Kurisu Makise

Kurisu Makise (牧瀬 紅莉栖) is the daughter of Shouichi Makise, a genius girl who graduated from university at the age of seventeen, a neuroscientist at the Brain Science Institute at Viktor Chondria University, and also a member of the Future Gadget Lab.

Appearance
Kurisu is a slender young woman with waist-length, chestnut hair, and dull violet eyes. Her hair, which she prefers to let loose, ranges in ginger shades all the way from mahogany to auburn. Her hair color differs considerably in the anime (red) from the original VN (chestnut), though this is only in artistic appearance. The "Kuri" part of her name means chestnut, and her hair color is meant to resemble the color of a chestnut.

After attending Ayamein for two weeks she modeled her outfit after their uniform, with her outfit being composed of a white long-sleeved blue-rimmed dress shirt with a red necktie. Her shirt is tucked into a pair of black shorts on top of black tights, held up by a white belt with a gold buckle. Her red tie hangs loosely around her collar, and she wears a loose khaki jacket that covers her upper thighs, and has black and white straps at the end of both sleeves and the rim which are used to keep the entire jacket on her arms. She also wears a pair of black boots which are partially unzipped and folded down.

Once "recruited" into the Future Gadget Laboratory, Rintaro Okabe gave her Itaru Hashida's white lab coat that he never uses and is now often seen wearing one while in-lab. Like Okabe, Kurisu is interested in lab coats.

Personality
Kurisu is generally a sensible, serious mature young woman, usually calm and collected even when someone is acting tense in front of her. However, she can also show a much more timid side at times. She is shown frequently to hate being nicknamed, as she dislikes all of the names that Okabe gives her, with 'The Zombie' bugging her most of all. Ironically, on the rare occasions that Okabe uses her real name, she takes it as a sign that something is seriously wrong. Kurisu is also practical and a realist, almost to a fault; initially, she believes firmly that time machines are fiction and refuses to believe the Phonewave is one even after seeing it in action, claiming that Okabe had simply seen what he wanted to see. It takes the group's looking up SERN's research about time travel to finally convince Kurisu of the truth. However, in Steins;Gate 0, she doesn't deny the possibility of time machines and would build one herself if she had the materials.

Mature as she is, Kurisu is very sarcastic, and often expresses this through her interactions with Okabe and Daru, the former due to his eccentricities and frequent insensitivity and the latter due to his perverted remarks. Apart from these two, she is quite friendly with anyone as long they don't do inappropriate actions and constantly engage in petty arguments, particularly Mayuri, whom she instantly takes a liking to in contrast to the male members of the lab. In general, how Kurisu treats others depends largely on how they treat her; she sometimes says disrespectful things to respectful people, but she is usually kind. She has been described as a tsundere by Okabe and Daru time and time again, though she is shown to be annoyed whenever someone calls her that, usually by doing something that ironically ends up proving their point.

Kurisu says that she is not good at sports, but she loves swimming. More than liking the pool itself, she likes the feeling of floating in water. Kurisu describes it like being released from gravity, like a load had been taken off your muscles. Swimming puts Kurisu in a good mood, to the point that when Okabe calls her "Assistant", she does not retort towards the name. Kurisu can swim very well, despite Okabe's beliefs in that everyone was a "hikikomori".

Though she is hesitant to admit it, she is a frequent user of the text board @channel, and dons the net handle "KuriGohan and Kamehameha". Okabe likes to trick her into admitting this habit, much to her chagrin. When posting on @channel her personality is noticeably different, as she often uses netspeak or emoticons to communicate and her posts are generally much less mature and more aggressive than her usual dialogue.

Her accomplishments in spite of her youth have exposed Kurisu to the jealousy of those who consider themselves her superiors. This includes her own father, who despises her for overshadowing him and causing his fall into obscurity. This is the reason behind her acerbic attitude, which she adopted as a defense mechanism to hide her vulnerabilities. At heart, Kurisu is a very curious girl who loves science and can not resist an interesting experiment. She occasionally makes statements—for example, that data collection should be considered before a subject's privacy—that have led Okabe to dub her a fellow mad scientist, much to her annoyance.

Although Kurisu is hesitant to confess her feelings for Okabe, she does, in fact, love him. This has been shown many times throughout the series and most noticeably when she was drunk.

Background
Kurisu grew up with her father, Shouichi Makise, and mother, with her father being a physicists dedicated to studying time-travel. From a young age, she took an interest in her father's work and the two grew very close, with him gifting her a monogrammed spoon on her 10th birthday with the intention of gifting her matching fork the following year. However, this never came to be as by her 11th birthday, her genius ability started to shine through, leading her to disprove one of her father's theories for the first time. This resulted in him snapping at her and never gifting her the fork. As she continued to disprove his theories, Shouichi's resentment against his daughter eventually grew into pure hatred. This resulted in him taking out his frustration on his wife, leading to a divorce. by the start of the story, Kurisu had not spoken to her father in 7 years.

As a genius, Kurisu excelled in school. At her mother's suggestion, the two of them moved to the USA where Kurisu graduated college at age 14 with a specialty in Neuroscience. She was quickly hired as a researcher at Viktor Chondria University, where she became acquainted with Alexis Leskinen and Maho Hiyajo, with the latter becoming her best friend after bonding over their mutual affection for Mozart. They often intensively discussed about theories and slowly developed a bond where Kurisu would encourage Maho whenever the opportunity arose and always secretly looked up to her as her senior. A few years later she, Maho and Leskinen began working on the Amadeus system, an AI based on Kurisu's thesis to convert human memory into digital data. She was one of its first test subjects and reuploaded her memories from time to time. Sometime, she started posting on @channel with the name "KuriGohan and Kamehameha" which she regularly used due to missing Japan.

She was briefly part of an exchange program where she spent two weeks attending the all girls high school Ayamein (Ayamein Women's Academy) in Japan. She grew fond of the uniform and based her casual clothing off of it.

Several months before the start of the story, she is contacted by her father who, wanting to show off his newest theory, invited her to a press conference he was speaking at in Akihabara. Seeing this as an opportunity to reconnect with her father, Kurisu wrote a time-travel thesis that she intended to co-publish with him.

Quotes

 * “I don't want to deny who I've been. Because even my failures are a part of who I am today” — To Rintaro Okabe.
 * “Something must be wrong for you to use my actual name.” — To Okabe.
 * “I am a scientist, I have to act on my own theory. I can't let my emotions get in the way. But it's impossible to forget everything... because I've known you for longer than we've lived. This is reality. This is the world. This is...”
 * “People's feelings are memories that transcend time.”
 * “Say it right, Hououin Pervert-Kyouma!” — To Okabe.
 * “Who'll eat a pervert's banana anyway?” — To Okabe.
 * “It looks like you're both perverts.” — To Okabe & Itaru Hashida.
 * “There was a scientific rationale for that! Because... important memories, including, but not limited to, one's first kiss, are stored in the hippocampus, which makes them harder to forget.” — Kurisu after kissing Okabe.
 * “Time is passing so quickly. Right now, I feel like complaining to Einstein. Whether time is slow or fast depends on perception. Relativity theory is so romantic. And so sad.” — Kurisu after kissing Okabe twice.
 * “I've only lived 18 years, but I don't want to change any of them. They're all part of my life, even the failures.”
 * “You've pretty much figured it all out by now, right? That there is no absolute justice in this world. The opposite of justice is... another justice. Choosing the past through Time Leaps is just choosing between these justices. Can you say that your justice is correct?” — To Okabe at Mayuri Shiina's grave.
 * “99.9% of science is boring.” — Kurisu's response to Rintaro's lack of interest to proceed with mundane tasks with the PhoneWave (name subject to change).
 * “Shut up! I stopped wearing teddie bear panties a few years ago!...Ah!”

Trivia

 * Like many other anime girls (and some guys), Kurisu entered Saimoe Contests.
 * On September 25, 2014, Kurisu Makise won the AnimeBracket - Best Girl Contest, with 6620 votes. She topped the Aquamarine 1 stage of the International Saimoe contest.
 * Kurisu has two separate endings associated with her. While both focus on her relationship with Rintaro Okabe, only one of them will lead to the true outcome of the game (both Mayuri Shiina and Kurisu being saved).
 * Okabe gives Kurisu several nicknames over the course of Steins;Gate, only calling her by her real name in serious situations. Kurisu's most frequent nicknames are "Assistant" or "Christina" (by adding '-tina' to 'Kurisu'), but Okabe also calls her "The Zombie", "Money Bags", "@Channeler", "Mongolian Spot", "Experiment Loving Girl", "Perverted Genius Girl", "Cold-Blooded Perverted Girl Genius", "Experiment Loving Perverted Genius Girl", "Celeb Seventeen" (sometimes shortened to "Celeb Sev"), "Celeb Thirty". Even though Kurisu seems to hate being nicknamed, she thinks it is hopeless to point that out to Okabe.
 * Kurisu is known by lab members and Okabe especially as the source of evil, even worse, the terror in the kitchen, as they despise Kurisu's many-a-times questionable cooking skills and taste palate. Okabe once stated that the lab will fall into the pits of Hell if Kurisu ever cooks, even when Mayuri is helping her and Luka once complained that Kurisu's apple pie tasted like death. She even tasted Okabe's gelnana without any hesitation, even when Okarin and Daru warned her.
 * In the light novels and drama CDs, Kurisu is shown to be upset about her small bust size, to the point where she will angrily yell at people if they even allude to it. That is likely also a reference to her voice actress, Asami Imai's real-life gag.
 * In Episode 15 of the Robotics;Notes anime adaptation, Kurisu's @channel handle "KURI_KAME KuriGohan and Kamehameha" is seen posting on "Twipo" on December 20, 2019 at 10:05 am about the differences between and limitations of 2D and 3D.
 * Kurisu is a playable character in the Phantom Breaker fighting game series originally developed by MAGES.KurisuPhantom.webp
 * Kurisu is the most favorited female character on MyAnimeList with more than 64,000 votes. (checked on September 15, 2023)
 * Kurisu's handle name KuriGohan and Kamehameha is most likely based off Dragon Ball Z, particularly the characters Krillin and Gohan and the energy wave technique Kamehameha.
 * Regarding the 'What I wanted the most now is my fork', it was supposed to be a birthday gift from her dad, Shouichi Makise back when she was 7 years old. However the gift was not delivered due to an argument between the two and was kept in hold by Shouichi's good friend, Akiha Yukitaka. The gift will then be delivered to Kurisu before she time leaped to convince Okabe to not give up on Mayuri and seek help from her (the first time she tells Okabe that she knows that he time leaped). This can be found in Kurisu's Story in Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram.
 * In the Beta Attractor Field, the official story of her death is that Kurisu was killed by a foreigner whom she caught stealing, but the foreigner had already left the country by the time police started searching for them.
 * In the story "Babel of the Grieved Maze" (Drama CD Alpha / Manga), Kurisu learned her father's past from a cassette tape Faris made her listen to, about the research her father kept on researching, time travel. This cassette tape belongs to Faris's father, Yukitaka Akiha. Later on after she left Okabe in front of the train station, Faris caught up with her and made her listen to the other side of the cassette tape she listened before. It contained her father's message, about what he felt when both his professor and close friends died in year 2000, and his apologizing for getting mad over Kurisu and leaving her, and about the gift he kept in Akiha's place, "My Fork". Faris brought that gift with her and gave it to Kurisu after she had listened to the cassette tape.
 * In the one minute and two seconds ONA "Mahou Shoujo Sonico Magica Puella Magi Sonico Magica", Kurisu has a cameo appearance.
 * There are a lot of similarities referencing Steins;Gate in all of the works 5pb, Nitroplus and MAGES. create. In Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 1, the character MAGES. can wear outfits of Faris, Mayuri, Kurisu (etc.) The main character Neptune also shares Kurisu's love for pudding.JaUreAI.png
 * According to Okabe, Kurisu's lips are warm and possess a faint smell of lemon.
 * According to a line in My Darling's Embrace, Kurisu had only stopped wearing teddie bear panties "a few years ago".
 * According to Blended Coffee Encounter drama CD, Kurisu met Maho on September 5, 2009.
 * According to "Time Long Ago" special chapter from Eigou Kaiki no Pandora (manga), Kurisu met Maho at 14, around 2006-2007.
 * She is a fan of Mozart.
 * She dislikes when people fidget with their phones in the middle of a conversation.
 * She is afraid of cockroaches.

Etymology

 * The name Kurisu means “crimson, deep red” (紅, ku), “jasmine” (莉, ri) and “nest, rookery, hive, cobweb, den” (栖, su).
 * Kurisu, while being a proper Japanese name, is also the Japanese pronunciation of the western name Chris. This is likely the origin of her nickname Christina.
 * Kurisu's surname Makise means “breed, care for, shepherd, feed, pasture” (牧, maki) and “rapids, current, torrent, shallows, shoal” (瀬, se).