Classroom of the Elite Characters

The narrator, a quiet, expressionless first-year who scored exactly 50 in every subject of the entrance exam and was placed in Class D. He says he wants an ordinary school life and keeps his abilities hidden, solving his class's problems from the shadows and letting Horikita take the credit, but he was raised in the White Room, a facility run by his father, and believes that only winning matters. His father wants him back and keeps trying to have him expelled. In the spring break before the second year he starts dating Kei Karuizawa, which he privately treats as a way of learning about love.

Ayanokoji's classmate, a brilliant, cold loner who believes friends would only hold her back, which is why her brother Manabu and Ayanokoji suspect she ended up in Class D. She enrolled to win Manabu's respect and is set on reaching Class A. Over the first year she learns that she needs allies, talks Sudo back into the sports festival and grows into the class's leader, and at the end of the year she cuts her hair short to show she is moving on from her brother. In the second year she joins the student council.

The most popular girl in Class D, cheerful and friendly with everyone, who wants to be friends with the whole school because she needs to be admired. Early on Ayanokoji sees the cold, spiteful side she hides from everyone else. In middle school, which she attended with Horikita, she exposed her classmates' secrets and tore her class apart, and she schemes to have Horikita and Ayanokoji, the two people who know what she is really like, expelled, even leaking Class D's sports festival line-up to Ryuen.

The confident, sharp-tongued leader of Class D's girls, who spends her first months as Hirata's girlfriend, an arrangement the two agreed on to protect her. On the cruise ship Ayanokoji learns that she was bullied in middle school and makes a deal with her: he will protect her if she helps with his plans. She becomes his most trusted ally, and when Ryuen corners her to make her name Class D's mastermind, she refuses. Ayanokoji confesses to her in the spring break before the second year, and they start dating.

The leader of Class B, bright, kind and fair to everyone, including students from rival classes and other years, and determined to graduate without losing a single classmate. She allies her class with Class D in the first year, helps set up the security-camera trap that clears Sudo and becomes a member of the student council. When Sakayanagi exposes something from her middle-school days, she confesses it to her classmates herself and puts it behind her.

The leader of Class C, who will use any means to win and rules his class through violence and fear, with followers such as Albert Yamada and Daichi Ishizaki to carry out his orders. He plots against Class D all through the first year, sending Mio Ibuki to spy on it in the island test and using Kushida as an informer, and spends season 2 hunting its hidden mastermind, finally cornering Kei. When Ayanokoji reveals himself and beats him, Ryuen steps down as leader, but he wins the post back by crushing Class B in the first year's final exam.

The self-proclaimed genius who leads Class A and the daughter of the school's chairman. She was born with a condition that keeps her from exercise, walks with a cane, and believes that talent is decided at birth. As a child she watched Ayanokoji in the White Room on a visit with her father, and she has waited ever since to beat him; their duel comes in the first year's final exam, as a chess match that Tsukishiro secretly tampers with. She later plays him again, loses, and accepts that he is a genius.

Class D's kind, popular representative, a strong student and athlete trusted by boys and girls alike. In the first year he poses as Kei's boyfriend to protect her, and he swears that nobody in the class will be expelled. The Class Poll, which forces every class to vote one student out, breaks that promise and leaves him in despair for a while, but he recovers and helps Horikita lead the class.

At first one of Class D's 'three idiots', a hot-tempered basketball player good enough to outplay older students. He is nearly expelled twice in his first months, once for failing a midterm by a single point and once over a fight with three Class C students, and Ayanokoji and Horikita save him both times. Once he falls for Horikita he calms down, starts studying with her and steadily raises his grades.

The son of a rich and famous family: vain, self-centred and completely unbothered by what anyone thinks of him. He is among the most able students in the whole school, in lessons and in sport, but rarely takes an exam seriously, and because his future is already secure he has no interest in graduating in Class A, or in worrying about points. He drops out of the first island test claiming to be ill, costing his class 30 points, yet in the second year's island exam he runs second overall.

Suzune's older brother and the respected president of the student council during Ayanokoji's first year, who keeps his distance from his sister and is quick to criticise her for landing in Class D. He notices early that Ayanokoji scores exactly 50 on every test and offers him a place on the council, which Ayanokoji turns down. He races Ayanokoji in the sports festival relay, spends his own points at the mixed training camp to save his secretary Akane Tachibana from expulsion, and makes peace with Suzune before he graduates.

Class D's homeroom teacher, a former student of the school who teaches Japanese history and seems cold and indifferent to her class. She is one of the first to see through Ayanokoji, and she tries to push him towards Class A, warning him that a man has asked the school to expel him, a man she later confirms is his father. Behind the act, she badly wants a class of hers to graduate in Class A.