Hat Kid

**Hat Kid**, the main protagonist of *A Hat in Time*, is a human-like alien attempting to collect the scattered Time Pieces, the fuel for her spaceship, so she can return home. She is also the first playable character, the other being Bow Kid for co-op mode.

Her real name is unknown, as it's never mentioned in-game, and in the instruction manual, she is listed as "Me," due to it being written entirely in first-person. She also handwrites her name in Korean-like symbols when she signs The Snatcher's contracts.

## Physical Appearance

In all respects, Hat Kid looks like a small human child. The only possible difference between her alien species and normal humans is the presence of bones in her ponytail when the C.A.W Agents take an X-ray photograph of her. She has brown hair and blue eyes. She wears a big, purple shirt with a bright yellow cape sporting a large zipper, as well as white pants and brown boots. She also wears a variety of hats, her favorite of which is a big, purple top hat with a yellow stripe, also known as the "Kid's Hat".

## Personality

Hat Kid is shown to have an energetic and childlike personality. This is mainly shown through the innocent nature of her voice lines and idle animations. She is also shown to be rather mischievous, especially with the Mafia, such as when she knocks Mafia Goons off of ledges in Mafia Town, or when she burned paintings containing the souls of trapped individuals in a fire in order to help a group of Fire Spirits commit suicide in Subcon Forest. Despite this, she is also rather friendly, as shown during Your Contract has Expired in Subcon Forest, when Hat Kid attempts to befriend The Snatcher. She can be shy at times, such as when Mustache Girl asks for her name, or during her idle animation where she stops playing with dolls because she thinks someone might be watching. In contrast, she is very frank and emotive in her diary entries, calling out many people and situations on her adventure as weird or unpleasant.

## Groups she's in

* The Guardians of Friendship
* A Hat in Time Crew (Leader)

## Nicknames

* Kid in a hat
* Kid in a stupid happy-sappy hat (By Tord Larsson and Junko Enoshima)
* Kid with the hat
* Hat Thief (by Bug-Hybrids)
* Thief (by Queen Viviana)
* Another source of happiness (by Junko Enoshima/Makoto Naegi/Komaru Naegi/Monaca Towa)
* Mafia Girl
* Nyakuza Noir (When using the Cat Miraculous)
* Hat Tigress (When using the Tiger Miraculous)
* Raven Peck (Miraculous Heroine Name/When using the Raven Miraculous)
* The ??? (nickname from Team Harmony’s Adventures Chronicles Season 16 intro)
* Bad Guy Killer (Black Z-Ray Name)

## TV Tropes

### Canon

* Affectionate Nickname: The planet inhabitants gave her many names:
	+ The Conductor calls her "lassie" and credits her as "some girl".
	+ DJ Grooves calls her "darling".
	+ The Snatcher calls her "kiddo".
* Action Girl: She’s quite the skilled acrobatic and is pretty handy with walloping baddies with her umbrella.
* All There in the Manual: Since she's (mostly) a Heroic Mime, most of her dialogue and personality is fleshed out only if you read the game manual or find her diary in her bedroom.
* Ambiguously Human: You'd be forgiven for initially thinking she was just some kid with a space ship, if not for the fact that she doesn't seem affected by the vacuum of space (and orbital entry for that matter), her hat-based powers, she can apparently carry a fully-grown walrus, and that almost everyone on the planet she meets seems to recognize her as an alien or foreign entity. An X-ray taken by C.A.W. seems to indicate her skeletal structure is rather different from a human's, anyways, most notably the fact that apparently her ponytail has a bone in it.
* And Your Reward Is Clothes: Hat Kid can collect and wear quite a lot of different hats and other accessories. The hats give extra abilities, however, so they're not just for show. Unless you count the different styles of already-owned hats or outfit palettes you can randomly unlock as after-mission Gifts.
* Anti-Hero: Hat Kid is collecting Time Pieces to get back home, and shows no interest in sticking around and fighting crime any longer than she has to... much to Mustache Girl's chagrin. Hat Kid will even assist the Mafia if it leads to getting a Time Piece back. That's on top of destroying the Fire Spirits by burning paintings that are outright shown to be poor souls suffering a Fate Worse than Death.
* Ax-Crazy: Downplayed. However, she gets a bit too excited when beating down Mafia goons and burning the fire spirits. In the latter case, very blatantly cheering for them to burn. That’s not even getting into her feeling empty on the inside, and the reason she "killed" the victim on the Owl Express is because "the voices wouldn’t stop".
* Badass Adorable: She is a cute little girl, capable of trouncing any challenge she meets.
* Badass Boast: She says "Down with the Mafia!" after she gets her umbrella.
* Badass Cape: Her default costume has a little cape.
* Batman Can Breathe in Space: She, along with other characters, can survive in the vacuum of space. She even opens a window on her ship with no ill effects in the ending.
* Batter Up!: She can buy a bat from a Nyakuza cat and use it instead of the umbrella, though it doesn't do any more or less damage.
* Becoming the Mask: While she only takes part in the film competition in the second chapter so she can get her hands on the Time Pieces, there are plenty of indications that she really gets into being an actress. She smiles in some of the loading screens for Act 2, her poses for Paparazzi pictures in "Picture Perfect", and her inner monologue voices approval when she examines one of the posters in the actual final act. Also in her diary, she talked about how excited she is that she is becoming a star.
* Bones Do Not Belong There: One level features an x-ray image of her, showing that her ponytail has a bone in it.
* Bratty Half-Pint: Hat Kid shows quite a bit of brattiness in certain parts of the game, such as when she sticks her tongue out at any Mafia she walks by.
* But Now I Must Go: In the ending, she's somewhat upset at having to leave her newfound friends, but heads off on her journey and gives them one last wave goodbye.
* Cat Smile: Has this expression combined with Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes when she's dancing.
* Clothes Make the Superman: Her various Nice Hats give her various abilities. She also gains powers from badges, which are also pinned on her hat.
	+ Default/Top Hat: Points to Hat Kid's objective.
	+ Sprint Hat: A visor with wings on the side. Makes Hat Kid move faster. A badge can turn this into a scooter, which is faster and moves automatically. She cannot Double Jump while sprinting, though.
	+ Brewing Hat: A witch's hat. Allows Hat Kid to create throwable potions that blow up.
	+ Ice Hat: A winter beanie. Turns the Kid into an ice statue, which lets her bounce off of boards, creates a Shockwave Stomp, and temporarily turns her invincible (but immobile).
	+ Dweller Mask: A fox-shaped mask with glowing green eyes. Lets Hat Kid interact with green objects or remove purple ones.
	+ Time Stop Hat: A pillbox hat with a clock on top and a ribbon that wraps around like a visor. Lets Hat Kid significantly slow down time.

* Empty Shell: When The Snatcher swipes her soul as collateral for his contracts, she notes that she feels very empty inside. Getting it back returns her to her usual amount of emptiness.
* Everyone Calls Her "Barkeep": She's a kid wearing a hat and she's called Hat Kid!
* Finger Gun: In sneaking sections, she holds up her right hand with her index finger and thumb pointed out like her hand is a gun.
* Fragile Speedster: While Hat Kid is not the strongest or toughest (she still has 4 HP and can't lose more than one per hit, however), she's still quick and agile enough to dodge them and she has a large set of badges to use against her opponents. This trope can be taken to its logical extreme with the Sprint Hat, which makes her faster, but prevents her from double jump, and / or the One-Hit Badge, which reduces her health to a single HP with no benefit at all.
* Gadgeteer Genius: The spaceship is custom-made and built entirely by her. The numerous special hats she wears across the game are also made by her using various balls of yarn.
* Heroic Mime: Zig-zagged. She never speaks in cutscenes, but she does utter a few words in gameplay and is very talkative in her diary entries and the manual.
* Heroic Neutral: While she's willing to help people at the drop of a hat, it's mostly to gain back the Time Pieces that fuel her spaceship. Her need to recollect her Time Pieces often overrides common sense or decency, and she'll do just about anything that's asked of her as long as it means getting those pieces back.
* Human Aliens: She's basically a space alien from the point of view of the rest of the cast. She also, throughout the manual, identifies as non-human. One of the relics she gets is a toy model of a UFO abducting cattle called "Mockery of Off-Planet Life", where she shows offense at the stereotyping.
* Idle Animation: She has various adorable ones that includes:
	+ Playing with her umbrella by balancing it on the tip of her index finger.
	+ Cheering in place.
	+ Playing with two dolls (and then nervously hiding them).
	+ Rocking back and forth... and then pulling up her umbrella, ready to attack.
	+ Introduced in the Nyakuza Metro DLC, she snaps her fingers, flipping her hat over her head, and revealing several items on top her head with each snap. This animation only happens if said hat is big enough for it, though.
* Improbable Weapon User: Uses an umbrella to fight enemies. Said umbrella can also hold a wave beam and hookshot upgrades.
* Innocent Prodigy: She's a kid, of course, yet can maintain and pilot a spaceship by herself and beat up bad guys. Everything else about her betrays her innocence and childishness; from her voice clips to the fact that examining the microwave has her comment how she uses it to "punish food that has been bad". And there's also her diary entries which has plenty of snarkiness.
* I Shall Taunt You: She has two taunts: Blowing a Raspberry, and blowing a kiss. They can be done at any time by pressing a button, though she automatically taunts the Mafia if they're nearby.
* Item Get!: Hat Kid performs one a la Super Mario 64 when she collects a Time Piece.
* Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Hat Kid can be bratty and selfish, but she does help people and grow to love the friends she made on her adventure.
* Kamehame Hadoken: One badge she can buy gives her a chargeable one that she blasts from the tip of her umbrella. There are three levels, with the first almost instant but relatively thin and weak, and the last taking a few seconds to charge but launching a large and powerful beam.
* The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Hat Kid gets giddy with excitement when she learns that the trains in Nyakuza Metro are pulled by giant cats.
* Little Miss Badass: Hat Kid's pretty tough for a little girl. She can take on creatures several times her size, and win.
* Little Miss Snarker: Her diary gives her some moments of this. While a lot of things fly over her head, there are times she notices how weird everything around her is and just has to snark about it.
* Made of Iron: She can survive the vacuum of space, and survive falling to the planet from space.
* Muscles Are Meaningful: Her lack of muscles means that, unless she uses jumps or potion grenades, attacks without her umbrella will just hurt her hand. (Amusingly enough, her punches actually do cause damage to bosses, but will still put her into her hurt animation.)
	+ Muscles Are Meaningless: Although it doesn't stop her from lifting a walrus at least quadruple her size with one arm. (Walrus Captain: How are you so strong?!)
* Nice Hat: Naturally. Her default hat gives her the ability to sense where her objective is. She collects multiple different hats throughout the course of her adventure as well. Each of them also gives her a secondary power.
* No Name Given: She's never given a proper name. Everyone she meets just refers to her as whatever nickname they feel like using (with "Kid" or "Girl" being the most common). Heck, even her signature doesn't reveal her actual name, since it's in an in-universe language.
* Not in This for Your Revolution: Hat Kid doesn't care about any of the people or problems present on the planet she's stuck on. She only gets involved in anything in order to get back her Time Pieces. This causes tension between her and Mustache Girl, who is an idealist out to save the world. At the end of the game, the player gets the choice to break her out of this, just once, to give Mustache Girl a single Time Piece for her cause.
* OOC Is Serious Business:
	+ One of the few instances Hat Kid loses her normally smiling face is when she gets close to Mafia goons intimidating the people of Mafia Town.
	+ In "Queen Vanessa's Manor", Hat Kid is noticeably scared of the manor's titular owner. Hat Kid hunches up, nervously glances around, and tiptoes when moving. Actually being spotted by Queen Vanessa sends her into full-blown panic.
	+ She appears to have some dislike of toilets. While she knows what they are, Hat Kid gets visibly nervous at having to fight a toilet in the Subcon Forest, and her ship doesn't include any toilets.
	+ Hat Kid also doesn't have her default easygoing smile during the boss battle against The Snatcher, either.
	+ "The Illness Has Spread", the final Act of Alpine Skyline, features Hat Kid destroying the purple flowers that have corrupted the mountains, without any NPCs or the promise of a Time Piece to prompt her. This is one of the few instances in the game where Hat Kid isn't acting out of her own interests to get ahead.
	+ In the game's final chapter, you can choose to run away from the Final Boss before the battle starts when Mustache Girl gives you the chance. If you choose to do so, Hat Kid will run away in tears, visibly scared of her. It's not until a Mafia goon, The Snatcher, DJ Grooves, the Conductor, and one of the Goats give her a pep talk that she regains her confidence to face Mustache Girl.
	+ The Empress seems to make Hat Kid visibly nervous, and her threat when she offs one of her underlings seems to shake her up rather effectively. When she tries to steal her Time Pieces back and The Empress catches her red-handed, Hat Kid is utterly and completely terrified; the enraged Empress seems to scare her even worse than VANESSA did.
* Parasol of Pain: Her Weapon of Choice, stolen from a mafia in the first level. It can get a hook shot upgrade and a badge to fire beams.
* The Quiet One: While she is more talkative than many a silent protagonist, she still rarely speaks in actual dialogue with other characters. Mustache Girl comments on this, describing Hat Kid as a "less talking, more fighting kind of girl".
* Sanity Slippage: Only really during "Murder on the Owl Express," but hovering over the evidence that implicates her suggests that the murder was done to silence the voices in her head. Furthermore, said description was done to a closeup to her smiling face. Though seeing as it's very obvious Hat Kid isn't the killer, she may have been playing it up for the film. That, and there was never a murder in the first place.
* Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: During gameplay, she can occasionally say things like "Boop!", "Bam-bam!", "Swing!", etc. Naturally, they're all incredibly cute to hear.
* Super-Strong Child: In the final act of The Arctic Cruise, despite normally being Weak, but Skilled, she's somehow able to carry the boat's captain, a walrus several times her size without any hindrance to her ability to jump, climb, glide, et cetera. It's lampshaded how unusual this is.
* Tomboy and Girly Girl: Appearance-wise, the Tomboy to Bow Kid's Girly Girl; her umbrella is blue, she wears a shirt and pants, and her default hat is a large purple top hat. Of course, gameplay-wise, the two act exactly the same.
* Tomboyish Ponytail: Her hairstyle.
* Vague Age: There's no clear indication of how old she actually is. She looks like a little kid, but her interaction with some things and diaries entries show a degree of snark that goes beyond her young appearance.
* Vitriolic Best Buds: One-sided with Rumbi. Hat Kid likes to mess with him by riding him, hitting him for Pons, and even putting a Purple Flower on his head. Despite this, she cherishes his friendship and loyalty, dancing with him and hugging him after the events of the main campaign.
* Weak, but Skilled: She's physically weak, as shown by her punches doing nothing other than hurting her hand. She can still take on mafia goons, Eldritch Abominations, and all kinds of nasties using her smarts and agility.
* What You Are in the Dark: The final dialogue choice, which doesn't affect the ending other than the implications of a risk post-credits, involves Hat Kid deciding whether or not to give Mustache Girl a Time Piece to use to defeat the Mafia with.

### In Starable’s Projects

* Adaptional Villainy: In White Bomber AU (Mega Man), Hat Kid's role (being Bass in the AU) is being created by Buggler to be White Bomber's rival, although she could be anti-heroic.
* No-Sell: Despair doesn't affect her so much like Yellow Bomber.
* This is Unforgivable!: In Sugar Crusher (MHA) along with Shovel Knight and White Bomber

## Abilities

* Hats: The default hat Hat Kid wears can guide her to the nearest timepiece or goal (although it is not always accurate). Throughout the course of her adventure, Hat Kid stitches together other hats which give her several abilities:
	+ Sprint Hat - Allows running quickly,
	+ Time Stop Hat - Slows time down for a limited time,
	+ Brewing Hat - Involves throwing explosive potions,
	+ Ice Hat - Turns her into an icy statue to bounce off ice platforms and stuns enemies (but does no damage), she also gains immunity to few attacks while in the ice. (After blocking damage, there is a longer cooldown)
	+ Dweller Mask - Makes green see-through platforms tangible, and purple patterned surfaces intangible.
	+ Time Stop Hat - A late-game hat that allows you to temporarily stop time.
* Peace and Tranquillity: One of many most humorous ability. When Hat Kid uses this, she will make everyone/someone else to stop fighting while dancing to the Peace and Tranquillity music. The victim will either accept Hat Kid or fight her back in refusal. If the victim accepts it, they will let Hat Kid pass through, but if they refuse, they will

## Theme Songs

* Welcome to Mafia Town
* Rush Hour

## Songs she sang

* Rush Hour (Man on the Internet cover; alongside Queen Viviana, Bug-Hybrids and The Elements of Darkness/As Hat Kid herself)

## Trivia

* In The Amber Harmony Heroes Z, she was hit by Black Z-Ray under the name of "Bad Guy Killer" (later under commands with Mustache Girl).
* She will Starable, Team Harmony, Bell and the Guardians of Friendship in Team Harmony and A Hat in Time and will later join The Guardians of Friendship.
* Virtue in Harmony Mode: Wonder.
* Hat Kid is sometimes the target for the akumas
	+ In Sugar Crusher (MHA), she along with Pretty Bomber, Pharaoh Bomber, Yutaro Kimura, Jewel Bomber, Fennec Fox Bomber, Pink Bomber, Phantom Bomber, Bow Kid, Fluffy, Spectra and Green Bomber were of the target of Mustache Girl/Sugar Crusher, due to
	+ In Crimson Controller (MHA), She along with Blue Bomber, Bow Kid, Amanda's Tom, Dr. Wasabi Cookie, Mustard Cookie, Yutaro Kimura, Lil' Judd, Phantom Bomber, Yellow Bomber and Green Bomber were part of the target of Tord Larsson (Amanda's Universe)/Crimson Controller, due to their sabotage on his schemes.