Bakuon!!/Characters

Sakura Hane

The main character of Bakuon!!, Hane is an apparently ordinary high school girl, but becomes enamored of motorcycles when she spies Onsa riding her cycle to school. She immediately seeks out and joins the biking club at her school, then throws her heart into getting both a license and a motorcycle. Along the way she ends up making new friends and going on previously unexpected adventures. Including receiving the Holy Grail from Jesus on the road to Aomori.

For all that she's sixteen, Hane is a complete innocent, with even the broadest and most obvious dirty jokes and sexual references passing entirely over her head.

Tropes exhibited by Hane include:

The Chosen One: Suggested by events in Episode 4.
The Cutie
Expressive Hair: It's not frequent but it occasionally happens that Hane's "idiot curl" changes to reflect her thoughts.
Genki Girl: Hane definitely has aspects of this in her personality.
Hair Decorations: Hane has pink wing decs over her ears.
Idiot Hair: Although she's anything but an idiot.
Innocent Fanservice Girl: Not as a matter of course, but when she washes her bike... whew.
Ordinary High School Student
Parental Abandonment: For some reason, Hane's parents are in the United States, and apparently have been for quite a while and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, leaving Hane and her younger sister Yume to live alone.
Santa Claus: Perhaps as an indication of just how innocent she is, Hane admits to her friends in episode 8 that she believed in Santa until her third year in middle school -- equivalent to 9th grade in the US. She would have kept on believing had her younger sister Yume not broken the bad news to her that year.
Weirdness Magnet: So far almost all the Magic Realism elements of the show seem to happen to or around her. They aren't her imagination, though, as other people encounter them as well.

Amano Onsa

The closest this series gets to a nasty, badass biker. Like most of the other girls, Onsa is sixteen, and she thinks she's a lot tougher and meaner than she really is. In fact, she's almost as innocent as Hane, but she grew up around motorcycles and has a certain amount of biker in her blood as a result, making her a bit on the rough and crude side. It makes for an odd combination. She's an enthusiastic, if not always terribly eloquent, advocate of motorcycles and biking in general; it's her encouragement (as casual as it was) that pushed Hane over the edge from "curious about bikes" into "must have, must ride".

Her family owns a motorcycle shop, but it specializes in junker bikes with their odometers turned back, and isn't an authorized dealership for any manufacturer as a result. She seems permanently poised between accepting and embarrassed by this.

Tropes exhibited by Onsa include:

Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Onsa reacts this way when Hane's choice of motorcycle shop turns out to be the Amano family store when it comes time for her to buy her bike.
Badass Biker: Onsa clearly thinks she's one.
Hair Decorations: Onsa ties up her shock of curly hair with a white bandanna.
Malaproper/Little-Known Facts: Onsa seems to hover between these two tropes, always willing to make a confident-sounding guess when she reaches the boundaries of her ignorance or innocence. Unlike many examples of the latter trope, though, she occasionally makes it clear when she's not sure but trying to figure things out (like guessing that "proletariat" has some something to do with art because it has a syllable that sounds like "art" in it). Other times, though, she's just confidently wrong.
Vitriolic Best Buds: Seems to be developing into this with Rin.
Wrench Wench: It's her family business.

Suzunoki Rin

Blonde, busty and a complete Suzuki snob -- this is Rin. Like Onsa, she grew up around motorcycles -- in her case her father's Suzuki Katana.

And all the accidents he got into while riding it.

Despite a history that seems just a little worse with every Flash Back we see, Rin is an almost obsessively dedicated motorcyclist, but has clearly lost all respect for her father, from whom she gained her love of biking. She doesn't have much respect for anyone else, either, taking several episodes just to officially join the biking club despite hanging with its members and even going on a trip with them; she sometimes seems to want to be both a solitary biker making her own way through the world and The Leader of the Pack. That she's not the Leader seems to grate on her -- as does the fact that nobody respects how obviously superior Suzuki motorcycles are compared to anything else on the market.

Tropes exhibited by Rin include:

Embarrassing Tattoo: Thanks to yet another brilliant move by her father when she was much younger, Rin has the Suzuki "S" emblem literally branded onto her butt. But she didn't know it until she was sixteen and the rest of the Bike Club noticed it at the hot springs in episode 4.
Gainaxing: Rin can't move without gainaxing.
Girlish Pigtails
Hair Decorations: She has bells and bows tying off her ponytails.
Tsundere
Vitriolic Best Buds: Seems to be developing into this with Onsa.

Minowa Hijiri

Hijiri is the sweetest girl in the show, and even more innocent in her own way than Hane. Heiress to the Minowa Group -- a powerful conglomerate of unspecified (but apparently large) size and power -- she appears to have been a Lonely Rich Kid until she discovered the biking club. She's not old enough to get a license yet, but she gets around that by having her butler, Hayakawa, drive the motorcycle while she sits in its sidecar.

Hijiri's major quirk is that she is a very proper and polite young lady who wants to be a delinquent, and thinks that by joining the biking club (and beating everyone at a game of "chicken") that she is finally a "bad girl". She takes such an innocent delight in thinking that she's now a delinquent that no one else in the club seems inclined to disabuse her of the notion. Despite this, she does seem to be a bit of an (unintentional) snob, sometimes almost reflexively looking down on the other club members.

Tropes exhibited by Hijiri include:

Beware the Nice Ones: Hijiri's terribly sweet and always smiling -- but if she gets too frustrated or upset, she can get unexpectedly violent.
The Cutie: Though not quite to the extent that Hane is.
The Ditz: Hijiri isn't exactly stupid, but she does seem woefully ignorant of real life at times.
Hair Decorations: She wears a single slender bow above her forehead.
Hime Cut
Lonely Rich Kid: Hijiri seems very much this, somehow only finding friends to bond with when she joins the Biking club.
Meganekko
Ojou
Scary Shiny Glasses: The first time she gets pushed over the edge of frustration and anger in episode 8.
Screw the Rules, I Have Money: Hijiri does this on occasion, with a surprising matter-of-factness and lack of arrogance or pretense about it. She even sees it as a kind of imperative, or even a virtue.

Hijiri: All problems that can be solved with money shall be solved with money. That is the Minowa family motto.

Spoiled Sweet: Oddly, though, she's still a bit of a snob (calling the other girls in the club "proletarians", for instance), although such a pleasant, endearing one that you almost can't fault her for it.

Kawasaki Raimu

A faceless, voiceless figure of mystery, Raimu was the only member of the biking club until Onsa and Hane together went looking for it. They and the other girls all assume Raimu is an upperclassman, but the truth is she's a bike racer who's at least in her thirties (and maybe older), and has been asked by the principal of the school to watch over the biking club. She never speaks, and she never takes off her helmet, and her history is Shrouded in Myth. Every few episodes we find someone older who calls her "sempai" and knows of her from past association, and who reveal more about her almost legendary past. Oddly, though, she never seems out of place or uncomfortable spending all her time with schoolgirls who are so much younger than she is.

Tropes exhibited by Raimu include:

The Faceless
Hair Decorations: Subverted by Raimu's big red bow -- which is affixed to the outside of her helmet. (Although her pigtails have little red bows at their ends, too.)
Meaningful Name: In episode 7 the tote board for the bike race reveals that the spelling of her name in roman letters is actually "Lime" -- the color of her motorcycle.
- Her last name is unknown -- "Kawasaki" is a pseudonym given to her by the principal for her bogus student ID, inspired by her Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle.
Older Than They Look: Raimu is actually in her middle to late thirties, if not older (at least two forty-something pro racers refer to her as "sempai") but is masquerading as a schoolgirl to watch over the bike club as a favor to the school's principal. It helps that she seems to naturally have very school-girlish body language.
Shout-Out: Raimu is a very obvious shout-out to the Stig.
Shrouded in Myth: The more we learn about Raimu, the more she seems to be this.
Talking with Signs: When simple nods and gestures are insufficient to communicate her message, Raimu will resort to notes jotted down on paper.
The Voiceless: She's not mute, even though she never speaks on screen and resorts to written notes when she has to -- there's at least one moment where she steps away from the action to take a cell phone call.

Hayakawa

Hijiri's butler and driver. Little is known about him, although the picture that is slowly forming seems to depict a Retired Badass. What really was it that he did in Siberia?

Tropes exhibited by Hayakawa include:

Cool Old Guy
Covered with Scars: As we see in episode 4 at the hot springs.