Kurumi Nanase

About

Kurumi Nanase (Japanese: 七瀬くるみ)^[1] is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company Joynet and illustrated by the company's designer Pom (ぽむ). She's well known as the main character from the 4koma manga Menhera Shoujo Kurumi-chan. (メンヘラ少女くるみちゃん。, Unstable Girl Kurumi-chan). Online, she is often referred to as Kurumi-chan. Due to her manga’s title, she has also been referred to as Menhera-chan, though this name is shared with another unrelated manga and its protagonist. Since the manga’s creation, Kurumi has gained popular usage as Discord emotes. She has also become notably used on 4chan’s /lgbt/ board to represent “boymoders” due to her wearing a large black hoodie.

Origin

According to news archives of Joynet, Kurumi Nanase first appeared on the company's product line as stickers for the instant messenger app LINE on December 27th, 2017.^[2] The company released the first English version of Kurumi's stickers on January 15th, 2018^[3], and then started her merchandising sales. The manga's serialization also started on Pom's official website on May 8th.^[4] In its first episode^[5], male protagonist Taichi Nanase remarks that countless guys would want to date his sister Kurmi Nanase, but it is because they only because they see a certain side of her. When Taichi arrives home, he finds his sister writing a note to her boyfriend saying she will kill herself because her boyfriend had not replied to her text for three minutes. Throughout the series, Kurmi frequently overreacts to situations involving her boyfriend, assuming he is cheating on her with no evidence and contemplating suicide over the stress this causes her.

This manga series ended with 158 episodes in December 2020. Pom occasionally reuploaded the manga on Pixiv.^[6] The creator also released the first 25 episodes on LINE Comics between September 2019 and February 2020.^[7]

Spread

Over the following years, Kurumi grew popular on Discord in emotes. Several GIFs of the character dancing and participating in other activities have grown widely popular on the service (examples shown below).

Trans and Boymoder Usage

Because of the character's large sweatshirt, she has been adopted by some online for use in memes about being transgender. It appears this started on 4chan among the "boymode" community, aka people who present as male regardless of gender (example posts shown below).

China

Kurumi has a decent online presence in Greater China and is called by the Chinese name "七濑胡桃" and nickname "menherachan," or "menhera酱," because the Chinese company Giant Interactive Group developed merchandising businesses of the character for several years until early 2023, according to Moegirlpedia.^[8] The company produced Nanase's activities as a Virtual YouTuber, called Virtual Uploader (虚拟UP主 or 虚拟Uper) on the Chinese web, on Weibo^[9] and video-sharing services^{[10][11][12][13]} between June 2018 and April 2022 while earning over 700,000 subscribers on Bilibili. On April 16th, 2021, the Chinese game publisher Tencent Games released the smartphone app game Kurumi Diary (胡桃日記)^[14] and its theme song "Kurumic ☆ Wonderland" (胡桃天國), sung by her in Japanese (shown below). This video game discontinued its service on February 15th, 2023.

Because of this situation, fan art for her on the illustrator community often has tags for Chinese speakers^[15], and there are some videos of Chinese users doing her cosplay and dancing with her song or singing covers. Weibo and the Chinese illustrators' community Bcy.net have dozens of fan art for her.^[16][17]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References