Mato Kuroi

Mato is a black-haired school girl with blue eyes. She has short, spiky pig tails and wears a school uniform consisting of a white shirt, a yellow blazer with blue adornments, and blue pleated skirt, along with white socks and brown school shoes. She has a band-aid on the outer side of her right thigh.

An always cheerful, a bright, innocent, and naïve 15-year-old. However, even she doesn't realize that she has a “certain feeling” buried deep inside.

Mato is a kind, optimistic, and deeply caring person to a fault. If she has a problem with someone, but can remember the good in them, she believes they can always work it out by talking to each other. Saya Irino describes Mato as the kind of person who has never hated anyone or had anyone hate her. Mato herself dislikes the idea of getting upset over small things or hating other people, but the fault of this is that Mato doesn't want to be hurt or hated by anyone. Yuu Koutari believes that Mato doesn't have the capacity for hatred, jealousy, or self-consciousness because she cares more about other people than she does about herself, pushing her own feelings aside to focus on helping people. True to her kind nature, Mato believes what Black★Rock Shooter and the other selves go through on their human counterparts' behalves is wrong, though relents once she learns they fight because they love their human counterparts.

She has a tendency for philosophical musings, and often remarks on some quality that she sees in the world around her to no one in particular (for example, she remarks on the sky as "light blue" and a flower as "blooming"). She is also slightly perverted, remarking on the length of her schoolmate's skirt as "short".

Mato is very fond of the book The Tiny Bird & The Colors and reads it repeatedly, though she herself is unsure of why she is so drawn to the little bird in the story. Her fondness of the book was what led to her being interested in Yomi Takanashi after learning of her last name.

Black ★ Rock Shooter is the “other self” of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl named Mato Kuroi. In this universe, a person’s “other self” is like an alter ego that lives in a separate world, called Otherworld, and fights for you against other “other selves” that are in that same world (and that are also like alter egos of human beings living in real life).

An “other self” hosts the psychological suffering that belongs to the human it is attached to, that is, it exists because of some kind of psychological affliction that the human attached to it may have. The power of “other selves” comes from the intensity of the disorder or affliction. If they exist, if they act the way they do, it is because they protect a toxic defense mechanism used by the human whose soul is connected to these beings.

「An “other self” could very well be the personification of a mental disorder, defense mechanism and/or intense, ideological desire that the person on the other end may be suffering from. This comparison may be accurate in most cases.」

Curiously, all the “other selves” that live in the Otherworld are alter egos of the souls of people who are friends or similar acquaintances in the real world. For this reason, they fight each other because, if an “other self” dies, the psychological suffering of the person to whom it is linked will disappear; and for this reason Black ★ Rock Shooter or Burakku has a great determination to kill the rest of the “other selves” of that world, since these “other selves” belong to Mato Kuroi's friends, and she does not want her friends to suffer as much as they do in their daily lives. However, as long as Burakku continues to exist, Mato Kuroi will continue to suffer psychologically, to a greater or lesser extent... But it is something that Mato Kuroi, for the sake of her friends, is willing to put up with.

Yomi Takanashi, Yu Kotari, Izuriha Kagari