Akane Aoi

Akane Aoi (赤根葵) is a first year student at Kamome Academy's High School Division and Nene's best friend. She is mainly used in the plot to introduce supernatural rumors to Nene.

Appearance
Aoi is a cute, petite girl with indigo hair and eyes. She keeps her hair tied up into two circle sections behind her head. Her bangs are loosely parted to frame her face, and there are two thin, wavy locks of hair that fall past her chest.

She wears the regular Kamome Academy uniform.

Kannagi Appearance
As the kannagi, she is shown to wear traditional attire appropriate for the sacrifice by No.6's assistants. She dons two magenta flowers in her hair, a light teal coat, and a black hakama tied with a large bow behind her. In Chapter 69, she used the hem of her dress as bandages to wrap around Akane's wound in his abdomen.

She was given a protection charm from Teru, which is a woven bracelet with a bell and tassel at the end.

Personality
Aoi is a sweet and cheerful person who is very close with her friend, Nene. Although she claims to dislike scary stories, she continues to delve into them for the sake of cheering Nene up, since she knows that Nene enjoys them. Considering her zealous presentation and continued involvement with the tales, she may actually have some interest in them herself. She is shown to adore romance, as evidenced by her enthusiastic support of Nene's romantic endeavors and enjoyment of discussing crushes. Despite her continued rejections of his advances, she was also rather jealous and upset when her childhood friend, Akane, seemingly began to date someone else.

Aoi is also shown to be good with words and is able to get people to do what she wants just by using a little bit of pressure. She is especially harsh towards Akane, denying every single one of his love confessions all while smiling cheerfully.

If Teru is the king of popularity in Kamome Academy, Aoi is the queen of it. She gets confessed to left and right and easily rejects her suitors.

True Personality
Her true personality reveals her to be a person who looks down on others, as stated by Akane. She is bitter and resentful towards her classmates as they each have an idealized version of her in their mind, setting impossibly high standards that she fails to meet. Aoi feels as if she has no one to trust or rely on as all her loved ones deceive her. Aoi believes all those who confess to her are in love with the idea of her, and not her herself. She suppresses all her negative emotions and traits in fear of being ostracized and in an effort not to shatter the image most people have of her. Ultimately, Aoi is a deeply lonely person, firmly believing that no one could care about the "real" her.

She no longer has on a cheerful facade in the later chapters, but still has innately kind intentions when treating Akane (despite cynically saying she didn't want to look at the wound at all). She also gets very emotional after her argument with Akane and her attempts to run away. When he told her he liked her again, she started tearing up knowing she would regret not saying I like you to him before disappearing.

As revealed in Chapter 64, she's always wanted to go "far away", which is why she agreed to help No.6. Akane claims the reason why she wanted to leave this world was because of the fear that everyone would discover her true, genuine side sooner or later, and turn against her. Although Aoi assumed he was oblivious towards it, Akane admits that Aoi was inclined to look down on people if given the advantage. She refused to confide or get herself intimately involved with others, even if it meant putting on an act around Nene.

Past
Aoi was childhood friends with Aoi Akane, who became deeply in love with her at a young age. From Chapter 69, it was revealed that Aoi's past consisted of being bullied by her fellow classmates and frequently lied to by her father at a young age. She rarely showed any signs of defiance or sadness when she was picked on by her grade-school classmates, so she didn't have a response to them.

As she grew up with Akane, she began developing a cheerful facade to cover up her actual thoughts, but despite these changes, she was still perceived to be a different species from everybody else. It led to people either putting her on a pedestal or accusing her when she attended Kamome Gakuen. Although Nene and Akane were the two people she trusted, she avoided explaining her personal thoughts or having a genuine personality--which was the part that Akane despised the most. Nevertheless, he still kept true to his feelings for her when he witnessed her crying as kids, suggesting it was the first time he saw her real identity.

Seeing Supernaturals
Recurring from Chapter 61, it was shown that Aoi could see supernaturals when she first witnessed No.6 and Akane's clock keeper appearance, much to his surprise. She could also see Hanako in Chapter 64, and she playfully assumed he was Nene's crush due to her prior knowledge from the Confession Tree incident.

Controlling Supernaturals
Forshadowed from Chapter 29 when Aoi threatened Nene with a tiny centipede, she was later seen to control a swarm of insects climbing out of the boundary's pit of No. 6. Attired in her kannagi appearance, she rode a gigantic centipede that stabbed Akane into suffering a fatal wound through his abdomen.

Trivia

 * Her favorite snack is raspberry pie.
 * Her recent concern is how Nene seems to be busy as of late.
 * Except for the Hell of Mirrors, Aoi has always been the one to tell Nene about supernatural rumors (in the Picture Perfect Arc, it is her equivalent that tells Nene the rumors).
 * Aoi studies hard on a constant, daily basis.
 * In the previous examination, she ranked #40 out of 224 students, while in the most recent one, she ranked first with 510 out of 500 points.
 * She's scared of lightning, but doesn't want to admit it.
 * She prefers the left direction.
 * She used to carry a giraffe plushie in her childhood, which foreshadowed her love of giraffes.
 * In Chapter 70, Aoi decides to reveal a bit more about herself by saying she likes giraffes, but she has never seen them in person before. She also doesn't like being in crowds. Her favorites are desserts and other sweet confections, to which Akane remarks that she liked that cake shop in front of the station. She also likes playing games.