Yoshino Sōma

Yoshino stands tall, her chest-length brown hair sweeping into a broad fringe over one side of her forehead above pale violet eyes and slender brows accented with red lipstick. Her outfit is elaborate: a faded green dress with an upturned collar circled by a flat-ended red tie and edged in purple frills, its front split into two curving halves, worn over a short dark top that bares her midriff, blue-gray trousers, and plain brown shoes. Centuries earlier, while living among humans, she dressed simply in a pale pink gown with a fluffy white collar and a hood. Because Ran'Tao's soul served as the template for her creation, her face closely mirrors that woman's.

At first Yoshino comes across as cold and cynical, even preying on innocent humans, yet she soon reveals a firmer moral core than the rest of her kind. She clings to the single Bount law forbidding the consumption of living souls, understanding that breaking it would unbalance the worlds, and she sets herself against her former husband Jin Kariya once he does exactly that. Blunt to a fault, she thinks nothing of telling Uryū that his soul smells unappetizing, and she flatly refuses to take orders from anyone.

Beneath the sharp exterior lies a woman ground down by centuries of unwanted immortality. Unable to live among ordinary humans, who once branded her a witch, she settled into a lonely apartment where she could watch strangers pass below, and she quietly longs for death. She has reached the conclusion that only mortals, precisely because their time is short, can truly be happy or know lasting love. Her closeness to Uryū rekindles a faint hope she cannot fully deny, and her bond with her doll Goethe, born of her rare maternal spiritual power, runs so deep that the two are willing to die together. In the end she passes away peacefully in Uryū's arms, grateful for his kindness.

Yoshino had come into existence many centuries earlier, her face shaped after Ran'Tao's when a Jōkaishō meltdown disturbed the souls moving through rebirth. She was raised in a European city, making friends and living peacefully until she noticed that she never aged while everyone around her did. Left behind by time and hunted as a witch, she withdrew to an abandoned church, ready to take her own life with a piece of broken glass. Kariya interrupted her there, revealing that he too was an immortal Bount and asking her to live alongside him.

The two married, and she knew happiness for a while, until she watched him devour a living human's soul and grasped that his hunger for revenge against Soul Society would doom the Bount as surely as the Shinigami. From that moment she worked to undo his plans, refusing to follow him like the others did and steadily building up her own strength so she could one day face him.