Hotaru is first introduced when she becomes friends with Chibiusa. She did not have friends until she met Chibiusa and Usagi. In the anime she was not popular with her classmates because of her powers and her strange seizures as well as personality changes for being the host of Mistress 9, the evil entity that lived in her after the age of 5. Naoko Takeuchi, the series creator, describes her as delicate, quiet, precocious and expressionless.