Ayanami Shiratsuyu/Personality and Relationships

## **Ayanami Shiratsuyu**

* RL
* SAO
* ALO

> "*Hi, hi! Everyone, it's your favorite child singer, Aya-chan~! I hope everyone is having a jolly time~! If not, then Aya will be sad... Well, that got you excited, didn't it? I pray that you all enjoy my songs as much as I do, okay~? Let's go, everyone! Idol, Ayanami Shiratsuyu, going all-out~!*"
> ― Ayanami's usual self-introduction during her concerts.
>
>

**Ayanami Shiratsuyu**, or more colloquially known as **Shiranami**, is the main protagonist of *Sword Art Online Alternative: Spell Blade Online* and a great portion of the story's narrative is dedicated to her point-of-view. This article details the various quirks of her personality as well as the relationships, whether hostile or friendly, between her and the people she has met throughout her many adventures.

## Personality

Ayanami is kind and caring but also very strict; this is due to being raised in a militaristic household and as a result, Ayanami displays quite a few traits that the '*ideal Japanese woman*' would display. As previously stated, she is kind and caring of other people and is capable of true empathy and while confident, she never lets it get to her head. Ayanami is relatively hard to anger but should someone incur her wrath, she will verbally lash out at them (albeit some people consider this cute because despite being angry, Ayanami is incapable of fluently cursing, only using a select few disparaging words). In addition, Ayanami absolutely loathes excessive physical contact with the opposite sex and she will physically lash out at them for touching her for too long. Ayanami carries herself with the prim and proper manners of a lady of high society and as a result, Ayanami has a way with words and is fully capable of holding extended conversations with others to which Klein often teasingly compares to Kirito because he is unable to hold an extended discourse.

Her cheerfulness and outgoing personality is the primary reason why she chose to become an idol over an actress when her mother presented to Ayanami her career choices. Despite having a basically incurable addiction to video games and computers, Ayanami has a heavy appreciation for nature since she views nature as the idealized form of the world and that she, as a human, must constantly strive to become as beautiful as nature. As an extension of her love for nature, Ayanami is a very skilled cook, citing that knowing how to prepare the blessings of nature is one step a person must take to achieve perfection; concerning the art of cooking, Ayanami is strangely competitive over who can cook better, especially with fellow cooks, Asuna and Yuna.

Within the world of SAO, Shiranami is a shining beacon of hope. While she herself was a bit sad and tired at the fact that the game world which she had initially used as an escapade from her busy life as an idol had become a place where she has to put her talents to use, Shiranami did not take offense and willingly put herself on a pedestal to keep the high-level players from despairing; for Shiranami, if all she needs to do is use her voice, she will sing until she cannot do so even if it costs her very life. Aside from this, Shiranami is the type of player who would willingly sacrifice herself to save others and she has done so multiple times, however, it usually backfires on her due to most players seeing Shiranami as a "goddess". On several occasions, her presence clouds the judgment of less-well-mentally-oriented players who instead protect Shiranami and die in the process; this becomes one of many sources of Shiranami's survivor's guilt upon the clearing of SAO and awakening in the real world.

Ayanami also has developed feelings of great affection for Kirito, otherwise Kazuto Kirigaya, from the second she first met him in the SAO Closed Beta. Ayanami, however, has decided that she has to bury those feelings because from her continuous interactions with Kirito, she has seen that he cannot see him as anything more than a little sister; this is especially true when Kirito instead falls in love with Asuna, a gentle well-mannered older girl. Nevertheless, Asuna would eventually find out about Ayanami's feelings which grew into feelings of guilt as she knew that Ayanami was first in line which culminated in Asuna proposing that they both should wed Kirito. Kirito himself accepted the proposal, promising to take care of both of them in both the emotional sense and the physical sense.

Despite being level-headed most of the time, Ayanami has experienced several emotional outbursts that are completely contrary to her normal personality; she first began exhibiting these outbursts at the age of ten after a year of working as an idol. When she was brought to a renowned pediatrician to check her condition, Ayanami was diagnosed with the mental disability of dissociative identity disorder, a trait which the pediatrician thinks was inherited from Ayanami's paternal grandmother as she displayed the traits of the aforementioned disorder as well. The pediatrician surmised that the disorder was dormant until Ayanami began to fully understand the stresses her job as an idol placed on her and that in order to protect her outer personality, her brain created a second personality which housed every single one of Ayanami's dark thoughts.

There have been several occasions in which Ayanami's alter persona breaks out of her self-control and rampages to which Asuna was a witness to; she describes this side of her as a '*savage woman with no regards for boundaries, whether they be physical or moral*'. Ayanami's alter persona is generally far more terse and harsh-lipped than her counterpart and this version of Ayanami also has an extremely cynical outlook on life; in fact, after the deaths of Kirito and Asuna on the 75th Floor and her alter personality surfaced, she had no qualms in attempting to commit suicide (multiple times as well) in her grief and anger; her efforts were of course stopped by her friends albeit with great difficulty.

## Notes

1. ↑ Yui refers to Shiranami as "Auntie".

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Part 4
2. ↑ Volume 16, *Welcome to the World of Fairies*, Part 2
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 Material Collection 01: Ayanami Shiratsuyu's character profile.
4. ↑ Volume 1, *Dawn Romance*, Part 3
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 Material Collection 07: Ayanami Shiratsuyu's second character profile.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 Material Collection 12: Ayanami Shiratsuyu's third character profile.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Part 7
8. ↑ Volume 14, *Round Robin Chorus*, Part 2
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Material Collection 01: Ayanami Shiratsuyu's in-depth background check.
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Prologue
11. ↑ Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Part 3
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `V1MEP5`
13. ↑ Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Part 2
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Volume 13, *Awakening of the Silver Beauty*, Part 2
15. ↑ Volume 1, *Memories of Evil*, Part 1
16. ↑ Volume 2, *The Princess' Seclusion*, Part 4
17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Volume 1, *The Torch's Inheritance*, Part 4
18. ↑ *Progression of Despair* Part 3
19. ↑ Volume 2, *Facing the Evileye*, Part 5
20. ↑ *Origins of the Silver Flower*
21. ↑ Volume 1, *Dawn Romance*, Part 2
22. ↑ *Blossoming of Two Flowers*
23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 *A Cursed Mind*
24. ↑ Volume 1, *The Torch's Inheritance*, Part 7
25. ↑ Volume 2, *The Princess' Seclusion*, Part 1