Maomao

* Anime
* Manga
* Light Novel
* Novel

* Main
* Notebook

## Relationships

* Luomen (adoptive father / biological great-uncle)
* Lakan (biological father)
* Fengxian (biological mother)
* The Madam (maternal grandmother)
* Lahan (cousin / adoptive brother)

* **Maomao** (猫猫 (マオマオ) , *Maomao*?) is the main protagonist of *The Apothecary Diaries* series. After getting kidnapped and sold, she found herself working as a court lady in the Inner Palace of Li. There, she was able to make use of her keen sense of practicality and insightful knowledge of herbs and illnesses to solve the mysterious problems within the inner court.

## Appearance

Maomao is a petite girl who is both scrawny and short. She has dark green hair and purple eyes, in the anime, she has blue eyes . She usually has bandages covering her left arm to hide the burns and scars that she has inflicted on herself for experiments with both poisons and remedies. In the rare instances when she is in makeup to beautify, her face changes so much that others do not recognize her at first. She has freckles above her nose, later revealed to be artifically created with dried clay and reapplied daily by Maomao. Though she normally wears an impassive expression on her face, she flushes, her eyes light up, and she begins to smile whenever she is able to taste poison or interact with rare medicines.

## Personality

Having been raised by the esteemed pharmacist Luomen, Maomao is fascinated by poison and herbs, and has a habit of experimenting with them to observe their effects, primarily on her own body. Due to her passionate love of poisons and her enjoyment when consuming them, she is considered strange, creepy, or obsessed by many characters in the series - a trait she shares with many other members of the eccentric and uniquely talented La Clan. This obsession is a major motivation for her actions throughout the series, as Jinshi learns to bait her to solve court mysteries with the promise of giving her rare medicines.

Maomao's approach to life is very practical, focused on learning to survive in whatever way her environment demands her to and avoiding trouble. Being raised in the red light district led her to develop exceptional street smarts. Calm, mature, and sharp-witted, she is rarely tricked or charmed by others: she is one of the few to be unaffected by Jinshi's beauty and charm. Her mindset has helped her come to terms with matters that many would find concerning or even scarring: she considers her near-rape, and later her kidnapping, enraging situations, but also as inevitabilities of living in the red light district.

As she has learned that her focus on survival and avoidance of trouble requires her to act with caution, she never acts rashly and follows commands without outward protest. In part because of her own self-preserving attitude, she finds people who will help others to their own detriment (e.g. Luomen and later Jinshi) painful to watch. Despite her awareness of the hardships of being low born, she believes that social hierarchy is the inevitable way of things, and that people of lower status who can be used should be used, including herself.

Despite her pragmatism, Maomao's insatiable curiosity often leads her to involve herself in the problems of others. It is also implied that she has a strong sense of justice, empathy and compassion, which makes it hard for her to ignore misdeeds and injustice once she has witnessed them. This has made her wish she could avoid seeing certain things.

## Abilities

**Herbal medicine:** Having been taught by Luomen, one of the best pharmacists in the country, Maomao is an excellent user and maker of herbs--so much so that she makes her own unique medicine, which she often tests on herself.

**Poison resistance:** Because she constantly experiments with poisons on her own body, Maomao has developed a mithridatic resistance against drugs and poisons. Whether afflicted by snake bite, aphrodisiac, alcohol, or hallucinogenic mushroom, her body is able to resist the effects, and she is able to consume the same alcohol content as multiple grown men combined.

**Perception:** Having been raised in the red light district, Maomao is very good at dealing with and manipulating others. Along with her experience and knowledge of herbs, she is able to deduce and solve problems more effectively than most. In spite of this, she does not consider herself intelligent by academic standards, as the only thing she can bring herself to study is medicine.

## Trivia

* Her date of birth is March 14.
* In episode 6, she is stated to be allergic to buckwheat.
* In episode 8, Maomao is somewhat familiar with how to perform mouth-to-mouth and using the Heimlich maneuver despite living in a culture similar to the 18th-century of China's Qing-dynasty.
	+ According to most doctor's reactions to Maomao, she is administering CPR the wrong way by pressing her knuckles against the victim's abs and giving him too many rescue breaths. However, most fictional depictions of CPR are usually inaccurate and anyone knowing CPR in the time depicted is fanciful, since anything like chest compressions is not known until likely the mid 19th century.
* Maomao's name is derived from 猫 (*māo*), the Chinese word for cat, so her name could be read as "Cat Cat".
	+ This name is reinforced by how she is often described as a cat or cat-like. Especially when she gets excited or agitated, she exhibits cat ears and tail in the anime.

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**Characters**