impressions & permissions

[liedol]

Ai Hoshino

"I'll keep on lying, hoping some day it becomes the truth."

basics

name. Ai Hoshino
age. 16 | 20 (canon point dependent)
birthday. November 26th

canon. Oshi no Ko
canon point. Varies; default is post chapter 9 / episode 1

characteristics

height. 4'11" (151cm)
build. Slim, toned – dancer's build
hair. Dark puple, pink streaks
eyes. Purple & pink

physical affection

Characters are free to initiate physical affection with Ai and she generally won't reject it, even if she doesn't feel fully comfortable. She tends not to initiate physical contact unless she's attempting to get close to someone (sincerely or otherwise) and physical affection/touch is one of her primary love languages for people she is sincerely attached to.

physical violence

Ai is a totally normal average young woman and could probably easily lose in a fight but. Imagine the emotional toll. In addition, Ai is a victim of physical abuse in her childhood so this is not something I want to casually inflict on her. In general, please hit me up before beating her ass!

mindreading/memshare/etc.

As a total normie, Ai's brain would be an open book for psychics and mind readers. HOWEVER, since lying and putting on a front is integral to Ai's character and the process of getting her to come out of her shell is part of the fun of playing her for me, I'd prefer for mind readers to not get a good scope on her if it ever comes up and that players contact me OOCly to discuss this before trying.

This also goes for characters with "Sherlock scanning" types of abilities, nonmagical deductive reasoning that verges on magic/mindreading/etc – basically, if your character would immediately "see through" Ai so to speak that you get permissions from me before acting on it, having characters react as if she is having off or suspiciously in tags unless I've specfically described it, etc.

relationships (& ship prefs)

ICly, It's Complicated. While they're no longer together, Ai still has a lot of baggage from and sense of responsibility for her ex and she herself is not in a position to pursue romantic relationships, given the pressures of her career. However, Ai herself is a deeply lonely person who wants companionship and is desperate to sincerely give someone her love even if she has a lot of hangups about the concept of love in general stemming from trauma and abandonment. She's constantly looking for someone to give her love to and – as see puts it – someone who'll see her "dirty parts and my rough edges" and "tell [her] that it's okay, that they accept [her]."

OOCly, I love shipping her around and exploring Ai's weird relationship to romantic love and adult relationships! I have a pretty detailed shipping prefs and info post here but overall I love crosscanon, cross medium, anything! M/F is her IC preference but tbh I'll ship anything if I like the chemistry.

sex & smut prefs

oops one day i'll write this up properly. The TL;DR is yes, but with Ai's Unfortunate Baggage About Sex I'm not super interested in casual sex/one night stand type dynamics and am primarily only interested in it in the context of a pre-existing relationship (assumed CR or otherwise). Please also check the CWs below in that regard!

content warnings

The TL;DR is that Ai as a character deals with (to varying degrees) parental (physical, emotional) abuse in childhood, pedophilia, victim blaming, underage sex & teen pregnancy, misogyny & slut shaming and exploitation of child and teen celebrities in the entertainment industry. Much of this content I will not directly depict in my tags unless I know someone is on board with it but these issues are too foundational to Ai's character for me to ignore entirely. To be blunt, 99% of the time most of the worst stuff will not come up at all unless it's being directly addressed in a thread but it's all stuff I take into consideration re: my interpretation and her behaviour.

Check the drop down below for a more thorough summary of what this content entails. If there is anything specifically on this list – or just in general – I need to avoid when tagging you, please comment below (comments are screened) to let me know or to opt out of tagging Ai.

Detailed Content Warnings

Ai is a teen mother who became pregnant and gave birth to twins at age sixteen. I also play her following the implication that she became sexually active a year or two prior to this. This is not an aspect of her life Ai will ever readily talk about as she is completely dedicated to keeping this secret but it may occasionally pop up in her thoughts and is too central to her character to entirely ignore.

Ai also has some particular hangups about sex and her own sexuality as a result of various comingling factors and in contexts where this is relevant, she will use a lot of shaming-adjacent language in reference to herself – 'dirty', 'impure', etc. This is not something I can avoid in this particular context, so please be sure you're down to engage with it before taking threads in that direction!

In addition, as mentioned above, Ai is explicitly stated in both the manga itself and various official side materials to be a victim of physical and emotional abuse by her mother while in her care. In addition, while no active abuse or grooming took place, Ai's stepfather is stated to have had an inappropriate sexual interest in her when her age was still in the single digits and she experiencing victim blaming and abuse from her mother as a result. This is far back enough in her past that I can avoid direct mentions of it if necessary, but the effects of her mother's abuse and the influence it has on her mindset is too pervasive for me to entirely write around or ignore.

Finally, Ai was removed from her mother's care and raised in the Japanese foster system until she aged out. While we know little about this period of her life, we do know that she was actively abandoned by both her mother and her only other remaining relatives and this abandonment is very influential to Ai as a character.

As mentioned above, while I can avoid direct mentions and/or depictions of these things in tags, they are too fundamental to my portrayal of Ai to entirely write out or to exclude the influence of. Please comment below (comments are screened) to opt out if this is something you'd rather avoid altogether, or to otherwise let me know if there's anything I should avoid directly mentioning in tags with you.

appearance & impressions

visual

Ai is a petite young Japanese woman, standing at 4'11/''151cm. She has a slim, toned build potentially recognizable as that of a dancer - closest to that of a ballerina (slender, small bust, narrow hips, little visible muscle definition).

Ai is noted in canon to be a particularly bewitching beauty. While she's noted many times to have a pretty face in general, her eyes are what make her truly beautiful. They're a purple fading to pink gradient and are stylized with a six-point star as an expression of how striking and bewitching they're said to be and her eyelashes are thick and full. When she's smiling or laughing – which is often – it's possible to spot that her canines are a little larger than is typical, which gives her smile a slightly playful, catlike air. She has long, deep purple hair with a few stray strands of pink and swept bangs with two chest-length locks framing her face.

Fashion wise, when Ai is out and about in public she tends towards dressing up and looking her best. She always wears 'natural' makeup, enhancing her looks rather than trying to cover them up and tends towards frilly, feminine outfits with a focus on looking pretty, youthful and cute as opposed to striking or mature. To this end, she gravitates towards trendy and fashionable styles like girly kei and jirai kei.

When she's dressing for her own comfort or is going incognito, Ai tends towards loose fitting, comfortable clothes -- hoodies, loose t-shirts, oversized jackets and cardigans, etc. When she's in her full cozies, she usually ties up her hair in either braids or a bun.

aural

Ai's voice is high, lively and a little airy - rather than high pitched or squeaky, she sounds clear and sweet. Her natural tone is more soft when she's at ease, but she generally injects a lot of pep and energy when she's talking. In general, she tends to sound a little airheaded or ditzy on a moment to moment basis, emphasized by her floaty, often noncommittal vocabulary. In general, she perfectly embodies what one would expect from a teen idol – at least with her public face. When in private or letting her guard down, her voice becomes a little lower and softer and loses a little of her ditzy edge.

Of note is that Ai is also a professional idol who performs as the lead singer of her best-selling group and she's an exceptionally talented singer as a result. Her Japanese seiyuu is Rie Takahashi and a sample of her voice can be found here with an example of her singing here.

Ai speaks Japanese natively and exclusively, with no fluency in any other languages.

demenor

The first and most important thing to note about Ai's presence is that she is absolutely rizzed to the max - she posesses an almost otherworldly level of charisma which is part of what makes her such an incredible idol and when seeing her perform at max power, most people who see her are caught off guard by how captivating they find her. The six-point star her eyes are stylized with is a representation of her beguiling, spellbinding presence and Ai knows very well how to lean into it to do what she needs to do.

This same charisma tends to bleed through into her more normal social interations, though to a much more toned down degree. On a moment to moment basis, Ai generally comes off as a bright, social and well adjusted young woman. The most immediate first impression most people will form of her is of someone who's playful, friendly and airheaded. She's agreeable and gregarious and will rarely speak up in disagreement or anger - in the long term, it will become apparent that she's maybe a bit overly friendly and eager to please, creating the impression of someone who's a bit of a pushover or a people pleaser.

Something very important to note about Ai is that she will often instinctively lie, usually lies of omission and covering up her feelings. She does this effortlessly enough that characters who are actively aware that she lies and are trying to work out what she says it true and isn't can't catch her out on it.

Because of her history of abuse and neglect, Ai lives with the deep seated belief that her true, authentic self is not just unworthy of love but entirely unlovable full stop and that to connect with other people, she must incessently perform as the Ai of B-Komachi - a self described idealized self, a "kind, invincible girl who loves everyone". It's important to note that this idealized self is not an entirely fake mask or a fabrication, but a version of Ai's true self with all her inconvenient humanity airbrushed away. As Ai herself describes it, her public face lacks the real Ai's "dirtiness" and "rough edges".

Observant characters will generally not be able to see through her without long term work and trust, but something that will become apparent are a few things: Ai has difficulty matching names to faces and retaining people's names in general in a way that speaks to faceblindness and neurodivergency as opposed to a lack of care or effort. She lacks common sense in a lot of basic life areas and if confronted on these issues tends to play up a sort of klutzy, charming, childish helplessness.

Finally, Ai also reacts to being yelled at, subjected to someone's anger, physically intimidated or otherwise threatened with physical harm in a way characteristic to someone who has experienced emotional and physical abuse. She tends to freeze up and immediately go as hard on people pleasing and generally framing herself as nonthreatening and dismissable in order to protect herself.

other notes

A flurry of notable things about Ai's general physical presence gets dropped on us in the manga so here's a rapid-fire list of them: Ai has good eyesight along with a sensitive sense of smell and hearing. She takes bigger than average steps when walking and holds her chopsticks 'a little crooked' when eating.

Ai is noted a handful of times to have only completed compulsory education, meaning she left schooling after graduating middle school at 14. Because of this, she is lacking in knowledge of anything that would be taught in the Japanese high school curriculum and has struggles with literacy, being implied in the anime and various side stories to have difficulty with kanji comprehension, though she reads well enough to muddle through and on a day-to-day basis primarily only struggles with names.

Ai can't cook and has anxieties relating to food security, so she relies primarily on premade meals and will do her best to take leftovers and uneaten food from any social gatherings. Because of an instance of physical abuse in her past, she has a specific phobia of white rice and while she can eat it, she will be noticable slow and will take her time.

Ai is canonically noted in the manga to have a developmental disorder, using a term in Japanese that refers to neurodivergencies such as autism, ADHD, Tourettes, etc. While it's never specifically namedropped, I'm like 99.999% certain she is canonically intended to be read as autistic and play her as such.

player

claire. age. 28 timezone. GMT contact. phainein @ plurk & discord code. tessisamess