Belle Kobayashi

The quiet and aloof Belle Kobayashi is someone who is commonly mistaken for being shy due to her inability to express her emotions properly. To make up for this, she tends to read the body language of others very well, knowing full well when someone is telling the truth or if they’re lying. Contrary to her petite, doll-like stature, Belle is surprisingly agile and has a rather high endurance, which only makes sense considering how frequently she gets hurt.

Personality

On the surface, Belle seems like an innocent, reserved girl. She doesn’t speak a lot to Hajime in the beginning aside from small talk as she’s shown shifting her gaze to the side often. It’s hard for her to properly express how she feels most the time, but she tries anyway with short sentences. Despite this, she feels high levels of empathy for both living things and inanimate objects, and she usually ends up expressing that through gestures and actions. 

Belle also gets flustered very, very easily. Even just mentioning something can get her flustered. She becomes a stuttering, blushing mess, unable to cope with even the slightest feeling of embarrassment. She tends to get flustered easiest by receiving any type of compliments. In this state, she usually questions whoever is saying anything, even downright refusing to accept their compliments.

Despite the lack of emotions expressed and her less than average verbal communication skills, she is an optimistic person who simply tries her best to help out in whatever ways she can, even if she tends to be blunt about what she thinks and does.

Deep down, she doesn’t understand herself as a human being. Sometimes, she thinks she is broken or defective for being unable to express her emotions the way her peers can. Sometimes, she sees herself relating more to entities like robots or some types of animals instead of human beings. She doesn’t bring this up, mainly due to the fact she feels her peers would find it weird if she mentioned it, or worse, she feared they would chastise her and ostracize her.

If provoked, she can get very angry and violent, using biting and scratching as her main forms of attacking anyone that ends up doing so. In this state, she gets very callous and merciless to those around her, even having her words being referred to as venomous. She has also been describe to get visibly shaky in such an angered state, and that her eyes have a heartless, animalistic glint in them.

History

Belle was born with dual citizenship, with her mother being American and her father being Japanese. In her first years of living, she ended up developing a spinal infection that needed treatment that the family, at the time, could not afford. In order to pay for the procedure, her parents stole her drawings she made of clothing designs and submitted them to fashion designer agencies, in which her designs were accepted. She was able to get the infection successfully treated, and that was the beginning of the little girl’s designing career. Her parents pulled her out of school and any other activities, such as her ballet classes, in order to force her to focus on her newfound career.

By the time she reached middle school, her parents couldn’t agree on a direction to take their daughter’s life and career, even going as far as to drag Belle into the arguments. The fights got so bad that they divorced and went their separate ways, making her have to deal with custody battles overseas, which ultimately ended up with her in the American Foster care system, abandoning both her parents and claiming they were dead to her. However, as soon as she escaped the manipulation and emotional abuse from her parents, she was met with more emotional abuse in the foster care system, which led to her ultimately running away and fleeing back to Japan. When she started high school, taking the time to enroll herself, she started living on her own and felt as if she had no choice but to create her own fashion brand, making her an official fashion designer.

As much as she was considered one of the most creative designers and was sought out by multiple fashion shows to make designs for them, she started to hate the career, despising the direction her life had taken all because of something she didn’t even want to do. As she designed stuff that was trendy, she couldn’t help but resent everything she had worked so hard for. She was then invited to be a student at Hope’s Peak Academy, and was initially very nervous about what choice to make. In order to remedy any qualms within herself, she sought out a psychic to perform a reading on her for her future, in which she was told that she would lead a happier life if she went to Hope’s Peak as well as be greeted by a beautiful, flourishing love with someone or something that was truly beautiful inside and out. With the reading in mind, Belle accepted the invitation to Hope’s Peak Academy, attempting to take her lonely, hate filled life into a new direction filled with love, happiness, friends, and hope.

Trivia

• Belle is double jointed, and can contort her body with ease.
• Belle is short for Jessabelle.
• Belle is also very agile and flexible, which makes sense as she used to take ballet classes before her parents pulled her out to focus on her fashion design career.
• Belle is autistic.
• As much as she hates to admit it, Belle loves girly and frilly things.
• If there’s too much negativity in the room, Belle will be more prone to having a meltdown.
• Belle drinks Coca Cola and eats Mentos simultaneously to “feel something.” She will also eat mints and drink water as well as snorting fun dip or confectionery sugar.
• Belle is hypersensitive to the cold.
• Belle made her own weighted blanket by getting a quilt and replacing some of the stuffing inside with rice.
• Belle owns seventeen spiders in her cottage, all named Snowflake. She takes care of them with Gundham’s help.
• Belle had her tongue tie snipped. She deliberately asked to not be put under anesthesia when she had it removed.
• Belle eats entire lemons, with the skin, for fun.
• Belle has synesthesia, specifically emotional-olfactory synesthesia. In her case, she can sense other people’s emotions, and simultaneously smell something that correlates with the emotion. For example, she describes the feeling of despair to have the scent of rotting flesh.
• Belle continued to teach herself ballet ever since she was pulled out, and she had to do it in secret so her parents wouldn’t find out.
• go stones? more like gone stones. she likes them because she wants to eat them and will attempt to do so.
• Belle’s canines are really sharp because she filed them down to a very fine point. 
• Belle has a soft spot for surf music. It’s one of her favorite genres.
• Belle does, in fact, have a middle name, and it’s Daisy. This makes her full name Jessabelle Daisy Kobayashi.
• Belle is a big cheese fan. She loves cheese and her favorite is Mozzarella.
• Belle likes knitting almost just as much as she likes embroidery.