Shino "Sinon" Asada

Shino Asada is a character from the Sword Art Online anime and novels.

Sinon is a skilled Virtual Reality game player, who began playing Gun Gale Online based on the suggestion from her friend, Shinkawa Kyouji, in an attempt to overcome her trauma concerning guns. After the events of the Phantom Bullet Arc, she began playing «ALfheim Online» as a Cait Sitharcher, capable of hitting targets two hundred meters away with a bow that should only be able to shoot arrows accurately at a maximum distance of one hundred meters.

In the AWA fics, Sinon is a student at the AWA Academy.

Appearance
Similar to both of her VRMMO game avatars, Shino has thin hair tied in small ribbons by the sides of her face, with the back cut short. Unlike her avatars, Shino has dark hair in real life. She also wears a pair of half-rimmed glasses with oval-shaped lenses. Her skin is pale and she has black eyes. She has a black spot on her right hand, left there by gunpowder from the time she fired a gun in real life.

Shino's avatar has thin, pale blue swaying hair that was casually short, but there was a tuft of hair tied up on both sides of her forehead, and indigo colored eyes. Her combat attire consists of a desert-colored military jacket, bulletproof armor of the same color, and combat boots, as well as a white muffler around her neck.

Shino's avatar maintains her blue hair from GGO, yet holds the appearance of a Cait Sith, her chosen race, with blue ears and a matching tail. She wears a green coat with white chest armor, a black choker and a belted quiver across her shoulders.

Personality
Calm and cool are two words that best describe Sinon's personality. In battle and most of the time in the game, she keeps a cool head, which earns her respect from her friends. However, Sinon has a violent temper once angered, best seen with her interactions with Kirito. It is actually said that Kirito is the first one to make her extremely angry. Despite all this, Sinon, while perhaps hard to approach, is generally a friendly person and does not mind helping others.

Shino, however, can be a fragile-minded character. This is due to her childhood incident that involved her killing a robber. If someone were to act as if they were shooting her in real life Shino would have a nervous breakdown and be on the verge of collapsing. People have used this to take advantage of Shino before. Not only this, but the guilt of taking another's life haunts Shino the same way killing Laughing Coffin members haunts Kazuto. After the Death Gun Incident, Shino has made progress with handling her trauma, as she did not have any serious reactions to seeing a model gun when Endou threatened to shoot her with one, and was even able to use it while feigning that she was not affected by it.

Shino is shown to have an uncommonly kind heart. Not only was she willing to forgive Shinkawa Kyouji, but still cared for him as a friend to the extent that she resolved to visit him in prison to try and help, if not save him as a person.

Abilities
In  GGO, she's one of the best players, which includes both Japanese, and worldwide players, has one of the rarest guns in the game, and tends to be fairly popular amongst the male players as a result.

Sinon's sniper rifle has one of the highest single-shot damage outputs in GGO, but more importantly, the first shot taken by a sniper from stealth does not give the target any warning or window to dodge. However, it is also one of the hardest weapons to actually hit with: the distance creates a low base accuracy, and the shooter must keep their pulse as low as possible to maximize their chance to hit. Furthermore, a sniper loses their primary advantage (surprise) after the first shot, making it ill-suited in 1v1 battles or when outnumbered.

This carries over to archery in ALO. The game has no automated systems to aid the accuracy of an archer (unlike GGO), and arrows are affected by gravity and wind. But unlike magic, archery is a ranged weapon with no casting time; a master archer could defeat any melee opponent before they even managed to get within attack range. Since Sinon has already mastered long-distance shooting in GGO and all of the games created from The Seed use the same physics engine, she masters the bow very quickly.

In addition, she is skilled with the bow and arrow and she prefers using polearms for melee combat.

Trivia

 * The glasses Shino uses do not have any prescription and are not meant for correcting eyesight. Instead, the lenses are made from an NXT polymer which is said to make the glasses able to withstand even the impact of a bullet. This gives her a modest sense of security and allows her to stay calm despite her trauma from the past.


 * The visual acuity rating for both of Shino's eyes in real life are 2.0, which is twice as good as the average person.
 * Asuna has nicknamed Shino as "Sinonon".
 * Sinon's avatar in ALfheim Online was originally supposed to be a Sylph archer. This was changed with the creation of the Calibur side story.


 * Shino aspires to become a policewoman.


 * Shino's motto is "One Shot, One Kill". In the real world, this saying is popularly known as the "Sniper's Creed", and is often quoted by real-world military snipers.
 * While discussing about the designs of the series heroines, the light novel illustrator abec felt that the glasses factor in the series was too low at the time and suggested making Sinon a glasses girl. This idea ended up being adopted.