Hanazono Tae

Hanazono Tae is a third-year student at Hanasakigawa Girls' High School and the lead guitarist of Poppin'Party. The other members call her O-Tae.

She is a huge lover of music and used to work part-time at SPACE before it shut down after the final live, which Poppin'Party also played in.

Background
Tae lives with her parents and 20 rabbits. She has considerable skill with the guitar, since she started playing it when she was in elementary school.

One day, when Tae had to finish her home economics assignment with Kasumi after school, she started interacting with her and taught her how to play the basic guitar chords.

Tae at first doubted Kasumi's idea to audition at SPACE when she told her about it, because the band needed a considerable skill level to pass. But when Kasumi performed for the first time in front of their friends and family with Arisa, Rimi, and Tae herself, Tae realized how much fun she had performing with them, which led to her joining Kasumi's Poppin'Party as its fourth member. Adding to this, Tae was impressed by their own performance and believed in their potential.

Appearance
Tae has gentle green eyes and straight, waist-length, dark brown hair. She has choppy bangs with a section of hair that reaches her navel and covers her right ear.

Her casual attire is mature with feminine accents like sheer fabric and gems.

During winter Tae wears a pink fluffy sweater which shows her shoulders off and blue jeans. She also has a black choker around her neck. During summer, she wears a mint green T-shirt with flowers on top, high waist loose white pants with a belt, and a thin black necklace.

Personality
A relaxed individual who lives at her own pace, Tae sometimes surprises the people around her with her keen observations and understanding of music. She carries a sense of knowing in her discussions with others, while always keeping an optimistic outlook on a situation. However, she is also slightly airheaded like her mother, and tends to make or say weird remarks befitting to the situation at hand.

Tae loves both rabbits and hamburg steaks and is constantly thinking about them, sometimes to the point of daydreaming and losing focus during a conversation. She loves rabbits so much to the point where she feels bad or is unable to eat rabbit-shaped things or pastries, and she even started doing imitations of her rabbits during the New Year party's talent show. In addition to this, Tae has compared other people, such as Rimi and Arisa, to rabbits (Rimi because of her overall nature, and Arisa because her twin tails remind Tae of a rabbit's ears). She affectionately refers to one of her rabbits, Odd-Eye (nicknamed Occhan in Japanese and Oddie in the localized version), as her boyfriend.

Game Interactions
A list of characters Tae interacts with in the game (during Lives and in the dialogues at the end of every game).

Etymology
Hanazono (花園) means "flower garden". Hana (花) means "flower" and Zono (園) means "garden". It refers to the Shinto shrine located in Shinjuku, "Hanazono Jinja".

Tae (たえ) means "odd". Its Kanji is actually (妙) and can be referred to her abnormal personality.

Trivia

 * In the original storyline, her personality was more similar to Arisa's, and she was also a lot shyer. She also had reading manga and watching anime listed as her hobbies.
 * ESP Guitars has released a real-life version of Tae's guitar, Snapper, alongside Kasumi's guitar, Rimi's bass, and other Bandori merchandise.
 * The rabbits shown at Tae's house are based on her voice actress' own pet rabbits.
 * Aside from Odd-Eye, some of their names are Shiroppi, Purple-chan, Danjuro, and Doro-chan.
 * She has also named all of the rabbits in Hanasakigawa's middle school's pet room after her favorite guitarists, such as Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King.
 * Tae owns a lot of rabbit plushies.
 * She has the same height as Touko, and is also the tallest member of Poppin'Party.
 * Outside of her listed hobbies she also loves visiting both pet shops and music stores, as well as looking for and taking pictures of rabbit-shaped things.
 * She is childhood friends with Rei. Tae also attended the same music school with Rei and Arisa, and was part of the Guitarist Course.
 * This was initially seen as a retcon as Tae mentioned in BanG Dream! 1st Season (and its in-game adaptation, Poppin'Party Band Story 0) that Poppin'Party were her first friends. Later in the ending chapter of the Before the Start of a New Season event, she even goes as far as saying that "You all said that I was your friend. That... really shocked me. In a good way. Nobody had ever considered me a friend before that."
 * However, she later specified that while Rei is her childhood friend, she doesn't consider Rei her friend in the same way as she does with the four other members of Poppin'Party (whom she sees as her first real friends) because the two were apart for such a long time.
 * She sometimes mixes words like 'Rosepa' as a combination of Roselia and Poppin'Party.
 * She really likes a famous guitarist named Mortin, who was mentioned in the 2nd and 4th episodes of BanG Dream! 2nd Season.
 * Tae has the ability to convince people with "puppy eyes".
 * Since her second year in high school, she's worked part-time at multiple live houses and musical instrument stores.
 * After the event Do It Ourselves!!, Tae became interested in knitting and making handicrafts. In My Design, My Texture's event story, she reveals that she has started knitting outfits for her rabbits.
 * In the A Certain Scientific Railgun T collaboration, her character design was based on Saten Ruiko.