Sumika Kagami
Sumika is a character who is very much ruled by her emotions and defined in terms of love, friendship, and anger. Her virtues are -- she's very passionate and enthusiastic and follows her heart. Her vices are -- she has a short temper and is even prone to violence, and will often make hasty assumptions or get worked up about things that probably aren't worth getting worked up about. Sumika is, in my mind, pure and monochromatic . And you might ask, what about the times when she puts the happiness of her friends above herself and denies her feelings in order to help someone else? In my mind, she's still acting in all of those cases because her behavior is still predicated entirely on emotional whim. True, she is more thoughtful and selfless than she's often given credit for, and essentially a good person under the adorable brat routine, but that just means she's non:b:, not that she's something other than . It kind of makes sense that she's possibly the most aggressively character in the series, as she's the only major character who is never psychologically integrated into a military structure Even in Alternative, she may serve but she's not conditioned as a soldier, she's just a superpowered artifact creature.

Meiya Mitsurugi
Meiya is one of two characters who makes a very solid argument for being a multicolor. In Meiya's case, I'd even say she could be held up as a good example of what a HYBRID character might look like in terms of personality rather than pure game piece considerations. But, when trying to analyze her as a single color, there is no doubt or hesitation in saying that is her primary. She is, at her most core, a character who has strongly integrated the more parts of her self, which are powerful, and has forced those components into an overwhelming structure that is the core of her personality. Yes, Meiya is strongly driven by love and personal convictions, but despite being a character who is stuck in a predetermined role that isn't always comfortable, she never wants to actually escape the role she's given. She accepts it, even defines herself by it, and then seeks to, while remaining obedient to the spirit and the letter of her predetermined role, reach her best self within that role. Sometimes she may bend rules, as in the Mt Tengen incident in Unlimited, but even then it's because Meiya herself is fundamentally unbending. She has an absolutist view on life and approach to existence that is very . Her extravagant shows of romance? Those aren't so over-the-top because Meiya is more powerfully passionate, they're over-the-top because Meiya goes all out in everything she does; she's the kind of person for whom anything worth doing is worth overdoing, where every effort is all or nothing. This ultimately is more born of principles than of passion, so that even if she largely exists in the overlap of the two colors I can safely say that the is closer to her core.

Chizuru Sakaki
Class Rep, the constant voice for order and discipline, unforgiving and insistent, a "dog of the system" as Ayamine might say, couldn't be a color other than . Yeah, she's the smart one who wears glasses, but she is not (first and foremost) a character: she needs to learn to be more flexible, which in her case means relying more on her cunning than on the rules she's otherwise entirely devoted to. I'd argue that her character growth later in Alternative sees her shifting more towards her elements, but she doesn't ever really color shift; she's still Class Rep: as unbending as Meiya and way more repressed. This might not sound too flattering, but I actually do like her and think that (at least on her routes) she can show off some of the good sides of as well. She has a group-focused take on life and is generally looking out for the many even when she looks out for the few, and is the first to raise concerns about how peoples' actions affect the whole.

Kei Ayamine
Ayamine's biggest ideal is self-sufficiency, in the sense of not relying on or trusting any people. She's a determined loner who hates those who try to tell her what to do or enforce their vision (hence her constant hostility with Sakaki). Ayamine has the basic egocentricism that's typical of characters -- if she doesn't like what's going on, she goes and does her own thing and damn whatever the consequences are for other people. She never explains herself, or tries to really reach mutual understanding and often either lets down anyone unfortunate enough to have to rely on her. Can she bring it back and be a decent person to those around her? Sometimes, but she retains a core nature. In Unlimited and Alternative she does temper it somewhat with a sense of overall responsibility (and "no retreat" ethos) that allows her to exist within the military structure, but she still exhibits the same basic loner nature, independent to a fault.

Miki Tamase
Tama is a Peacekeeper first and foremost. I feel like she could have a significant secondary coloration as she does exist in large part in the overlap. After all, she doesn't keep the peace because of rules like Sakaki, but because she doesn't like her friends fighting each other, while being a little odd and off-beat (even by Muv Luv standards) herself. I think one important element that gives more of a clue to her color is her anxiety: Tama is afraid of failure and trips herself up, and it's implied that part of her coping mechanism is to allow herself to not live up to her full potential rather than trying her all. In general, the vibe is that Tama is much more comfortable being part of the group than she is standing as her own person, and that is much more than it is .

Mikoto Yoroi
Mikoto is absolutely -- the survival expert who doesn't do people or social situations well, who can be called "feral" without too much of a blink, and who all the same and despite not really listening to what others have to say still does try to take good care of other people. Mikoto shows off 's nurturing and 's self-sufficient elements. I was actually worried when I first started writing this up that I wasn't going to hit on a character, but not for long because Mikoto is both a main character and incredibly obvious as a character besides.

Marimo Jinguji
Marimo is honestly a candidate for both of her allied colors as well -- she is more personally caring and careful than most characters, who would be stricter and more concerned with the group outcome rather than the outcome of each of her students, which is kind of a -including outlook. On the other side, the side, Marimo is very dedicated to educating people as best she can. You see this more in some of the BETAverse side materials, but she very much does value knowledge highly. More than anything, though, Marimo is an authority figure. True, in Extra she's kind of a limp noodle that makes her come off as less , but in Unlimited and Alternative where she's a sergeant instead of a civilian professor we see how and why she tries to properly serve not just each of her cadets but the squad as a whole and even the greater needs of the military as a system. She does want everyone she teaches to survive for as long as they can but she has this big-picture view as well, of creating a better world through the necessity of war, and preparing youngsters for a brutal environment. She's mildly more than other colors, but it's there.

Yuuko Kouzuki
Yuuko was a shoe-in for thanks to being a super-genius mad scientist. That's always going to imply a heavy component. However, it's not just what she is, but who she is, that inclines me towards , and mono at that. So, let me do my work busting the idea of her other possible/probable colors. Her Extraverse self is a hot-rodding maniac who forces her co-worker to do embarrassing cosplay as penalties for absurd competitions. So , right? With respect, no. She does seem to legitimately like fast cars and dangerous driving, but that's a quirk. Characters of any color can have quirks. What's true about her is that she aggressively bills herself as a genius driven by curiosity, and that seems to be largely honest. She doesn't engage with people on a normal level, doesn't have friends (barring Marimo, who she doesn't seem to treat as much as a friend until we see how much Marimo means to her in more wrought scenarios). She picks apart the world, seeing it as rational and transactional, which is a fundamentally outlook. Everything is a rational puzzle. In Alternative, we see that she may even see herself as a more figure, because she does a lot of really terrible things in order to forward her goals. She trades lives under her care for political capital and seems rather glib about backstabbing machinations. The thing is, we see that's an act. Alternative Yuuko tells herself she's evil, that she's "Sold her soul to the devil" as she says at one point, to cover for the fact that when the chips are down all the sacrifices she's had to make do hurt her, and that she does care about other people even as she, where necessary, throws them away for the sake of the mission. She plays it off as nothing when she does it, but she goes the extra mile for individuals in the way a character wouldn't. And "Everything for the mission" is more (As Yuuko does it, methodical and calculating) or even (in abstract) than it is . is "everything for myself". If BETAverse Yuuko really had a significant component, then at the end of Unlimited she would have been eagerly securing her place on the Alternative V migrant fleet, NOT drinking herself into a stupor and crying her eyes out at having been unable to prevent a billion people from becoming sacrifices for a hundred thousand chosen that would almost certainly have included her from the get-go. At the end, she's and nothing but.

Kasumi Yashiro
It should be no surprise that the weird girl with the flat affect is , the color of strange and unemotional people. It gets stronger when you get into Alternative material and find out that she's a telepath (so .) who has little in the way of thoughts and feelings of her own and has thus incorporated thoughts and memories she's read from other minds into her own. If Kasumi was a Magic card, she'd probably be some sort of legendary Clone variant (maybe a 1/1 that copies abilities?), which was always going to be a pure, dyed-in-the-wool sort of entity. One interesting element of her color identity is that her primary "personality donor" isn't . Kasumi adopts the behaviors, actually, of a character, but carries them out in a way. She does the same things, but does them with a quiet, mechanical regularity so that even if she is feeling something, she's not showing it the way the original would show it.

Mana Tsukiyomi
Tsukiyomi is a Devoted Retainer, an individual who does her best to carry out the will of another. She can be a little batty in Extra (but then, everyone can) while her BETAverse self, being a soldier of the imperial guard rather than a ninja maid, is a little more generally serious. There is a warmth to her, where she genuinely cares for her charge, Meiya, more than just absolute and robotic loyalty. However, Tsukiyomi doesn't shrug the rules lightly for that affection; across all the endings of all three games she only does it twice, once to follow the spirit of her service rather than the letter of her orders in Meiya's Extra ending, and once to bypass default rules of conduct in order to not only help Meiya but give an effort that the survival of the Empire and humanity alike will be riding on its best possible chance of success at the end of Alternative. Suffice to say, she's not ignoring the rules to satisfy her feelings freely.

Naoya Sagiri
Sagiri is, in whatever world, a character who seems to aggressively hate considering the broader consequences of his actions when they get in the way of what he wants or (in an emotional sense) believes in -- whether that's in Extra being 100% serious about divorcing his wife and in the process completely ruining his whole career if the girl he liked before is even remotely willing to take him back or in Alternative starting a bloody revolution against a 'corrupt' government on behalf of a people and shogun who never asked for this violence, playing directly into the hands of his most hated enemies with basically any realistic outcome. Sagiri is very convicted, but his zeal isn't the variety, though he probably sees himself as such in Alternative (no illusions in Extra), it's purely based on putting his personal views above reason. You could make a better case for , in the raw self-centered arrogance of what he does, than you could for , and while there is a degree that his goals are held up as having been noble in principle even if absolutely moronic in practice, he is also very rightly called to task in Alternative about the way he went about expressing those theoretically noble principles. Again, in Extra he has less self-deception and, oddly enough, a greater actual respect for the people he claims to respect and want to act on behalf of.

As a complete aside, I've often felt that and could be fairly trivially reversed on the color wheel, since and have a deep and effective overlap in zeal and militarism while and harmonize well mechanically and flavorfully with life and death as a cycle rather than poles. Being seen with different allies and enemies, would be more about its savagery (removed from 's community) while would be less about the individual (removed from 's selfishness).

Yuuhi Koubuin
While Yuuhi doesn't get a ton of screen time in Alternative (which is the only one of the three games where she appears), she makes a ton of use of it to be, essentially, the voice for the best elements of . Yuuhi is firm and honorable, but also merciful and understanding. She is selfless, both in a material sense (being willing to endure danger or harm for greater purpose) and in a spiritual sense (being willing to take responsibility for what follows from her actions that must be taken, advocating a willingness to get blood on one's own hands rather than remaining useless in apparent purity), but she's also authoritative, forceful, and certain. Yuuhi is a character for whom the weight and obligation of rank means much more than does any privilege, a leader who exists, in essence, for the sake of those she leads.

Michiru Isumi
Michiru was a difficult read between and . On the side, she's a leader-type and who doesn't hesitate to sacrifice herself for the good of the mission. On the side, we have her insight and, to my reading, clinical approach to the challenges of her existence. In my opinion, the latter wins: Anyone can be thrust into a position of authority, and isn't . Michiru is an interesting case of social intelligence -- she shows her ability in how she tells each of her squadmates exactly what they need to hear to grow forward and become better people, and I think she's able to do it because she's observant and insightful rather than emotionally "in tune", considering that she, despite being the older and wiser of the two, needs and dearly wants advice from Shirogane on interpersonal matters. As a matter of solidifying my stance, I'm actually going to draw on some sidestory content: we see a good deal more of Michiru in "Confessions", it being centered around her backstory and all, and it's clear there that her natural state is one more of an aloof loner who leads through exemplary skill, sharp wit, and careful consideration, not a -aligned team player. I think I'd still call her without Confessions, but it essentially verifies my analysis.

Ms. Kyouzuka
Kyouzuka is an interesting case for color. You always have to ask, with nurturing characters, whether they're more or more , as the behavior exists very much in the overlap.. Kyouzuka, at first look, makes a decent case for since she plays it kind of fast and loose with regulations (though, her kitchen being what it is, she's kind of got the authority to do so) and gives personal touches to the people she knows. On the other hand, there's a very string and voluntary note of duty in Kyouzuka's presence. She may just be, essentially, the lunch lady for Yokohama Base, but she is one of the few people who actively chose to be there. She's not even actually a soldier, she's just a cook who lived in the area before it was devastated, and came right back to cook for the base as soon as what used to be her town was reclaimed. In the BETAverse where practically everything is about the continued fight against an existential threat, Kyouzuka willingly took on her role, to support the great effort however she could and to care for the kids who would have to fight and provide remembrance for those who died. When I think about cards in canon M:tG that have flavors I'd associate with things Ms. Kyouzuka does, some of them are (particularly anything that gets a leg up from food tokens and still fits) but more of them are . If we were actually doing some YMTC, she'd be a shoe-in for multicolor, but if I have to pick one? it is. And, thinking about that brings me back to the idea that the themes of the story skew the color of the characters. doesn't have much of a place in Muv Luv as a whole. It's not about things. , , and are all strongly represented in the content of the story, its themes and conflicts, so in the case of characters like Kyouzuka, who are split between one of those colors and one that's not, the color that's core to the story themes is probably going to be the more aggressively expressed and therefore the one that's predominate when having to pick just one.

Takeru Shirogane
Now we come to the man himself, Takeru... the other character I alluded to in Meiya's write-up who has an interesting position as a character. Takeru is fundamentally a character to start out. He's clearly in Extra, where doing things his own brash and impulsive way is kind of his thing, but something interesting happens when he enters Unlimited and especially Alternative: he wants to become , or at least a balanced and functional like Meiya. Takeru comes to see his elements as shortcomings or limitations. He starts to dislike that he gets emotional about things, and that he has serious trouble doing what's correct when it's not necessarily what's right. He comes to see his insubordinate, individualistic nature as childish. He sees himself as lacking in conviction and resolve, and even when he gets looks "under the hood" of characters like Michiru to find that it's not all about the childish and surface side of either (since they have personal emotional motivations that can be even stronger reasons to fight than the abstract propaganda-poster-like devotion to cause and country) he resents his own nature and his more anti actions. Towards the latter parts of Alternative, even though his only romantic interest is in Sumika, Takeru comes to see Meiya as his guiding light, the person who he can strive to emulate and hold up as a model, and it's clear that he's seeing her more virtues like purpose and conviction when he looks for that light to push him onward. All the same, while he'd be a shoe-in for Multicolor by the end of Alternative and possibly even by the end of Unlimited, I don't think he ever really turns around and makes his primary color. He's still at heart. He's still motivated largely by love. He still does things the way they work even if that's not the way in the rulebook. He still has trouble following through on that whole 'needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' thing that's so core both to and to life in the BETAverse. But he's trying. To an extent, you could say that Muv Luv Unlimited and Alternative are, together, the story of a character being thrust into a environment where they technically and philosophically don't fit in, and learning to adapt to his circumstances and adopt new traits despite the friction.