranged style, Gurololi, may seem to also be an Erololi offshoot, it was intended to be more disturbing and classic kawaii than erotic.

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