Kei Karuizawa

Appearance
Kei is a teenage girl of average height with waist-length blonde hair that is tied in a ponytail and purple eyes. Her school uniform consists of a light blue dress shirt below the red school blazer with rolled-up sleeves and a short white skirt. She walks in standard school shoes with light blue calf-length socks. She predominantly wears a blue ribbon around her collar. In a more casual situation, she simply wraps her school blazer around her waist and rolls up her dress shirt sleeves.

Personality
At the start of the series, Kei comes across as a sloppy and spoiled girl who only cares about herself. She spends most of her time with the girls after school and uses her points to buy clothes and accessories. She is admired and feared throughout the class for her strong personality and her status as Yōsuke Hirata's girlfriend after only two weeks of entering the school, thus establishing her position as one of the leaders along with him and eventually Suzune Horikita. Kei often acts as Yosuke's supporter during the class discussion, this can be seen when she voiced her opinion regarding Sudou's conflict with Class C which resulted in many of the girls start to express their support to Sudou, proving her influence in the class and later she led the Gal team to search for an eyewitness for Sudou's incident. Despite her haughty personality, Kei also showed her willingness to compromise during the Deserted Island Exam. When Shinohara argued that they need to buy a temporary toilet, Kei expressed her readiness to just bear with the situation for the sake of class points.

For some people, Kei can comes across as a bully, this was seen when Kei laughed at Airi who tried defending Kiyotaka Ayanokōji from everyone's accusation. She also doesn't take notice of less prominent people in the class as shown when she mentioned Kiyotaka being a gloomy, lecherous flower after Suzune nominated him as a guard with Yōsuke.

Background
Kei is a prominent figure of class. Being gifted with an attractive personality, she is considered to be the girl's leader of class D. Her development in the story is worth reading. Despite her looks and attitude she displays and the relationship between her and Hirata, she has her bunch of secrets that she cannot afford to reveal to others.

Abilities
Kei was assessed as being subpar by the school whose absences and grades in middle school were direct reasons for her being placed in D-Class. She doesn't like academics nor sports, but she is surprisingly able to compete with others.

According to both Kiyotaka Ayanokōji and Kakeru Ryūen, Kei has immense mental strength.

Quotes

 * (Monologue) God is cruel. My life was destroyed because of that nightmarish day. I lost my youth, my friends, and even myself. I have to fix that mistake. No matter how much people hate me, it'll be better than suffering like that again. The most important thing is protecting myself.


 * (To Kiyotaka) "Well, whatever. It's not like this is the first time someone's used force against me. After a while, I gave up trying to resist. That's right; I was everyone's victim. I became cold, robotic. I could cry, scream, or thrash around, but it didn't matter. So, why aren't you laughing? Why don't you laugh at the pitiful loser who's been bullied all her life?"


 * (To Kiyotaka) "I'm grateful to the people who bullied me, and the school that covered it up, No one here knows about my past. That's why I was able to become a new me."


 * (To Kiyotaka) “It’s just... I don’t really like bringing up my past. I thought I’d never tell anyone about it. But I ended up telling you, and it felt so surprisingly fine that it’s kind of odd..."

Name Etymology

 * The name Kei  consists of kanji that mean "favor, benefit" (恵) (kei).
 * Kei's surname Karuizawa consists of kanjis that mean "light" (軽) (karu), "well, mine shaft, pit" (井) (i) and "marsh" (沢) (sawa/zawa).

Trivia

 * As D-Class is for those with defective traits, Kei's defect is her low grades and for previous absences during middle school.
 * Kei ranks #8 in the "Female Character" category in the 2019 edition of 's  guidebook.
 * In the 2020 and 2021 edition, she is ranked #1.


 * For the 2nd Year arc, when asked about her aspirations for the next year, she answered  'To spend as much time as possible with the person I love. And... to become even just a bit more useful to him. That sorta thing?'