Hiyori Shiina

Appearance
Hiyori has mid-back length silver hair that has black ribbons tied behind it. She also possesses light purplish eyes.

She is usually seen wearing her school uniform and grey-like knee high socks that reached near her skirt area.

Personality
Hiyori was said to have been a quiet and reserved girl, although she is occasionally seen smiling at times whenever she happens to engage someone in a conversation who has a similar taste as her in books. Even though she was quite happy being alone, Hiyori also felt a sense of loneliness every once in a while and wants to establish friendship with someone along the way. She always carries books with her in her bag in case she meets someone who shares the same interest in literature like her in the event it catches their attention and they reach out to her. Since nobody in Class 1-C is into literature, Hiyori doesn't have anyone to talk to about the novels she read. Hiyori extremely loved books to the point that when she finds someone who has the same or similar reading hobby like her, she would become overly and excitedly talkative without noticing it herself until after the conversation was almost ending. Hiyori would act enthusiastic and cheerful when she found her first friend and reading buddy at the school's library where she often visits from time to time. Hiyori was regarded as a pacifist in nature. In spite of this, she still harbors a strong desire to respect the wishes of her class. While Hiyori possesses a gentle face that appears as outwardly kind, Hiyori is honest and bold with her words when giving her own analysis, making her classmate like Mio Ibuki feel that she can be merciless if asked by others for her opinion. Hiyori is rational and cooperative whenever her class was in a difficult situation, speaking logically about what she feels was right to do and needed to be taken into consideration. Hiyori is an adventurous individual who expresses curiosity of the unknown, appearing seemingly interest in meeting new people who intrigue her and going to different places she had never been to before.

On the other hand, Hiyori is occasionally energetic and outgoing, making the decision to invite a few classmates into karaoke and sing several songs with them. She was mindful of the class atmosphere and would be questioning towards it. Hiyori would brighten the mood of people she gathered together to hang out, proposing they stay longer with her and have some fun times. Hiyori's attitude is encouraging and uplifting to make people like Mio feel it as difficult to reject, choosing to go along with the flow she created. She always speaks politely including to those who are not part of her class. She dislikes how the classes are competing with each other and made everyone hostile to one another, wanting what she feels is the best for everyone. Hiyori can't help but be concern if one of her friends are in deep trouble by things like rumors and expulsion. She wishfully desires for everybody to be friends and remain friendly no matter their backgrounds and positions in conflicts. If she sees someone from Class 1-C being awfully rude to other students despite them not belonging in the same class as her, Hiyori was still determined to find a way to make amends in relations. She would use some of her private points to buy that victim a replacement when a classmate of hers done something as disrespectfully destroying their thing. She felt it was rightful to express apology and forgiveness on behalf of her class even though her classmates never asked the former to go through with that sort of action. She has a strong heart to embrace the harsh reality that is expulsion, knowing that a certain sacrifice has to be made at the price of saving someone who was more valuable to the class like Mio and Kakeru over the other. She is wishful and outspoken for what's best between all classes, hoping that someday everyone will battle each other that doesn't involve hostility without letting class competitions and conflicts get in the way of dictating how they feel about each other.

She genuinely wanted to befriend Kiyotaka Ayanokōji after he helped her reach for a misplaced book in the library and they started to talk about mystery novels ever since whenever the two meet up together. Hiyori was even described to be very mindful of her own action and manners to anyone she met that thinks her as being disrespectful and intrusive. For this reason, Hiyori didn't want to let people see her as incompetent that she didn't know how to do something people like Kiyotaka who could handle things on his own. It was a matter of maintaining her pride and appearance in front of others without coming off as incapable in front of others, worrying that it may somehow inconvenience them unless the person was fine with it. Let alone that, Hiyori cares deeply about her friends like Kiyotaka, whether they're her classmates or not to the point of getting her message across to the other side that she doesn't want to see someone closest to her expelled. Hiyori is a patient, considerate girl, willing to wait for however long she wants and tolerate people being late to the meeting she arranged. With her classmates, Hiyori act happy-go-lucky and carefree as she appears to be enjoyably appreciative of the accompaniment and conversations of her classmate if she views it as nice and lively to her. At the library, she has a bookworm type of attitude and manners, going so far as to remain completely silent once she got herself immerse into reading even while in the presence of a friend, not desiring to talk until near the end when break time is over. She is thoughtful of what her feelings towards Kiyotaka were that seem unknown to her at the time, seeking to explore further of why this was the case with him and not like the other boys by meeting and talking to the latter in-person.

After falling in love with Kiyotaka and developing romantic feelings for him, Hiyori became increasingly happy with herself thinking that she was the same as other girls experiencing the exact thing as them. Understanding where the girls are coming from when liking a person, she became more inclined to sort out her thoughts about the person, taking immediate action by doing an investigation on it herself. This was indicated when she grew a little proactive and impatient, wanting to quickly contact Kiyotaka as soon as possible and have him arranged a face-to-face meeting with her. For instance, Kiyotaka wanted to meet her again next time during early April, but Hiyori convince him that they can hang out together early in the middle of late March instead which she desires. Hiyori can be a bit insistent and assertive in pulling Kiyotaka along with her fellow classmates, wrapping her two arms around his own to drag him to their meeting place. Hiyori is not only someone who was regarded as trustworthy by her classmates, but she also has a trusting side to her attitude, fulfilling and recalling promises that the former and latter had made. Hiyori is also confident about the people she harbors trust for, believing that Kakeru Ryūen will definitely come to her meeting and how Kiyotaka won't get expel in the Uninhabited Island Exam as she has shown faith in him. Whenever explaining the reason of why she thinks like that, Mio notes that Hiyori herself didn't seem to understand the sheer weight of her own words. Each and every moment in time she is with Kiyotaka, Hiyori was yearning to talk to him more and more. Hearing from her classmates that they will be visiting Kiyotaka and hoping to convince him in switching to her class, she was more than ready to accept their idea even if it looks almost impossible just to go to his side.

Background
In Advanced Nurturing High School, it was said that Hiyori didn't have anyone she could truly consider as her friend in the classroom and had always been spending time alone by herself in the school's library. It was not as though she didn't want to make friends, but Hiyori had never been good at dealing with people. Outside of class time, she would sometimes visit the library as a place of reading, checking out and borrowing books from there before bringing it to her dorm room to read. According to Kiyotaka Ayanokōji, she was the kind of girl who happened to have an extreme love for books more than anyone else in her classroom altogether.

Academic Abilities
Not much is known about Hiyori's academic background, but one thing is certain: the scores she got on her assessment by the S-system indicates that she belongs to the upper echelon among her colleagues. Besides borrowing various novels to read at the school's library, Hiyori also has her own personal collection of books she has at home to immerse herself in among her studies. Because Hiyori was regarded as a top student who always went to the school's library, Kiyotaka notes how it wasn't so surprising that she ended up receiving some special treatment in that location just for her. Alongside Satoru Kaneda, she perform academically well in their class and this could be suggested when the two of them have ended up being handed a high position of power as co-leaders by Kakeru to lead their classmates.

Physical Abilities
According to Kiyotaka Ayanokōji, he doesn't exactly picture Hiyori as somebody who was the athletic type, consider how much time it took for her to reach Honami Ichinose and Mei-Yu Wang who were way ahead of her in running speed before the latter slow down to allow the girl to catch up.

Intellectual Abilities
Hiyori is known to have a sharp intuition which is why she is sometimes tasked with info gathering and surveillance, though she is never serious about it. Let alone being incredibly perceptive, Hiyori was described to be quick-witted. When Kiyotaka first met her, he notes how she always had a keen insight to learn and determine the truth with her own eyes. She'd pretended to display remarkable powers of observation to shake the Ayanokōji Group up with how amazing her ability was supposedly is to them. She was capable of piecing whatever information she could find together and form a hypothesis around it shows how impressive Hiyori's deduction skills are. Kakeru has given her permission to have some degree of power as a leader of their class to influence her classmates' decision and decide it for them. Her analysis tend to be sought after by Kakeru due to having a good understanding of what the overall strength of a rival class is in terms of judging their threat level, particularly Honami's.

On the other hand, she was known to be terribly bad at remembering faces and names if they don't belong in her class or left a weak impression on the former. Beyond her fellow classmates, it isn't easy for Hiyori to commit all people's faces and names to long-term memory unless there are certain people like Kiyotaka who she ends up befriending within a year or Rokusuke Kōenji who come off as unique to her. According to her classmate Kakeru Ryūen, Hiyori was highly regarded by him as being clever and intelligent. However, the fact that she hated the idea of participating in a hostile class conflict was what made Hiyori seem totally useless as a pawn in his grand scheme of things compared to her other fellow classmates who are more or less involved all the times. Nonetheless, Hiyori was able to sharply grasp what Kakeru's intentions are unlike her classmates Daichi and Mio when explaining the framework of his strategy he suggested to them in a way that they can better understand it.

When Haruka Hasebe dropped her empty coffee cup on the ground, Hiyori managed to know specifically how much sugar was in it, to begin with, and get a new cup of coffee with the exact sugar amount for Haruka later. In a way, she was quite keenly attentive to the smallest details. Hiyori was able to smartly figure out that the person Kakeru was looking for in Class 1-D was Kiyotaka after suspecting that he stepped down from his position after being defeated, and that Daichi Ishizaki taking him down was merely a cover-up. This proves her hypothesis to be correct in the end after the following volumes when she asked Kiyotaka about his involvement in crippling her Class 1-C which he admitted to be his doing. Compared to both Daichi or Mio, Kiyotaka thinks Hiyori's suggestions may hold more value to Kakeru if he had bother to hear her out and take them into consideration. According to Kiyotaka, if Hiyori were able to easily control Daichi, Mio, Albert and even Kakeru from going out of control, then Hiyori herself would become an even more dangerous opponent who can support them better.

Quotes

 * (To Kakeru Ryūen): "Both their faces are weak. I'll probably forget them immediately."
 * (To Daichi Ishizaki): "Yes, that's right. Hirata-san. Why are faces and names so hard to remember?"
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "I don't mind. I've read this book before. And besides, while looking for that book, I was blessed to run into other books. It seems this school’s library has a large collection of books. If I were to immerse myself into reading them, I might have graduated before I realized."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "There's no one in Class C who likes reading novels, so I have no one I can talk to."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "That's a relief. Because creating cracks between classes over such trivial things makes me unhappy. After all, the best thing is for everybody to live in harmony."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "They're from my personal collection. I've been walking around with them, hoping I'd meet someone who shared my tastes and would want to borrow them. I started out just carrying one, but I suppose I accumulated more and more books while waiting to find that certain someone."
 * (To Mei-Yu Wang): "This is very nervewracking, is it not? To be surrounded by unfamiliar people."
 * (To Mei-Yu Wang): I think so too. School life can be more than just everyone being hostile towards each other.''"
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "Honestly, I don't want to see Ichinose-san tortured like this anymore. She's the type of person who's even willing to be friendly to somebody with barely any friends, like me."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "When I first came here, I didn't like this behavior that the school encourages, where we hurt others. But now, I think it's necessary to fight from time to time in order to protect your friends."
 * (To Daichi Ishizaki): "Please don't keep going on like this Ishizaki-kun. I won't allow you to continue any further."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "It's a pity, but we simply can't avoid the expulsion. So, I'm ready to accept the fact that we're going to lose someone, potentially even me. Though, if Class D really wants to reach for the top again...I've been starting to think that we might need Ryūen-kun..."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "Ayanokōji-kun, please don't drop out of school, okay...? With everything that's been happening, I just don't want my precious friend to disappear as well."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "I just put the pieces of the puzzle together. Ryuuen-kun had always targeted your class. But he suddenly stepped down from his position during his targeting of Class D. Apparently, this was due to Ishizaki-kun's taking him down, but no matter how I think about it, it still seems like a cover-up. After I tried contacting Ryuuen-kun's close associates, Ishizaki-kun and Ibuki-san, about Ryuuen-kun himself, I became sure of it."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "If this upsets you, I apologize. I've been nervous this whole day because I had to reveal what I knew to you. Because I'm afraid that getting too involved with this would anger you. No matter what the truth is, one glance at you tells me that you don't want to talk about it."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "If we can't be friends after this...I'll definitely regret it. If I can't talk to you like this anymore, I will definitely regret what I did."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "I think that if you don't look into this any deeper, there won't be any...further developments."
 * (To Kiyotaka Ayanokōji): "Yeah...I don't really know what I'm saying myself."

Name Etymology

 * Hiyori's surname Shiina consists of kanjis that mean "oak, mallet" (椎) (shii) and "name" (名) (na).

Trivia

 * The first person outside her class that Hiyori was able to become very close friends and talk about books with is none other than Kiyotaka Ayanokōji himself who was most likely the one to convince herself to befriend more people after him like Mei-Yu Wang along the way.
 * After spending quality time with him each and every meeting they hang out together, Hiyori also end up eventually beginning to view and feel Kiyotaka as her one and only first love interest she came to develop a liking for so far beyond just thinking it to be friendship any longer.
 * The reason for Hiyori's evaluation of Class C is due to lack of teamwork skills.
 * Hiyori ranks #30 in "Female Character" category in the 2021 edition of 's  guidebook.
 * For the 2nd Year arc, when asked about her aspirations for the next year, she answered  'To read as many books as I can in the library. And searching for a new book to meet.'