Yuriko Aoki

Yuriko Hiramaru (née Aoki) is a supporting character and mangaka in Bakuman. She uses Ko Aoki as her pen name in Jump to avoid crowds of fans. She was the writer of Hideout Door and working together with Takuro Nakai. She later worked alone with serializing her works A Time of Green Leaves and What God Gave Me.... The former of which got canceled due to dropping popularity. Aoki has short ash blonde hair in a bob and honey-colored eyes. She can be distinctively be seen with glasses when she reads and is easily identified by the iconic beauty mark under her left eye and her soft, fashionable, and strongly feminine taste in clothing. Her attire usually consists of various skirts and cardigans/sweaters. Her appearance in the manga has slightly changed with her character development from a conceited brat to a more traditionally motherly role in a manga (enlarged breasts and kinder, softer eyes). When she is first introduced, Aoki is presented as extremely haughty, judgmental, and dogmatic, similar to the later fully introduced Aiko Iwase, but as the story progresses, she undergoes enough character development to overcome her initial attitude (revealed to be caused by a distrust of men) and show a more tender, kinder, and more agreeable character. It isn't revealed until she begins talking to Akito Takagi that, in the beginning, she believed that men were unreliable and that, despite her previously pompous pride towards her romances, she had never dated. However, as the storyline progresses, Aoki develops a crush on Takagi and starts to trust men more. This is made most prominent when she swallows her pride to ask for help from Shinta Fukuda in order to properly draw girl's panties. She has also developed a romantic relationship with Kazuya Hiramaru and became engaged to him. Aoki is also shown as being very innocent especially on matters of love. This is due to her inexperience with men. The first man that she could really trust was Takagi when they agreed to help each other understand the opposite sex for their respective mangas. It is also due to this innocence that she did not realize the awkwardness of admitting to having started to like Takagi after encouraging Takagi and Kaya Miyoshi on their planned marriage. In contrast, she is able to quickly figure out Iwase's feelings for Takagi after hearing them converse. Initially, Aoki was shown to be extremely stubborn, especially about her manga stories. Her former editor, Aida, even said that she was a really challenging author to work with. Later on, after learning to respect her mangaka peers, she is shown to be more flexible as shown during her collaboration with Nakai for Hideout Door. Aoki is willing to learn from anyone if they have anything worthwhile to teach her, as well as able to stand her ground and show an enormous amount of courage in tight situations, as shown when she stands up to Nakai and tells him to hit her if he's really so angry at her in Chapter 129. She's also a bit dense when it comes to what can be told and what is a private matter; she told Team Fuduka the reason why Akito didn't want Iwase to come. Aoki also can't seem to see how much Iwase is like how she used to be, but the difference is that she had a distrust of men while Iwase is better at being rejected by her crushes.