Hiyori Shiina

Appearance
Hiyori has mid-back length silver hair that has black ribbons and 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 is a quiet and reserved girl, although she is occasionally seen smiling at times whenever she talks to someone who has a similar taste in books. Even though she was quite happy being alone, Hiyori also felt a sense of loneliness every once in a while and yearns for a friend. She always carries books with her in her bag in case she meets someone who shares the same interest in literature as 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 meets 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 was regarded as a pacifist in nature. In spite of this, she still harbors a strong desire to respect the wishes of her class.

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. 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 who are not from the same affiliation as her, Hiyori was determined to find a way to make amends in relations such as using some of her private points for that victim. 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 have to be made at the price of saving someone who is more valuable to the class like Mio and Kakeru over the 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.

Background
In Advanced Nurturing High School, it was said that Hiyori didn't have anyone she could truly consider as her friend and had always been spending time alone by herself. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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 after the following volumes when she asked Kiyotaka about his involvement in crippling her Class 1-C which he admitted to doing.

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): "It's understandable that you would be bewildered if you're suddenly told to get along or break down walls."
 * (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 Daichi Ishizaki): "Let's suppose that you manage to beat Hashimoto-kun and Kitō-kun in a fight here and force them to confess to everything. That still wouldn't be real evidence. I'm also fairly certain that the person that matters, Sakayanagi-san, won't admit to anything at all. Isn't the fact that we weren't able to get him to admit to it more than enough?"
 * (To Daichi Ishizaki): "I know it seems unfair, but it is what it is. Please just bear with it for now."
 * (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."

Name Etymology

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

Trivia

 * 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.'