Ai Hoshino

"It's a secret~"
This article contains SPOILERS to later chapters. Read this page at your own risk.

Ai Hoshino「星 (ほし) 野 (の) アイ, Hoshino Ai^?」 was the titular character and the poster child of Oshi no Ko. She was the lead idol of the original B-Komachi and mother of Aqua Hoshino and Ruby Hoshino.

As an idol, she lived a life of deceit by pretending to genuinely love her fans. After becoming pregnant with the twins, to not squander her reputation, she gave birth and raised them in secret, playing the role of both idol and mother. However, her lies inevitably caught up with her when she was fatally attacked by a disgruntled fan, using her final moments to tell her children that she loved them.

Even after her death, her influence is felt throughout the remainder of the series, with her daughter carrying on her legacy while her son devoted his life to revenge against the one who sold her out, her ex-boyfriend.

Quick Answers

What was Ai Hoshino's perspective on lies and love?

Ai Hoshino believed that lies were a form of love and saw them as a way to express her feelings towards her fans.

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How did Ai Hoshino's attitude change after having children?

After having children, Ai Hoshino realized the true meaning of love and experienced genuine feelings of love and satisfaction.

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How did Ai Hoshino's personal life differ from her public persona?

In her personal life, Ai Hoshino was not very social and had few close friendships outside of the entertainment industry. Her public persona was a bright and cheerful act that hid her true personality.

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What was the meaning behind Ai Hoshino's name?

The name Ai Hoshino can be interpreted as "wild star eyes" and has various meanings, including "love" and "indigo."

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Appearance

Ai was a beautiful and quite thin girl with gradient-colored eyes from purple to pink and a six-pointed star in each of her eyes. She was shown to have brownish-red hair on the first chapter cover, but it is shown to have more of a blue-purplish hair color on the volume cover.

Her idol outfit was adorned in a pink aesthetic of varying degrees of lighter and darker shades. The outfit's design has an overall ruffled appearance. A black belt is located on her waist, and other miscellaneous accessories are present throughout the design: three blue stars on her chest, a heart-shaped necklace on her neck and a bunny hairpin accentuated by two gold stars and a pink ribbon.

Personality

When Ai was very young, her mother Ayumi Hoshino was arrested on a theft charge, and even after her release, she did not care enough to raise Ai anymore, which made her grow up in an orphanage. The environment she suffered being with her abusive mother caused her to think of ways to protect herself. Ai lacked any memory of loving or ever being loved herself, - prominently shown when Ichigo Saitou scouted for idols to start a group. She believed she lacked the qualification to become due to these reasons, showcasing a lack of faith in herself. She became quickly convinced to join when Saitou told her that lying is fine and is, in fact, a desirable trait.

Thus, Ai's perspective started to shift. She convinced herself that lies are a form of love—a love harbored out of the selfish desires of both sides of the spectrum. Ai sought to find an object for her "love.". She wanted to learn how to love by telling her fans that her deceitful lies are, in fact, love. This desire also came when she bore children, but in a different context. She never once said that she loved them because being disingenuous towards them would be terrifying. Nonetheless, she was shown to enjoy her time with her children and was particularly delighted when the twins did an eye-catching performance with idol lightsticks, which stunned the entire venue.

No matter what, lies allowed her to process the world around her. Within these contexts, she never sought to make things right to the point where she was fine to face the consequences of her actions. Lies were her way of expressing love, hoping that one day they would become the truth. Only when a terrible event happened did Ai finally realize she loved her children, a genuine form of love free from impurity and dishonesty. She was relieved and satisfied to finally be able to experience these true feelings. Even before this realization, Ai had grown concerned over their wellbeing and stressed over the prospects of getting better paying jobs in order to provide for them.

According to several characters through the series, Ai had a unique charisma capable of drawing all the attention to herself when she was in the spotlight. Miyako Saitou and Taishi Gotanda commented that Ai was a very uncommon idol and probably they would never get to see anyone like her, stating that she was a rare case among countless idols who wish to be at the top. Ai was notoriously ambitious and a risk-taker to the point of recklessness, best evidenced by her intentions of both continuing her idol career and having children in secret, which was by all accounts extremely dangerous, as it would jeopardize not only her entire career but have harmful ramifications both to her company and coworkers.

When it comes to her private life outside the stage, Ai wasn't very social, and most of her relationships were with people related to the entertainment industry, showing that Ai used to be a loner. Aqua pointed out that Ai didn't have any close friendships, even among her fellow partners at B-Komachi. The seemingly bright and cheerful personality was nothing more than an act that hid her true personality.

It is noted by multiple characters that Ai had disorderly, impulsive, reckless, clumsy, and asocial behavior with a low level of education, a direct result of growing up in an abusive environment. It wouldn't be until she met her boyfriend that she would have a drastic change in attitude, acting more cheerfully, taking better care of her own appearance, acting more femininely, and reducing her self-destructive inclinations. Although said information was private, observers such as Masaya Kaburagi and Akane Kurokawa were able to correctly deduce that she had found a special someone; the latter in particular was able to observe certain character traits common amongst girls with teen pregnancies, and accurately determine that she had given birth in secret.

Career

Filmography

Film

• That Was the Start

Television

• Unknown TV Show^[7]

Discography

B-Komachi

• Our Sign Is B
• STAR☆T☆RAIN
• HEART's♡KISS
• More than 30 unnamed songs^[8]

Manga Appearances

Anime Appearances

Etymology

Together, her full name means "wild star eyes" as a caricature of her double star eyes. When pronounced, it can also be interpreted as "desires of love".

• The name Ai, when written in katakana (アイ), means "eye", but when written in kanji (愛 or 藍), it could mean:
  • 愛 - "love, affection".
  • 藍 - "indigo".
• Ai's surname Hoshino means "star" (星) (hoshi) and "field, wild/wilderness" (野/野生) (no).
  • The pronunciation of Hoshino (ほしの) is similar to (欲しいの), which means "Desire of".

Trivia

Spoilers Ahead!

• Ai's death resembles the real-life stabbing of Mayu Tomita, a 20-year-old Japanese singer and actress, in May 2016. Tomita originally became famous by playing a fictional idol named Ai Takano in the web drama Secret Girls. The perpetrator in Tomita's stabbing was a 27-year-old fan who had harassed her online and sent her unsolicited gifts. Twelve days before the attack, Tomita reported the harassment to the police out of fear for her safety, but they dismissed the case. Tomita survived the attack, but received lasting physical and psychological injuries. The incident led the Japanese national government to revise its anti-stalking laws to include online harassment.

• Ai has two stars in her eyes compared to her children, who only have one each (Aqua Hoshino has one in his right eye and Ruby Hoshino has one in her left).

• • As the mix of Aqua and Ruby's eyes colors results in purple, this is an allusion that they are half of their mother.
• Ai's smartphone ^[9] & blog account password, "45510" is the initial of the four founding members of B-Komachi^[10]. The number corresponds to the Japanese flick keyboard:
  • Takamine (た Ta): 4
  • Nino (に Ni): Double 5 (If using a flip phone, double press な Na to get に Ni)
  • Ai (あ A): 1
  • Watanabe (わ Wa): 0
    • The novel 45510 also revealed that through her drafted apology in B-Komachi's former blog, Ai had always wanted to remain friends and reconcile with the other original B-Komachi members, but this is now impossible after her death and the novel's main character deleting the blog.^[10]
• Tsukuyomi remarked that Ai's children were originally "soulless" before the souls of Gorou Amamiya and Sarina Tendouji entered their bodies, implying she had a stillbirth.^[11]
• Ai's glowstick idol color is red, which is the reason why when Ruby becomes an idol like her mom, she also chooses red as her glowstick color.^[12]
• Ai shares her first name with Ai Hayasaka from Kaguya Sama: Love is War, another manga which was also written by Aka Akasaka.

References

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