Lily Hoshikawa

Lily Hoshikawa (星川 リリィ, Hoshikawa Ririi) was a breakout star in a long-running drama show and a famous actress who starred in multiple primetime shows of multiple networks. When she was born, she was named Masao Go (豪 正雄, Gō Masao) who died of a sudden heart attack stemming from a combination of severe exhaustion and the mental shock from growing a facial hair. She's also a member of the idol group Franchouchou.

She is titled as the Legendary Child Actress Prodigy (伝説の天才子役 Densetsu no Tensai Koyaku).

Appearance
As a human, Lily has two bright blue pigtails with dark blue bows. She also has one large orange star and other stars in the middle of her head. She has orange-yellow eyes and pale skin. She wears a green school uniform with a dark blue bow and a white skirt. Her height is average for a 12-year-old, but she is much shorter than the rest of Franchouchou. On her feet, Lily wears brown shoes with white socks.

As a zombie, Lily has her heart sticking outside of her body. Like the other zombies, she has grayish-blue skin and red eyes.

In Episode 8, Lily has a strong resemblance to her late mother.

Personality
Lily is often seen with a smile. She is shown to be quite playful due to her young age. She has also demonstrated some professionalism, which she learned from her experiences before her death.

Lily does not like nicknames. She forcefully emphasizes her name when being called "squirt" or any reference to her former name by Saki Nikaidō; especially early on in their relationship. When it comes to things she finds lame and/or ugly, she becomes very honest and blunt about it.

Early Life
Lily's mother passed away when she was young and she lived a peaceful life with her father Takeo Go. She later took up acting roles with Takeo as her manager. She became renowned for her cute persona, appearing in many series and shows. Sometime between Lily's birth and before taking up acting she began identifying as a girl. Her birth name was "Masao Go."

Over the course of her acting career, Lily was overworked numerous amount of times by Takeo, who had now become too attached in career management and neglected Lily's feelings. As his ignorance continued, their relationship soon rifted apart as Lily began to shut herself away from Takeo for ignoring her. She later expressed worry she was going to be an adult. While keeping herself away, she looked into a mirror and --- to her shock --- sees facial hair growing on her. The combined mental shock and exhaustion caused Lily to have a heart attack and died as a result. When Takeo found her body, he was riddled with grief as he became alone.

Sometime in the future, Lily's body was found by Kotaro Tatsumi and revived her as a zombie to become part of his zombie idol project. Her zombification made her into an eternally young girl and Kotaro used her stage name to cover her real identity. From this point onward, she uses Lily Hoshikawa as her preferred name.

Episode 1
After their successful death metal performance in a death metal festival, all of the zombie girls regain their senses, she wakes up along with Ai Mizuno and Junko Konno but was frightened upon seeing Tae Yamada's primal nature.

Episode 2
With Lily's senses restored, she can now think and act freely like a normal human. However, she lounges back doing nothing like the rest of the girls, while Sakura Minamoto remains proactive with Kōtarō Tatsumi. Nevertheless, when the girls are later given a performance opportunity at the Saga Castle, they try to follow Kōtarō's performance instructions, even though Tae Yamada almost compromises the all of girls' human disguises. As Sakura tries to keep everything under control, Saki pushes Sakura aside and mocks everyone in the audience with Tae's head. Sakura eventually snaps and knocks Tae's head away, then verbally fights Saki in a rap battle. Lily and Yūgiri join alongside the fight as background rappers to appeal to everyone in the audience and intuitively make the performance a success.

Episode 3
Before training to meet with Kōtarō Tatsumi's expectations, Lily suggested that they should elect a leader among them, where Saki Nikaidō stands up to elect herself as the leader. Secondly, Lily says they should come up with a new group name as she feels that Kōtarō's provided ones are too bland. She insists on a cute name, but the rest don't feel comfortable with that. Just then, Tae Yamada sneezes and interrupts everyone. The sneeze inspires Lily and she comes up with an original name: "Franchouchou." Everyone agrees with her idea and so they've decided to be called Franchouchou.

Episode 8
As Franchouchou enjoy a string of new gigs and events, a large man named Takeo Gō comes to one of their events after noticing something familiar about child star named Lily Hoshikawa. Lily then explains to Sakura Minamoto that the man was her father, further revealing that she was a boy named Masao Go. She died from the shock of growing facial hair, made worse by many months of overwork. Realizing how much Takeo cared for Lily, Franchouchou invites him to a concert where Lily performs a special song to give him a proper goodbye.

Etymology

 * The name Lily is a feminine given name directly derived from the flower, lily.
 * Lillies are often used to represent purity, passion and rebirth.
 * Lily's former name Masao means "right, proper" (正) (masa) and "hero, manly" (雄) (o), which literally means "righteous man".
 * Lily's surname Hoshikawa means "star" (星) (hoshi) and "river, stream" (川) (kawa), which a possible homage to the stars she has in her hair and her attire (idol ribbon and in a flashback in Episode 8).

Trivia

 * Lily was only 12 years old when she died in 2011.
 * Lily died one month after her twelfth birthday.


 * Lily is the only one out of the zombie girls with an exposed organ. Her exposed and often rapidly beating heart represents her cause of death, a heart attack/cardiac arrest which was caused by mental shock.


 * Lily is the only Zombie not shown with bandages or stitches (likely due to her death not being from an outward injury).
 * Lily is the first (and so far only) official LGBT+ character in the series and the first canonically transgender character in a popular idol franchise.