Roma Hoito

Roma looks slight and girlish, an impression she plays up with a scatterbrained manner. She usually pins her red hair into a spiky bun, a few strands left loose around her face. Her clothing shifts with her role: Anteiku's plain uniform when posing as staff, gaudy circus wear when acting as a Clown. Her mask conceals the top of her face and reads like a cartoon rabbit or rodent, round-nosed with jutting front teeth, two big drawn eyes, and a star ringing the left one.

At Anteiku she plays the fumbling airhead, forever dropping cups and drawing Nishiki's scolding, but that is only one of many masks. In her true colors she is cruel and bored, cheerfully auctioning off captives and toying with investigators by feigning helplessness before running them through. Slipping between ditzy, pitiful, and vicious comes to her with unsettling ease. Above all she is addicted to chaos, having built the Clowns simply to relieve her own tedium, and she carries a deep resentment of humans, envious of the ordinary happiness she feels was never hers.

Roma cannot recall her parents and grew up entirely alone, scraping by on rotting meat until, at seven, she killed and ate her first human. The years seem to blur together as she slaughters humans and ghouls alike for turf or amusement, building a fearsome reputation and shedding countless discarded names along the way. Convinced that people lead hollow lives yet somehow enjoy them, she comes to view society as a circus and founds the Clowns to keep herself entertained. The CCG dubs her the Dodgy Mother, an SSS threat who once battled Tsuneyoshi Washuu and lost.

Held in Cochlea under the lesser alias Gypsy, her true leadership of the Clowns goes unnoticed, so her execution is never carried out. She treats the cell as a fresh stage and savors Rio's nightly torment through the walls. After slipping out and getting a new haircut from Uta, she learns of a one-eyed ghoul at Anteiku and installs herself there as a part-timer, eager to meet Kaneki.

At the auction she performs alongside Ganbo and Uta, jeering at the human merchandise, and flees the instant Juuzou Suzuya strikes. Cornered by an investigator squad, she fakes a mortal wound, lures Shunichi Shibashi close, and devours him before ducking back behind Uta and escaping the raid.

On Rushima she runs Nishiki Nishio through and mocks him, only to be skewered and captured by Kurona Yasuhisa after her ally Shikorae abandons her. Her end comes during Furuta's purge of dissenting investigators, when she and Shikorae ambush Kuki Urie and Iwao Kuroiwa. She unfurls her Dodgy Mother kakuja and even swallows Urie whole, but he tears free, shatters the pair with a newly formed kagune shield, and beheads her, mutilating the severed head until she is finally, permanently dead.

Her bikaku produces up to eight slim tentacles that she can thread underground to strike from odd angles, or a single heavy tail, and she can detach a squirming piece of it as a tracker. Cannibalism in her youth twisted her into a kakuja whose full form is a hulking, many-limbed beast with a lamprey-like maw, her real body lodged in its brow. Ferocious regeneration and an almost total indifference to pain let her keep fighting, and talking, even after grievous wounds. Ages old yet frozen with a teenager's looks, she is a genuine monster beneath the giggling exterior.