Characters / Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online Team LPFM

Sword Art Online Main Character Index
Main series: Major Characters (Kazuto Kirigaya, Asuna Yuuki, Shino Asada, Eugeo, Alice Zuberg) | Aincrad | Alfheim Online | Gun Gale Online | Underworld (Integrity Knights, Dark Territory) | Unital Ring | Antagonists (Laughing Coffin, Nobuyuki Sugou) | Bosses | Others
Alternative Gun Gale Online Characters: Team LPFM | Team SHINC | Team MMTM | Others
Video Game Continuity | Gameverse Characters (Gameverse Main Characters) | Mobile Game Exclusives

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Team LPFM

From left to right: M, Clarence, Shirley, Pitohui, Fukaziroh, LLENN

A four member squad comprised of the main quartet. Initially on separate squads, they form this team by the Third Squad Jam. They later gain two more members, Clarence and Shirley, starting from the Fourth Squad Jam onwards.

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Team as a whole

• Action Girl: Three of four members are Girls with Guns who are more than capable of kicking ass.
• Animal-Motif Team: All of Team LPFM has an Animal Motif.
  • LLENN invokes a rabbit with her small size, Super-Speed of bounding round the battlefield, and her hat that has two ears that resemble a rabbit. Not to mention she is constantly called a rabbit In-Universe as an In-Series Nickname of sorts.
  • Pitohui names herself after a species of toxic bird, but she's also given a lot of snake motifs with her design appearing snake-like and she once gets represented by an actual snake in official artwork.
  • M is themed after a turtle, being a Mighty Glacier who carries an indestructium bulletproof shield on his back that he can unfold and hide behind to snipe his enemies, where he really resembles a turtle withdrawn into its shell. This is especially prominent when put alongside LLENN with the two of them invoking The Tortoise and the Hare.
  • Fukaziroh can be likened to a dog. She based her in-game name after her late dog, is very excitable and energetic like a puppy. She also chose to use a dog as her in-game chat profile picture.
• Badass Crew: Small in number they might be, they are a very efficient squadron.
• Badass on Paper: Downplayed. Ironically, despite the team consisting of some of Squad Jam's heaviest hitters and being lorded as one of the strongest squads in the tournament, it took them until SJ5 to actually win a Squad Jam. Despite LLENN and M winning the first Squad Jam, that was before the team was properly formed as LPFM. Thus far, their track record consists of both halves of the group killing each other before the survivors are finished by a third party(when they were still separate as LF and PM4), one of their members joining a team of betrayers and defeating their old team, and then all the members getting killed performing a series of Heroic Sacrifices, the last of which was for the leader of an enemy team. It isn't until SJ5 where they finally score a win, and that's because Eva saved LLENN from getting blown up by the last surviving member of DOOM.
• Car Fu: Both Team LF and Team PM4 engage in battle while riding buggies, however when both cars run out of gas they resort to ramming each other.
• Date Peepers: During Karen's date with Fire IRL, Miyu comes all the way from Hokkaido and meets up with Elsa and Goushi to spy on it, while relaying information to SHINC.
• Debut Queue: The four main characters are introduced in a sequential fashion over the space of two episodes. LLENN/Karen and M get introduced first in "Squad Jam" which is a Flash Forward showing them partaking in the first Squad Jam tournament. Miyu/Fuka gets introduced at the start of "GGO" helping Karen get into VRMMOS, while Pitohui debuts last in the second half of the same episode as LLENN's first in-game friend.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • All four of them appeared in Fatal Bullet as DLC about a month before the anime's debut.
  • LLENN had a special appearance in Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax Ignition as a DLC support character where she was voiced by Minami Tsuda, over two years before the anime was even announced.
  • LLENN and Pitohui were also available as playable characters in Memory Defrag as part of the anime promotion, with LLENN getting a special tie-in quest event that explained her backstory.
  • Fukaziroh also became available as a playable character in Memory Defrag after the anime started, but before she got introduced in the actual show^note she had already appeared in real life as Miyu, but her in-game avatar had yet to be seen.
• Fighting Your Friend: In the third Squad Jam, the team is forced to fight against one of their own, when that person is switched onto a team with "betrayers" from the other teams. They initially think that Pito is the betrayer, but it turns out to actually be LLENN.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble:
  • LLENN (Phlegmatic): As Karen she was very introverted and had few friends, but all in all was still quite a kind person. Her reasons for playing GGO actually stem from wanting to become more confident in real life.
  • Pitohui (Choleric): Favors the game above all else and the thrill she gets from it. With a few exceptions (such as LLENN), she cares little for people and does not value human life.
  • Fukaziroh (Sanguine): Easily the liveliest and most sociable out of the four, taking a carefree, live life to the fullest approach.
  • M (Melancholic): Very cold and difficult to work with initially, and is constantly forced into the game against his better judgement.
• Fusion Dance: LLENN and Fuka's Alternative Gear, which they paired with each other for, is effectively this. LLENN's gear is a Photon Sword with a set of pipes with wheels attached, while Fuka's are a set of metal bullet proof plates. The two of them would then combine these together in order to create the "PM", a trash can shaped structure with wheels and a completely silent lid. Wearing this, Fuka would use her high strength to push the impenetrable structure around, while LLENN would ride on her shoulders and slash at opponents with her Photon Sword through the gap on the lid. This turns them into a Two-Woman Army capable of darting around the battlefield while deflecting even high-calibur bullets while slashing away at the opposition, with the weakness being explosives that could knock them over and Plasma Grenades.
• Girls with Guns: Three gun-wielding girls to be precise.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: LLENN is the tiny girl to M's big guy, with the two of them being the original members of the team.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Squad Jam 2 and the first season of the anime concludes with LLENN vs. Pitohui.
• Out of Focus: Aside from LLENN, the rest of the team suffers this in the beginning of SJ5 due to the unique rule separating all of them and covering the battlefield in a deep fog. Instead, we end up following LLENN as she navigates through the fog and ends up pulling an Enemy Mine with Vivi, leader of ZEMAL.
• Privileged Rival: Surprisingly enough, they are the wealthier rival to Team SHINC, whose meager allowances mean they can barely afford the subscription, much less buy rare weapons. Meanwhile, LLENN's family is wealthy enough to put her up in a luxury apartment and fly her home first class, and Pito can afford to splurge lots of money on expensive items (being a famous singer in real life), which she shares with M and Fuka.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: LLENN and Pito are predominantly short range combatants, while M and Fuka both use long ranged weapons.
• The Squad: While they're rather unconventional compared to the other big-name Squadrons, they do still possess elements of this.
  • While the official role is often given to LLENN, M is arguably the team's actual Leader, being the one who decides their movements and plans. He also serves as the Cold Sniper, or designated marksman more accurately, especially with his Improbable Aiming Skills that allow him to shoot without needing system assistance, preventing opponents from seeing his Bullet Line.
  • LLENN is the Designated Point Man, being the fastest member of the team who can scout ahead. She also has a suppressor that she can equip onto her P90 to give her elements of The Sneaky Guy. She also often serves as the Decoy Leader, serving as bait for the scan to allow her squadmates to get the drop on their enemies or mislead them.
  • Pitohui is The Big Guy, being the Walking Armoury who's adept at multiple firearms, and can fight in close range with either her Photon Swords or even her bare hands. She's also an adept strategist when she wants to be and is often The Face, surprisngly enough.
  • Fukaziroh is the Demolitions Expert, by virtue of Dual Wielding two MGL Grenade Launchers, and who has used specialized grenades such as smoke grenades with pink smoke and plasma rounds that create more destructive explosions. She's also arguably the New Meat, seeing as she doesn't mainly play GGO but transferred from ALO.
  • In SJ4, the team gets Sixth Rangers in the form of Clarence and Shirley, who joined them to bypass the prelems. Though after dealing with DOOM, the both of them become Sixth Ranger Traitors.
• The One Guy: M is the only male member of the team.

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Original Members

Karen Kohiruimaki / LLENN

Karen Kohiruimaki / LLENN

Voiced by: Minami Tsuda (Japanese, Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax), Tomori Kusunoki (Japanese, anime), Reba Buhr (English)

^{Click here to see Karen}

The protagonist of the spin-off series, Sword Art Online Alternative — Gun Gale Online. Kohiruimaki Karen is an 183cm/6'0" tall young woman who has developed a complex as she is often teased for her above average height. She decides to take up VR gaming where she could be someone else, someone shorter and cuter, hence LLENN was born.

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• The Ace: In Squad Jam 3, Fukaziroh reveals to Pitohui that Karen is this. Karen has the ability to quickly learn anything by just looking at it being done once, no matter how difficult it may be. Pitohui states that if Karen had seriously entered a sport, she would be an Olympic athlete by now. Her problem is that she just lacks self-confidence. This is hinted at numerous times in the series, with LLENN quickly learning anything she is taught after seeing it just once.
• Ace Custom: The Vorpal Bunny handguns gifted to her by Pito in the climax of SJ4. They were originally AM.45's, original GGO guns based on Detonics Combat Masters that can carry six round and fire 45. ACP rounds. But Pito has customised them with a part on the barrel that allow LLENN to keep firing them even when they're pressed against a target, while the parts on the slide are there to ensure the slide works properly even if something comes into contact with it, like someone grabbing to stop it from moving. And, for easier reloading, they come with a custom backpack with every layer lined with thin layers of armour ship plating that carries more magazines that LLENN can load into the empty magwells by place them against the bottom of the backpack. Plus, Pito painted them pink to match LLENN's style.
• Achievements in Ignorance: She had no idea her all-pink attire would be perfect camouflage in the desert, being completely surprised when other players walked right past her, allowing her to get the drop on them and kill off the entire squad.
• Adaptation Personality Change: The anime omits some of the times when Karen questions whether she wants to continue with GGO, a plotline that is hinted at in the Squad Jam 3 arc and is openly discussed in Volume 6.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • In the light novel LLENN wasted three months walking around and enjoying her short avatar before deciding to play the game properly. In the anime, LLENN tries the tutorial almost immediately after entering the game so she's out in the field hunting monsters and gaining EXP much sooner.
  • In the manga adaptation of the story, she already knows how to use a knife and engages in a mock battle against M using only that weapon right before they start the first Squad Jam tournament and soundly defeats him. This is in contrast to the light novel and anime, where M handed her a knife and had to give her a fast tutorial on its use before starting Squad Jam.
• Adaptational Curves: The Light Novel describes Karen having as petite body to match her tall frame, leading to her derisively calling herself a "beanpole". The anime on the other hand depicts her as having more noticeable curves, bearing something close to an hour-glass figure.
• Adventure Duo: LLENN has this dynamic with Fukaziroh, with LLENN being the more serious hero, while Fuka is the more eccentric lancer who provides humor.
• Affectionate Nickname: Is called "Kohi" by Miyu in real life.
• All for Nothing: Her backing up Fuka and opposing Pito's decision to kill Suuzaburou ends up being this when, after Pito wins, she reveals that she realised the Secret Test of Character behind Suuzaburou's request and never intended on killing him, only pretending that she would to get a fight out LLENN. She's naturally kind of pissed.
• Alliterative Name: Karen Kohiruimaki.
• Ammunition Backpack: An accessory of her Vorpal Bunnies. The backpack they came in also has a special reload system, where all LLENN has to do is place the empty magwells against a pair of holes at the bottom sides of the backpack, which will slide new magazines in.
• An Arm and a Leg: In the final moments of Squad Jam 2, Fuka charges at Pito with a knife. However Pito who is holding LLENN by the arms tries to use her as a Human Shield, making Fuka hesitate. LLENN then tells Fuka to cut off her wrists and then kick her towards Pito, to which LLENN attacks by biting down on Pito's neck.
• Animal Motifs: LLENN's small size and 'ear' appendages on her hat bring to mind a pink rabbit. She's also extremely agile and nimble on her feet, bounding around the battlefield and out-speeding her enemies. Just to hone the analogy across, Memory Defrag offered tie-in quests for each new episode's trailer, which features literal pink rabbits as enemy mobs.
• Apologetic Attacker: After M wipes out an enemy squadron riding hovercrafts and blows the last survivor out of the water with a grenade, he tells LLENN to finish him off. LLENN apologizes to him before shooting him, then apologizes again after he's dead.
• The Apprentice: Becomes Pitohui's protege in GGO, being mentored in how to achieve greatness in the game.
• Ascended Fangirl: Is a big fan of Elsa Kanzaki. Little did she know her first in-game friend, Pitohui, was her idol Elsa herself.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: As she found out in the tutorial, LLENN's best combat style is to spray an opponent with a rapid succession of bullets rather than taking aim with a precision shot.
• Audience Surrogate: LLENN asks a lot of questions both for her and the audience to learn about how GGO works.
• Awesome by Analysis: By Squad Jam 2, LLENN has picked up a few tricks from M. She's able to analyse the sound of gunfire from a distance, noting how unnatural it sounds, along with observing the team positions on a map to figure out they were walking into a trap.
• Badass Adorable: Her GGO avatar is pint sized and cute, yet she's one of the most dangerous PKers in GGO. If anything, her 'adorable' features actually make her more of a badass, with her pink uniform making for excellent desert camouflage and her small body making her much harder to hit.
• Badass Bookworm: Given she's a college student she had to have performed well academically, but she's also seen studying hard on how to play GGO.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: Wears one round her neck, and is undeniably one of the best players in GGO. In the light novel during the final battle of Squad Jam 1, she forgets to pick up her cap after M shoots it off her head and instead wraps her bandanna around her head in the traditional look before taking on Team SHINC. She does the same in the manga, but that was because her cap had gotten destroyed by M shooting it.
• Badass in Distress: Ends pinned down under a bus while surrounded by False Lancers, a team of skilled snipers, and ends up nearly killed by one of them. Like in her battle against SHINC in SJ1, she's able to survive with the clever use of a Plasma Grenade.
• Beam Spam: In Fatal Bullet, her knife is considered a gadget, thus the now-vacant second weapon slot is instead occupied by the Sirius beam assault rifle, which serves as a long gun to compliment her P90.
• Berserk Button: The one thing that will make LLENN truly lose it is P-chan getting destroyed. When Eva shoots it and it breaks, she snaps and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Best Friend: Both Karen and Miyu consider each other to be their dearest friend, even as Karen makes more friends.
• Beware the Cute Ones: Her game avatar may look adorable, but her personality gets wild when she fights seriously. Even Miyu takes note to never do anything to piss Karen off in RL.
• Blank Stare: LLENN gives these to Clarence as the conversation keeps getting weirder.
• Blood Knight: By the end of the Test Play, LLENN has come to accept that she's one of these, allowing her to enter SJ4 with more gusto than she did 2 and 3, as well as commit more to her rivalry with SHINC.
• Born Lucky: Insists that she is a "lucky girl" when asked by M, elaborating in the novels that she has a loving family and doesn't want for anything. Her claim is supported at least once per Squad Jam.
  • In episode 4, M himself makes this remark, noting that when LLENN got sniped she got hit in the arm and missed taking damage to her vital parts.
  • In episode 5, Eva notes her luck too. When she snipes LLENN and misses the kill shot, allowing LLENN to escape.
  • Also from episode 5, Eva has LLENN pinned on the ground and shoots at her point blank, but several shots end up hitting her scan terminal which is an Immortal Object. LLENN then moves her head out of the way of several headshots, before Eva realizes she's run out of bullets.
  • Probably her luckiest moment is in Squad Jam 2 when after eliminating three teams at once, she is nearly out of ammo, a fact made worse since her P90 uses the rare 5.7x28mm cartridge. It just so happens that the last surviving member of the teams she just slaughtered also happens to equip a gun that not only uses that cartridge, but also uses P90 magazines as well.
  • In Episode 11, Pitohui fires a scatter of shots at her and only one bullet manages to hit. Pito remarks LLENN had the "luck of the devil" much like Eva did previously.
  • She got kissed by Elsa Kanzaki in Episode 12, twice. Though this one seems more like a case of Be Careful What You Wish For.
  • In Squad Jam 3, while hiding behind a train car, an enemy sniper shoots her using the gap between the track and the car and only grazes her foot. He had been aiming to take her leg off entirely and was one of the best snipers on his team, and curses her luck.
  • After their 110,000 yen drone is shot down by the NPC team during the Test Play, LLENN manages to catch it and prevent it from suffering further damage, with M noting that all they need to fix it are some replacement propellers... which they don't have on hand.
  • When Tanya ambushes LLENN and shoots at her from behind in SJ4, the most she does is get LLENN's shoulder despite firing in full-auto, which LLENN survives thanks to the smokescreen Fuka created.
  • Later in SJ4, she trips over a piece of rubble and as a result, avoids being shot in the head by a sniper.
  • In Volume 10, what appears to be a bit of bad luck ends up being this; during her fight with her Mirror Boss, she manages to track her down and attempts to open fire, only to suddenly realize that she accidentally turned on the safety of both Vor-Chans, leaving her a sitting duck for her doppelganger to finish off... only, her opponent makes no such actions. This allows LLENN to realize that her copy, while capable of free moment, is limited to mimicking any actions LLENN makes, giving her a means to defeat her by drawing her knife and slashing the imposter's throat, who's own mirrored nature means that her attempt at retaliating in kind is foiled by her trying to grab her own knife with the wrong hand.
  • Her first bought of luck in SJ5 sees a group of players she and Fuka were fighting with the LM getting ambushed by a separate group just as she and Fuka were about to end up at a disadvantage. Additionally, the last two survivors of the resulting battle are Locked Out of the Loop of the PM's true nature and proceed to carelessly chat by it, allowing LLENN to kill them both with ease.
  • Her luck is noted to have rubbed off on Shirley in SJ5. After her Big Damn Heroes, Lax of MMTM is ordered to hold fire when he notices LLENN and take over, causing him to just miss Shirley making her way down the bridge, which would have made her easy pickings for him.
  • LLENN's final, desperate survival strategy in SJ5, hanging off the ledge below the arena's bottomless pit just below the tower her team and SHINC were previously held up in, while MMTM and ZEMAL utterly destroy it, wouldn't cause the tower to fall in their direction. Needless to say, it doesn't.
• Big "WHY?!": Her reaction, a good couple of times, to SHINC seemingly joining Fire's alliance of squadrons.
• Brains and Brawn:
  • The brawn to M's brains. She acts as a decoy for the enemies and takes them down by using her small size and nimble speed, while M comes up with the plans and guides her on what to do. Ironic considering LLENN is physically smaller in height and build.
  • Inverted with Fuka, where LLENN is the more knowledgeable and experienced combatant who comes up with the plans, while Fuka is the newbie with high stats and lots of firepower.
• Breakout Character: LLENN is immensely popular in Japan. Ranked #2 in popularity in the Spring 2018 rankings of the magazine Newtype, just behind Zero Two.
• Bullet Time: There are a few instances where time slows down as LLENN dodges or ducks from bullets. In the final battle of the first Squad Jam, she actually pulls a Neo and leans backwards to evade a bullet fired at her head.
• Butt-Monkey: While LLENN certainly proves to be a "Lucky Girl", that doesn't stop her from ending up in some unfortunate scenarios. This often comes in the form of her team making her the leader and in turn the only one to appear on the scan so they can use her as bait, and just generally ending up in dangerous situations that she only gets out of due to quick thinking or her aforementioned luck. Additionally, as she lampshades before SJ5 before the next issue props up, every Squad Jam thus far has always had some factor that hindered her overall enjoyment, from impromptu death games, getting manipulated into getting stuck in a one vs all with her as the former, a bet that could see her married off if she loses, and a 10,000,000 Credit bounty, that the taker could turn into 1,000,000 Yen IRL, that guarantees that pretty much everyone will be gunning for her.
• Character Development:
  • She starts out as a shy Huge Schoolgirl who has no friends at her new college. In the course of the first volume, she, by participating in GGO, gains confidence in herself, overcomes her Height Angst and makes some friends.
  • Volume 6 has her coming to accept that she does GGO for fun. It may not seem like a very significant epiphany, but considering that she'd only entered the first two Squad Jams at the request of her friends, and was relatively apathetic toward the third one, it's a sign of how much she's changed.
• Character Narrator: Much like Kirito, certain points of the story are narrated by her. Unlike Kirito(and Lisbeth in "The Warmth of the Heart" and one scene in Volume 4), her sections are done in a third-person POV, rather than a first person perspective.
• Chekhov's Gun: It's stated that LLENN really likes tea, to the point that she uses precious inventory space to carry a thermos full of it along with biscuits so she can relax while out in the field. During the Five Ordeals' quest's Fourth Ordeal, that being killing a mechanical dragon that's impervious to bullets and has an electromagnetic field to prevent Plasma Grenades from activating near it, the group speculates that it being a machine might make water or other liquids effective against it, prompting LLENN to offer said thermos to use against it, which Pito throws at it and destroys with her shotgun to cover it in tea and knock it down, taking half it's HP.
• Child Soldiers: She's mistaken for one by one of the enemy soldiers in the special event in Volume 6, which is part of the reason why he elects to take her prisoner, and is horrified when she kills herself to escape.
• Chunky Updraft: When LLENN goes into rage mode over P-chan being destroyed, wind starts billowing around her like a Battle Aura.
• Clark Kenting: To keep a low profile in town so her identity as the desert PKer "Pink Devil" won't be exposed, she wears a khaki colored cloak. Though her pink sleeves, gloves, and hat can still be seen. In the LN she changes costumes to a green outfit in addition to wearing the cloak whenever she's back in Glocken.
• Close-Range Combatant: As LLENN realizes in her first fight against SHINC, she's at her best when she's using her Super-Speed to get up close and personal with P-Chan and her combat knife. In SJ4, Pito gifts her the "Vorpal Bunnies", handguns custom made by her with LLENN's close ranged style in mind with a part on it's barrel to allow repeated firing even when pressed against a target and parts on the slide to allow it to keep firing even if someone tries grabbing to stop it from moving.
• Color Motif: Dresses entirely in pink, earning her the nickname the "Pink Devil".
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Using M's plan, she uses her tiny size to hide in a suitcase on a highway, allowing her to get the jump on an elite squadron. After killing a few of the enemy players she uses their corpses as shields from gunfire^note corpses in GGO's BoB and Squad Jam modes are Immortal Objects for 10 minutes after death before finally killing the remaining survivors.
  • Later after the boulder she's hiding behind is sustaining heavy fire and giving way, she throws a plasma grenade to the other side and uses the explosion as cover to flee away.
  • When Eva has her pinned to the ground, LLENN throws her magazines which hits Eva in the head, distracting her enough to allow LLENN to escape her grip. In the final moments, LLENN uses P-chan as a shield from Eva's gunfire, costing LLENN her beloved weapon but saving her life and allowing her to continue fighting on with her knife.
• Comically Invincible Hero: Unlike Kirito, LLENN's overpoweredness is largely Played for Laughs, with her ridiculous speed in combat making her defeat other enemies in hilarious fashion.
• Comically Missing the Point: When the group gets Bottomless Magazines for the first part of the Five Ordeals, which includes unlimited Photon Sword Energy and barrel durability, LLENN is quite ecstatic due to how useful that is. It's only when the others point out that there has to be a reason they were given such a handy buff from the get go that it starts to sink in.
• Companion Cube: LLENN loves her P90 sub-machine gun a little too much, calling it "P-chan" and talks to it when no one is watching. She even bought an AirSoft™ P90 replica in real life. Taken to new levels when LLENN has an Imagine Spot and hears P-chan talking back to her!
• Confusion Fu: Both she and Fuka do this against Pito and Eva in Volume 10, donning each others outfits to trick Pito into going after Fuka thinking it'd be LLENN, and vice versa, allowing them to get the drop on their respective opponents.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Has several glaring differences to Kirito.
  • While Kirito is stoic and serious, LLENN is easily excited and full of energy. Kirito has no sense of fashion and always dresses in black, LLENN wanted something cute to wear which led her to dress in pink (although in real life, Karen has no interest in fashion, as being tall makes it difficult to find clothes her size). This in turn led to their respective monikers "Black Swordsman" and "Pink Devil".
  • It took a long time for Kirito's backstory to be revealed, while LLENN's story is told by the second episode. In addition, Kirito's story is all about accepting the virtual world as his new reality and he is the same within the game as in the real world, while LLENN specifically went in-game to escape real life and be someone else.
  • Both end up as being very powerful players, however while Kirito was introduced as having overshadowed everyone else due to having prior experience as a beta player, LLENN was a complete newbie who is shown to have a learning curve of gradual improvement over several episodes.
  • While both tend to play the close ranger in a Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy dynamic, there’s a very noticeable difference between their fighting styles. Kirito tends to be a Lightning Bruiser with all his stats being through the roof, allowing him to tank weaker attacks as well as dish out high damage. LLENN is a Fragile Speedster who strictly relies on evading attacks and barraging her enemies with a rapid succession of bullets, and while she can deal a lot of damage she can't take much punishment herself and goes down quite easily if she gets hit.
  • This also extends to their real life identities. Kazuto is a male gamer enthusiast introduced at the age of 14, remains a minor for the majority of the series, and looks very ordinary. Karen is a college girl and an adult by the time the story picks up, she's a VRMMORPG newbie, and her unusual height leads her to stand out among crowds.
• Cool Aunt: Karen's niece, who lives in in the same apartment as her with her sister and brother-in-law, absolutely adores Karen and looks for chances to spend time with her. Unfortunately, Karen's new GGO hobby, which she opts to keep secret from her family, forces to Karen deny some requests to spend time together.
• Cool Big Sis: Team SHINC totally admires her, both for her amazing GGO skills and her delicious sweets. After the First Squad Jam they ask her to help them improve.
• Counting Bullets: In Squad Jam 2, LLENN has started counting bullets or rather magazines, having heeded M's advice from the last Squad Jam. Calculating how many she has left and trying to save them for the showdown with Pito. Knowing she's running low as she had to waste several to deal with an ambush, she forcibly takes some from Clarence.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Her AGI-built character is best at using traps and high-speed ambushes to defeat enemies quickly, and the vast majority of her kills happen when she has the element of surprise. Enemies who attack first or are prepared for her give LLENN a much tougher fight.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Her very first PvP fight in GGO was over in less than 30 seconds, thanks to her accidentally managing to blend in the desert with her pink camo, her high speed, and her enemies not expecting any other players to be in the area.
  • Effortlessly wipes out the entirety of the Team Narrows by her lonesome in the first Squad Jam.
  • She does so again twice in Squad Jam 2, first against the team that spawned near her, and later the teams in the domes through use of a pink smokescreen provided by Fuka.
• Curtains Match the Window: Both in-game (brown) and in real life (black).
• Cuteness Proximity: Instantly becomes excitable after she finally gets an avatar with the appearance of a cute, short girl. She also squees over the P90, which is why she bought it. This also applies to other players who gush over how cute she is when they see her.
• Cute Bruiser: While she's primarily uses guns, she also shows she can be a tiny girl who packs a punch, by kicking, slashing, or biting her enemies dead, combined with her lethal speed.
• The Cutie:
  • Intentionally went to Virtual Reality games to become a pint-sized little girl and she plays up the cuteness for all its worth. She finally got one in GGO, which is why she stuck with the game.
  • Karen's natural beauty, excellent figure, coupled with her sweet and kind personality, makes her real self equally as cute as LLLENN is.
• David Versus Goliath: Most of her battles end up being this, with LLENN's short stature making her the David fighting the taller Goliath.
• Death Glare: Gives one to Pitohui just before they engage in their Final Battle during Squad Jam 2.
• Decoy Leader: In the first Squad Jam, she's registered as the squad leader of LPFM, but in reality she's the one who gets instructions from M. Subverted by the second Squad Jam where she's the proper leader compared to Fuka who is a newbie in comparison.
• Defiant to the End: After the groups gets almost decimated by ZEMAL's surprise attack in SJ4 and the leader, Vivi, approaches to request they surrender, she immediately plans to dash over and kill her with Kni-chan before the two guys behind her finish her off. Fuka puts an end to this plan though by claiming to be the leader.
• Deliberately Cute Child: As LLENN she loves playing up her cuteness, being proud of how short and adorable she is.
• Determinator: While M is busy cowering in fear of dying, LLENN vows to take on Team SHINC by herself, persevering despite the odds stacked against her.
• Devious Daggers: LLENN is a Weak, but Skilled Guile Heroine who was taught to use a combat knife by M, and she has used the one he gifted her extensively since the first Squad Jam, later painting it pink to match the rest of her attire. She later sacrifices said knife to get and edge against Pito in SJ3, and gets a new "Kni-Chan" after the fact.
• Double Tap: After M blows up the hovercraft on the lake and its driver falls onto shore, LLENN runs up to finish him off. Being that her gun is a bit weak, she hits him with about a dozen rounds... then another burst of fire... and then another burst of fire until the P90's 50-round magazine is empty.
• The Dreaded: Due to her PKing activity where she effortlessly wipes out other players by ambushing them in the desert, she becomes known as the "Pink Devil" in GGO.
  • Pitohui admits to Fuka that LLENN is actually this to her. In her history of VR Gaming, she had met many gamers better than her, but she's only met two people that she admits completely surpasses her. The first person is LLENN. Just looking at LLENN terrifies her, but it also makes her someone that she wishes to overcome. The other? A certain pretty-boy that she met and defeated her in a duel in the SAO Beta.
  • Also ends up becoming this to Fire after her Roaring Rampage of Rescue, which causes him to call off all attempts to get together with her.
• Establishing Character Moment: It took a whole episode to get round to it, but she finally shows off how dangerous a player she is when she ambushes an elite squadron by hiding in a suitcase, then killing off all of them on her own, using her speed to outmaneuver them while her tiny size makes it difficult for her to be hit.
• Even the Girls Want Her:
  • In Squad Jam 2 she attracts the affection of Clarence, who requests a kiss from her in exchange for the magazines LLENN demands, shortly before Clarence reveals she's a girl.
  • When meeting Pitohui/Elsa Kanzaki in real life, she's revealed to be romantically interested in Karen and steals her first kiss.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In SJ5, after LLENN and her temporary alliance of Vivi, David and Eva witness Shinohara's death at the hand of his Grenade Launcher wielding temporary partner, they're quick to lambast the culprit among themselves for their clear lack of honour... until LLENN remembers that she knows a certain someone who specializes in Grenade Launchers and would totally shoot a temporary teammate In the Back if given the chance and motive. Cue Fuka angrily demanding Vivi to come out and face her before she blows the mansion they're in up.
• Expressive Ears: It's subtle, but the 'ears' on her hat actually move with emotion. They droop when she's sad and raise up when she's surprised.
• Eye Scream: How she dies in SJ4, getting her eye crushed by a zombie monster as she's trying to save Fire.
• Famed In-Story:
  • She gained a reputation as a dangerous PKer who hangs out in the desert, known as the "Pink Devil".
  • After winning the first Squad Jam, pretty much everyone in GGO has heard of her and treats her like a celebrity.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: She keeps her online gaming a secret from her parents and never takes her Amusphere back to Hokkaido when she goes home on break, as they have an understandably low opinion of VRMMOs after the Sword Art Online incident.
• Flower Motif: The marking on her elbow and kneepads resemble four-leaf clovers, fitting with her "Lucky Girl" status.
• Foil:
  • To Sinon. Both girls were stigmatized in real life and started playing Gun Gale Online as a form of escapism where they could be someone else and potentially become a better person in real life. However Sinon did so as a form of immersion therapy to deal with her PTSD, while LLENN did so due to having a complex over her height and GGO happened to roll the avatar she wanted. Furthermore, Sinon is known to be calm and stoic in-game, but more fragile and vulnerable in real life; meanwhile, LLENN is energetic and excitable in-game, but mature and calm in real life. While it's implied in the light novels that Shino is desperate to have friends, at least before Endou takes advantage of Shino's trust, Karen isn't all that bothered by not having any real life friends at her college.
  • To Kirito. Both were players who migrated to GGO and ended up having the randomized avatar generator granting them a cute attractive avatar that wooed the male population, however while Kirito disliked this side-effect for quite a while, this was the very reason LLENN wanted to play to begin with. Both also gained reputations as exceptionally strong players by soloing mobs rather than being part of squads. However Kirito did so due to being a Beater who alienated himself from everyone, while LLENN was just too eager to play the game with her new short avatar that she never took the chance to make friends. Both also became Famed In-Story where they would gain color-themed aliases among other players.
  • To Silica. Silica is a young girl who wants to grow up and is disappointed in how she's still a kid with little to show off. LLENN is a college aged Huge School Girl who desires to be short and cute, escaping to VRMMO so she could be just that.
• Fragile Speedster: Fast as she may be, she can't take many hits. When she is shot in the arm by an SVD Dragunov's 7.62x54mmR from 600 meters, it takes off almost 2/3 of her health and requires her to use a medkit 3 times to fully recover. By contrast, a shot to M by the same bullet at the same range to the leg does only about a quarter's worth of damage to him and he recovers the damage from a single medkit. Her primary firearms class, submachine guns, is also on the weak side, and she has to expend quite a bit of ammo for each kill.
• Friendless Background: She had few friends growing up due to becoming an introvert after constant bullying over her tall height. Even after playing GGO, she doesn't have any friends besides those she meets in game, and Miyu (who now plays GGO with her).
• Fun Size: As LLENN she's less than 150 cm, which is the shortest known GGO avatar, and also the cutest.
• Gangsta Style: She tends to fire her P90 at a 45 degree angle when she is prone or low to the ground, which is justified because the P90 ejects its shell casings downwards and it would get awkward shooting perfectly straight in those positions.
• Gentle Giant: Karen's real life persona is this, being painfully shy due to insecurities stemming from her above average height, and a very sweet and kind girl once she opens up to you.
• The Gift: Despite being a GGO newbie who had been playing for a few months, LLENN had already taken down countless squads as a PKer on her own. Pitohui is impressed at what she managed to achieve for someone with such little experience and remarks she has natural talent.
  • It turns out, this is not a coincidence, as Miyu admits that Karen is unknowingly this in real life as well, with her ability to quickly learn how to do anything after seeing it done just once.
• Girls with Guns: By virtue of being a female player in a shooter game.
• Girl with Psycho Weapon: Don’t let her short stature and adorable appearance fool you. The P90 submachine gun she wields will turn all who stand in her way into Swiss cheese.
• Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak: Karen desperately wants to be short and cute, but had no problem with playing a shooting game with a predominantly male playerbase. She also cuts her hair short after the first Squad Jam, having only grown it out in order to make herself look a bit more girly.
• Glass Cannon: While she can inflict a lot of damage thanks to the rapid fire of P-chan, she can't take much damage herself. Being an AGI build she relies on avoiding being hit, but if she gets caught off guard, she sustains far more damage compared to the same attack that hit her partner M.
• Godlike Gamer: Following suit from Kirito, LLENN quickly becomes an elite gamer in Gun Gale Online. Despite only being a newbie, she quickly becomes an infamous player-killer and is able to destroy entire squadrons of enemy players by herself. It's up for debate how much of her feats are actual skill and how much is due to her short-statured avatar, being one of the rare speedy AGI builds, and "lucky girl" attribute, but nonetheless she ends up Famed In-Story and comes out as the champion of the first Squad Jam tournament. Pitohui even describes LLENN as "God's gift to FullDive."
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: In SJ4, LLENN has a "bad angel" try to convince her to abandon Shirley, arguing that Shirley's goal is to kill Pitohui, and that LLENN should only be concerned about surviving in order to avoid having to marry Fire. The rebuttal doesn't come from LLENN's "good angel," but from P-chan
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: LLENN often curses using the word "kuso"^note the equivalent of crap or dammit
• Guile Hero: Being a Weak, but Skilled player using a disadvantaged stat build, LLENN's victories often rely on using her wits.
  • In SJ1, she gets pinned down by Sophie and Tohma and her cover, a large rock, is going to broken apart from the heavy gunfire. Her solution is to use one of her Plasma Grenades to create something of a barrier that'll disintegrate the bullets and allow her to flee as it serves as a sort of smokescreen. Both Sophie and Tohma are impressed by this.
  • In SJ3, once she and Fuka reach the "There Is Still Time" with M lagging behind and at the risk of drowning in the incoming tide, she has Fuka use a few Plasma Grenades to create crater behind him for the water to go in, giving M time to catch up.
  • In her final confrontation with Pito in SJ3, she sacrifices her knife, new dubbed Kni-chan, against Pito's swing to lower her guard, before whipping out the knife she borrowed from Eva that she had hidden in her magazine pouch and cutting off Pito's hand with it.
  • After getting captured in the Test Play and finding that the NPC Soldier won't kill her no matter what she does, she takes advantage of her remaining available life to commit suicide by running headfirst into the wall, allowing to respawn outside of the castle.
  • During her rematch against Tanya in SJ4 after she luckily avoids being shot by her, she uses the cover of the smokescreen Fuka created to set up P-Chan so she'd fire on her own to draw Tanya over, sneaking up behind her to cut her neck with her knife. Unfortunately, Tanya notices the trap at the last moment and just barely avoids the attack, leading to a struggle.
  • In SJ4 again, when trapped under a bus and surrounded by a team of snipers, she harkens back to what she did in the first Squad Jam and how Fuka's accidental Plasma Grenade in SJ3 launched Tanya to safety, and comes up with the idea to place a grenade at the bottom of the bus and blowing it up, launching her from under the bus to the inside of a building, at the cost of only 20% of her HP.
  • In her Quick Draw Duel with Eva before she confronts Fire, she knows it's likely that Eva will draw first thanks to her Super-Reflexes and greater experience with pistols. So the moment they draw, she jumps up into the air and turns her body to avoid the bullet before shooting back, winning the duel.
• Guns Akimbo: Before buying P-chan she wielded a pair of Skorpion Vz.61 sub-machine guns, and she does spray bullets, but the increase in firepower more than makes up for the loss of accuracy.
  • In SJ4, due to the rule that certain areas are "pistols-only", she's gifted a pair of heavily customised AM. 45 handguns, guns unique to GGO based on the Detonic Combat Master, that their creator Pito has nicknamed "Vorpal Bunny". She whips them out in the climax when the group reaches the mall.]]
• Hearing Voices: During intense moments, LLENN will hear the voice of P-chan in Imagine Spots with the gun glowing and sprouting eyes. The first time it happens she freaks, but later on she brushes it aside as either an annoyance or goes along with the encouragement.
• Height Angst: In real life she's 183 cm tall and had been bullied throughout her life over her excessive height, even hitting a store panel by accident because she's so tall. This makes her taller than 99.98% of Japanese women. Even when not specifically bullied, people always stare at her and whisper about it where ever she goes. She desired nothing more than to be shorter and cuter, trying a multitude of VR games before finally finding GGO where her avatar was able to be a mere 150 cm tall.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Miyu, who she has openly called her best friend.
• Heroic BSoD: She lapses into this in Episode 11 where she loses her will to fight after seeing just how overpowered Pitohui is.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Not her rather, P-chan takes the kill shots for LLENN, having itself destroyed in the process. This sends LLENN into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • P-chan 2 meets the same fate, being damaged when LLENN used it to shield herself from gunfire. However this P-chan lasts a little longer and manages to explode when Pitohui tries to use it, thoroughly damaging itself in the process.
  • Her Knife, who she recently dubbed Kni-chan, does this in SJ3, being destroyed by Pitohui's Photon Sword to lower her guard so LLENN can stab her with the knife she borrowed from Eva.
• Heroic Second Wind: In Episode 11, after Team SHINC and Fuka all fall against Pito and M, LLENN finally stops hesitating and worrying about Pito, resorting to blindly charge in without a plan and let her instincts take over.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: In the light novel, she's hesitant to get involved in the second Squad Jam despite being the champion of the first, noting that she'd made more than a few mistakes in the course of the first.
• Hero of Another Story: The Protagonist of Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online, a separate story set within the canon Shared Universe of Sword Art Online, with no relation to Kirito and co at all.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform:
  • A full on pink combat suit. Subverted in that it actually does work for stealth in a desert environment (as seen in the manga's opening). Truth in Television — in real life, the British SAS used "desert pink" land rovers for desert ops. Played straight when she's in a forest and sticks out like a sore thumb.
  • Exploited in Squad Jam 2, where LLENN and Fuka devised a plan for Fuka to carry smoke canisters containing pink smoke to conceal LLENN.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Just barely Subverted in SJ5. Shortly after the castle rule comes into effect and the arena starts to crumble, a member of DOOM makes a beeline for the castle on a snow mobile and, when his efforts are stopped, detonates anyway. While just out range for it to be fatal, the lack cover causes a shockwave that forces everyone to lay down, but LLENN's small size and the lightness of her equipment almost causes her to be sent flying. It's only thanks to Eva placing an arm over her to keep her in place that prevents LLENN from being sent flying to her doom.
• Honor Before Reason: When she sees a scout monster about to kill Fire, instead of letting it finish the job, she shoots it and subsequently goes One-Woman Army on the horde that appears, simply because she wanted to confirm with Fire that his team comprised of his IRL friends and subordinates instead of mercenaries and wanted to ask him to apologize to them on her behalf for the mistake. That, and she found Fire simply surrendering to be anti-climatic.
• Hot-Blooded: She can get pretty fired up when she gets really into GGO.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The tiny tiny girl to M's huge guy. Inverted in reality. Check this trope entry under M's folder for details.
• Huge Schoolgirl: She's 183cm (6'0") tall IRL and has quite a complex about it, resulting in a poor social disposition. When getting into Gun Gale Online, she's elated that she can set her character's height to less than 150 cm.
• Hypocritical Humour: LLENN is shown to make or think up snide remarks in regards to other people's naming sense in regards to their guns, namely Fuka's. Her own naming sense however simply amounts to her taking the first few letters, or just the first letter period in one case, and simply adding "Chan" at the end.
• I Am Not Pretty: Even though she is quite beautiful, Karen never realizes this due to the bullying and insecurities she received since childhood due to her above-average height. She was therefore quite taken aback when M corners her at a wall Offline in a "confession" scenario commonly seen in Japanese Romantic Comedies, because she never dreamed that a man would find her attrative enough to "deserve" to be confessed to (let alone in such a heart throbbing manner), made doubly awkward by the fact he is significantly shorter than her... though it turned out to not be a romantic confession. All the same, poor Karen dosen't realize how her kind and caring personality, coupled with her natural good looks, makes her just as attractive and adorable as any stereotypical "small and cute" Bishoujo .
• Iconic Outfit: Her pink camouflage suit that she wears in battle, especially her rabbit eared cap which is particularly iconic.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Doesn't appear until Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online which didn't debut until 6 years after the original launch of the Sword Art Online light novels. Her anime counterpart took about the same amount of time, with the spin-off anime adaptation also taking 6 years after the initial airing of Sword Art Online.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • LLENN named her P90 sub-machine gun "P-Chan", and does the same with all subsequent ones. She will always replace it whenever it is destroyed.
  • In SJ3, she ends up calling her Combat Knife “Kni-Chan”.
• Important Haircut: Cuts her previously waist-length hair short after winning the first Squad Jam- she'd grown it out to make herself look more "girlish," even though it was difficult to maintain, so cutting it signifies that she's made progress coming to terms with herself. Funnily enough, when her family members see Karen with the new haircut, they initially think it's a Traumatic Haircut and that she must have gone through a bad breakup.
• In a Single Bound: LLENN displays an impressive ability to jump, being able to launch herself from the ground over the head of a grown man.
• In-Series Nickname: Is often called "chibi-chan"^note translating to "munchkin" or "shorty" by those who don't know her gamer name. It becomes a bit of an Insult of Endearment with Eva.
• Instant Expert: Part of her Ace status is that she's capable of picking up something once and being able to get the hang of it soon after.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: In Episode 5, after finding out M is at risk of being killed by Pitohui in real life and he's scared of dying, LLENN declares she would handle the last battle on her own while allowing M to hide. The episode is even titled "Leave the Last Battle to Me".
• In the Hood: While in town she wears a khaki colored cloak to hide her pink attire.
• Kawaiiko: Her entire motivation behind playing GGO in the first place was to be cute. She does everything in-game to do so from acting like a Deliberately Cute Child and customizing all of her clothes to pink.
• Killer Rabbit: Don't underestimate the small girl in the bright pink outfit and floppy rabbit-eared hat.
  M: That pink bunny's fangs are very sharp.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: In the anime, she's seen petting a white cat in her lap while watching a news story about VRMMOs. You can later see a few pictures of that cat around her apartment.
• Laser Blade: In SJ4, to counter Team DOOM's suicide attacks without causing excessive damage that could set off their bombs, LLENN borrows Pito's Photon Sword to charge them singlehandedly, banking that they'd try to ignore to take out the others, to slash through them without detonating the bombs. Come SJ5, she includes a Photon Sword, once again lent by Pito, as part of her Alternative Gear for the the PM, where she would slash at enemies through the small gap in the lid.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Her attitude in the second Squad Jam is far more serious, dropping her giddy attitude for a soldier-like mentality, due to the lives of Pito and M being on the line. She's now the one disciplining Fuka and explaining their approaches, while analyzing and formulating plans much like M did for her.
• Little Miss Badass: Tiny and cute as she is, she's extremely deadly on the battlefield and not to be underestimated.
• Lonely Rich Kid: In addition to having few friends because of her height, Karen is fairly well off, since her parents pay for her apartment and give her a generous amount of spending money.
• Man Bites Man: LLENN kills Pitohui by biting her neck and depleting her remaining HP.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: She's the youngest of 5 children (two sons and three daughters). The apartment she's renting in Tokyo is the same building where her oldest sister lives with her husband and children.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It gets left vague if P-chan talking is all in LLENN's head or if there really are greater forces at play. P-chan the second even appeared to be able to protect LLENN on its own when she wasn't holding it. The light novels hints at the possibility that Karen is a natural VR gamer and P-chan is just the way her instincts are communicating with her during times of extreme stress.
• Meaningful Name: LLENN is simply the last three letters of Karen's name in Japanese phonetics.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Overlapping with Cuteness Proximity, as LLENN she looks like a little girl and acts like one. Although this may also be a case of her playing the Deliberately Cute Child.
• Mook Horror Show: She ultimately scares Fire away from pursuing her by doing this on the monsters she summoned saving him from a scout monster, culminating in her throwing a knife into one's back and killing the last one by biting their neck.
• More Dakka: LLENN's weapon is a P90 sub-machine gun that specializes in spraying out round after round of prolonged automatic fire. She was advised to choose automatics to compensate for her small size and imperfect aim, which she has stuck with since.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: The knife M gave to her proves useful. She draws it after P-chan gets destroyed in the final battle with Eva, taking advantage of the close range combat as well as her speed and agility.
• Nice Girl: A very kind person at heart. She's polite to all those she comes across, is an Apologetic Attacker to her enemies, and when M is too scared to carry on she goes to take on the enemies by herself while letting M hide in safety, so that he can resign if she loses.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: By Squad Jam 2, LLENN has become very serious in battle now that lives are at stake. She tries to end a fight by holding one guy at gunpoint and demanding him to tell his team that he killed her. When he asks what would happen if he refused, she wastes no time in shooting him dead then and there before continuing her slaughter.
• Oh, Crap!: Suffers a massive one in SJ5 when she and Vivi end up passing a member of DOOM in the mist, the both of them immediately trying to make as much distance between them and him as possible before he exploded.
• Older Than They Look: In real life she's a college student, but in-game her avatar is often mistaken for a kid.
• One-Woman Army: She can take out whole squadrons on her own. In the desert, her pink attire offers her perfect camouflage, her small size allows her to hide in unexpected places and makes it hard for gunfire to hit her, and her low weight makes her very nimble and fast on her feet. All of these factors together make her a very deadly player.
• Online Alias: LLENN.
• Only Sane Woman: Ends up becoming this in Squad Jam 3. Poor LLENN has to deal with Pitohui's eccentric personality, Fuka who would egg her on, and M who can't go against Pitohui's wishes.
• Ordinary Highschool Student: A college school student who suffers from Height Angst and being stigmatized, but other than that Karen had a pretty average life prior to the start of the series.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: As powerful as LLENN is, she finds herself outclassed by Pito after witnessing her slaughter Team MMTM and momentarily loses her will to fight.
• Pink Means Feminine: She was initially out to look for girly clothes, but as GGO offered none, she instead decided to customize her entire outfit to pink, including her gun! She inadvertently discovered that this also offered perfect camouflage in the desert.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: As LLENN, she's under 150cm tall and often mistaken for a little kid. Yet she's an exceptional GGO player, being an One-Woman Army who can annihilate entire squadrons on her own. Being pint-sized makes aiming at her difficult.
• Player Killing: She found fun in PvP by ambushing players in the desert. She ended up being well-known for this and gained the moniker the "Pink Devil."
• Plot Armor: While it's not as blatant as Kirito, there are many instances where LLENN is saved through sheer luck. Unlike Kirito, it's lampshaded in-universe as her being Born Lucky.
• Pride: As LLENN she's very proud of how cute and short she is, giggling whenever she hears passerby remarks on her tiny size. It's to the point where even insults towards her about her being short will make her happy.
• The Protagonist: She is the viewpoint character of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online. This is her story.
• Rage Breaking Point: Hits this is SJ3 after she realizes that Pitohui lied about being the Traitor and that it was actually LLENN, forcing her into a three vs one scenario against Pito, Fuka and M. Understandably pissed, she drops a Precision F-Strike and vows to kill Pitohui, a mindset that understandably worsens when Pito jokingly tries to deflect the blame onto her.
• Red Baron: The "Pink Devil" due to her pink camouflage attire and being a dangerous PKer. She continues being known as that name in the Squad Jam tournaments, which other players utter with fear.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: LLENN has red-tinted eyes, and when she becomes truly angry, her eyes turn glowing pink with rage.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • The more excitable red to M's serious blue. Though this changes by the second Squad Jam where LLENN has also adopted a more serious attitude.
  • The calmer blue to Miyu/Fuka's more energetic red. Even in GGO where LLENN is more excitable than in real life, she's still the more passive and mature one compared to Fuka.
• Reluctant Hero: She was hesitant in participating in both the first and second Squad Jams, with her eventual entering due to the circumstances giving her little choice. This is especially the case for SJ2 where she's forcibly drawn in due to the threat of Pito putting her own life and the life of M on the line.
• Replacement Goldfish: She finds a replacement P90 sub-machine after her first one got destroyed in the previous Squad Jam, which she also names P-chan for convenience.
• Rivals Team Up:
  • Teams up with SHINC after informing them that she's in to stop Pito from killing herself if she dies.
  • Does this again with Eva in SJ3. After it’s revealed that she was her team’s traitor and that Pito tricked her into three vs one scenario, Eva pulls a Big Damn Heroes and they work together to take down LPFM.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: The Final Battle of SJ4 ends up being LLENN versus a horde of zombie-like monsters, which started because she shot a scout monster that was about to kill Fire. This ends in her death when two go after him when he picks up the Vorpal Bunny she discarded, and she loses her eye killing the last one.
• Rookie Red Ranger:
  • The leader of the LM squadron in the first Squad Jam, but far less experienced than M. In her debut episode, M is actually the seasoned player and the one calling all the shots over radio, while her squad leader status is mainly so she can act as a decoy for the satellite scanners.
  • Averted by Squad Jam 2 where she's the previous Squad Jam Champion and the seasoned veteran, able to guide her new teammate Fuka using her past experiences.
• Samus Is a Girl: Due to how short and child-like her avatar is, several players were unable to tell if she was a girl or a boy.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the last battle of Squad Jam 3 against Pitohui. With the ship minutes from completely sinking, the two approach one another to finish things in hand-to-hand combat. As they get near, LLENN pulls out her knife, and Pitohui... takes out and activates two lightsabers. To Pitohui's complete shock and surprise, LLENN immediately bolts out of there. When confronted about it, LLENN yells at her that there's no way she's going to fight that with just a knife.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: While Karen usually dresses rather plainly, she ends up wearing a elegant blue dress for a party at her father's company, an illustration of which can be seen in Volume 7 where this occurs.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy:
  • The short range sub-machine gunner to M's long range sniper.
  • Also the short range sub-machine gunner to Fuka's long range grenadier.
• Shrinking Violet: Karen is quite shy and introverted in real life, in stark contrast to LLENN who is easily excited and overly cheerful about everything.
• Signature Headgear: Wears a pink bunny-eared hat as part of her battle outfit.
• Skewed Priorities: In Episode 9, while she's massacring the teams inside the dome, she's more concerned with the ammo she's expending, muttering "what a waste" as she shoots, rather than worrying about the gunfire that's aimed at her. Downplayed considering that, while the gunfire is a more immediate problem, running out of ammo before facing Pito is a legitimate concern.
• Slasher Smile: LLENN flashes one in Episode 9 when she holds Clarence at gunpoint and declares she would take all her magazines.
• Smash Sisters: Has this dynamic with Fuka. The two of them are best friends and have the utmost trust in one another on the battlefield.
• The Speedster: LLENN is one of the few GGO players with a pure AGI build. When combined with her small size and lightweight, she is granted Super-Speed and the ability to blitz around the battlefield and outrun even moving vehicles.
• Spiteful Suicide: Of a sort. At the end of SJ5, with everyone but her, three members of SHINC and a in-hiding member of DOOM dead, LLENN requests that tournament end with a Duel to the Death between her and Eva, and that if she wins she wants Anna or Tohma to finish her off. Her reasoning is that she wants to stick it to whoever posted the bounty by making them lose their credits despite the likely purpose of it, eliminating LLENN early, being rendered moot at that point. The last DOOM member's sudden appearance and Eva kicking her off the ledge to save her from the explosion prevents this from happening though.
• Spoiled Sweet: She's extremely wealthy due to her father being the CEO of a major corporation and her parents give her plenty of spending money, but she's also a Nice Girl and, as LLENN, is also very cheerful, if a bit of a First-Person Smartass in both cases.
• Squeaky Eyes: When M has a breakdown and begs for his life, as LLENN looks on in disbelief her eyes make audible sounds as she blinks.
• Statuesque Stunner: At 183cm, Karen is taller than 99.98% of all women in Japan, and 99.42% of all men!
• Stock Light-Novel Hero: LLENN starts off as an ordinary college student who decides to try out VR gaming. Upon landing in Gun Gale Online she randomly receives a short and cute avatar. By coloring all of her gear pink she discovers this is a stealth advantage in the many deserts of the world and becomes Famed In-Story as "The Pink Devil". While the harem aspect is mostly absent, she still ends up garnering a few admirers like Clarence and Elsa.
• Super-Speed: Has speed that may very well put Asuna to shame. When running, she's known to blitz right across a map and is so fast that enemy players have trouble hitting her. Pitohui explicitly states it takes a moving vehicle to be able to catch up to her running speed.
• Sword and Gun: Knife and gun to be exact. Ever since M taught her to use the knife in close quarters combat, LLENN has favored using the knife every once in a while.
• Sweet Tooth: LLENN seems quite fond of cookies. She's constantly seen eating them in GGO, fully conscious of the fact she can eat as much as she likes in VR without having to worry about getting fat.
• Taking the Bullet: Her gun, P-chan, which may or may not be alive, takes several kill shots meant for LLENN at the cost of itself.
• Taking You with Me: As a last resort with LPFM and SHINC cornered by MMTM and ZEMAL, she decides to strap a Grand Grenade to herself to perform a Suicide Attack. Once Pito and M show up with their ghost army to take MMTM and ZEMAL off-guard, she instead uses the grenade normally to take out David.
• Talented, but Trained: As mentioned above, LLENN possesses The Gift when it comes to virtual reality being a Godlike Gamer who rapidly became a top player, but it really helps that she received special training from seasoned veterans Pitohui and M who honed her combat prowess many folds higher.
• Talking Weapon:
  • In LLENN's Imagine Spot, P-chan sprouts eyes and starts talking to her!
  • In a surprise twist, instead of P-Chan the 3rd talking, it’s actually LLENN’s knife, who states that It Has Been an Honor and asks for a nickname like P-Chan has.
• Tempting Fate:
  • While setting out to fight Team SHINC, she takes inventory of her health and ammunition, and is confident she can win with what she has. Shortly afterward, she gets shot and seriously injured.
  • While doing karaoke with Miyu, Karen doubts that she'll ever meet M in real life. When she gets home, she meets him at her apartment.
• Token Mini-Moe: She isn't really one given her age in real life, but all of her friends in GGO still treat her like one given her short stature, even Fuka. Amusingly, Elsa Kanzaki continues to give her said treatment in real life even when she's far shorter than Karen is.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • In Episode 3, her aim has greatly improved from her time since doing the tutorial to participating in Squad Jam, along with her battle experience which has vastly increased her stats.
  • By the time of the second Squad Jam, LLENN had gained a lot of combat smarts, planning out a strategy and keeping Fuka disciplined, not unlike what M did for her.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Is very fond of tea, constantly shown drinking it during her down time. One time, Fuka even thinks LLENN is so happy because of the ice tea she's drinking at the time.
• Training Montage:
  • LLENN has a brief one when she takes the tutorial, showing her trying out various guns before finding she works best with a sub-machine gun.
  • She later has another one when M assesses her combat abilities, giving her lessons on top of the skills she already has.
• Trap Master: In addition to AGI, she put a lot of skill points into her DEX stat, which enables her to set up booby traps in-game. These are most commonly grenades rigged up to trip wires.
• True Blue Femininity: While her GGO avatar LLENN is pink, Karen's real life clothing is mostly blue. It is a reflection of being nice and friendly, but also more mature than LLENN.
• Underestimating Badassery: Her tiny size will often lead others to underestimate her, getting caught off guard by her sheer speed.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Or, more accurately, Unskilled But Fast. She is still considered a GGO newbie for a large portion of the series, but becomes one of the most dangerous players due to her sheer speed, small size, and later her powerful P90 sub-machine gun, P-chan. She's able to come out victorious in fights up against more experienced players because of the advantages her avatar gives and sometimes just sheer luck.
• Use Your Head: In SJ3, with Pito keeping her in place so she could stab her with her Photon Sword, LLENN resorts to headbutting Pito at fast speeds to force her to let go.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Team SHINC come to see her as one after the amount of difficulty she gives them in the first Squad Jam, especially Eva who becomes her rival.
  • By the time of Squad Jam 2, virtually every team sees her as one due to being the previous tournament champion.
  • To Pitohui, who is the top Squad Jam player alongside LLENN and the only one who is able to give her a satisfying fight.
• Weak, but Skilled: By the time of the second Squad Jam, LLENN qualifies as this due to her build. As noted in the main series, the more powerful guns require higher STR to use (save for some rare guns available as drops like Yamikaze's), whereas LLENN is a full-AGI build using purchased weapons. That being said, her speed and small stature let her take a sub-optimal build and wreak amazing levels of havoc.
• What You Are in the Dark: In SJ4 after Clarence's Heroic Sacrifice, she briefly considers leaving Shirley, who's trapped in the Humvee that's stuck on the ice, to drown since she can't afford to die before Fire and Shirley might try and kill Pito. P-Chan however convinces her to save her.

Elsa Kanzaki / Pitohui

Elsa Kanzaki / Pitohui

Voiced by: Yōko Hikasa (Japanese), ReoNa (singing voice, Japanese), Allegra Clark (English)

^{Click here to see Elsa}

Pitohui is a mysterious woman and one of the few female players in GGO, who becomes fast friends with LLENN. One day, she asks the protagonist to participate in team battle royale tournament known as "Squad Jam", kickstarting the light novel's plot. In real life, she is Elsa Kanzaki, an upcoming singer and Karen’s idol.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Her time as The Leader of Team BTRY was... rather tenuous, even if the others agreed to let her lead. Her [Dragons were David and Eva, the former outright hating her and the latter being wary of her, and Cole was planning to backstab her and everyone else. The only ones who could be seen as having no issue with her leadership are Ervin, who she effectively loses the loyalty of upon killing his team against her word and then literally backstabbing him, and Tomtom, who didn't seem to care who was in charge so long as he got to shoot something.
• Abusive Parents: Zig-Zagged. Both of Elza's parents were a famous classical musician duo who kept her birth a secret from the general public in fear that she'd possibly be kidnapped for ransom. However, their focus on their career made them very neglectful, leaving her with babysitters and expensive tutors most of her life, only saw her in person once every month to every half a year, and they were practically unreachable every time Elsa nearly died to her respiratory disease. They're also hinted to have been massive Control Freaks despite their neglect, not allowing her to watch TV, dictating that she never listen to anything other than classical music and wanting to send her to a private boarding school after she recovered from her disease, much to the anger of her maternal grandparents who were disgusted with the neglect she suffered and wanted to take her in the give her a normal life, which Elsa quickly agreed to.
• Adaptational Curves: Downplayed. It's not noticeable for the most part, but Pito is shown to be a bit bustier in the anime than she is in the Light Novel's illustrations.
• Adaptational Dumbass: While it doesn't change what ultimately happens to her, she doesn't stop her team's sniper from shooting at Shirley as she runs away, with her only surviving because she was carrying a teammate's corpse to save them and unintentionally used them as a human shield. In the anime, she explicitly orders her team to not shoot, deeming her Not Worth Killing. This makes her near-death experience at Shirley's hand ultimately due to her own arrogance.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In regards to how she handled Goushi for the first time in the anime compared to the light novels. In the light novels, although Goushi had been stalking her, he did genuinely rescue her from an attacker to which she invites him back to her home before she knocks him out, tied him up, and physically abuses him. The anime omits Goushi's rescue and had her inviting him back while he was stalking her. So while it doesn't make her any less nasty, she doesn't come off as an Ungrateful Bitch in the anime.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Her photon sword in the novels has a bluish-white blade whilst in the anime it has a red blade.
• Admiring the Abomination: When Pitohui heard about the PKers from Sword Art Online, rather than being disgusted and horrified by them like normal people would, Pito is entranced by them believing she could either be one of them or have killed the PKers herself in the name of justice.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Pitohui's Death Seeker attitude and complete disregard for the safety of her allies led her to be shunned by all squadrons of GGO until no one would accept her.
• Always Someone Better:
  • As skilled as Pitohui is in GGO, even she did not make it past the preliminaries of the third Bullet of Bullets tournament. A reminder to the audience that this is a Lighter and Softer series consisting of more casual gamers, with Pitohui dominating fights because the caliber of her opponents is a lot worse than the best-of-the-best during Phantom Bullet.
  • In Volume 5, Pito says she's met two players who she considers stronger than her, both physically and mentally. The first is an SAO player (implied to be Kirito), who'd forfeited a duel against her despite having taken off most of her HP, conceding her strength despite Pito being two levels below him. The other is LLENN, as mentioned elsewhere.
• Ambiguously Evil: As Pitohui, she's a crazed hedonist who believes steadfast in the G.I.F.T, but she's surprisingly decent when you get to know her. It becomes increasingly less ambiguous as the series progresses and she verges closer to Affably Evil.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • During her fight against LLENN in SJ3, LLENN is able to use Eva's knife to cut both her arms.
  • Ends losing a leg to David's grenade during the airport fight in SJ4.
  • Loses an arm in the mall battle when she cuts a water container that was thrown at her in half with her Photon Sword, creating a steam explosion.
• Animal Motifs:
  • Pitohui are several species of real life birds known to be toxic. Much like these birds she may be beautiful on the surface, but she can be poisonous underneath.
  • Her light novel artwork draws her like a snake. Exemplified in volume 5's afterword image showing a rabbit and a snake, representing LLENN and Pitohui.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Despite what led to their relationship and the general abusiveness of it, there are hints that Pito does care for M... in her own way.
  • For one thing, she must be aware of how much Goushi enjoys the physical and even verbal abuse she puts him through.
  • Despite dragging him into her impromptu Death Game in SJ2 and even expressing joking disappointment that he didn't die during the "Ten-Minute Massacre" since it would have given her an excuse to avenge him, she does quickly warn M to take cover upon realizing that SHINC killed Sophie so they can bring out a gun to deal with his shield.
  • She hints in a conversation with Fuka that she was rather jealous when M started getting some female attention after losing weight and gaining a better fashion sense... which she tried to fix by beating his face in.
  • The Prologue of Volume 10 reveals that Goushi's the only one to know of her past, with her usually lying to other people about it when asked. Though she does state that what she told him could also be lies, the way the narrator describes it suggests that this is the truth.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • She quickly figured out that Shirley was the one who saved her from David and Jake's pincer attack, as she reveals to her after they meet up again.
  • She knows David well enough to know that even if he found a working train, not only would he not use it himself because of the target it'd paint on his back, but he would Booby Trap it for anyone who thinks to use near the endgame, allowing LPFM, SHINC and T-S to use it to escape after entering carefully and disarming the traps.
• Ax-Crazy: Pitohui's favorite past time is going ballistic on the battlefield. She lets loose cackling like a lunatic while she pumps enemies with lead or bashes their faces in with brute force.
• Badass Driver: When her and LLENN's trike gets wrecked by David's grenade in SJ4, she's able to stop it safely despite it missing it's left front wheel and several other parts. And as revealed a bit later, she was able to do this while missing a leg.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Subverted. In the final stretch of the Five Ordeals quest, she once again becomes the Final Boss, with the assistance of Eva and Tohma, when she opts to Shoot the Dog at Suuzaburou's request, to the opposition of Fuka and LLENN . She ultimately wins the conflict, scoring her first ever win against LLENN, but reveals after that she never intended to kill Suuzaburou, realizing from her knowledge of the Novelist's books that it was a Secret Test of Character, and merely pretended that she was for the sake of getting a fight out of LLENN.
• Batman Gambit: In Volume 10, she manages to con a fight out of LLENN by pretending to be willing to Shoot the Dog, likely realizing that Fuka would be opposed, prompting LLENN to side with her, Shirley would join their side for either similar reasons or to kill her, that Eva and Tohma would back her up to make for an even match.
• Beneath the Mask: While she usually maintains a calm, polite visage, it's later shown that she really has a dangerously psychotic side kept under lock and key, which gets unleashed in its full terrifying glory whenever she's in the heat of battle.
• Berserk Button: The one thing able to send Pitohui into a surge of rage is telling her Sword Art Online was a terrible game, which she desired more than anything to be a part of.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In the climax of SJ4 when David attacks LLENN and Eva, she drops down in front of him and stabs him with her Photon Sword, getting killed when he unloads his pistol into his stomach.
  • When it looks like LLENN and the rest of the team is gonna be overrun and killed by MMTM in SJ5, she returns as part of its ghost rule leading an army of players to disorientate MMTM, allowing LLENN and successfully counter and finish them off.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Does this to Anna in SJ4 when she and M mount an attack against the rest of SHINC while LLENN deals with Tanya.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Tells LLENN she had no interest in music and can't even read sheet music, when she's actually a famous singer in real life.
  • She claims that she can't participate in the Squad Jam herself due to attending her best friend's wedding. In reality it's because her real life singer self is holding a concert.
  • When she meets Nishiyamada in Gun Gale Online, she claims that she pretends to be ruder than usual online. LLENN knows that Pito's online self is her true personality.
  • Most of what she shares about her life story when doing karaoke with the rest of her team and SHINC in Volume 10 is completely false, with the narrator saying "That was a lie" for most of her statements, but sometimes saying it's a half-truth and occasionally even the entire truth. Goshi knows the truth already, and Karen and Miyu suspect that she's lying, although SHINC seems to believe it.
• Blofeld Ploy: After M brings her Fuka as a hostage, Pito decides to shoot M instead, because he'd been covertly helping her enemies.
• Blood Knight: As an Ax-Crazy Death Seeker she lives for bloodshed. She becomes visibly disappointed whenever one of her opponents resigns or takes their own life before she gets a chance to kill them.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Suffers one in SJ2 at the hands of Shirley, who shoots her from cover while Pito is too distracted by LLENN approaching. She's able to survive thanks to M's quick reaction and her high stats, but coming so close dying causes her to suffer an excitement-induced breakdown and pass out.
  • The anime depicts her suffering a non-fatal one during her counter-offensive against MMTM, with one of David's bullets managing to get her head and cause her to flinch before she charges them.
  • In SJ5, Shirley is once again able to catch Pito off-guard, this time by allying with a member of DOOM to make an impromptu smokescreen that would bait her and the others into making a safe bee-line to the castle. Unlike last time however, the shot ends up being surefire kill thanks to Shirley's exploding bullets. It's noted that if it wasn't for GGO's censorship limits, it probably would have been a case of Off with His Head!.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • While Karen's happy that Pito didn't end up killing herself, especially considering that she's also Elsa, she admits that she can't look at Elsa the same way after Elsa kisses her twice. She'll just stick to playing GGO with her.
  • While David, the Leader of MMTM, makes it no secret that he hates Pitohui, he at least had a degree of respect for her as a fellow GGO player. This changes after she murders Ervin after breaking her promise to save his teammates and having the gall to claim that he should have been grateful for giving him a Hope Spot, with David renouncing any remaining respect he had and opting to kill her himself.
• Cast as a Mask: Elsa Kanzaki's singing voice is provided by a different voice actress to Pitohui, to hide the fact they are the same person.
• Casual Danger Dialog: In Squad Jam 2, after trying to shoot a guy hanging off a cliff, she boredly notes he survived getting shot and that was the reason she doesn't like pistols. The fact she's able to say "you're still not dead" in such a casual tone is really notable. She also casually wishes them farewell before killing them both with a thrown grenade.
• Character Development: After SJ2, Pito has begun to drop some of her Team Killer tendencies over the course of the series.
  • In SJ3, she's able to work well with the newly formed LPFM, and as The Leader of Team BTRY, she proves to be a surprisingly effective leader. Sure, she turns out not to be a true member and backstabs all of them, but it's notable.
  • In the Test Play, She's the one to suggest all of the Squadron's coming together, sharing the information her team acquired, unlike what most must have suspected when she suggested it, she doesn't intentionally send anyone to get themselves killed and commits to the assault with the other team's to the end.
  • In SJ4 during the fight with MMTM, She intentionally takes the brunt of the damage from a grenade David fired at her and LLENN to keep the latter safe. And later, when LPFM and SHINC teams up when Fire betrays the latter, she actually saves Eva's life by tripping her over and preventing a bullet from hitting her in the head. However, that doesn't stop her from leaving 003 from T-S to die after his carelessness gets his Grenade Launcher destroyed, removing some dead weight while motivating the rest of T-S to fight harder to avenge their comrade, as Fuka deduces.
• Cherry Tapping:
  • In Episode 9, after slaughtering the several squadrons of players who had allied together against her team, she keeps two survivors alive. When asked why she was prolonging their demise, she claimed that she was waiting for one of them to reach for his gun as otherwise she'd feel guilty about shooting someone defenseless. Then just before she kills them she instructs the two to radio their bosses and tell them in a pitiful voice that they got their asses kicked and to get revenge on them.
  • In Episode 11, Pito snipes off Fuka's legs followed by her arms while keeping her alive. M keeps telling her to finish Fuka off, but Pito insists on leaving her till later and waiting for LLENN to show up.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Pitohui has a long history of betraying her teammates, laughing as they get depleted of HP and will not hesitate to throw a grenade at a monster even if her teammate is standing right next to it. She does so again in Squad Jam 2 when Team KKHC try to strike up an alliance with her, after she declines she shoots them all dead as soon as their backs are turned.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Favors the color black in contrast to LLENN's pink, whether it signifies she's evil or not is left vague.
  • Pitohui owns a red photon sword, in contrast to Kirito's purple. While Pitohui may be a main character, she is not a hero.
• Combat Sadomasochist: The bigger the risk of dying, the more thrilled she gets. Her obsession with life-threatening challenges caused her to impose a rule on herself and her friends; if any of them die in-game, they will be killed in real-life.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Much like LLENN is a Contrasting Sequel Main Character, Pitohui really distances herself from the other antagonists of Sword Art Online. For instances she's part of the main cast, being a deuteragonist and not a straight up villain. In addition, she's also painted with a lot of sympathy and the main goal of the story is for the heroine to save her life, rather than stopping her from taking the lives of others.
• Cool Big Sis: She dubs herself as LLENN's onee-san. Seeing how LLENN was a little girl and a GGO newbie, Pito took LLENN under her wing and taught her the ins and outs of the game.
• Cowardly Lion:
  • Played With. While she ultimately reveals in SJ2 that she’s legitimately afraid of dying, she is addicted to the thrill she gets from ending up in such scenarios and frequently goes out of her way to put himself into high-risk events.
  • In SJ3, she reveals to Fukaziroh that she’s actually scared of LLENN. Despite this, likely due to the fact that she’s crazy, she instead opts to fight her head-on instead of running away.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Virtually every battle Pitohui partakes in has her laying one of these on her enemies. In Squad Jam 2, she proceeded to massacre over 20 players on her own in under 30 seconds.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: Her real life counterpart has an unusually high-pitched and nasal voice, befitting someone who looks like a child.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Wears an all black attire, but is quite a friendly person. Averted over time as she shows her immoral side, and actually plays up the Dark Is Evil theme quite well.
• Death Seeker:
  • For reasons unexplained, Pitohui had sought death for a long time. Sword Art Online being a real life death game was the perfect opportunity to realize her ambition, but she ended up missing out on this chance and hit the Despair Event Horizon. Memento Mori describes in great detail of how her approach to life is "I want to forget about living".
  • Also, she's playing GGO with the outdated NervGear, which doesn't have the AmuSphere's safety precautions of monitoring the player's heart rate, auto-disconnecting if they're overstimulated or pass out, and a different full-dive system that is unable to kill the players like happened in SAO.
  • Finally averted in Episode 11. For all her posing as a Death Seeker, Pito reveals that ultimately she is still scared of dying. If she weren't, then life-or-death combat wouldn't be so fun!
  • Volume 10 reveals a possible origin for these tendencies. When she was young, she suffered from a respiratory disease that nearly killed her a good number of times. This prevented her from leaving the house and she had to be homeschooled, and her parents were hardly around and left her care to various housekeepers and doctors. While her sheltered upbringing meant that she viewed this as a normal, a part of her was sick of the state of things and just wanted the disease to just kill her already. It was to the point that when she miraculously recovered from it, she felt disappointed. It's also Implied that the death of her grandparents, who took her in after she recovered from her disease and cared for her when she returned to Japan, worsened the issue due to her thinking that dying could reunite them.
• Depraved Bisexual: Is incredibly abusive to M both online and real life and frequently uses him as a sextoy (which he immensely enjoys), while also acting really flirty with LLENN (who doesn't appreciate it), even getting aroused during their fight.
• Deuteragonist: Pitohui serves as the antagonistic variant during Squad Jam 2. The story arc is told from two points of view, from that of Team LF (LLENN and Fukaziroh) and Team PM4 (Pitohui and M). Once all other teams are eradicated, these two teams come into direct opposition with each other and do battle, including the climactic fight between LLENN and Pitohui.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Goshi had been stalking Elsa, before seeing her get mugged where he saves her life. Elsa invites him back to her apartment where she proceeds to knock him out, tie him up, and beat the ever loving snot out of him before blackmailing him into serving her.
• Dissonant Laughter: In Squad Jam 2, seeing several teams conspire together to fight her team and take the mountain, Pito's only response is to cackle in amusement.
• Distaff Counterpart: Essentially a female Kirito, only older and more immoral. See foil below for more details.
• The Dreaded:
  • M is thoroughly terrified of her and how unpredictable she is. With good reason too since she has his life on the line.
  • Memento Mori seems to fear her as well for his past experience with her and her psychotic behavior.
• Dual Wielding: During her fight with David in SJ3, she's forced to pull out a second Photon Sword against his one. She later whips both of them out against LLENN, who reacts accordingly.
• Dude Magnet: As one of the rare female players in GGO, men have constantly been hitting on her. As a result she had tattoos put on her cheeks to keep them away.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Along with her squadmates, though even that relationship's rather warped, Elsa was close to her maternal grandparents, in part because they derailed her parents' plans to send her to some private boarding school to keep her isolated in order to raise her personally and let her live normally. Their deaths are Implied to have contributed to her Death Seeker tendencies, possibly since she thought dying would allow her to meet them again.
• Everyone Has Standards: While in reality she is a sociopathic, sadistic woman who is more than willing to kill herself and her boyfriend, Goushi, over a video game, Elsa is implied to care about her public image as a singer and seems to largely play GGO to prevent these traits from bubbling up and bursting out in real life, something she hints at while telling LLENN about the Squad Jam.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In SJ2, when Shirley picks up one of her teammate's corpses and starts running with him on her back, Pito is quick to assume that it's not because she wanted to save him, but because she knew he'd become an immortal object and used him as a bulletproof shield to protect her back. Though as revealed shortly after, Shirley's attempt to save her teammate was genuine.
• Evil Is Petty: Less Evil, more trollish Sociopathic Hero, but Pito isn't above being extremely petty, if nothing else than for her own amusement.
  • As stated by David, she wasn't above tossing grenades at monsters even if her squadmates were within the blast radius.
  • What does she do the next time she sees David after their mutual kill in SJ4? Claim to have reviewed the footage and boast that she lasted 0.5 seconds longer than him before dying.
• Exact Words: She makes a "gentleman's agreement" to have a ceasefire with Team KKHC during Squad Jam 2, then promptly kills them off as soon as they're done talking. After all, she is not a "gentleman."
• Experienced Protagonist: Much more experienced as a GGO player compared to LLENN, enabling her to become her mentor.
• Eye Scream: Shirley manages to land a headshot on her, which is marked by a gaping digital bullet hole straight through her eye.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: As Elsa Kanzaki she's a beautiful idol, who hides a dangerous violent impulsive side.
• Face of a Thug: Visually Pitohui looks quite intimidating with her Facial Markings, narrowed eyes, and imposing height, though she's cheerful, informal, and all-round quite caring towards LLENN. Subverted over time as she shows her immoral side, showing that not only is she as evil as she looks, but she exploits this trope to do all the villainy she can. It is inverted for the real life Pitohui with the reveal she is Elsa Kanzaki, who looks childish and adorable.
• Facial Markings: She sports tattoos on her cheeks, which serve to keep men from hitting on her in-game.
• Famed In-Story: In-game, she has a fearsome reputation for being powerful and more negatively, for using her teammates as cannon fodder or bait. In real life she's the famous singer Elsa Kanzaki.
• Fatal Flaw: Her Death Seeker nature, which makes her prone to making incredibly reckless decisions, even going as far as to specifically request that she has no back-up when she goes One-Woman Army on a bunch of players, and even leaving enemy players alive even if there’s a good chance of them coming back to bite her in the ass, such is the case with Shirley(In the Anime) and Fukaziroh. If it wasn’t for her great skill and luck, SJ2 would have been the literal death of her.
• Final Boss: The final opponent for LLENN in Squad Jam 2 and 3.
• Fire-Forged Friendship: Met LLENN when she was out looking for the "Pink Devil", but was surprised to find that it was a little girl. Their first meeting has Pitohui holding a gun to LLENN's head. However seeing that she was a fellow female player, Pito became fast friends with LLENN.
• Foil:
  • In an opposite scenario to LLENN, Pitohui is shorter and cuter in real life while Pito is taller and more intimidating in-game. Both girls also used playing GGO as a form of escapism but for very different reasons, with LLENN doing so to become someone else and to gain confidence, while Pitohui does it to vent frustration in real life by going to a place where she can go wild with no consequence.
  • In many ways Pitohui can be seen as a Distaff Counterpart to Kirito, with both being VR junkies who are overpowered and dress in black. But one key difference is Kirito is The Hero who sometimes lapses into The Berserker when really pushed to his limits, while Pitohui puts on a kind demeanor to hide her true nature and is known to be dangerously psychotic underneath. Essentially she's what Kirito could be without restraint, and her worldview is completely antithetical to Kirito's belief that indulging your darker side in an VRMMO will inevitably make you a worse person in real life. Pitohui wielding a Photon Sword is just the icing on the cake.
  • To Fukazuroh. Both are extremely excitable and friendly individuals who are quite possible the closest people to LLENN, and in GGO they are a pair of Blood Knights who enjoy the destruction they leave in their wake. However, Fuka is someone with a “live life to the fullest” mindset and is genuinely a Nice Girl, while Pito is a Death Seeker who finds fun in life threatening scenarios and her sociopathic tendencies make her appear more Faux Affably Evil than genuinely friendly. And, like LLENN, there's the fact that Fuka is mature looking in real life but looks like a child in-game while Pito looks like an adult in-game yet resembles a child IRL. LLENN even describes them as “Two sides of the same coin, flipped back and forth, both smiling”.
• Foregone Conclusion: As soon as Pito revealed that she had participated in the previous "Bullet of Bullets" tournaments, the audience knows that she could not have won any of them as the main Sword Art Online series had already established the victors.^note Gabriel Miller/Subtilizer had a joint victory with another player in the first one. XeXeed won the second one outright.Even her next attempt would be doomed to failure as the victors had already been revealed in the main series.
• Full-Frontal Assault: After finishing the Fifth Ordeal in the Five Ordeals quest, she spawns in the final area in nothing but her underwear. She explains that this is because once she realized it was a Mirror Boss, she opted for a bare-knuckled brawl and so removed all of her weapons and equipment, including her signature bodysuit and armour.
• Gamer Chick: Said to have been playing virtual reality games even during the Sword Art Online incident, along with being present since Gun Gale Online's launch.
• The Gloves Come Off: In Squad Jam 2 when she finally decides to stop goofing around and equips all her weapons and armor for the finale. And this is after she's already killed over 20 players using either her bare hands or stolen weapons.
• Go Out with a Smile: Does this in both SJ2 and 3, content that she got to fight LLENN at the end.
• Gratuitous English: Pito often spouts English words in-game especially during battle.
• Gratuitous German: After she kills M she sings a verse from Schubert's Erlkönig.
• Gun Fu: While she's slaughtering several allied teams in Squad Jam 2, Pito pretty much dances about as she bashes and shoots everyone in a massacre.
• Gun Nut: LLENN notices that she shows up with different guns every day, and is quite knowledgeable about them. Her loadout in Fatal Bullet, an AKM assault rifle and a full-length Remington 870 shotgun, references two of the weapons she used during the second Squad Jam, the American-made Krebs Custom KTR-9 and a shorty pistol-gripped 870.
  • It's revealed in Volume 10 that this possibly extends to toy guns.
• The Gunslinger: Pito fits the best out of the main cast, being a Gun Fu practitioner who is a Gun Nut in seemingly all forms of guns.
• Hartman Hips: Emphasised by the skintight bodysuit she often sports.
• The Hedonist:
  • She has a deep obsession with life-threatening challenges and the prospect of dying.
  • Goushi implies she's had many affairs with her various fans of both genders.
• Hellish Pupils: If you look closely, her pupils sometimes are slitted, which goes hand in hand with her personality.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Minor example in the Test Play. During an Enemy Mine with SHINC against ZEMAL, she and Tanya shoot themselves, costing both to lose one of their three lives, so they can spawn behind ZEMAL and ambush them.
• Hidden Depths: While her aggressive and violence loving nature might make her come off as Dumb Muscle when compared to say, M, Pito can prove to be very dangerous when forced into a strategist role.
  • In SJ3, she acts as Team BTRY's leader and strategist and comes up with some pretty solid strategists during her tenure. Namely, her plan to use the life boats to prevent the other teams from getting on the ship was pretty solid and only screwed up because a few of them had access to bombs and armor-piercing bullets, and even then she's able to kill Memento Mori from and entirely different room with some clever use of the ship's sprinkler system and generator.
  • During the Test Play, she's also able to rally all the other teams into an alliance against the NPC team with some very sound arguments.
• Hijacked by Ganon: In SJ3, her being on the same team as LLENN might make you think that she'll simply be the Token Evil Teammate and that the Final Boss will be somebody else. But then the Traitor Rule comes into play and Pito claims to be her team's traitor, taking charge of the newly found Team BTRY. It's later revealed that she Invoked this to become the Final Boss once again, tricking everyone into thinking she was LPFM's traitor so she could manipulate events so that the tournament would once again be decided by a one-on-one between her and LLENN, only this time with one of them coming out the legitimate winner of the tournament instead of a sudden third party.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: With Goushi in real life, given how tiny she is.
• Idol Singer: She is a singer and song writer in real life, and Karen is a fan.
• I Gave My Word: Zig-Zagged. It's Implied that for whatever reason, Pito takes giving her word to someone very seriously; Despite her dedication to her impromptu Death Game in SJ2, M was confident that she'd prioritise her promise with LLENN to meet her IRL should she beat her in a fight over fulfilling her loss condition, and he's proven correct when LLENN pulls it off. However, that's not to say she isn't above taking advantage of Exact Words, such as shooting KKHC In the Back after she made a "gentleman's agreement" to not shoot them, or a lack thereof, like when she responded to Ervin's request to pick up T-S from the building they got stuck on by directing the ship over to it instead of actually saying she'd help them, with her actually intending on crashing the ship into the building. At the same time though, it's suggested that she'll also abide by Loophole Abuse when it's used against her, based on how M attempted to kill LLENN and resign from the tournament back in SJ1 under the reasoning that he wouldn't have lost by dying, and therefore Pito wouldn't kill him like she threatened to.
• I Lied: Near the end of Volume 5, she admits that she lied about being chosen for Team Betrayer. In reality, LLENN was the chosen "betrayer" from LPFM.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • As shown when PM4 is taking out the leaders of the teams involved in the alliance in SJ2, she shows herself to be capable of Lineless Shooting when she has their sniper use his Bullet Line to get someone to jump into her sights. However, it's heavily Implied that she's not nearly as proficient at this as M, and she largely relies on Full-Auto weapons anyway, meaning she hardly gets to show this off.
  • In SJ3, she uses her Remington 870 shotgun to shoot down the grenades a group of allied players use to take out LPFM, a trick she repeats later in SJ4. The spectators state that such a trick often requires a good deal of practice to pull off, only for us to cut back to her revealing that it's the first time she's tried doing this.
• In Love with Your Carnage: She really gets off on LLENN mowing down enemies. It reaches new heights during their final battle in Squad Jam 2, where barely a scene goes by without Pito blushing at LLENN's feats and complimenting her on how skilled and deadly she is. At one point she even gets a nosebleed after LLENN stomps on her face.
  That's my LLENN! You're so irresistible! So irresistible...I wanna kill you!
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Insists on being called "Pito".
  • Later on in the series it's revealed she's known as the "Grim Reaper" due to her talent for taking lives.
• It Amused Me: Her main motivation behind doing anything, especially VR gaming and turning the Squad Jam tournament into a Death Game for her team.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Kindhearted might be a stretch, but it's suggested that Elsa has a fondness for cats, having white cat footprint patterns on the fret board of her guitar. Her grandparents who cared for her during her highschool years owned three cats, who were given to other families upon their deaths. Out of the three of them, Elsa was closest to one with white fur, hence the pattern on her guitar.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In a surprisng example from her, she realizes that ZEMAL, led by Vivi, have them dead to rights and they have no chance of coming out alive if they pick a fight, and so opts to negotioate with them instead.
• Laser Blade: She uses a Muramasa F9^note Yes, there is a difference between the Kagemitsu and Muramasa series of photon swords, with the F9 having blade emitters on both ends of the handle. photon sword as her melee weapon. It's also red. Though she lacks Kirito's ability to parry bullets which she makes up for with a shield.
• Laughing Mad: M is convinced Pitohui is insane. She certainly has the psychotic laugh to back this claim up.
• Lightning Bruiser: While Pitohui isn't as fast as LLENN, she's shown rapidly twirling about the battlefield where she mows down whole squadrons of enemies with bullets or beats them down with her fists.
• Loves My Alter Ego: Initially the case for LLENN towards Pitohui. While they are friends in-game, it's Pitohui's real life self, Elsa Kanzaki, that she adores. Though upon meeting for real, Karen decided she'd rather not do it again.
• Ludicrous Gibs: How she meets her end in SJ3. After LLENN pushes her off the destroyed and sinking ship she falls into the path of one of its propellers, causing her avatar to be cut into millions of pieces.
• Make Way for the Princess: When she arrives for the Second Squad Jam it is a showy and arrogant introduction as she joins her team (M and four Faceless Goons), attracting everyone's attention. This prompts other players to refer to her derisively as "princess" with the goons as her "knights". Instead of respect, this scene actually underscores her infamy as a team-killer.
• Manipulative Bitch: In SJ3, she's able to trick everyone into thinking that she was her team's traitor and lead Team BTRY in a counter-offensive against all the other teams. Then, when it's just down to her, Eva and the rest of LPFM, she reveals that it was actually LLENN, thus forcing her in a scenario where, if it wasn't for Eva's Big Damn Heroes moment, she would have had to fight her, Fuka and M. In the end, she ends up getting the fight with LLENN she wanted too.
• Master of All: Unlike most other players in GGO who devote themselves to a specific style of shooting, Pitohui has a good handle on every manner of gunfighting there is. She is equally skilled with pistols, carbines, shotguns, and sniper rifles. Her high STR stat also allows her to be just as deadly completely unarmed, while she also appears to possess a high VIT stat that allows her to narrowly survive a head shot from a sniper.
  • However, this is Implied to be downplayed, as when she whines about not being able to use the Barrett, M retorts by asking if she thinks she's better at sniping than him, promptly shutting her up, suggesting that while she's generally good with the available guns, it's be hard to call her a master of any of them.
• Meaningful Name: As she explains to Goushi, her stage name has the Kanji for Kan, meaning "God", while the Kanji for Saki means "promontory", a piece of land that juts toward the sea. The "El" in Elsa is a verb for "attain", while "Za" is the Kanji for "Seat". So altogether, her stage name means "A place to sit on the headland before God". She admits that it's something she came up with when she was younger, thinking it sounded deep, but refuses to divulge its meaning in the present due to seeing it as an Embarrassing Nickname.
• Mentor Archetype: Mentors LLENN on how to play GGO with information that the tutorial doesn't provide.
• More Dakka:
  • While Pito is shown to have ordinary 30 round magazines on her person when geared up, she typically has her Krebs Custom KTR Assault Rifle loaded with a 50 round drum magazine.
  • In regards to SJ5's Alternative Gear rule, Pito claims that she plans to bring in a 7.62 mm machine gun to give the group a better source of covering fire.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Is easily far more psychotic and violent than any of the male players, and easily steamrolls whole teams.
• Morphic Resonance: In real life, Elsa Kanzaki looks looks like a smaller Pitohui with a lot of similar facial features.
• Ms. Exposition: Pitohui serves as a mentor to LLENN, teaching her (and the audience) on things about GGO not covered in the tutorial. She's also the one to introduce the Squad Jam tournament, the main plot of the series.
• Multiple Gunshot Death: Her death as a ghost in SJ5 has her get riddled with bullets as she's slaughtering other ghost players.
• Must Have Caffeine: According to M, Pitohui loves black coffee.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Once you find out a pitohui is actually a family of toxic birds, it really gives an indication of the kind of person she is.
• Noodle Incident: Pitohui allegedly tried to buy Hecate off Sinon, but Sinon refused to sell it. It's stated in Sword Art Online that while Shino is strapped for cash as a Minor Living Alone, Hecate is of too great personal significance to her, as well as powerful enough, that she won't part with it easily.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: While she's one of the more deadly players in Squad Jam, a tournament that mainly consists of amateurs, she's no match for the pro players who compete in Bullet of Bullets.
• Not Me This Time:
  • Of a sort. When the Hassan brings out RPG-7s to combat the alliance of squadrons, David is quick to assume that Pito knew they would, only for her to point out that no one would have expected them to have that of all things.
  • In SJ5, she claims to not be the one who posted the 100,000,000 Credit bounty of LLENN's head, though how true this is remains to be seen.
• Now That's Using Your Teeth!: During their final battle, Pito catches LLENN's dropped knife in her teeth.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Became fast friends with LLENN due to the fact they were both girls playing a male-dominated game, but in terms of personality the two couldn't be more different.
  • Volume 4 also reveals that she's befriended Miyu, and the two have been secretly corresponding.
• Official Couple: She is Goushi's girlfriend/mistress/slave owner. Whatever you want to call it, they're involved.
• Older Than They Look: Elsa Kanzaki is very short in statue and has quite a youthful appearance. She could get mistaken for an adolescent but she's well into adulthood.
• One-Woman Army: On the battlefield, Pito is a ruthless killing machine, tearing enemies apart either through gunfire or her bare hands. In Squad Jam 2 when several teams ally against her team, she manages to kill over 20 of them all on her own in a brutal bloodbath, with at least 15 of them in under 30 seconds.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In Volume 6, after the NPC team makes quick work of Team MMTM, Pito doesn't make a snarky or insulting comment about the victims, but is described as "utterly stone-faced." Lampshaded when LLENN wants to ask Pito "Who are you?"
• Pet the Dog:
  • The anime gives her one. As opposed to randomly approaching her in town, her first meeting with LLENN involved ambushing her and putting a gun to her head, yet deciding not to kill her despite the perfect opportunity due to the fact they’re both women. Considering that fact that she’s a Sadistic Blood Knight and her sociopathic tendencies is what caused her to become a solo-player in the first place, this is pretty noteworthy.
  • In the Light Novel when M explains to her what happened when Eva shot Sophie she, upon realizing what they were planning, immediately orders him to get down and take cover. This is in spite of the fact that A). she dragged him into her impromptu Death Game in the first place, B) expressed disappointed that he didn’t die earlier as it would have given her an excuse to avenge him, and C) the fact that she’s infamous for not being a team-player and being known for sacrificing party members with no hesitation.
  • When she and Fuka are hunting down LLENN and Eva in SJ3, Pito briefly expresses concern that LLENN and Fuka fighting could negatively affect their friendship, before Fuka reassures her that it won't happen.
  • Inviting Clarence and Shirley to join their team to bypass prelims, even when they make it clear that they're gonna split from them first chance they get. Then again, this could just be her Blood Knight tendencies flaring up.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: In real life she's quite tiny in stature, yet she was able to beat the ever living snot out of Goshi and keep him incapacitated. While he was tied up for the beating, she had to knock him out first.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Most of the show's pop culture references come from her. Although it's unclear if the references she makes actually exist as In-Universe works of fiction.
• Psychopathic Woman Child: Takes childish glee in slaughtering her opponents.
• Raised by Grandparents: After recovering from her respiratory disease around the time she was to enter high school, she defied her parent's wishes to go to a private boarding school in Los Angeles to go live with her grandparents in Japan and attend a normal High School. This lasted until the end of her high school years, by which point they both passed away.
• Real Money Trade: LLENN notices that every time she goes hunting with Pitohui, she's always carrying a new gun(s). When asked on how she gets all this stuff, Pito refers to this trope and LLENN notes that Pito must be very, very wealthy.
• Really Gets Around: According to Goshi, she "goes through" male and female fans alike, and her offer to stay overnight at Karen's apartment suggests it goes a little farther than just kissing.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Pitohui dresses in all black and is revealed to own a red Photon Sword, she's also the closest this series gets to someone who's evil.
• Refuge in Audacity: In hindsight, her excitable and childish reaction to being "chosen" as LPFM's betrayer was probably not just because she was genuinely excited, but also so she could distract LLENN and confuse her enough so that LLENN wouldn't think to look at her terminal and figure out that she's the real traitor.
• The Reveal:
  • In real life she's Elsa Kanzaki, a famous singer and Karen's idol.
  • She Lied about being the traitor in SJ3; it was actually LLENN.
• The Rival: LLENN's main rival in Squad Jam 2, with both treating each other as Worthy Opponents and bearing a The Only One Allowed to Defeat You mentality towards each other.
• Russian Roulette: In Fatal Bullet she gets her, M, and the Player to play a game of Russian Roulette to determine whether she's actually lucky or not.
• Sadist: Pitohui takes great glee in slaughtering opponents and wants the deaths to be as brutal and humiliating as possible. She's not above prolonging an enemy's death so she can watch them squirm a while longer before finishing them off.
  • While Pito watches footage from the first Squad Jam and seeing LLENN being terrified from being pinned down by a barrage of machine gun fire, Pito laughs and proclaims her scared face was adorable. M remarks that Pito is an awful person.
  • It's even more evident when Pito gets in on the action herself. When several teams ally to take back the mountain from Team PM4, she brutally slaughters them with a terrifying grin on her face. Then when there's only two of them left she proceeds to gloat and toy with them, leaving them alive to prolong their fear.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • M explains that Pito went through a Despair Event Horizon after being left out of SAO, and while she mostly recovered from this incident, failing to partake in the first Squad Jam caused her to relapse. The Pitohui who appears after the first Squad Jam is noticeably crueler and more deranged than before.
  • The already psychotic Pitohui has her mental state further reduced when she very nearly dies after getting sniped in the head. She becomes conflicted over the fear of dying and her own burning passion to die, leading her to become even more unhinged than usual.
• Screw Yourself: Zig-Zagged. Her response to having a face a literal Mirror Boss in the Five Ordeals quest was to strip to her underwear, forcing her opponent to do the same, wrestle her, hogtie her, and then attempt to torture her before realizing she was running low on time and finishing her off.
• Secret Weapon: After SJ3, she managed to get her hands on an M9-A1 Bazooka, planning to use it as this in a the next Squad Jam. However, she's forced to bust it out during the Test Play to counter the NPC teams large supply of RPG-7s.
• Self-Harm: She engaged in this while she was enraged over not getting to play SAO. When Goshi tried to stop her, she knocked him out, breaking three of his ribs and fingers in the process.
• She's Back: In Episode 10, after passing out from exhilaration over nearly dying, she later announced her return by revealing she had a Photon Sword and cuts down Team MMTM.
  Pitohui: Sorry - for - the - wait.
• Shield Bash: She uses her indestructium shield to slam David and another Team MMTM member against the wall before she goes at them with her Photon Sword.
• Shoot the Dog: In Five Ordeals after Suuzaburou states that they can only complete the quest by killing him, Pito's quick to whip out her pistol to do the deed before being stopped by Fuka, and leads Eva and Tohma in a fight against Fuka, LLENN and Shirley when they oppose the decision. This gets Subverted though when she ends up winning and reveals that she never planned on killing the dog; she realized, based on how the previous Ordeals were based on the Novelist's books, that it was a Secret Test of Character where you only won if you opted to spare the dog; she only acted as if she was of this mindset to get another fight out of LLENN.
• Shotguns Are Just Better:
  • One of her Sword Skills in Memory Defrag is blasting enemies with a shotgun.
  • She officially uses one at the end of Episode 10, where Team MMTM try to raid the cabin she's in and one of their members gets Swiss-cheesed by a shotgun blast through the wall.
• Singing Voice Dissonance: By virtue of her singing voice being provided by a different voice actress.
• Slasher Smile: Quite fond of giving menacing smiles, especially when her more unhinged side is exposed.
• The Smurfette Principle: In Squad Jam 2, she is the only female member of Team PM4. The other members are her manservant and hired goons. This leads to other squads calling her "princess".
• The Sociopath: She's an Ax-Crazy sadist who uses GGO as an excuse to vent her urges to shed blood. According to M, who knows her best, she is also rather selfish and lacks empathy for those she manipulates.
• So Proud of You:
  • In episode 5.5, as Pito watches LLENN's performance in the first Squad Jam, she is evidently filled with pride not unlike how a parent or older sibling would be towards a young child.
  • Pitohui also has this response when she and LLENN finally fight in Episode 11, and LLENN manages to land a kick on Pito's face and draws blood.
• Spell My Name With An S: Her real name is spelled "Elza" in official light novel translations, the anime, and the website for her singer, ReoNa, but many subs and fan works spell it "Elsa" instead.
• Split Personality: She seems to treat Pitohui and her real life self as two different people, always referring to herself in the third person when talking about her other identity.
• Spoiled Brat: She behaves like one in real life, demanding things from others rather than asking, and has Goushi indulging her every whim. Her whole exchange with Rei Satou, the club owner, also implies she needs to be bribed like a child to sing at places.
• Spy Catsuit: Her outfit as Pitohui. Even when she's armored up in the 2nd Squad Jam, she still retains her outfit's skin-tight appearance.
• Statuesque Stunner: Her in-game avatar is quite tall, and she is indeed stunning.
• Strong and Skilled: Pitohui is a veteran GGO player with expertise in all of GGO's firearms, however she also has extremely high STR stats so she can beat up enemies with her hands too.
• Super-Senses: Despite not knowing about it, she was able to sense the armadillo monster coming out of the ground to attack Clarence in SJ4
• Sword/Shield Contrast: Thanks to her Photon Sword and her bulletproof shield Made of Indestructium, Pitohui has in her possession one of the strongest sword and shield combos in all of fiction.
• Taking the Bullet: LLENN speculates that the reason why Pito was so damaged while she remained fine from David's grenade in SJ4 was because Pito leaned to the side to absorb the brunt of the damage.
• Team Killer:
  • In Squad Jam 2, she kills M after she learns about how he betrayed her.
  • In Squad Jam 3, this is ultimately subverted. While she does betray and kill some of the members of Team BTRY, she was never actually part of the team.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: She doesn't get along particularly well with the other members of PM4. The hired members aren't thrilled to play with her, and M doesn't hesitate to call Pito out on her sadism and thrill-seeking tendencies. That being said, they do hold off MMTM to give M time to heal her and wake her up.
• There Are No Therapists: Effectively Invoked. The reason M doesn't try to get Pito a therapist despite her clear mental health issues is because he knows that she doesn't want to see one, so he doesn't bother trying.
• Three Chords and the Truth: Elsa's singing style is a J-Pop version of this, as she stands on stage with a guitar and no other music aides.
• Token Evil Teammate: Is easily the most amoral and violent of the four main characters. This also goes for when she gets picked for Team BTRY in Squad Jam 3, a team consisting of one member of each surviving team, and she doesn't hesitate to steer the ship into Team T-S or kill Ervin when he objects.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: As Pitohui she sports a ponytail and she's far from the stereotypical elegant lady. Her real self wears her long hair loose during a concert.
• Too Awesome to Use: In the finale of the Test Play battle, M has to convince her to finally take out the M9-A1 Bazooka she has in storage, otherwise they are never going to beat the NPC team. She does so with great reluctance, having spent a small fortune to buy one of the few rocket launchers in GGO.
• Troll: Along with being a ruthless Blood Knight, Pito enjoys screwing with people when she can.
  • She constantly calls David "Daveed" just for the sake of annoying him.
  • When she was scouting out Clarence and Shirley to join LPFM for the 4th Squad Jam, she and M followed the two of them as they went out hunting. She also let out a notice that the two of them were hunting in that area, causing players to avoid it like the plague, forcing the two of them to wait for hours with nothing to do before she ambushed them.
  • During SJ4, LLENN stayed behind for the scan to trick the other teams into thinking they were staying in the forest while the others went on ahead to secure transport across the bridge. When they find a vehicle, Pito jokingly pretends to forget about LLENN and leave her behind, only for LLENN to catch up and yell at her.
  • In SJ5, she happened to witness Thane forming an alliance of up to nineteen players and them collectively deciding to go after LLENN's bounty. However, instead of mowing them down, she opted to just let them go about their business.
• Underestimating Badassery: Pitohui is often on the giving end of this, leaving opponents alive when she deems them no longer a threat or Not Worth Killing, only for the would be victim to return later rearing to fight and causing her trouble.
  • After killing off Team KKHC in a betrayal of trust, she lets Shirley escape believing that a pacifist like her isn't worth killing. Shirley would later come back on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and lands a near kill-shot on Pito.
  • Pito leaves Fuka alive, after sniping off all her limbs. Despite M telling her to finish Fuka off before her limbs regenerated, Pito wants to leave it for later as she no longer deemed Fuka a threat. M's warnings came true as Fuka comes to LLENN's rescue at a critical moment shortly after.
• Ungrateful Bitch: In the light novels, she beats up Goshi for stalking her after he'd saved her from a different stalker.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Pito lives by this, making sure she's as cruel as possible in the virtual world and having no regard for human life and takes great joy in killing and maiming others.
• Walking Armory: Having no gun specialization and being skilled in all firearms, Pitohui carries an assortment of different types of guns in her inventory. Shown to full effect in SJ2 when she opens her inventory and suits up with two Springfield XD pistols, a pistol-grip Remington 870 shotgun (complete with holsters), and a Krebs Custom KTR-09 assault rifle with a drum magazine, along with a load-bearing vest carrying extra shotgun shells and a combat visor. In the Test Play, she trades her KTR, shotgun and twin pistols for a Heckler and Koch HK416C with an equipped suppressor, making for a comparatively lighter-weight build, so she can carry the M9-A1 Bazooka she bought.
• Walking Spoiler: Her real life identity comes off as a surprise, so listing her real name alongside that of her avatar spoils the twist.
• Womanchild: In real life, she looks and acts like a child, behaving like a Spoiled Brat, despite being well into adulthood.
• The Worf Effect: As powerful as Pito is shown to be on the battlefield, she still falls short of the top GGO players shown in the main series, as she did not even make it past the preliminaries in the third BoB tournament. This establishes the level of expertise one can expect in Squad Jam, where one of its best players is still not in the BoB league.
• Worthy Opponent: Blood Knight she is, Pito has a few people she considers this.
  • First and most obvious of them would LLENN, often stating how she's In Love With Her Carnage and expressing a great deal of excitement whenever the opportunity for them to fight shows itself, such as in SJ2 when she sees her approaching and SJ3 when the Traitor Rule comes into play.
  • As she reveals to Fuka while they're hunting down LLENN and Eva in SJ3, there's a player she met in the SAO Beta-Test who she got into a duel with over who got to fight a monster and pretty much wiped the floor with her before he surrendered and let her fight the monster, impressed that she could last so long despite being two levels beneath him. She notes it as one of the few times she acknowledged someone was stronger than her.
  • She seems to have gotten an interest in Shirley, the girl who shot and nearly killed her in SJ2, even inviting her and Clarence to join SJ4 as a member of LPFM with full knowledge that they'd split off from them the first chance they get and come after her.
  • She finally acknowledges David of MMTM as one these when he manages to kill her as she kills him in SJ4, jokingly stating that she might have fallen for him if she knew he was gonna get so tough.
• You Have Failed Me: Pito coldly executes M for subtly helping Team LF in the second Squad Jam. M explains he did so out of love, and Pito states that she knows but also adds he wasn't allowed to bring love into the game.
• You Monster!: On the receiving end of this by several characters.
  • Shirley is so disgusted by Pitohui she states she isn't human but a vermin who hunts other humans, and that "vermin should be exterminated"
  • LLENN herself is appalled by Pitohui after she kills M, outright calling her "monster", before adding on other names like "devil" and "grim reaper", though Pitohui seems to like the last name.
• You're Insane!: She's often on the receiving end of this, particularly from Karen. When Karen calls the idea of Pito making Squad Jam 2 into a death game for herself insane, M points out that this is what he's been saying all along.

Miyu Shinohara / Fukaziroh

Miyu Shinohara / Fukaziroh

Voiced by: Chinatsu Akasaki (Japanese), Faye Mata (English)

^{Click here to see Miyu}

Karen/LLENN's friend in real life who introduced her to VRMORRPGs. Usually an ALO player, she converts over to GGO to partake in Squad Jam 2 with LLENN.

---

• Abnormal Ammo: She's also carrying smoke canisters for her grenade launchers, specifically pink smoke canisters to support LLENN in ambush attacks. And in SJ3, Pitohui gifts her with a whole cylinder's worth of Plasma Grenade Ammo, which are much more powerful than your standard ones.
• Accidental Truth: Some of her made up backstories for the so-called NPC soldiers in Volume 6 actually Foreshadow some aspects of their true identity.
  • She claims that the reason Hassan looks so sad and troubled is because he's currently going through a divorce while his wife has a better chance of getting custody over their daughter, despite her being a Daddy's Girl. While she got the person wrong, Jacob's wife did threaten to divorce him if he became a mercenary before eventually relenting and taking care of their daughters while he was away on missions.
  • She all but says that Doc is the Big Bad of the whole scenario, which he actually kind of is; while he's not actually a villainous character, he is the one heading Jacob's Medicuboid therapy and is therefore the reason that the Play Test is happening.
• A-Cup Angst: While quite fond of her cute GGO avatar, Fuka is disappointed that she's now lacking in the chest department.
• Adaptational Badass: Implied. In the Light Novel when she attacks a pervert with an Assault Rifle as a bludgeon, the most she accomplishes is dealing chip damage and having the guy whimper in fear, prompting LLENN to finish him off when she finds them. In the anime, she’s apparently beats the guy to death with no help at all.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The anime drops a fair few of her Fish out of Water moments over her unfamiliarity of GGO, such as her being confused about GGO currency and real world currency, or referring to LLENN by her real life name.
• Adventure Duo: Fuka has this dynamic with LLENN, with Fuka being the more wacky lancer, to LLENN's more serious hero.
• Ambiguously Bi: Has an interest in guys but says some peculiar things with LLENN in an almost Friends with Benefits sort of way, even joking about staying at a love hotel with her. Whether she actually swings both ways or is just enacting some Gay Bravado is anyone's guess.
  • When she, Pito and M are guarding LLENN using M's shield in a sort of turtle formation in SJ4, she jokingly tells LLENN to "tell her girlfriend how much she loved her" if she gets killed.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • At the start of Squad Jam 2, Fuka accidentally activates a tripwire tap and gets her legs blown off. Fortunately they grow back as per GGO norm.
  • Also in Squad Jam 2, while going up against Pito, the latter intentionally snipes both her legs off followed by both her arms to try and draw LLENN out, unaware that LLENN had been incapacitated via shoelaces.
• And Zoidberg: When she first partakes in Squad Jam 2 with LLENN, being a relatively unknown new player, most of GGO's residents refer to the two of them as "LLENN and her partner".
• Animal Motif: Not as pronounced as her companions but she can be easily compared to a dog or puppy. Her avatar is named after her deceased pet dog and she's very excitable and always seem to be in a good mood, akin to an excitable puppy. An in-game texting app also has her Icon image set as a picture of a dog.
• Ascended Fangirl: Like Karen she's a fan of Elsa Kanzaki and even got to meet her in real life.
• A-Team Firing: LLENN has described Fuka's aim as being so bad she couldn't hit a target from almost point-blank with a pistol. For this reason or perhaps due to the fact, she mains with Grenade Launchers that do not require accuracy. She even went ahead and told the salesman to take off the scopes on the grenade launchers when buying them.
  • In Squad Jam 2, she unloads an entire pistol magazine at a guy on the ground but not a single one of her shots hits.
  • Subverted when it comes to her grenade launchers. While they do have a larger AOE, Fuka has figured out how to effectively aim them using their parabolic trajectory over long distances without even having to see the target.
  • LLENN is forced to protect her from monster hoards in SJ4 after Clarence and Shirley betray them due to her terrible aim, and the few times she lands a headshot, she mentions that she was aiming for the one next to it.
• Atomic F-Bomb: Outright calls LLENN an “Evil Bitch” after she tricks her and Pito into splitting up before directly challenging her, knowing the Pito wouldn’t intervene due to a desire to beat her one-on-one but would also kill Fuka if she took her kill.
• Attention Whore: Unlike most other females in GGO, she welcomes all the male attention she gets in the game. One of the first things she does is to wander around Glocken and see how many men try to hit on her (it turns out to be 43).
• Badass Driver: Fuka reveals she's had experience with some driving games, which allows her to use those skills in GGO when she comes to LLENN's rescue.
• Badass in Distress: She's briefly captured in episode 12, but frees herself and goes on to prove vital in LLENN's victory over Pitohui.
• Bag of Spilling: When she's shot and nearly blown up by members of the Alliance in SJ4, she ends up dropping Rightony and Leftania and is forced to leave the city without them.
• Bathtub Scene: Miyu gets one in the post-credit scene for Episode 6, coming out of the bath tub and a full camera shot of her bare behind as Karen calls her and invites her to be part of the second Squad Jam.
• Best Friend: Karen officially considers Miyu to be her closest friend, and the feeling is mutual.
• Beware the Silly Ones: As quirky and eccentric as she can be, if you push her the wrong way then she will destroy you.
• BFS: Heavily Implied. When Fuka transfers to GGO, she tells LLENN about how she favours heavy weapons like Two-Handed Swords, and in ALO she's apparently known as the "Zweihander Sylph."
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In Episode 11, Fuka shows Pito it was a bad idea to leave her alive. She recovers her limbs and HP, and arrives in a Hummer to rescue LLENN.
  • During Shirley's Sniper Duel with Beralto in SJ4, she shows up in an electric cart to help get the chandelier Beralto dropped off Shirley, allowing her to return fire and (partially) finish him off.
• Big Eater: She chows down in GGO with LLENN, and in real life she almost missed Squad Jam 2 because she ate nine full ice cream pints and got a bad stomachache right before the event. In Volume 6 as she and Karen are having a strategy meeting for the Test Play battle, they eat lunch together and it's noted the table is full of spaghetti carbonara, Caesar salad, and cheesecake, as well as cheese as far as the eye can see.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Miyu is always cheerful, Fun Personified, and extremely hammy. She says very outlandish things, but is also very strong and reliable in combat.
• Book Dumb: While very competent in-game, being able to make angle calculations to use her Grenades Launchers, she’s stated by LLENN to have been a terrible student, skipping classes to hang out with boys to the point that she to weep and beg her teacher to give her a passing grade.
• Boom, Headshot!: In SJ3, she’s killed when Eva manages to shoot her in the head while falling to her death.
• Bound and Gagged: When she's captured by M in episode 12 and restrained with duct tape.
• Brains and Brawn: The brawn to LLENN's brains. By Squad Jam 2, LLENN is the seasoned veteran due to being the previous Squad Jam champion, and she can use her experience to guide Fuka. While Fuka is the newbie from ALO but retains her impressive stats from her time there and wields a pair of deadly grenade launchers.
• Breaking the Bonds: Manages to free herself when captured in episode 12 by cutting the tape binding her hands with a hidden knife.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Has a habit of bringing up random things in the middle of the battlefield like going fashion shopping.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Played for Laughs. While shopping for weapons on first arriving in GGO, she mentions that one of her weapon preferences is two-handed swords; since Photon Swords like Kirito's and Pitohui's are light one-handed weapons, she doesn't get any luck. Then a pervert mentions wanting to kill her and molest her corpse during the 10 minutes it's an Immortal Object, and she notices his rifle is near her foot and has a similar profile...
  • As stated before, Fuka mainly plays ALO and so has experience with the game's Flight mechanic. This proves useful in knocking down V2HG's drones to stop their grenade, flying LPFM's drone using it's VR goggles and expertly taking them out before going to distract the minigun Humvee.
• Childhood Friends: She has known Karen for a very long time and one of the few friends she had kept in touch with.
• Combat Pragmatist: Fuka's an odd example in that she's less this for pragmatisms sake, but more because she's so much of an emotion driven Blood Knight that she'll disregard what other players would consider the more honourable thing to do and end up doing less honourable but arguably more pragmatic actions in the process, namely killing someone who could be a problem down the line. Case in point, in SJ5 she's quick to shoot Shinohara, who she pulled an Enemy Mine with like LLENN did with Vivi, In the Back with her Grenade Launcher and kill him upon learning that Vivi was in the mansion they were assaulting before challenging Vivi to come out of the mansion and face her before she blows it to kingdom come with her plasma rounds. LLENN is aware of this and has an Oh, Crap! after the above happens, realizing that Fuka is the only Grenade Launcher wielder she knows who would do something so underhanded.
• Cool Helmet: Wears an American World War II-era helmet as part of her in-game attire.
• Crazy-Prepared: In the Five Ordeals quest, realizing the need to have LLENN rush to the door after they defeat all the monsters during the Third Ordeal, she spends her time creating makeshift snow shoes (and a doghouse for Suuzaburou) so LLENN can immediately run for the door without sinking into the snow.
• Crutch Character: Fukaziroh serves as one in Fatal Bullet where she's particularly useful as a playable character or party member with her high VIT and DPS.
• Devious Daggers: SJ2 reveals that the trench knife she's using to tie her hair is for more than just decoration; as Pito's about to kill LLENN, she uses it to cut the ropes binding her hands and catch Pito off guard.
• Distaff Counterpart: She's basically the Klein to LLENN's Kirito. Being the same gendered best friend to The Protagonist who largely serves as a Plucky Comic Relief, but is also very strong and reliable in combat. Bonus points in that she enjoys the attention she gets from the many male players, while on the opposite side of the gender spectrum Klein desperately wants a girlfriend but has no luck. Which makes one wondering what would happen if the two meet each other.
• Dude Magnet: Much like other female players of GGO, Fuka immediately attracted the male population of gamers. She decides to turn it into a game and manages to have a total of 43 people trying to talk to her on her first day. She even thinks there's the possibility of a reverse harem. A bit more Played With IRL, where while she can get a date and even enter a relationship, they don't exactly last long.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Miyu hardly shows herself as a dating guru, with a lot of the relationships she does enter ending quickly, but when she warns Karen about how Fire Nishiyamada might have an interest in her even if he didn't ask for her number, she's proven right when Karen's dad receives an Email from him asking for permission to court and maybe even marry her.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Fukaziroh first gets name-dropped by Dyne in Ordinal Scale almost half a year before the AGGO anime was announced, revealing he's a fan of her and asking if he could buy her a new grenade launcher.
  • She made her debut in Episode 2 as Karen's real life friend who introduced her to VR, but she doesn't play a major role until Episode 7 when LLENN requests her help and calls her over to GGO.
• Emergency Weapon : The trench knife she uses to keep her hair in a bun isn't just for show. When she's away from all her other weapons, she can pull the knife out of her hair and uses it to attack.
• Everyone Has Standards: While she’s a bit of an Attention Whore when it comes to men and literally spent her first day in GGO seeing how many guys would hit on her, she doesn’t seem to like people being openly creepy, such as a player she killed in SJ2 who was planning messing with her corpse after killing her since it wouldn’t activate the harassment code, and initially being creeped out by Clarence’s behavior, constantly asking if she can shoot her.
• Famed In-Story:
  • She's something of a minor celebrity in Alfheim Online.
  • In GGO, after her performance in Squad Jam 2, she also starts acquiring fans in that game, among them is Dyne who references her in Ordinal Scale.
• Fangirl: She's an even bigger fan of Elsa Kanzaki than Karen/LLENN is.
• Firing One-Handed: Grenade launchers, to boot!
• Foil:
  • As mentioned above, she's basically a female Klein, being similarly goofy and fun loving. But since she's the opposite gender to him she experiences the opposite effects when it comes to romance, having a large following of admirers pursuing her, while poor Klein endlessly pursues girls with no luck. The point is driven further by the reveal that, at least IRL, Miyu also has bad luck with relationships, namely that a lot of them tend to end quickly.
  • To Sinon, having an almost completely opposite scenario. Both Fuka and Sinon are the Experienced Protagonist who serve as Ms. Exposition to the main character. However Sinon started off in GGO and ended up migrating over to ALO so she could spend time with Kirito's friends, while Fuka started off in ALO and moved over to GGO on request from LLENN.
  • Also to Kirito. Both are players used to fantasy type games that rely on melee weapons, before migrating to the gun-oriented GGO. However Kirito managed to defy all odds and still found a melee weapon he could use, while Fuka had no such luck and had to resort to guns much like everyone else. Amusingly they both get harassed by the 'Avatar Buyer' trying to get them to sell their rare avatar's account to him.
• Fun Personified: Fuka is always out to have a thrill and enjoy herself to the fullest. She eagerly dives into GGO and is even more excited and curious then LLENN was.
• Fun Size: As Fukaziroh, she's no more than 150cm tall, in direct contrast to her regular 165cm height.
• Gamer Chick: Unlike LLENN who is a VR newbie, Fukaziroh has experience with a wide range of games. LLENN mentioned that ever since converting to GGO, every time she's logged in, Fuka immediately sends a party invite as she's already playing.
• Gay Bravado: In-game, she occasionally makes some pretty suggestive remarks to LLENN, such as joking about staying at a love hotel with her during Squad Jam 2's final battle, or asking LLENN about her dating life and then having describe her ideal date while imagining Fuka as a man. However, out of game, she's strictly straight in real life and only shows interest in men.
• Genki Girl: Miyu/Fuka is shown to be very excitable and cheery about everything.
• Glacier Waif: In ALO Fuka primarily specialized in STR and VIT, and preferred heavy weapons like broadswords and battleaxes. All this carried over to GGO as well, where she dual-wields grenade launchers (heavy enough that LLENN had trouble holding one), and clubs a man to death with an assault rifle. This is all in spite of being roughly the same height and build as LLENN. She's also unbelievably tough, only losing about a quarter of her health from a trap that blew her legs off, while being sniped multiple times by Pitohui that dismembered all her limbs still leaves her with a slice of critical level HP left.
• Gratuitous English: Has a tendency to spout English words midsentence, with "Okay!" being most common.
• Grenade Launcher: A pair of Milkor MGL-140 launchers are the cutest weapon in GGO in her opinion, and likes making things explode.
• Guile Hero: While Fuka is The Big Girl, and generally comes off as loud, boisterous, eccentric, impulsive, and has incredibly poor aim with normal guns, that's not to say she's without a moment of brilliance.
  • In SJ4, she's able to trick two members of MMTM into crashing their trike's into each other, killing Lax and injuring Kenta, by aiming both her launchers at their left and right respectively, prompting them to evade right into each other.
  • In SJ5, when she, LLENN, M, Eva and Anna are victims of a pincer attack being launched by a bunch of money hungry players, with even M not having any ideas of how to get out of it, it's Fuka who comes up with a plan of escape, questioning if the invisible barrier at the top of the walls preventing bullets and grenades from passing also blocks passage to players. It turns out that it doesn't, and so she and LLENN, with the help of the other three, are able to get on top and make a beeline for the centre while the barrier prevents anyone from shooting at them from below.
• Guns Akimbo: Dual wields two grenade launchers!
• Grenade Launcher: Her weapon, specifically a Milkor MGL-140 used by the US Marines. She choose this to get around her terrible aim because gernades have a large area of effect.
• Harem Seeker: Invoked and downplayed. After seeing all the attention she got from the male players of GGO, she briefly considers the possibility of a reverse harem.
• Happy Dance: Fuka does one in Episode 9 after her legs (that were previously blown off) grow back.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: While a bit eccentric, Fuka is still a Nice Girl with blonde hair.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • When Vivi, ZEMAL's new leader approaches and request they surrender, Fuka pretends to be the team's leader and approaches to negotiate with her, telling LLENN to run through the comm so she'd survive and not lose the bet with Fire. Subverted in that Pito prompts her to make a deal with Eva and she gets to live.
  • Played Straight later during the mall battle where, after she, Eva and LLENN get surrounded by MMTM and WEEI, she runs to Kenta's position and turns around to give Eva a good shot of her grenade pouch, allowing her to shoot it and blow up her Plasma Grenades, taking them both out.
• Hero of Another Story: Fuka mostly plays ALO and only converts to GGO to partake in Squad Jam with LLENN. She has experience several adventures prior to SJ2.
• Heterosexual Life-Partner: Miyu is stated to be Karen's best friend. They've known each other a very long time, still reconnecting despite Karen moving away, and share intimate secrets with one another. In fact they are close enough that Fuka is the only person who LLENN doesn't address with an honorific. When Pito expresses what might be worry that them being on opposite teams in SJ3 could harm their friendship, she shrugs it off by saying that they’ve gotten into plenty of arguments back in High School and that if something as simple as being on opposing teams could ruin their friendship, they probably would have killed each other by now. She’s proven right when they get into a duel and an insult fight, during which LLENN brings some of Fuka’s most embarrassing memories, but after the tournament ends they act as if nothing happened and join SHINC for a celebratory drink.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: LLENN's miraculous survival and counter strategy is somewhat foiled by Fukaziroh's amazing accuracy with her signature Grenade Launchers being too accurate, as it made them closely knitted together and a single one's destruction enough to destroy it's neighbours, whereas a few would have slipped the hail to preventative gunfire if they were more spread out.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Fuka is able to use her experience with melee combat in GGO when left without any ammunition.
  • She picks up an assault rifle and uses it as a club to bludgeon a guy to death.
  • She also uses the trench knife in her hair as an offensive weapon, cutting off LLENN's hands to free her and able to propel her forwards with a kick.
  • Her driving skills come from playing other VR driving games, while in real life she is still working on getting her driver's license.
• Improvised Weapon: After losing her Grenade Launchers, she instead uses a bit of clothe as a slingshot, only with Grand Grenades instead of rocks. She does not to attack the snipers targetting LPFM and SHINC, but more create cover for them to escape with.
• Informed Attribute: We never actually get to see Fuka play ALO and it's only through her statements that we know she plays as a Sylph.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • In-game, everyone calls her "Fuka".
  • She also loves to dub herself as a fairy, due to migrating from ALO.
• Jumped at the Call: In stark contrast to LLENN, Fuka is all too eager to dive into GGO and prove her might when LLENN requests for her help.
• The Klutz:
  • In SJ2, she ends up falling victim to a trip-wire Grenade Trap which blows her legs off. Good thing she is a high VIT build.
  • In SJ3 during the battle against SHINC, she fires one of her Grenade Launchers at them… one that just so happened to have been filled with ultra-powerful Plasma Grenades without realizing it, putting her team at risk too.
  • During a taunt fight, LLENN brings up instances when she spilled indian takeout and had to have half of Karen’s and when she accidentally forgot her bra at a hotel during a field trip and had to be called to get it over the school’s loudspeaker.
• Large Ham: Fuka loves hamming up the theatrics in-game, especially during battle. She'll give herself and her teammates flashy titles while spouting over-the-top Badass Boasts. Also applies when she finds herself in danger in GGO, she has a habit of melodramatically crying out to LLENN "I'm a goner, leave me behind and save yourself!" as if she was in a gritty war movie.
• Mad Bomber: Will often go wild with her grenade launchers, causing her surroundings to explode. In Fatal Bullet, M cautions her not to blow any of her allies up.
• Meal Ticket: Invoked by her, as M left a stash of 10 million credits (about $900.00 in real life cash) for her to get started in GGO on LLENN's request. She refers to M as her "sugar daddy" no fewer than three times while buying her grenade launchers. Fuka even contemplates marrying M for all the money he gave.
• Meaningful Name: Her gamer name Fukaziroh is derived from her beloved pet dog who had passed away, with the dog's name being derived from fuka which means "not allowed" and jirou which means "second son". It was named as such due to Miyu's parents not allowing the dog into the house, while Miyu loved the dog like a second son (as she previously had a pet sparrow).
• Motor Mouth: Fuka has a tendency to excitedly let her mouth run, blurting out sentences at high speeds.
• Ms. Exposition: Karen turns to her when wanting to try out VRMMO and Miyu teaches her the basics. Karen even openly calls Miyu her VR mentor.
• Multi-Melee Master: Implied. When going gun shopping with LLENN in GGO, she claims to specializes in Two-Handed Weapons like Swords, Axes and spears. Her lack of specification of which of them she wielded hints that she's rather adept at all three. The finale of SJ2 also shows that she's handy with a knife.
• No Indoor Voice: Is always very loud and enthusiastic when she speaks.
• Noodle Incident: Miyu mentions that she battled a player named Zekken in ALO, which is the moniker for Yuuki. Miyu is almost certainly talking about fighting Yuuki when she issued a challenge to all players at the start of the Mother's Rosario arc.
• No Sense of Personal Space: When Karen expresses some interest in trying out a VRMMO, Miyu gets so excited she gets right into Karen's face and launches into a big spiel about the joys of VR gaming.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: She's one of the few of the group to pass the Fifth Ordeal in Five Ordeals.
• One-Steve Limit: One of the members of Team ZEMAL is named Shinohara, the same as Miyu's real surname, but there's nothing implying the two are related.
• Only Friend: Karen has very few friends in real life due to being stigmatized, with Miyu being one of the few she has before playing GGO. The light novels mention Karen does have a few other girlfriends from high school that she hangs out with whenever she's back in Hokkaido.
• Older Than They Look: Much like LLENN, she has a pint-sized avatar that makes her look like a child, while in real life she's over the age of 18.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: When Fuka fails to kill a guy due to her terrible aim with the pistol, the guy reveals himself to be a lecherous creep, telling Fuka that as corpses in Squad Jam are considered Immortal Objects, he could do whatever he liked to her and not get penalized by the Harassment Code. Fuka responds by picking up an assault rifle and bludgeoning his head in.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: As Fukaziroh she is barely taller than LLENN, but she's still a force to be reckoned with. She carries a pair of deadly Grenade Launchers and she inherited her high STR parameter from ALO meaning she can lay down a beatdown even without guns.
• Plucky Comic Relief: It's quite clear that out of the main cast, Fuka is meant to be taken the least seriously. She's the source of the majority of jokes and funny moments in almost every scene she's in.
• Rage Breaking Point: Reaches this when LLENN “cheats” in their insult game in SJ3 by stealing her turns, prompting Fuka to disregard Pito’s desire to fight her and try to attack. Exactly what LLENN wanted.
• Really Gets Around: Volume 6 implies she goes through boyfriends pretty frequently, such as in her introductory scene where she is patiently waiting for a date in the sweltering summer heat but both parties decide they can't stand each other and end it after that one date. Later when she tries to persuade Karen to join the Test Play battle while they're in Hokkaido, she reveals she has a second Amusphere (which Karen will need since she left hers in Tokyo). Karen figures out the second device was meant for her date and implies that Miyu may have wanted to engage in some "play" with him.
• Red Baron: In ALO, she's apparently known as the "Zweihander Sylph".
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The more reckless and excitable red to Karen/LLENN's calmer blue.
• Replacement Goldfish: In Five Ordeals, she's quick to latch onto the talking Suuzaburou as one of Fukaziroh, her first dog who passed when she was in High School, treating the talking NPC dog with the same Big Sister Instinct she apparently treated her first companion with. It's to the point that when the final task of the quest is to kill Suuzaburou, she's opposed and, along with LLENN and Shirley, opts to fight off the others to protect him, and is crying at the end after he gives her some touching parting words and ascends to doggy heaven.
• The Rival: Revealed in SJ4 to be one to Vivi, a Salamander player from ALO who transferred to GGO and quickly became the new Leader of ZEMAL due to her decision to use a Machine Gun. While Vivi seems to see this as a Friendly Rivalry and expresses excitement at meeting Fuka in GGO after her new team deals a Curb-Stomp Battle against LFPM, SHINC and T-S, Fuka evidently has no such positive feelings, only recounting times where Vivi killed her back in ALO, with implications that she's never been able to get back at her.
• The Roleplayer: Fuka loves roleplaying as the hammy, trigger-happy Action Hero and rarely takes anything seriously.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: In SJ3. After LLENN survives her Plasma Grenade by kicking it away, she opts to crawl away and leave it to Pitohui, knowing she had no chance of winning after something like that.
• Secret-Keeper: One of LLENN's few in-game friends who knows her real life predicament and her reasons behind playing GGO. Though she sometimes accidentally let's these slip out to which LLENN will chastise her.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Only slightly taller than LLENN, but wields two Grenade Launchers that are almost half her size.
• Smash Sisters: Has this dynamic with LLENN. The two of them are best friends and have the utmost trust in one another on the battlefield.
• Smoke Out: As part of her strategy with LLENN in Squad Jam 2, Fuka carries smoke grenades to help obscure the scene and aid her partner. In particular she carries pink smoke grenades that help LLENN blend perfectly into the environment.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Miyu named her in-game avatar after her late pet dog.
• Stating the Simple Solution: In SJ3 after M manages to survive getting strangled by Tanya by crushing her against the ceiling, Fuka simply ask why he didn’t just turn his back to them so that she could shoot Tanya since she was hanging onto the backpack that housed his shield, meaning the bullets wouldn’t hit him. LLENN is rightfully pissed that she didn’t suggest this while he was getting strangled.
• Swapped Roles: While Fuka is the VRMMORPG veteran, in GGO she's the newbie and it's LLENN's turn to show her around.
• Sweet Tooth: Just before partaking in Squad Jam 2, Miyu binges herself on nine tubs of ice cream, and it really upsets her stomach.
• Taking You with Me: Gets her long awaited kill on Vivi in this fashion in SJ5. After her rival ends up on top of the PM, she grabs her by the wrist to keep her from escaping and runs it off a ledge, causing the both of them to fall to their deaths.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Fuka's reaction to seeing the field littered with dead players courtesy of LLENN, while hearing LLENN's screams of fury as she slaughters the remaining survivors. She makes a note to never set Karen off in real life after this.
• Unfriendly Fire:
  • When Fuka arrives at the mansion LLENN and Vivi are hiding in with Shinohara, she kills the former and goes about blowing up the mansion with her collection of grenades in a bid to kill Vivi, unintentionally putting LLENN, Eva and David at risk. When LLENN, after escaping the mansion's destruction with the others, informs and subsequently calls her out on this, Fuka simply calls it a small price to pay to get her revenge on Vivi, and that netting LLENN's bounty would have been a nice bonus.
  • In the same tournament, Fuka's finally able to take out Vivi by grabbing her wrist while she's on top of the PM before running off the edge of the room, with LLENN jumping off under the assumption that Fuka did it in a manner so she could escape. Unfortunately, against LLENN's initial assumption, Fuka wasn't actually planning on LLENN jumping off the PM and complains over the comms how she was denied the bounty reward.
• Ugly Cute: In-Universe. Like LLENN, Fuka picks out her gun based on how cute she is. However, Fuka's idea on what qualifies as cute couldn't be more different, with LLENN finding the grenade launcher Fuka picked out to be ugly.
• Understatement: In Fatal Bullet she has a habit of putting things lightly in regards to talking about herself.
  • She claims her aim isn't the best, only for LLENN to clarify she couldn't hit something with a pistol at point blank. This was exactly what happened during the second Squad Jam, where she dumped the entire 17-round magazine of her Smith & Wesson M&P9 pistol at an opponent that was no more than a few feet away, and missed with every single shot.
  • When searching the rooms and coming across a machine, Fuka claims she had a flash of ingenuity and made it work again. LLENN elaborates that she just kicked the machine in frustration until it started making noise again.
• Unreliable Narrator: LLENN insists Fuka always twists the truth with her recounts and to take everything she says with a tonne of salt.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: SJ4, she inadvertently causes the Alliance to break their agreement with SHINC earlier than they planned because she happened to spot one of their jeeps and decided to shoot at it for fun, prompting them to try and take her out and rush in to kill both teams. Of course, she keeps this to herself.
• Wild Card: In SJ5, M orders her to stay put and wait for help in light of the unique rule separating everyone in a thick fog, due to her being at a large disadvantage in the current conditions. Evidently, she at some point decided to say "screw it" and formed an Enemy Mine with Shinohara to mount an attack on a mansion, which LLENN speculates would have been For the Lulz, before shooting her new partner In the Back upon seeing a chance to get a revenge match with Vivi.

Goshi Asogi / M

Goshi Asogi / M

Voiced by: Kazuyuki Okitsu (Japanese), Ray Chase (English)

^{Click here to see Goshi}

LLENN's first reluctant squad member who Pitohui brings in as a replacement for herself. He's also the manager of famous idol, Elsa Kanzaki.

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• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Surprised that this giant man mountain, who rarely shows emotion would resort to this? LLENN finds this out when she holds him at gunpoint for attempting to betray her.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • In SJ4 during the fight with SHINC, Eva manages to snipe his shield with the PTRD, sending a section of it into his arm and (temporarily) crippling it.
  • During his fight with Penebia in SJ4, he kills him by holding his shield in front of him, blocking his punches, and using his free hand to detonate a shrapnel grenade in front of the shield, destroying his arm and sending shrapnel into his opponent's stomach.
• Animal Motifs: Thanks to his space battleship armor shell, he can be compared with a turtle. He carries it on his back like a turtle's shell. When unfolded, M crouches behind it with his sniper rifle reaching out of a turret, which really looks like a turtle who has withdrawn into their shell. This is in contrast to LLENN's rabbit; invoking The Tortoise and the Hare.
  • In the first volume, he gets a minor link with bears. When LLENN first meets him she says that he resembles a bear in both size and ferociousness. Even after she warms up to him, she compares him to a big teddy bear. However, this is never brought up past Volume 1.
• Awesome by Analysis: He can identify guns just by listening to the sound of the gun fire. He can also very accurately anticipate enemy movements by simply observing their positions on a map.
• Beneath the Mask: It's revealed that his calm, tough guy persona is an act he puts on, the real M / Goshi Asogi, is much more vulnerable and is terrified of dying, at least before Pito.
• BFG: For SJ5's unique Alternative Gear rule, M is coming equipped with a Snipex Alligator Anti-Material Rifle, which LLENN notes resembles SHINC's PTRD-41.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • After spending most of Episode 5 hiding in fear, M finally joins LLENN and snipes her would be killers and saves her from dying.
  • Under Pito's orders to make sure the winner survives, M prevents LLENN from losing her HP to drowning after she beats Pitohui in SJ3.
  • In SJ5, upon witnessing Anna getting pursued by two players from his hiding place, he's quick to snipe them due to LPFM's alliance with SHINC.
• The Big Guy: Gets treated like one by Pitohui since he is a big, stout guy with an indestructible shield. He's actually really smart being a master strategist.
• Blunt "Yes":
  • As mentioned under Brutal Honesty, when LLENN confronts him about using her as a decoy.
  LLENN: Th-Then you knew and used me as a decoy?
  M: That's right.
  LLENN: "That's right"?
  • Karen asks why he doesn't tell the police or a psychiatrist about Pito, and Goshi says he won't go against Pito's wishes.
  Karen: Is it because you respect her decisions?
  Goshi: Yes.
  Karen: Even if they're crazy? At worst, involving suicide?
  Goshi: Yes!
• Boring, but Practical: In SJ5, whereas everyone else, either under his orders or in spite of them, took their chances in wandering the mist and picking fights with any player they found, M simply found a safe spot in the building he spawned, hunkered down, and tried to wait the mist out. This not only led to him being in significantly less risk than the likes of LLENN, but it afforded him the chance to learn about DOOM return under a different name by hearing one of their explosions in the distance, with no risk to himself. The only reason he abandons this strategy before the mist clears was because he witnessed Anna being chased and pulled a Big Damn Heroes, prompting them to make an escape from the city. Subverted in that if Anna didn't show up and he stuck with his wait it out strategy the entire time, he very well could have been a victim of the tournaments surprise "collapsing ground" rule.
• Brains and Brawn: The brains to LLENN's brawn. He does the planning, she does the killing. Ironic considering he's actually physically the bigger of the two.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • LLENN caught on that he was using her as a decoy. Not only does he not deny it, but he doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with it either. LLENN is visibly unhappy with this.
  • After LLENN foils his attempt to betray her, after his explanation on why he tried to kill her, he then remarks that it would have been better if he killed her using a grenade.
  • When he meets Karen in real life, he makes no bones about how there's no way to prove that he's M (since anything he says could hypothetically be something he learned from the real M), and she'll only have to take his word for it.
• Charles Atlas Superpower:
  • M's talent is his unrivalled navigation skills, enabling him to visualise any location in his head and flawlessly guide others through.
  • M's Improbable Aiming Skills which allows him to aim without System Assist, comes from pure training.
• The Chew Toy: He's practically Pito's personal punching bag, both verbally and literally.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Sometimes will serve this role for Pitohui, holding her back when she gets a bit too illogical and reckless.
• Cold Sniper: He's a stoic man, in-game and in the real world (to an extent), and an exceptional sharpshooter who is deadly even without using the aiming assist systems in-game.
• Combat Pragmatist: Being a coward by his own admission, M's playstyle revolves around avoiding direct confrontation and picking off enemies from long range using a sniper rifle. His ability to snipe without using aim assist was honed because the ability to attack without creating prediction lines that can be traced back to him minimizes his risk. When the need arises, he also uses a shield constructed from the same material as starship hulls to create a sniper's nest that grants him a high degree of protection.
• The Comically Serious: Always strict and soldier-like, showing very little emotion, conversing with a straight face and almost never smiles. This extends to him in real life as well. All this makes him funny when reacting to Pitou's craziness.
• Devious Daggers: He gives LLENN a lengthy and very detailed explanation of how to use a knife in close-quarters battle right before the first Squad Jam tournament, including techniques on the best way to cut major arteries and the best places to stab to kill someone quickly.
• Dirty Coward:
  • For all his acts of being a tough guy, he's really scared of dying. Upon reading a letter from Pitohui which stated if he died in the Squad Jam tournament then she would kill him in real life, he tries to kill LLENN so that her leader status would be transferred to him and allow him to resign without dying. When LLENN turns the tables on his attempted betrayal and holds him at gunpoint, the once comically serious M is reduced to tears and begs for his life.
  • Subverted later on. When Karen questions why he has no problems taking part in Pitohui’s impromptu death game when he expressed such fear of being killed in the first Squad Jam, he reveals to her that it’s not dying itself he’s afraid of, but of dying first and leaving Pitohui behind.
• Et Tu, Brute?:
  • LLENN is shocked when M turns his pistol on her, but recovered quick enough to dodge the shot and quickly puts the pistol's fire selector back on safe so that he couldn't get another shot off. She then holds her would be betrayer at gunpoint and demands answers from him.
  • In Squad Jam 2, Pitohui caught wind that M had been subtly helping LLENN's side, noticing that M had the humvee make an unnecessary amount of noise to disguise Fuka arriving on the scene, along with M taking out all of Team SHINC so only LLENN would be left for Pitohui (because only LLENN could save her life by killing her). M had done this because he loved Pito, though she still shoots M dead for his trouble.
• Everyone Has Standards: While he has an Undying Loyalty to Pitohui, being willing to put up with abuse, overwork, her cheating on him with his knowledge and getting dragged into situations that literally put his life at risk, there are some things that’ll he’ll complain about and even get angry over.
  • Being the Combat Pragmatist he is, he will become annoyed by Pitohui’s sadism and Cherry Tapping, such as when she practically tortured two guys and when she didn’t immediately finish off Fuka. The latter is a well-founded concern which comes back to bite her.
  • He also takes umbrage with Elsa neglecting or acting lazy in regards to her singing career, as LLENN can attest to based on phone conversations with him.
  • He is quick to tell her off when she punches him in the back of the head after he tells her that SJ3 was announced. Justified in that he was driving at the time, and doing anything to the driver in that situation is ''very'' dangerous.
  • In the manga, a brief scene is added where LLENN tries to convince Pito to ditch her prior engagement to join the Squad Jam. While Pito is convinced at first, M is able to Death Glare her into submission which, considering the later revelation about their IRL relationship, is pretty damn impressive.
• Experienced Protagonist: Quite possibly even more so than Pitohui due to his military background. He's an exceptional sniper, can perfectly read a battlefield allowing him to anticipate enemy numbers and locations, identify guns just by listening to the sound of the gunfire, and is an expert in many forms of combat for both guns and hand-to-hand.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • A variant where it's LLENN who provides the "Oh Crap" reaction. As LLENN hides from heavy gunfire, M is busy analyzing what each gun is based on the sound, prompting LLENN to tell him to stop analyzing and save her.
  • Reverses role with LLENN in this regard in SJ4, with LLENN explaining DOOM's action while he provides the Oh, Crap! When LLENN explains that only one of them is riding over, as he realizes DOOM's playstyle and orders everyone to get out of the truck.
• Extreme Doormat: M takes a lot of physical and verbal abuse at Pitohui's hands, yet never complains about it and continues to let her walk all over him. Then it's revealed he actually enjoys it.
• Formerly Fat: Before going to work for Elsa, he was quite chubby. The photo he shows to Karen and Miyu scarcely resembles him. He didn't try to lose the weight, it just happened when Elsa was running him ragged as her manservant.
• Friendly Sniper: M's very helpful to LLENN during fights in GGO.
• Genius Bruiser: He's stocked and burly, but he's also a brilliant tactician on the battlefield.
• Guile Hero: Being The Smart Guy, M usually becomes this in scenarios when he can't rely on his usual tactic of sniping from behind his indestructible shield, and sometimes comes up with such tactics for whatever team he's on to use.
  • In the first Squad Jam, he's the one who comes up with the idea to have LLENN hide in briefcase so she can get the drop on Narrows.
  • In SJ2 when PM4 fight SHINC, he's able to kill Anna by having their sniper aim his Bullet Line at her, then sniping her with his Lineless Shooting as soon as she jumps into his sights.
  • In his fight against Penebia in SJ4, he finds himself outmatched by his opponent's matching strength complimented by his IRL CQC skills. His solution? holds his shield in front of him as Penabia pins him to the ground and pummels him, then hold a grenade in front of the shield and detonating it in his hand, blasting Penebia with shrapnel and killing him at the cost of his hand. And while M himself ends up near-dead anyway, he's later able to sacrifice himself so Pito can get the drop on a member of WEEI armed with a Desert Eagle.
• Gun Nut: Enough of one to recognize a gun's caliber based on sound, even when there’s other guns firing, and deducing that SHINC has snipers using semi-auto sniper rifles based on the brief instance he saw LLENN get hit.
• Happiness in Slavery: When Pitohui's IRL self catches him stalking her, she blackmails him into essentially becoming her manservant, forcing him to do her every bidding to the point where he had to drop out of college and couldn't find a job. Karen starts to feel sympathetic to Goushi, but...
  Goushi: Those were wonderful days...
  Karen/Miyu: What.
  Goushi: Being near a beautiful woman, serving her every whim... As a man, there could've been no greater blessing.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In the final battle of SJ3, Pitohui gives him the job of making sure that whoever wins between her and LLENN survives long enough to be declared the winner, which he does by holding LLENN up while standing in the water, ensuring that his HP runs out before she hits the water and has LLENN win the tournament before it kills her.
  • Severely injured and armless after his fight with Penebia, M assists Pito in ambushing WEEI's Desert Eagle wielding member, getting shot and falling over dead as Pito leaps over him to attack.
  • In the Five Ordeals quest, after Shinohara gets killed by the mechanical dragon-turned-crab monster, he opts to charge it in his buggy before having Tomtom shoot the vehicle to blow it up once he's right next to him, killing himself in the explosion but knocking the dragon-crab down for the others to finish off.
  • In SJ5, with the revelation that all surviving players need to reach the castle in the center of the map less they fall with the collapsing map, Pito is quick to suggest that M and Anna, who suffered a lot of damage in their efforts to regroup with them, stay behind to provide supporting fire as the rest of the group make their way to castle. However, the sudden appearance and detonation of a member of DOOM, which creates a massive dust screen to prevent others from firing on them, removes the need to do this.
  • He later pulls a successful one offscreen, holding the line so that SHINC could escape and regroup with LLENN and Fuka.
• Hidden Depths: His Day in the Limelight in SJ5 shows that M seems to have a vested interest in cars, recognizing the racing modified Baja Bug car he and Anna commandeer and displaying a good deal of knowledge on how to drive it, even instructing Anna on how to put the seat belt on. He's even described smiling when describing to Anna the first-model Ford Mustang being used to chase them, even expressing a desire to drive it himself while Anna tries getting him to focus.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Before the first Squad Jam, he rigorously drills LLENN on all his equipment on the chance she has to be the one to use it, including the safety lever of his HK45 pistol. Later in the tournament when he tries to betray her, LLENN remembers said lessons and uses it to disable his gun so she can hold him at gunpoint instead.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl:
  • The big guy to LLENN's tiny girl; she could ride on his shoulders easily. It's inverted in real life. At 175cm, he's actually shorter than Karen.
  • This applies to him and Pitohui in real life, who is tiny in stature.
• Hypocritical Humour: In SJ5, during his team-up with Anna, she gripes about how her status as the Decoy Leader and how it guarantees that every player will be gunning for her makes her feel like she's being stalked, which he states would be terrible. He then imagines LLENN, Fuka and Pito calling him out on his hypocrisy.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: His aim is so good he doesn't need the system assist of the Bullet Circle. He can just aim on sight and hit his targets with exceptional precision. Sinon would be jealous.
• Inelegant Blubbering: He does this while LLENN holds him at gunpoint, which crosses over with Tears of Fear.
  "That was an image (Karen) didn't want to remember: a big tough macho man weeping like a baby."
• Irony: In SJ4, he ends up commandeering the PTRD, the same gun SHINC procured to use against him and his invincible shield. And he's using it from behind that same shield no less.
• Japanese Honorifics: Averted. He states he dislikes using honorifics and prefers calling others by name. Though this apparently doesn't extend to real life, as he's perfectly fine with addressing Karen as "Karen-san". In SJ5, he justifies this by stating that honorifics are very impractical if you're trying to give quick commands or warnings.
• Killed Offscreen: In SJ5, he holds the line so that the rest of SHINC can meet back up with LLENN and Fuka, with us learning of his death after Eva and LLENN reunite.
• Like a God to Me: He describes Pito's real-life self as the most beautiful person he had ever seen; so beautiful he compared her to a goddess. Then he realized during her initial abuse of him that she was more like a "fierce devil", which was even better in his opinion.
• Logical Weakness: As deduced by SHINC and MMTM, his his portable sniper-nest shield Made of Indestructium, has two weaknesses;
  • As David easily deduced, while the shield makes shooting at him from the front a complete folly, it leaves him completely exposed from the back and top, prompting him to acquire an Underbarrel Grenade Launcher to allow him to strike from above.
  • As SHINC figured out, the shield's portability is because it's joint aren't as thick or sturdy as the actual shield plates, so therefore enough force would cause it to break and effectively make the shield useless. This, combined with also feeling the need to surpass his effective range, compelled them to get their hands on the PTRD.
• Loophole Abuse: Pito said that she'd kill him if he died in Squad Jam, not if he surrendered. Because of that, when it looks like he might be killed, he decides to kill LLENN in order to become squad leader and resign.
• Love Makes You Dumb: Downplayed. M's feelings for Pito compels him to go along with her more out there or life-threatening whims, and avoid more rational solutions like getting her a therapist because he knows she'd be opposed to it. As a result, the most he does is employ Loophole Abuse to make sure they both come out unscathed, such as when he tried killing LLENN so he could resign as leader since she only said she'd kill him if he died, or trying to minimize the risks of her actions, such as getting LLENN to participate in SJ2 to kill Pito since he knows she'll prioritize her promise to LLENN over her Absurdly High-Stakes Game.
  • On a minor note, despite the fact that black coffee doesn't agree with his stomach, he drinks it regularly for no other reason than the fact that Pito does. It could be that Pito is forcing him to drink it, but him choosing to drink it even when meeting with Karen without her knowledge suggests otherwise.
• Love Martyr: He goes though a lot of trouble for Pito's sake, even going behind her back to help LLEN defeat her in Squad Jam 2 so she won't kill herself for losing to anyone else. What does Pito do when she discovers this? Execute him as a traitor.
• Made of Indestructium: He has a fold-up bulletproof shield made from space battleship armor, the same material Death Gun's estoc is made from. It is the strongest material in GGO and most bullets will bounce off it. The hinges holding the plates together are not quite as strong.
• Manly Tears: Several times in Squad Jam 2.
  • He first cries when Pitohui takes a headshot and very nearly died, leading M to carry her to bed and is by her bedside the whole time.
  • He cries again after LLENN defeats Pitohui, this time out of joy as he's assured that Pito will live, thanking LLENN while he does so.
• Meaningful Name: Played for Laughs. His GGO avatar is simply called M, which Karen deduces could mean "Masochist" after Goushi reveals his "blissful time" serving Pitohui.
• Mentor Archetype: LLENN's second GGO mentor after Pitohui , and her third VR mentor overall, who gives her a lot of lessons during the first Squad Jam.
• Mighty Glacier: He's nowhere near as fast and agile as LLENN, but he's far more durable and can take a lot more damage. His Sniper Rifle also inflicts more damage if he gets in a Boom, Headshot!. Hunkering down behind his space battleship armor shell gives him greater defense at the expense of remaining stationary.
  "I'm a chicken, so this is my armored chicken coup."
• Mysterious Past: Downplayed. While it’s known that he used to be overweight before entering his “relationship" with Elsa and how he came to become her manager and lover, almost nobody knows how he came to be so experienced with firearms and military combat. The most Pito mentions is that he went overseas at some point, but that's all that's said on the matter.
• Naked Apron: When the 4th Squad Jam is announced, Goushi is serving coffee to Elsa wearing this, and is rewarded with a kick to the ass.
• The Navigator: He has an exceptional sense of geographical location, able to visualize a map of any location. He's able to skillfully guide LLENN through a labyrinth of a destroyed city block.
  • He uses this again in SJ4 for the fight against SHINC, having LLENN run around throughout the abandoned city they're held up in and pinpointing where they haven't attacked LLENN, narrowing it down to where they're waiting to ambush her, allowing Fuka to fire a Plasma Grenade and ruin their attack while creating something of a smokescreen for LLENN to get the drop on them.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: Gives LLENN a knife, telling her that in a closed room a knife can be more useful than a gun. He turns out to be right, as LLENN uses the knife in the final battle against Eva, taking advantage of the close range and her speed.
• No Sense of Personal Space: One of the most evident things about Goshi is that he has a tendency to get too close to others for comfort.
• Not Afraid to Die: Zig-zagged. While he's terrified about Pito killing him, he says he's not afraid of dying- he's afraid of leaving Pito behind.
• Not So Stoic: When LLENN hold him at gunpoint after foiling his attempt to betray her, he breaks down into tears and begs for his life.
• Official Couple: He is Elza's boyfriend/manservant/sextoy. Whatever you want to call it, they're involved.
• The One Guy: The only male member on Team LPFM.
• One-Letter Name: His in-game handle M, of course.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: For M to show emotion, let alone burst into tears and beg on his hands and knees, things must truly be dire and serious. It turns out his life in the real world is at risk and dying in Squad Jam would mean Pitohui would kill him for real.
• Post-Stress Overeating: According to the light novel, he didn't lose weight until becoming Pito's slave because he was stressed about his less than stellar career prospects.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Has one when he appears to a downed Eva after she drops the PTRD, and proceeds to use it to nearly kill the sniper that shot her and force him to retreat.
  M: I'm borrowing this.
• Servile Snarker: He may have Undying Loyalty to Pitohui, but he's not above making snide jabs at her erratic behavior.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: In the light novels, he's often described as wearing a suit.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: The long range sniper to LLENN's short range sub-machine gunner.
• Stalker with a Crush: It's revealed this is how he met Elsa Kanzaki in real life. He was in love with her and stalked her for some time, before ending up saving her life from a thug and got injured in the process. Elsa offers to treat his wounds at her place, to which he accepts. He ends up unconscious and tied up, while Elsa reveals she knew he had been stalking her and gets repeatedly beaten for it. He is then blackmailed into working for her as a manager, which he enjoys due to still harboring feelings.
• Stalker without a Crush: He follows Karen around before tracking her down to her apartment to ask her to join the second Squad Jam.
• The Stoic: Always serious and never smiles, Pitohui frequently has to prompt him to join in on the conversation.
• Straight Man: Always the serious down-to-earth realist when put alongside the more enthusiastic risk-taking Pitohui or the naive and curious LLENN.
• The Strategist: A tactical genius who can devise fullproof strategies to help LLENN take down foes.
• Too Kinky to Torture: He describes the abuse and servitude he was forced to endure at the hands of the real life Pitohui, before revealing it was the best moments of his life.
• Undying Loyalty: To Elsa Kanzaki/Pitohui. It takes unbelievable levels of loyalty to endure the abuse he takes and catering to her every whim. His loyalty to her is so great that he refuses to turn to the police or a psychiatrist over Pitohui's state. In fact it's revealed he's not afraid to die himself, but afraid to die first and leave Pitohui alone.
• Unreliable Expositor: His recollection of how he met Pito may not be 100 percent accurate, since he describes Pito as a waitress who took business classes at night school, rather than a famous singer, because he was still trying to keep her identity secret from Karen and Miyu.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Guides LLENN over comms while he watches from a distance.
• Wall Pin of Love: Played with. He does this to Karen... immediately before talking about how much he loves Pito. The second light novel begins with this scene out of context, making it look like he's interested in Karen.
• Wham Line: Shortly before the second Squad Jam, LLENN notices someone following her around.
  "Please don't scream! It's me, Llenn! It's M!"
• What Does She See in Him?: Despite Goshi's less than desirable traits both Karen and Miyu are left perplexed at how he can be so devoted to someone like Elsa. Karen even calls out Elsa on needing to treat Goshi better and stop being unfaithful. Though Elsa just snarks that Karen can sleep with Goshi if she's bothered so much.
• Worthy Opponent: After his time in the first Squad Jam, other teams treat him (and LLENN) as huge threats, due to his bulletproof shield and his sniping skills.

Additional Members

Mai Kirishima / Shirley

Mai Kirishima / Shirley

Voiced by: Marika Kouno (Japanese), Jeannie Tirado (English)

A real life nature guide and deer hunter who started GGO as a way to practice her sniping under the suggestion of a co-worker. She's reluctantly dragged into taking part in the second Squad Jam with a team comprising of her fellow IRL hunters, but becomes a massive Blood Knight after shooting Pito in an attempt to avenge her team.

---

• Abnormal Ammo: In Squad Jam 3, she has equipped her rifle with nothing but exploding bullets, having taken advantage of the in-game ammo customization ability to overload her cartridges with enough smokeless powder to turn each shot into an Instant Death Bullet.
• Achievement In Ignorance: When Pito backstabs her team, she attempted to save one of her dead teammates by picking him up and running off with him. However, this actually served to save her life since her teammate became an Immortal Object upon death, preventing Pito and PM4's machine gunner from shooting her as she ran.
• Apologetic Attacker: When she and Clarence enact their betrayal, she says "Sorry" as she shoots the scouting monster to summon more to attack LPFM.
• Badass Boast: Before the mall battle in SJ4, she claims to intend on being the only one to leave the mall alive, go back for her R93, and then kill ZEMAL, which LLENN admits she could honestly see her being capable of doing.
• Batman Gambit: In order to kill Pito in SJ5, Shirley took adventure to LPFM and SHIN Cs need to reach the castle by having a member of DOOM, who she formed an alliance with earlier, make an attempt at the castle with the intent of exploding and kicking up dust to create a smokescreen that would obscure the vision of those shooting any stragglers. This added protection from getting shot prompted them to charge the castle while Shirley laid in wait for Pito to enter her sights.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In SJ4, she snipes Jake's trike and blows it up, saving Pitohui from his and David's pincer tactic.
  • Unintentionally. In SJ5, while wandering around the snowy mountains, she happens a large group of players shooting at what she doesn't realize is M and Anna hunkering down under their totalled Baja Bug car with M's shield duct taped around it trying to fight them off. She then proceeds to snipe the attackers before deciding to go down after them, only to stop upon realizing who they are.
  • Pulls a more intentional one later, when she sees LLENN and Fuka being pursued atop the walls by two players using a sling to go beneath the walls to avoid their return fire. She proceeds to shoot one of their arms off and cause them to fall, allowing LLENN and Fuka to continue unhindered.
• Blood Knight: She becomes this after SJ2, having a new appreciation for PvP and, in an ironic reversal, is the one to force her teammates to join SJ3 when they voice their reluctance to do so.
• Boring, but Practical: In contrast to the rest of the team, who decide to take advantage of SJ5's Alternative Equipment rule in some way for the element of surprise and extra variety in their loadout, Shirley opts to not bother getting an alternative set of gear as her pure dedication to sniping makes her rather inexperienced with GGO's other available firearms, and the time she'd be spending cramming in training in a new type of gun would be better spent refining her much more considerable sniping ability. The others are quick to accept her decision after she makes her case.
• Car Fu: In SJ4, her poor driving of the Humvee she and Clarence took accidentally kills one of the Wrong Lancers' members, when she crashes into a building while making a turn and crushing him in the process, and intentionally kills another of them and slamming into his back form behind while making a bee-line to Pito.
• Country Mouse: While she was born and raised in Tokyo, she has always had an affinity for nature and working outdoors in general, so she moved to the Hokkaido wilderness as an adult and makes a living as a huntress and nature guide.
• Cold Sniper: Being a real life huntress she's a very skilled sniper. She manages to land a head shot on Pitohui and very nearly kills her. She also has a Sugar-and-Ice Personality, showing the "ice" in-game and the "sugar" in real life.
• Compliment Backfire: Whenever they're working together and Pito compliments her, it only serves to piss her off. She prefers compliments from literally anybody else.
• Crippling Overspecialization: As a pure sniper, she suffers a bit from being largely vulnerable in close range, with her only melee weapon being a hunting knife. It's part of why she engages in her partnership with Clarence, as she can defend her with her more mid-ranged gear if someone gets close. It also forces her to ask Clarence to help her buy a pistol and learn to use it in light of SJ4's Pistol Only Zones. And even then, said pistol is basically a miniature sniper rifle.
• Cuteness Proximity: Being an animal lover in real life, Shirley ends up being to first, even before known former dog owner Fuka, to react to the dog LPFM and SHINC meets as part of the Five Ordeals quest, gushing about cute it is before composing herself.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In the Third Ordeal of the Five Ordeals quest, she instinctively shoots a cephalopod monster in the head despite the fact that they can survive losing it, with her cursing that she should have shot it's body.
• Death by Irony: Her long-awaited kill of Pitohui in SJ5 is pulled off due to her allying with a member of DOOM, whose explosion created a massive smokescreen that lured Pito into her sights. Her death in the same tournament is the result of three grenades accidentally dropped by SHINC detonating in her face.
• Death Seeker: Played With. In SJ2, she abstained from fighting and intentionally served as the team's scout and spotter in hopes that she'd get killed in the process. Though unlike Pitohui, this was because she wanted to get booted from the tournament as quickly as possible.
• Determinator: In SJ5, even as the ground behind her begins to crumble and she speculates that she could fall to her death in mere seconds, she patiently waits for Pitohui to enter her sights for her to make her long-awaited kill shot. As soon as her perseverance pays off, she's quick to make a mad dash for the castle, determined not to die yet.
• Dude Magnet: Subverted. Many of the guys who see her before SJ2 begins note that she's rather attractive with her cute face and impressive bust, but the scowl on her face kept anyone from trying to hit on her. If anything, Clarence is the only one who dares to try anything flirty.
• Dumb Muscle: Very Downplayed. For all intents and purposes, Shirley is one of the most competent players in the Squad Jams, and she's the Blue Oni between her and Clarence, often reigning in the latter's more murder-happy qualities. However, her single-minded focus on killing Pitohui can cause her to miss a few details, and her plans typically start and end with "kill Pitohui" while failing to consider outside factors. In comparison Clarence, while a more overt Blood Knight who seems willing to enter an all-out brawl, is not as single-minded and so is more aware of their surroundings, and is a lot more perceptive and craftier than her often silly behaviour would suggest.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Her username, Shirley, was a nickname her friend from middle school gave based her on her real name, with the kanji for her first being read as "rice" instead of it's original meaning of "dance", which turned into "shari" by free association, meaning "vinegary sushi rice". Mai didn't like being called this in public, but was less bothered using it as an online handle.
• Enemy Mine: In SJ5, Shirley ends up running into a member of DOOM and, realizing that shooting him herself would likely get her killed due to her explosive bullets, decides to approach him and propose an alliance. She ultimately uses this to finally score a kill on Pitohui, having him explode and creating a cloud of dust that not only provides Pito and her group both cover and incentive to make a beeline for the castle, but also provides Shirley with cover to take up a sniping position and wait for Pito to come into her sights.
• Exact Words: During SJ2, she's uncomfortable with killing other players in GGO, seeing it as analogous to killing humans. Then Pitohui backstabs her team. Once she's sure she's safe, Shirley declares that Pitohui isn't human, she's vermin. Vermin are to be eradicated.
• Famed In-Story: Her near kill of Pitohui in SJ2, even if most just assume she merely grazed her with her bullet, was enough to earn Shirley a reputation among Squad Jam spectators.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Downplayed, unlike with Clarence. While there's no hints their IRL working relationship is being affected, it's mentioned that the rest of KKHC are slowly veering away from GGO due to be intimidated by Shirley's intensity.
• Friendly Rivalry: Despite her hostile attitude towards her, there are hints that this is how she sees her obsession with killing Pitohui; before shooting her in SJ2, she realized in that moment that everything really was just a game, and that after she shot Pito and avenged her team, the two could have a drink together and talk about how they got back at each other, with the narration even saying that her bullet was "without anger or resentment". It's likely her ongoing obsession is because, since Pito survived her shot, they never actually settled the score of Pito killing her teammates, meaning this attitude will remain until she pulls it off.
• Glad He's On Our Side: Zig-Zagged. When SJ4 begins, Shirley is eager for her and Clarence to split off from LPFM so they can raise hell on their own. However, when they're forced to stick together due to the monster spawns and the difficulties in crossing the bridge, LLENN is quick to realize how cool-headed and clever Shirley, and hopes that she'll and Clarence be forced to work together for the long haul. They don't.
• Go Out with a Smile: She's noted to have had a smile on her face when she died, feeling euphoric from the first time she actually enjoyed GGO as a game.
• Graceful Loser: After LLENN kills her after she shoots Pitohui, she responds with only mild disappointment while admonishing herself for being sloppy before dying with a satisfied smile on her face, at least glad she seemingly took out Pito and avenged her team.
• Grew a Spine: She was a very passive girl who was unwilling to shoot other players in-game (though she had no problem with the PVE Monsters), but seeing Pito gun down her team in cold blood after explicitly promising not to do so, sends her on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and leads her to be out for Pito's blood. She's a willing and eager participant in the third Squad Jam, much to her teammates' surprise.
• Guile Hero: In SJ5, she briefly takes command and leads a successful counteroffensive against the Wannabe Millionaires by having LLENN stab holes in the wall to shoot at them from as they approach the tower.
• Hero Antagonist: Shirley is on an opposing team to the main characters, but is actually portrayed in a very sympathetic light. In any other situation she could have easily been The Hero of the story, going up against Pitohui to avenge her fallen team who was cruelly gunned down.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: As Shirley, she's rather anti-social best and Sadistic at her worst, but she does legitimately care about Clarence and value their partnership, and her occupation (as a nature guide, not a hunter) has given her a love of animals, which she displays in Volumes 9 and 10.
• Hypocritical Humour: When Team DOOM reveal themselves as a team of Suicide Bombers, she calls it "the calling card of scum", only for Clarence to point out she uses explosive bullets.
• I Know Mortal Kombat:
  • Downplayed. Ever since Shirley really got into PKing in GGO, she found herself studying snipers and sniping in a variety of ways, from books, to films, to online information. While most of her skill does still come from her IRL job as a hunter, it also became part of the reason she teamed up with Clarance, as she learned that most real-life Snipers had spotters to help find targets and watch the sniper's back.
  • Played With in regards to horse-riding, which she's able to use to ride the mechanical horse she and Clarence find in SJ4, which she and her team is stated to have practice extensively in-game to do, but Shirley certainly had help as she did horse-riding IRL and frequently does horse-mounted tours.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Like M above, Shirley is capable of Lineless Shooting thanks to her IRL hunting experience. While her squadmates are capable of the same, Shirley proves herself multiple times to be the more devastating markswoman.
  • In SJ4, she's able to snipe Jake's trike and blow it up from twelve hundred yards, just a hundred and sixty seven yards short of the 20th longest sniper kill and something not even she was sure she could pull off, in one shot. She tries to underplay it by stating that a vehicle is a larger target than a person, but that doesn't deter Clarence's praise of the feat.
  • Her long-awaited kill of Pitohui in SJ5 required her to make a truly impressive shot from half a mile away, roughly 880 yards, all while contending with the foggy conditions caused by the explosion by her temporary ally from DOOM, and the bullet drop, all without the system assistance to ensure her shot remains undetected and doesn't alert Pitohui. She naturally manages to hit her head, with her noting that her aim was only slightly off.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: When it seems like Pito isn't gonna reach the final area of the Five Ordeals quest, seemingly having been killed by her Mirror Boss, Shirley curses her for dying before she can kill her. Cue Pito spawning in at that exact moment.
• In the Hood: In SJ3, she comes equipped with various poncho’s for different environments.
• Irony: For the second Squad Jam, it was her teammates who wanted to join the tournament and dragged her into it, with her deciding not to actually fight due to being a Technical Pacifist. By the time of the third one, she's quite possibly the biggest Blood Knight among them and was forcing them to join when they proved reluctant.
  • Also, the group save for Shirley were a close to becoming a bunch of Blood Knights, getting excited and eager whenever they scored a kill while Shirley made it a rule to not shoot anyone before Pito killed the others. In SJ3, their entire strategy revolves around not getting caught and killed, which prompts them to avoid picking fights, while Shirley is the one doing all the killing.
• I Work Alone:
  • Took this stance in SJ3, having her team utilize a strategy that would allow her to split up from them and wreak havoc on her own. In fact, she was the only one in her team who kept her comm off, while the rest opted to keep them on to chat.
  • Before the final battle of SJ4 when Pito suggests a buddy system, Shirley claims she'd rather work alone when told to work with Fuka, perhaps not liking the idea to work with someone other than Clarence.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • In SJ3. While she would love to have another shot at Pitohui and possibly LLENN as revenge for SJ2, she knows that she wasn’t in the best position for a sneak attack and instead focuses on the remnants of the Squads they and Clarance were decimating.
  • She makes one last attempt on Pito's life in the last stretch of the "Fourth Ordeal" in the Five Ordeals Quest, only for Tohma to aim the PTRD at her and silently threaten to shoot, prompting her to call it quits.
  • In the climax of SJ5, with what little left of LPFM and SHINC cornered in a tower by the combined might of MMTM and ZEMAL, Shirley seems content with just surrendering, recognizing their poor odds and content that she managed to eliminate Pito. Even when LLENN comes up with the admittedly risky plan to hide on the wall above the bottomless pit to survive the destruction of the tower via MMTM's RPG and ZEMAL's M2, Shirley simply hangs from the bottom of the floor and instructs the others on climbing, ready to cut her rope at a moments notice should she be discovered.
• Last Breath Bullet: As she's getting shot to death by MMTM in SJ4, she chooses to shoot at WEEI's grenadier before dying instead of running, taking his arm in the process.
• The Load: Invoked, hoping to drag her team down and get them to lose, or at least get killed herself and get to leave the tournament sooner.
• More Deadly Than the Male: After SJ2, she’s become a Blood Knight and the deadliest and most effective fighter in her Squadron, who are all men. She is the only one among them using their knowledge of hunting to inflict greater harm on other players per bullet.
• Motive Decay: Initially, Shirley wanted to kill Pitohu to avenge her team, who Pito mercilessly gunned down after they tried to strike up an alliance with PM4, in part due to her difficulty in distinguishing the real and virtual worlds, and therefore seeing her as a monster. Considering that she finally realizes the difference just before she shoots Pito, her insistent attempts on her life in the present seem to be more about her surviving said shot, likely feeling that the score was never properly settled and potentially seeing it as a wound to her pride as a hunter.
• My Greatest Failure: Somewhat Played for Laughs. She reveals to Clarence that not killing her before Sam in the third Squad Jam 3 was "the biggest regret of her GGO life", to which Clarence joking jabs that there's no take-backs.
• Not So Above It All: During LPFM's team huddle before SJ4 begins, with Clarence joining in their cheer despite the two of them planning to splinter off, she's also clenching her fist, silently taking part in the cheer.
• Obliviously Evil: Sure, she hated Pito's guts and wanted to avenge her team, but it's doubtful that she knew that Pito was planning to kill herself IRL if she died in the Squad Jam and, considering her Technical Pacifist status at the time, she very likely wouldn't have shot if she did know.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Most impressively among the group, she's the first to clear the Mirror Boss Fifth Ordeal, which she explains to LLENN turned into a knife fight when she grab her doubles Ken-Nata with her thigh before strangling her to death.
• Off with Her Head!: Not quite. During the "Sixth Ordeal" in the Five Ordeals quest, Pito kills her by stabbing her hand with her Photon Sword to get her to drop the handgun she borrowed from Fuka, before cutting her head vertically.
• One-Woman Army:
  • Her re-introduction in SJ3 sees her going on a killing spree in the shipyard, sniping players with her explosive bullets to One-Hit Kill them before relocating, killing any player in her path with an expert use of snapshots. Her rampage only ends when she bumps into Clarence, who she duels and scores a Mutual Kill on.
  • After SJ5 begins, she spends her time wandering the mountains wearing a pair of ski-equipped galoshes, effectively re-enacting her killing spree from SJ3 until she runs into a member of DOOM, who she opts to make an alliance with in her plan to kill Pito.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Her reasoning for killing Jake in SJ4, giving Pito a chance to escape certain death at David's hands.
  "I'm her Grim Reaper."
• Perpetual Frowner: Her default mood is being sour and gloomy. Even though her in-game avatar is quite pretty, the aura of negativity she emits dissuades any guys from flirting with her.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Unlike the much taller Shirley, Mai is actually five foot one IRL. Doesn't stop her from being an effective hunter.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Tells Clarence to do this while they're retreating in a Humvee, which they commandeered via Clarence stripping down to get the drop on the original driver.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Has one after Pitohui kills her entire team, leading her to drop her pacifism and swear to kill Pito herself. She very nearly succeeds. That being said, the light novels reveal that by the time she pulls the trigger, she's no longer angry with Pito for tricking the others, but has simply come to accept that it's a game and sees her animosity to her as part of a fun rivalry.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Due to the requirements for getting a Rifle License IRL, Shirley is adept with a shotgun. Pito actually lends her her 870 for the first challenge of the Five Ordeals quest.
• Slasher Smile: Becomes a bit more prone to flashing these over time.
• The Smurfette Principle: Shirley is the only female member of the team. This is because the team is composed of the "real-life" team of hunters, the "Northern Country Hunters' Club", and it is difficult for anyone, man or woman, to legally be a rifle-owning hunter in Japan. So the odds of Shirley having female teammates is rather slim.
• Sniper Pistol: Fittingly, instead of getting a normal pistol for SJ4's pistol zones, Clarence helped her procure a Remington XP-100 chambered in .308 so she can use her explosive bullets and she put in enough practice with it to kill from at least 400 meters away. This helps in the mall battle not just by allowing her to retain her sniping style, but allowing her to notice Beralto, who's using the same gun, take up position and warn the others.
• Sole Survivor: In the second Squad Jam, Shirley is left as the only surviving member after Pitohui betrays and kills the entirety of her team. She got spared due to Pito deeming her Not Worth Killing. This was a mistake on Pito's part, where Shirley later returns for revenge and manages to land a head shot on her.
• Spanner in the Works: She utterly ruins the elaborate plan that Teams LF and SHINC set up to eliminate Pitohui when she ends up sniping Pito from afar.
• The Strategist: In Squad Jam 3, she is the one who basically drags her team kicking and screaming into the tournament, and the one who forcefully takes over the leadership role by laying out her whole plan to deal with Pitohui to the rest of KKHC. Her plan was to make herself the last person on her team to gain leadership among her teammates in the event that the leader dies, and have the others scatter and avoid danger while she goes around killing with no one seeing her coming, as only the leader can appear on the scan.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: While Shirley is a bit cold in-game, Mai comes off as warmer and more personable in real life, especially when interacting with Ai.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A female Cold Sniper with greenish-coloured hair, generally unsociable, has a Blood Knight streak, has what is essentially an insta-kill weapon and is partners with a black-clad player who is the opposite gender that their avatar would suggest. Sound familiar?
• Sweet Tooth: Implied. In their attempts to get Shirley to join the second Squad Jam with them, the others in KKHC offered to buy her a slice of her favourite cake.
• Taking the Bullet: Her death in SJ5 is due to inadvertently doing this; after SHINC accidentally drop their grenades while trying to fight back against the combined firepower of MMTM and SHINC, they fall down the wall where her and LLENN are hanging and detonate after falling past her, killing her but preventing the blast and shrapnel from hitting LLENN.
• Target Spotter: Serves as this in SJ2 instead of actually taking part, hoping to end up getting shot and booted from the tournament.
• Technical Pacifist: Shirley was initially reluctant in shooting people in-game, having difficulty keeping reality and the virtual world separate. However after watching Pitohui gun down her team in cold blood, after they had struck up a deal, she draws her rifle and prepares to kill Pitohui herself. After she manages to land a headshot on, she drops all pretences of being one in-game.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: In Squad Jam 4 when Pitohui invites her and Clarence to join LPFM. She still hates the woman and accepts the offer solely so she and Clarence can bypass the prelims, but loudly proclaims they will do their own thing and run off when the tournament starts. However, the special rules of SJ4 lead to them sticking with LPFM longer than she intended.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Her response to her incoming death via grenades accidentally dropped by the surviving members of SHINC is to complain about going out in such an anti-climatic fashion.
• Tomboy: From a young age, she always preferred outdoors physical activities rather than fashion, and took up horse riding, camping, mountain climbing, and eventually hunting.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: Her hair IRL is black and much longer, and she usually ties it up like this.
• Too Awesome to Use: Subverted. The narration states that her explosive bullets are 50 times more expensive than basic assault rifle ammo, due to the required materials and the possibility of screwing up the creation process. Despite this, she made a whopping 200 of these rounds in preparation for the Squad Jam, even using the cash-conversion system to buy more materials.
• Took a Level in Badass: A massive one. After Squad Jam 2, she dedicates all her time in VR to becoming stronger and more skilled for the sole purpose of killing Pito in the next tournament, becoming almost obsessive with it. Any semblance of her previous shy, subdued self is gone. She develops her own explosive ammo for the tournament, goes out hunting monsters day in and day out to test her skills, and wipes out almost a dozen players on her own. Her final kill in Squad Jam 3 is Clarence, whom she mercilessly stabs through the chest right before she too is also killed by Clarence triggering a grenade.
• Tsundere:
  • Towards Clarence. She generally acts rude and cold to her, often threatening to kill her and even citing not killing her before Sam back in SJ3 as My Greatest Failure. She's also rather upset when Clarence chooses to sacrifice herself to take out PORL and RGB, trying to talk her out of it and admitting she wanted her to be there when she killed Pito.
  • Also towards LPFM in SJ4. Despite making it no secret that she plans to kill Pito and her and Clarence's plans to split off from them, with the both of them even betraying them after they deal with DOOM, she shows herself to be a surprisingly dedicated team player, allying with them later after Clarence's Heroic Sacrifice, expressing concern when LLENN seems to drown trying to save her, saving Fuka from a member of SATOH, and eventually opting to risk her life to shoot off the arm of the WEEI's grenadier to stop him from reloading, something that surprises even her as she dies.
• Unknown Rival: She is heavily motivated to kill Pitohui, who she has labelled as "vermin" for shooting her team mates in cold blood immediately after a negotiation. Meanwhile, Pito really has no idea who she is. LLENN knows that Shirley was the one who landed the headshot on Pito in SJ2 but even she is also clueless as to how consumed with hatred Shirley is with Pito. Subverted by the Test Play and SJ4, where Pito not only tries to invite her and Clarence for a celebration after the Test Play, but also tracks them down to offer a temporary spot in LPFM to bypass the prelims.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: On the surface, their partnership can appear rather dysfunctional, with Shirley generally being rather cold and not above threatening to kill her, while Clarence frequently teases her and isn't afraid to snipe back. That being said, the two of them display themselves multiple times as True Companions.
• What You Are in the Dark: After her team got killed by Pito, her immediate decision, after calling Pito a bitch a few times, was just resign with her new leadership status and leave the tournament without firing a single bullet, just like she wanted. Then, as she was opening her menu to log out, she saw her R93 Tactical in her inventory list. Thus, Shirley the Blood Knight was born.
  • Comes into play in SJ4 as well, when Shirley is given a choice in the final battle at the mall to either run and preserve her chance at killing Pito, or take a loss that will let her help the team's overall chances of success. She chooses to take the loss, and is even confused as to why she didn't run away.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Her reaction when, defiant of her hopes that her team would suffer a Curb-Stomp Battle and swear off PvP, their opponents in the SJ2 prelims ended up being Photon Sword users reliant on dodging and Parrying Bullets, which they couldn't do with her team's ability to fire without Bullet Lines appearing.

Ai Onoda / Clarence

Ai Onoda / Clarence

Voiced by: Mikako Komatsu (Japanese), Laura Stahl (English)

A participant introduced in Squad Jam 2 as part of an alliance of teams that tries to ambush LLENN. She forms a partnership with Shirley after they have a duel to the death in SJ3.

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• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • Along with Pito, she's the only one to realize that the monsters from the Third Ordeal were actually other players.
• Battle Strip: Strips down to her underwear to get the drop on one of V2HG's drivers.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Despite her eccentric and somewhat pervy personality, Clarence is not only a skilled fighter, but she's also rather devious. When we first meet her, she's Faking the Dead by laying atop of other player's corpses, which likely would have fooled anyone else if they weren't LLENN who recently Took a Level in Badass. Then in SJ3, she's able to trick the remaining players from LPFM's counter and kill at least eight of them, and later fights on even footing with Shirley and manages to pull off a Taking You with Me on her.
• Bifauxnen: Combines her androgynous looking avatar with a traditionally male name.
• Birds of a Feather: While she's this with Shirley, as seen above, she and Pito are also quick to hit it off due to their similarly excitable demeanors and Blood Knight personalities. Shirley's reaction to them interacting could be summed as "Oh God, there's two of them.".
• Blackmail: Implied. She apparently knows something about her male teammates that they don't want anyone else to know, which is what she used to convince to take part in the SJ3 prelems with her. She reveals to Mai IRL that as Clarence, she recorded a teammate making weird noises after putting on a sexy outfit and made him buy stuff for her or else she'd upload it online.
• Blood Knight: Along with being a massive flirt and a bit of a pervert, Clarence really enjoys killing, to the point of going into gruesome detail about what she’ll do to enemy players. While it's not enough for her teammates to outright abandon her like what happened with Pitohui, they often very disturbed by this aspect of her.
• Boyish Short Hair: It's more gender neutral length hair, but nonetheless makes it harder to tell she's female.
• Choosing Neutrality: In Volume 10, when the remainder of the group splits into two sides over whether or not to kill Suuzaburou to complete the quest, Clarence opts to stay on the sidelines to ensure there's at least one survivor in case both sides kill each other so someone can complete, or if Fuka's side wins, resign the quest.
• Combat Pragmatist: Has no problem with making an alliance with other teams to target LLENN and Fuka in SJ2 and in SJ3, pretends to form an alliance with some survivor of LPFM’s counterattack only to kill them all.
• Day in the Limelight: Compared to her first appearance in Squad Jam 2, she gets more combat focus in Squad Jam 3. She tricks several rival teams into spreading out so she can more easily eliminate them and goes head-to-head against Shirley. Neither of them walks away from this encounter.
• Death Equals Redemption: For all her perverted behaviour, Clarence was being genuine when she wanted to be friends with LLENN and Fuka, and proves it by Taking the Bullet for LLENN when they get sniped by Team MMTM.
• Defiant to the End: Her final moments in SJ5 are spent unloading her 1301 Tactical on MMTM, managing to disarm Bold before getting torn apart by their bullets.
• Depraved Bisexual: Downplayed. She openly admits to being bi, albeit hinting that she prefers girls, and while she's hardly what one would call "evil", being largely friendly and upbeat, she's Sadistic Blood Knight who tends to give out Too Much Information when describing how she'd kill players, and she can come off as kind of creepy, such as when she asked LLENN for a kiss on the cheek in exchange for her magazines.
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • The light novel says that "Even Clarence's own teammates in their random outfits didn't seem to want anything to do with (her)," after she phrases a question about their impromptu alliance in the most vulgar way possible. She is so off-putting that she has to enter Squad Jam 3 with only one partner, a man named Sam. By the time of SJ4, she was kicked out of her squad and unfriended by them.
  • Averted with her partnership with Shirley, who admits to not minding working with her despite her quirks, and their brief team-up with LPFM, with them exchanging friendly banter and opting not to put her at risk by shooting the monster that grabbed her. Justified in that her Blood Knight status makes her Birds of a Feather with Shirley, Pito and Fuka, and M and LLENN are fairly friendly, if a bit deadpan and snarky respectively.
• For the Lulz: When asked, she simply states that she joined the Squad Jam because she thought it'd be fun, taking Shirley, who joined the first one simply because her teammates dragged her into it and largely plays GGO for practice, off-guard.
• Gender-Blender Name: "Clarence" is a male name.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Takes the bullet meant for LLENN and tells her to win before dying.
  • How she goes out in SJ4. She decides to eliminate PORL and stop their RPG assault on them and the locomotive by sneaking over to them with a white poncho to blend in with the snow, and then setting off the backpack of explosives once she got close enough to them, killing them all.
• Hidden Depths: The end of Squad Jam 4 reveals that Clarence is actually Ai, a third-year in middle school(younger than even Team SHINC) who's being homeschooled.
• Hypocritical Humour: She, with absolutely no basis, calls one of DOOM's members a "perverted weirdo".
• Identical Stranger: Clarence's in-game avatar has a strong resemblance to Karen's real life appearance.
• In-Series Nickname: Goes by "Clay."
• I Surrender, Suckers: She tries to pull this. She requests permission from LLENN to move her right hand, only to reach for her gun. LLENN shoots her hand for her trouble.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: She happened to chance on an androgynous avatar and as a result pretends to be male. Just like Kirito did.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: She's one of the few of the LPFM-SHINC alliance to clear the Mirror Boss of the Five Ordeals quest. Unlike with LLENN, who's fight we follow, and Shirley and Pito, who described their fights, we don't get any details on how she accomplished this.
• Oh, Crap!: Says this word for word after her teammate Sam is sniped by Shirley.
• Playing Possum: After LLENN massacres her entire team, Clarence tries to avoid their fate by pretending to be one of the dead corpses on the ground. LLENN notices there should be one more person and exposes her by shooting at the corpse she's using for cover.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: In real life, Ai has long dark hair and her skin is so pale Mai is worried about her health.
• The Reveal: The last chapter of Volume 9 implicitly reveals Clarence's real life identity to the reader.
• Samus Is a Girl: Clarence reveals she's a female player with an androgynous avatar, which led her to pretend to be a guy. In the localized version of the light novels, she's referred to with male pronouns by the narration until her gender is revealed.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Her reaction to some kind of "armadillo person" grabbing her leg in SJ4, not expecting the tournament to have monsters.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: When discussing their advantages with Shirley in SJ4, she enthusiastically says that another is their beauty, saying they could strip down to distract the (mostly male) competition, and bemoans that they can’t remove their underwear as well. She later does strip down to her underwear to take out the driver for V2HG's second humvee.
• Shoot the Dog: Zig-Zagged. She opts to not take a side in the "Sixth Ordeal" to keep the teams even and make it there's at least someone alive to finish things, and states that depending on who wins, she'll either do the deed or resign the quest if the winners are unable to.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: For SJ5's Alternative gear rule, M recommended that Clarence get her hands on an Automatic Shotgun. Which one she decided to go with has yet to be revealed.
• Shrinking Violet: She comes off as rather shy and reserved in real life, at least at first glance.
• Skewed Priorities: In SJ5, when she and Tanya reach the castle and read the notification about it's nature as the Final Battle arena after the rest of the map starts crumbling beneath everyone, Clarence's's mainly curious about it's written in Minchi font, to Tanya's bafflement.
• The Smurfette Principle: Appears to be the only female member of her team. This is not immediately clear because Samus Is a Girl, so the team appears to have no female members at all.
• Taking the Bullet: Shields LLENN from Team MMTM's gunfire at the cost of her own life.
• Taking You with Me: Does this when Shirley manages to get on top of her and stab her, activating a plasma grenade and giving her no chance to escape.
• Target Spotter: Has this role in her partnership with Shirley, surveying the area for targets and anyone sneaking up on them with binoculars and being able to defend her with her assault rifle.
• Too Much Information: She starts going into way too much detail on her experiences kissing guys and girls in real life, making LLENN and Fuka cringe, and this is on top of violating the unwritten rule to not talk about personal real life stuff in a VR game in general. She also tends to do this in regards to what she wants to do to enemy players when she kills them.
• Trademark Favourite Food: It's frequently suggested that Clarence has a fondness for potato based snacks. When she and Shirley end up in the ghost players lobby in SJ5, she immediately orders everything potato-based on the menu, which Shirley Lampshades.
• Troll: In SJ5, Clarence wanders the mist and happens upon a player oblivious to her presence. Deciding to have some fun, she picks up some rocks throws them at him, throwing him into a panic. She then gets out the bull horn Pito was using during their strategy and proceeds to startle him with it until he starts panic-firing.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Well she's not really a child, being a third-year Middle Schooler IRL, but her behaviour as Clarence can be seen as rather concerning for a girl her age. As she confides to Mai when they meet IRL for the first time, she enjoys being "dirty" and doing morally ambiguous things she otherwise couldn't do IRL, such as Blackmail and Really Getting Around.
• Universal Ammunition:
  • Luckily for LLENN, Clarence is one of the few players in GGO who uses a weapon that is not only chambered for 5.7x28mm ammo, but also uses the same magazines as her P90: the ultra-rare AR-57 rifle. On top of that, her sidearm is the FN Five-seveN pistol, which also uses the same ammunition.
  • Before her Heroic Sacrifice in SJ4, she gives LLENN her remaining ammunition for her to use.