Kotori Minami

Kotori Minami is one of the nine main characters in Love Live!. She is a second year in Otonokizaka High School. She is also known as "Legendary Maid Minalinsky" while working in Akihabara. Her image color is gray, though she is also represented with green or white. She is a member of Printemps, a sub-unit under µ's. Her solo album is called Kotori, Lovin' You.

Background
Since she was young, Kotori has been friends with Honoka Kosaka and Umi Sonoda. Her mother is the chairwoman of the school board.

Personality
Kotori is known for having her head in the clouds. Despite this, she is μ's designer along with Nico Yazawa. Kotori has a very huge aptitude for fashion and is very good at drawing costumes for the group. Kotori is shown to be very kind and supportive to her friends and genuinely cares about them, especially their feelings. However, this can go too far as Kotori usually backs Honoka up when she (Honoka) is scolded by Umi.

Kotori is also shown as the most indecisive person among all nine members and tends to have Umi Sonoda and Honoka Kosaka, her childhood friends, make decisions for her. She also has a hard time expressing her feelings, since she always takes other people's feelings into consideration. Kotori is a kind person, but she can also be gullible, as shown in Season 1 Episode 10, wherein Nico claimed that she has a personal chef like Maki Nishikino, and Kotori fell for Nico's lie unknowingly.

In Kotori's Holiday (July 2012), it is revealed that Kotori is the type of person who can't relax unless all the work is done as soon as possible.

Clubs and Hobbies
She is μ's' wardrobe supervisor and their choreographer before Eli Ayase takes over the role. It is discovered in Season 1 Episode 9 that Kotori worked in a maid café in Akihabara and is a famous maid named "Minalinsky". She was known as a "Legendary Maid" in Akihabara due to her kindness, cuteness, and soft voice. She also likes making candy. Her special skill is her flexibility; her legs can reach her shoulders. She later becomes part of the student council and assist Honoka and Umi in doing their student-council duties.

Trivia

 * Kotori fulfills the pure attribute of the µ's second years.
 * She owns a yellow pillow which she treasures enough to go all the way back home to retrieve it, as seen in the fifth PV, and is never seen sleeping without it. She is also seen with her yellow pillow in her Yume no Tobira Rare card in Love Live! School idol festival.
 * Kotori is known for a photo-bomb at one of the bottom corners of the screens, sometimes referred to by fans as a "Koto-bomb".
 * This is a recurring joke from as early as the first PV, to the first season's opening theme, to the "Happy maker!" animated sequence, and eventually "Bokutachi wa Hitotsu no Hikari".
 * Another recurring theme is the bird emoticon: (・８・), which is also used by her voice actress Uchida Aya in blog posts and Twitter whenever she mentions Kotori.
 * It even makes its appearance in the anime, such as within S1 Episode 9.
 * The various media in the project disagree on the relationships between the second-years.
 * In the manga which was published earlier, Honoka is closer to Umi as the two of them are childhood friends and not Kotori.
 * In the anime and other newer media, the three of them are all childhood friends.
 * There has also been a Q&A answered in a magazine which stated that Honoka and Kotori are childhood friends because their mothers were also childhood friends, and they've always been living on the same street.
 * As Tsubasa refers to her as the "ex-Akiba Charisma Maid" in S2 Episode 3, she has either stopped working as a maid or lost the title to someone else.
 * It is possible for the kanji of her last name to reference the Minami-za (南座), the last remaining Kabuki theater in Kyoto.
 * Kabuki itself is an expressive form of Japanese theater that includes—but is not limited to—dance, song, and an emphasis on elaborate costume. This may explain her heavy role as a seamstress of exaggerated and elaborate costumes and ties with the musical and dancing theme of the series.