Top 10 favourite Puella Historia characters? (including NPCs, not including girls already in the game before Historia ie any arc 2 faction girl or Nemu, etc)

I'm gonna be honest, my brain held onto Historia about as well as a sieve holds sand. ;_; I think the best I can do is Top 5.

5. Toyo: She feels like a very realistic depiction of a preteen kid, but in an "I want to help you find cool frogs in the pond and then come back home for popsicles" way, not an annoying way. Her relationships with the other characters are very sweet, as is her optimism in the face of adversity. Finding out that her "curse" was just epilepsy was so... ;; baby no!!!!! I'm glad that she seems to be getting better after her wish.

4. Ebbe: Guy of all time. Finds his dead friend's kids on a raid, gives them a big ol' bear hug, and immediately adopts them and makes them the leaders of his badass viking warband. He's the kind of fearsome warrior who will kill a man for interrupting him, but he's also such a high-spirited dad. He better have made it to Valhalla; he's a good dude!

3. Olga: I like how she's passive without being submissive-- for all of her big dreams, she's not much of a go-getter, which is a contrast I don't often see in anime. I guess the best way to put it is that she's complacent? She ends up getting yanked this way and that way because she isn't particularly aggressive and doesn't know how to challenge the status quo. It makes her feel very believable.

It's also cute how much she dotes on Gunhild, like letting her take a little extra butter for her bread and telling her all kinds of stories to help them both stay strong. The bit in Olga's MSS where she makes up a place called "Olganheim", a world for the two of them where the temperature's just right and their favorite foods are plentiful... man.

2. Gunhild: "Dual-wielding, heavily-tattooed berserker with a wolf pelt" is a fantastic concept for a magical girl, honestly. (Plus I always love black and red together, haha.) But she's a great character in her own right, fiercely loyal to Olga and willing to do whatever it takes to keep her safe and happy, no matter how cruel or misguided it might be. Straight-up slaughtered a king and his retainer because Olga was in danger, consequences be damned. Now that's devotion.

I need to say that I appreciate the mushy poetry Gunhild tried to write for Olga, too. Is it awful and tacky? Extremely. But it was written with love, and that's what matters most. :')

1. Ebony: Pretty much the only Historia girl I still think about unprompted, aha. She reminds me a bit of Ranka, in a way-- she absolutely hates her job, but she sticks with it because she feels like she has nowhere else to turn to, and lacks the mental fortitude to survive on her own. I cry a little inside when I think about her relationship with Shizuka... She finally made her very first friend, only for Shizuka to have to go back to her own time. But even so, the fleeting time they spent together was enough to give Ebony the will to find her own way in life... ;;

And she's cute! Her little fox face has some adorable expressions. Her magical girl outfit is... not great (I don't even care about the fanservice factor; it's just not visually interesting), but I like her civilian outfit a lot.