She's rich and can be nice...when she isn't rhyming with rich.
Mayu Miyuki is a regular supporting character in the anime/manga romance series, Ai Yori Aoshi. She is voiced by Karen Strassman in the American English dub, who also voiced Rouge the Bat in Sonic the Hedgehog series, Kitana and Mileena in Mortal Kombat series, Helena Douglas in Dead or Alive series, and Poison in Street Fighter X Tekken.
Biography[]
Mayu enjoys the finer things her wealth buys her, no questions asked. But very often, the absence or inattention of her parents cause her great pain, especially as a small child. When her parents would attend functions on the Hanabishi estate, Mayu would come along, and there she was befriended by the Hanabishi heir, Kaoru Hanabishi (David Wittenberg), who went out of his way to make Mayu laugh. Since Kaoru was a few years her senior, Mayu saw him as a much older man and fell in love with him, and was somewhat saddened when her parents moved overseas and they had to part. Intelligence-wise, Mayu proved to be a prodigy and moved through school quickly.
Years later, while attending a university that she considered beneath her, Mayu had the pleasant surprise of spotting Kaoru, with whom she immediately began to strike up their old friendship, while almost deliberately snubbing his friends Tina Foster and Taeko Minazuki (Philece Sampler). Unlike the other would-be suitors to Kaoru, Mayu does not move into the cottage he uses while keeping secret his relationship with Aoi Sakuraba (Michelle Ruff), presumed to be his landlady. Mayu did not snub Aoi, finding her charming and well-mannered. Oddly though, despite her emphasis on the highly-placed status of her family and the Hanabishis, she never seemed to recognize Aoi as belonging to the wealthy Sakurubas.
Mayu is at her core an incredibly lonely child. Kaoru is one of her only friends in the world (that she will admit to having, anyway) with even her chaperone Saionji Ruka not as close to her as she would like. Her attachment to Kaoru is one born as much out of a need for friendship as any professed love. But her methods of expressing this affection often cause him as much discomfort as anything Tina does, despite the two being professed arch-enemies (this is made out to be more of a fighting friendship later on). Her teenage-level sweeping statements about the destined nature of her union with Kaoru can cause Aoi pain, though much of this arises from her own doubts. Mayu is over almost as frequently as any resident, an invitation she tends to extend to herself. One of her true colors is revealed when Tina leaves Japan to go home to America, and she and Mayu have the hardest time parting, their feud masking a grudging fondness.
As the series is drawing to a close, Mayu proves she is loyal to her friends in a major way when she allows her home to be used by the residents when they are summarily evicted by the Sakurubas, and when she aids Kaoru in getting Aoi back from her resistant family, who is trying to get her to marry another man. On the other hand, in the series finale, she seems to brush off the efforts of a nostalgic Tina, who is taking new pictures of their friends while handing out photo albums of their time together. Aoi reveals that despite her and Kaoru being married, Mayu is still a regular visitor, perhaps to the point of pressing her luck (which Aoi would of course never say directly). Mayu can be quite nice, but expect some bluster to get in the way every so often.
