Subaru Hidaka

Subaru Hidaka is one of the main protagonists of the visual novel and anime series Robotics;Notes. He is a second-year student in Tanagashima High School, the same school that Kaito Yashio and Akiho Senomiya attend. A skilled roboticist, he has won the Robo-One championship several times under the guise of "Mr. Pleiades." Subaru is secretive of his involvement with robots due to promising his father he would undertake the family's fishing business after graduating. Despite initially refusing to join the Robot Research Club, Subaru is later blackmailed to join by Kaito.

He is voiced by Yoshimasa Hosoya in the Japanese version of the anime and Jarrod Greene in the English version, the former of whom also voices Nezumi.

Appearance
Subaru always wears a mature, calm expression on his face. He is rather tall and is typically seen in his school uniform. Subaru has black hair and hazel eyes and his signature glasses have a blue frame. His PokeCom is fastened to his hip.

His Mr. Pleiades outfit possesses a range of flamboyant colors and has a military theme. He also dons a masquerade mask to further hide his identity.

Personality
Subaru has a very cynical demeanor and is generally stoic, afraid to allow his emotions to control him. This is the result of him growing under a very controlling father, who is incredibly insistent on him inheriting the family fishing business and will often physically abuse him when he attempts to go down another path of career. Despite this stoic attitude, Subaru has proven to be a very shy person, prone to stuttering when nervous and uncomfortable about physical contact with others, especially girls.

Subaru is very realistic, always prioritizing success and practicality over aesthetics and superficialness. This trait causes him to frequently clash with Akiho, who has a bad habit of letting sentimentality get the better of her. A good example of this is when he attempted to convince her to give up on GunBuild-1 and start on a new robot from scratch, saying that there was no point in sticking to such a hopeless project, regardless of how much work she and the other club members had put into it. While he is very blunt with his opinions, Subaru nonetheless gives Akiho very sound advice, and is shown to respect her a good deal, even calling her 'Chief', something no other club member does.

While under his Mr. Pleiades persona, Subaru becomes someone completely different. Haughty and flamboyant, Mr. Pleiades personifies all the emotions Subaru keeps repressed. In addition, the fame Mr. Pleiades has garnered amongst the robotics community is something Subaru is very proud about. He is shown to switch to the Mr. Pleiades persona on impulse his whenever the mask is put on, something that ended up exposing his true identity to Kaito and Akiho. Overall, Subaru shows that he can be just as silly as Akiho at times, despite otherwise being one of the more normal members of the group along with Kaito.

Subaru appears to be a fan of anime, though to what extent is unknown, as he was able to recognize the 'Gendo Pose' when Akiho did it, during the club's first visit to JAXA.

Skills & Abilities
Subaru is the most well-rounded member of the club; while not as skilled an operator as Kaito, not as brilliant a programmer as Frau and not as ambitious an engineer as Akiho, he is nonetheless quite skilled in all three categories. He is very knowledgeable about the inner workings and designs of robotics, understanding the best way to construct a robot to maximize performance. His programming skills are shown by how he single-handedly built and programmed his M45 robot.