Marika Kato

Marika Kato (加藤 茉莉香, Katō Marika), is both a fictional character and one of the main protagonists of the Bodacious Space Pirates series. She is a girl who is a member of her school's space yacht club and has a part time job as a waitress in a cafe. She learns one day about her recently deceased father, Gonzaemon Kato, who was a Space Pirate. As Gonzaemon's only descendant, she is chosen to become the new and current captain of the Bentenmaru. After joining her parents' former crew, she starts dividing her time between her studies, her part-time job and her duties aboard the Bentenmaru. It does not take long for her crewmates to confirm that Marika has what it takes to live up to her father's legacy.

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 * —Marika Kato.

Appearance & Biography

 * Voice Actor: Luci Christian (English), Mikako Komatsu (Japanese), Not Known/Not Known (Albanian), Not Known (Arabic), Not Known (Basque), Not Known (Brazilian), Not Known (Cantonese), Not Known (Catalan), Not Known (Chinese), Not Known (Dutch), Not Known (Finnish), Not Known (French), Not Known (Galician), Not Known (German), Not Known (Greek), Not Known (Hebrew), Not Known (Hungarian), Not Known (Indonesian), Not Known (Italian), Not Known (Korean), Not Known (Mandarin), Not Known (Norwegian), Not Known (Polish), Not Known (Portuguese), Not Known (Romanian), Not Known (Russian), Not Known (Serbian), Not Known (Spanish), Not Known (Swedish), Not Known (Tagalog), Not Known (Thai), Not Known (Valencian), Not Known (Brazilian Portuguese), Not Known (European Spanish), Not Known (European Portuguese), Not Known (Latin American Spanish), Not Known (Latin Spanish)

Light Novel
Marika has long pink/orange hair and light blue eyes. Two sections of hair come down either side of her face to chest level and spiral slightly towards the ends.

As captain of the Bentenmaru, she wears a black captain's coat with gold highlights, open at the lower and upper front, and the lower rear. The coat has white cuffs with gold highlights, shoulder guards, a plated section hanging around the left shoulder, and white frills along the open sections, the ends of the sleeves and the neck. An oversized belt at the waist holds her sword. She also wears a bicorne with the same colour scheme as the coat, with a pirate emblem in the middle of the front, white frills along the top and tuft coming out the middle-left side. She also wears a red checkered skirt and black boots.

Over the course of the novels, certain details of Marika's design have been changed along with the general art style (as seen on the covers), such as her facial design, her hair colour and the emblem on her hat, becoming a little more similar to her anime design.

Anime
Marika has light blue eyes and long orange hair that extends slightly above her waist. She usually wears two hairclips on a clump of hair beside her left eye.

At school, Marika wears the standard Hakuoh Academy uniform, consisting of a blazer with a white collared shirt underneath and a red ribbon situated at the front of her chest, and a thigh-length skirt. During work hours at the Lamp House and during Yacht Club activities, Marika wears a maid outfit and a blue Yacht Club hoodie respectively.

As captain of the Bentenmaru, Marika wears parts of her school attire (namely, the collared shirt, skirt, and footwear) underneath a black coat with gold highlights that is open at the lower front. The coat has white cuffs and frills at the ends of the sleeves and white skull emblems on the upper arms. Marika also wears a pale-yellow ribbon with a green gem-clip, and a brown waistcoat underneath. A black cape with a maroon tint inside is attached behind the coat via the shoulder guards. Her sword is attached to the left side of a red belt at her waist. She also wears a bicorne hat with the same colour scheme as the coat, the secondary Bentenmaru emblem in the centre, a red string at the front-left and a white tuft located at its middle-left side.

During the Hakuoh Pirates and Nebula Cup arcs, Marika's uniform sports a few changes, courtesy of her good friend Mami Endo. The usual ribbon on the neck is replaced by a large orange one. The cuffs at the ends of the sleeves become red with yellow frills, and the black/maroon cape is replaced by a white cape that splits into several feather-like ends (with red tips).

In Abyss of Hyperspace, during the search for Professor Mugen's legacy, Marika wears a red version of her captain's uniform with a black cape, a green strap going across her right shoulder and a brown belt.

Manga
Marika's character design in the web-manga contains elements from both her novel and anime designs. She has blue eyes and long pink-orange hair, with a section curling outwards and a section coming down to chest level on either side of her face. Her captain's uniform consists of a black coat with gold highlights and large gold buttons, white cuffs, frills on the sleeves, a neck-ribbon, and shoulder guards. She also wears a checkered orange-red skirt, boots, a bicorne with a tuft out the side and a pirate emblem on the front, and a red belt around her waist with a sword fastened to it.


 * Hair Color: Pink-Orange
 * Skin Color: Not Known
 * Eye Color: Light Blue
 * Age: Not Known
 * Birthday: Not Known
 * Height: Not Known
 * Weight: Not Known

Personality
Marika is cheerful, optimistic and charismatic. She can be naïve and a little clumsy at times, and can come across as a bit of an airhead, however behind this lies a cunning, intelligent and slightly devious persona. She is quite capable of taking into account every option open to her and whatever tools she has available, and utilizing them to great effect, in order to achieve her goals.

As a captain, Marika values the safety of her crew and ship above all else, however she is willing to take considerable risks if doing so would be beneficial to them in the long run. She is a hard worker and frequently pushes herself to exhaustion, but she does ask for help when it is necessary. Partly as a result of this, she often oversleeps and is quite difficult to wake up.

Friends/Allies

 * Hakuoh Academy Yacht Club
 * Mami Endo
 * Chiaki Kurihara
 * Gruier Serenity
 * Grunhilde Serenity
 * Bentenmaru's crew
 * Misa Grandwood
 * Kane McDougal
 * Hyakume
 * Coorie
 * Schnitzer
 * Luca
 * San-Daime
 * Kanata Mugen

Family

 * Ririka Kato (mother)
 * Gonzaemon Kato (father)
 * Bunzaemon Kato (great-grandfather)

Abilities and Powers
Marika has excellent leadership skills, capable of making quick decisions and sticking to them, and keeps herself relatively calm under pressure. Marika knows what tools she has available and what possible options are open to her, and from that she is able to make the best use of what she has to achieve the best result for herself and her crew. She is intelligent and tries to plan ahead, be it for an enemy's possible actions and a plan for a counterattack or what her ship will need in the near future. She is also capable of thinking outside the box and coming up with solutions that might not occur to other people. Dependable and hardworking, Marika will always see her tasks through to the end. Her cheerful attitude and charm also helps to bring people to her side.

Marika is a skilled pilot, impressing Kane during a dinghy simulation and dodging machine gunfire from the Bisque Company during the Nebula Cup. As of Abyss of Hyperspace, she is also a licensed shuttle pilot.

Marika is also trained in swordplay, handling firearms, hand-to-hand combat, spacewalking, electronic warfare, navigation and model-making. As the Bentenmaru's captain, she is familiar with her ship's systems and their operation, and as a member of the yacht club, she has experience in operating systems aboard the Odette II. She also experience with waitress work and making parfaits from her part-time job at Lamp House. After finding the Kato family's secret recipe, she was also able to cook her mother's pot-au-feu without trouble.

Past
Marika is the daughter of Ririka Kato (famous among pirates as "Blaster Ririka") and the late captain Gonzaemon Kato. Her home planet is the Sea of the Morning Star in the Tau Ceti system. She attends Hakuoh Academy's high school division, and is a part of the Snow Class.

Before becoming captain of the Bentenmaru, Marika had never considered becoming a pirate. However, for reasons unknown to her, she had always felt confined to the ground and deeply wished to traverse the vastness of space.

Notes & Trivia

 * Given that Marika's great-grandfather Bunzaemon Kato was the first to captain the Bentenmaru under the Letter of Marque and that the letter can only be inherited by direct descendants, it can be assumed, providing that there wasn't an interruption along the line, that Marika is the fourth captain to inherit the Bentenmaru's Letter of Marque.