Aoi Asahina

**Aoi Asahina** (朝日奈 葵), also known as **Hina**, is a major protagonist and a student in Hope's Peak Academy's Class 78th, and a participant of the Killing School Life featured in *Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc*. Her title is the **Ultimate Swimming Pro**

## Biography

During the Tragedy, Jin Kirigiri, the Headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy, planned to seal the school building and let the students live forever inside the Academy in order to protect them from the destruction. The class agreed to his plan, and they sealed the building together. The students lived peacefully inside the school building for a year without knowing that the Ultimate Despair members were already in their midst.

The students soon became forced into the killing game. As an incentive to murder in order to escape, the students were each given a DVD featuring a video from Monokuma which implied that their loved ones were in danger. Aoi's brother, Yuta, was captured by Ultimate Despair for this motive.

Aoi sometimes shared a dorm room with Sakura Ogami, because she was afraid of being alone at night after the Killing Game began, and appeared to spend the majority of her free time with her. Aoi and Sakura were key witnesses during the first trial, as they had seen Sayaka Maizono, the victim of the murder case, enter the kitchen while they were hanging out in the cafeteria. They helped Makoto Naegi deduce that Sayaka herself was the one who took the knife from the kitchen, not her killer.

After the deaths of Chihiro and Mondo, Aoi's mental health began to decline, crying alone in her room and falling into a depression. She decided to go to the Cafeteria in search of donuts to soothe herself, but on the way there she heard strange sounds coming from the changing room near the bathhouse. Cautiously investigating the noise, she approached one of the changing room lockers, where she saw a ghostly green image of what appeared to be the recently deceased Chihiro. In fear, she screamed and fled back to her room.

Still shaken, Aoi did not attend the customary morning meeting under the guise of not feeling well. The other students, concerned about her, asked why she had been absent and she explained that she had seen Chihiro's 'spirit' wandering in the changing room. When they went to changing room to investigate Aoi's claim, they discovered that the 'spirit' Aoi had seen was in fact Alter Ego, an Artificial Intelligence program that was made by Chihiro. Alter Ego's discovery caused a rift between Hifumi and Kiyotaka which lasted several days, as both felt "ownership" over Alter Ego for various personal reasons.

A few days after Alter Ego's discovery, several students were missing from the morning meeting. After searching for some time, Aoi and the others found Hifumi and Kiyotaka's bodies in the art room. With the death of two more of her classmates compounding her depression further, Aoi put Hifumi's head in her lap and began to weep. To her surprise, Hifumi regained consciousness momentarily, just long enough speak the name "Yasuhiro" before succumbing to his head wounds and passing away.

Shortly after Celestia Ludenberg was executed for the murders of Kiyotaka and Hifumi, Sakura, who had been forced to act as Monokuma's mole, decided that she had had enough of deceiving her friends and made up her mind to stop Monokuma's twisted games and confess to the others. Before Sakura could properly confess, however, Monokuma beat her to the punch by revealing her status as his mole. This revelation caused a major rift within the group dynamic, with most of the students pushing Sakura away, except for Aoi who tried desperately to protect Sakura from further slander. After Aoi was injured by Genocide Jack in a particularly heated confrontation, Sakura vowed to finally end things once and for all. She decided that the most unobtrusive way to go about fulfilling Monokuma's mutual killing instructions was to commit suicide; in doing so, she fulfilled his desire for a murder without harming any of her remaining friends.

Against Aoi's advice, Sakura had attempted to make peace with Yasuhiro Hagakure, Byakuya Togami, and Toko Fukawa - all of whom had turned against her when she was revealed as the mole - before she died. She had invited all of them to the Recreation Room to talk to her, which Toko and Yasuhiro accepted. However, Yasuhiro thought that she was going to kill him, leading him to injure her with a Monokuma bottle. Toko, shocked by the sight of a bloody and injured Sakura, fainted and switched to Genocide Jack, who also panicked and struck her with another Monokuma bottle. Aoi then came in the Rec Room and found a severely injured Sakura. Sakura then asked Aoi to make her a bottle of protein shake from the powder Sakura had left in the Chemistry Lab.

When she entered the Chemistry Lab Aoi immediately spotted the spilled poison on the floor, and ran back to the Rec Room as quickly as she could, realizing that Sakura was attempting to kill herself. Sadly, the door could not be opened because Sakura had jammed it with a door leaning against the door handle. From the outside, Aoi could see Sakura sitting on the chair, lifeless.

However, Sakura's sacrifice was severely complicated when Monokuma switched her suicide note for a fake he had written personally. When Aoi received the fake note, she was led to believe that Sakura had taken her life out of despair for the hostile situation in the academy. Infuriated and heartbroken by the "confession"; and at the end of her emotional tether, Aoi attempted to frame herself as Sakura's murderer in order to get everybody killed as revenge for pushing Sakura over the edge. Her plan was foiled however as the truth was eventually revealed and Sakura's dying wish was fulfilled. Disgusted by Monokuma's deception, the remaining students united against him, vowing to find the secrets of the academy and stop the mastermind. She briefly feared that the others would turn on her for nearly getting them all killed, but the students decided to reconcile and unite their strength in order to take down the Mastermind.

After some investigation by the students, the true mastermind of the killing game was deduced to be Junko Enoshima. Aoi and the other remaining survivors were shocked to learn that the 'Junko Enoshima' they met was actually Junko's twin sister, Mukuro Ikusaba, and that the world outside their walls was in a state of collapse due to The Tragedy. In particular, Aoi was crippled by the knowledge that her fellow students were longtime friends before having their memories removed; coupled with the knowledge that they were essentially killing each other over nothing, which sent her to the brink of despair.

Aoi was motivated by Makoto's words that hope is still alive, causing her to pause and consider what Sakura would say if she were still alive: "You only get stronger by taking adversity by the horns! Confront that thorny path with enthusiasm!" Realizing that Sakura would want her to move on in memory of the fallen, she decided to believe in Makoto. Along with the rest of her friends, Aoi witnessed Makoto - the newly-minted "Ultimate Hope" - managing to defeat Junko, leading to her executing herself in a special punishment. With Junko dead, the School Killing Life was finally over, and the survivors found an escape switch that would allow them to leave the academy. Aoi left the school with Sakura still on her mind, wishing her goodbye as she parted through the escape hatch, but resolving that "If we gotta say goodbye, we may as well do it with a smile on our face!".