KotoriFanAwards2019

Happy birthday to the wondrous birdie, Kotori Minami! Kotori holds a very special place in my heart, since Love Live was my first idol anime, and she was the first ever idol girl I ever really loved. I connected with her a lot in season one of the anime; struggling to tell the people closest to you what's on your mind, thinking that it might hurt their feelings or that it might simply disrupt the happiness in their life right now. I struggled with that a lot in middle school and high school, and having friends both irl and url become very negative towards me or ignore me completely for speaking a bit of my mind certainly made it worse. I sympathized with Kotori's doubts and worry over telling anyone about her getting accepted to a fashion boarding school, because I had dealt with the struggles before and was just starting to cope with a huge fallout of "friends" and fall into a sort of anxious chasm during the winter of 2014. And that's when I first found Love Live. And that's where I first found Kotori, going through the internal struggle I was going through with the friends I had left and the friends I started to make.

But then that helped me fall in love with her too, and with Love Live and idol animes in general. Because I got to see a happy ending of one of those scenarios; after telling what you wanted to say, and that even though there was hurt in the end friends stayed friends and everything was understood and okay. With Honoka rushing towards her to apologize I cried; when they both got back to the school and did the 9 member Start Dash! I sang along so loud that my mom asked what was up from another room. I love the resolution because I saw a part of myself in the journey, and from then on I wished to have a happier ending like that from any conversation.

I've started to get there. I've found a group of online friends that really support me and care for me as much as I care for them, and I have a couple of best friends that I keep really close to my heart and are so special to me. And throughout all my struggles and growth since first finding Love Live, Kotori's always been one of the characters I look at and smile at most, because of the possibility she and her show showed me; something that was just fiction slowly turning into reality, and making my heart soar.

My art pen nib is kind of broken, so I decide to do a sketch-type drawing for her for her birthday today, but it's not nearly enough to describe how much I appreciate and love her for helping me start to fly away from the dark place in my life.