Rio Nakamura

Nakamura keeps her long, straight blonde hair, a deeper blonde in the OVA, parted down the center and pushed back off her shoulders. Her aqua-blue eyes, which sometimes read as pale gray, are framed by long lashes, and the coloring gives this Japanese girl the look of a stereotypical Westerner, though flashbacks reveal the blonde is dyed over a naturally darker shade. For her uniform she opts for the school's pale yellow sweater in place of the gray blazer.

Nakamura's crude streak can outdo even Class 3-E's resident pervert Taiga Okajima, yet it sits beside the quick wits of the child prodigy she once was. She treats teasing as an art form, with a near-supernatural knack for sniffing out anyone worth needling, and she counts Nagisa Shiota as her favorite target alongside Karma Akabane. Energetic, playful, and blessed with a dirty mind, she still hides real depth: she cares about the class more than she lets on, once felt personally responsible for the bond it formed with its teacher, and can drop the clowning to speak with total seriousness the instant a situation calls for it. She insists she was a solemn person by nature, a claim borne out when she opposed sparing Korosensei.

Nakamura was a genuine prodigy in her early years, scoring perfectly on tests written for children years older, but the isolation that came with being so far ahead left her aching for an ordinary life. To fit in she chose to play dumb, coasting on her studies until she truly forgot how to sit an exam, and that slide, along with a run of dress-code and attendance violations, dropped her into Class 3-E. There she finally found somewhere she could both study and cut loose with friends, and she openly thanks Korosensei for it. Her talents remain formidable: she ranks among the brightest in the class behind only Karma Akabane, holds near-total command of English through wide reading of its literature, and rates highly in technology and night vision on top of solid marksmanship.

Her gift for English carries her from eleventh place to first in a semester final, leaving the Big Five member Tomoya Seo behind. When Nagisa Shiota later proposes saving their teacher rather than killing him, Nakamura is the earliest to object, insisting the bond between assassin and mark is the very reason to see the job through; the disagreement fractures the class into rival camps and triggers a paintball showdown, where she serves as Karma's second on the assassination side. She is ambushed and knocked out by Nagisa during the fight, and though she loses she readily grants that his team won cleanly, pinching his cheek by way of a silent apology.

Around Valentine's Day she and Karma coax Kaede Kayano into confessing to Nagisa, and in the process she quietly admits to Karma that she will bury her own feelings for him for Kayano's sake. She brings a birthday cake to the final battle to save Korosensei, leads the class in song, and meets his death at the last roll call with a smile before breaking into tears once he is gone. Seven years on she is studying abroad in London on an exchange program, unable to make the class reunion but sending her regards; she ultimately becomes a freelance interpreter with her sights set on the Foreign Ministry, her irreverent humor winning people over even overseas.