#mmm....analysis

I noticed how the notion of realism seems to affect people's view of certain characters a lot

This kinda goes along with something we noticed with my gf, but it is really interesting to analyze that looking at how Karen's character developped between the anime and the movie

Karen was easily categorized as the classic protagonist people easily find annoying (tho i'd argue that this is less of anime karen and more of stage play karen but thats another topic), because of her mindset that we can go against the rules and "what is established" to achieve what we want, that being going against the idea of only one person becoming the top star and performing Starlight with Hikari like they promised. The annoyance is also accentuated by the way people didn't manage to relate with what Karen was fighting for, and looking at her ambitions like actual arrogance and a form of tantrum that actually worked.

But the movie managed to completely flip that impression and noticed that people found her more likeable

I saw a japanese tweet some time ago pointing out how unrealistic the anime is because there is not a single man in it, specifically talking about the night guard and the police station, and about how they're glad Karen turned out to have male friends in middle school. Maybe it was translated weirdly with the auto translate feature, but at first I looked at that post weirdly thinking they were saying "we need men in this anime, look this guy friend Karen has seems important" and it rubbed me the wrong way, but if you look at that on a different angle, those elements did play in the viewer's perception of the characters.

All girl schools *are* a thing in real life, and yes the Takarazuka revues are very real too, but the anime is still set in a way it feels completely disconnected from reality. Yes we have a talking giraffe and a huge underground stage that magically appears and disappears at will, but the girls live in a closed place with unfamiliar routines and an unfamiliar school program. We are put right away in a fictional world and it immediately disconnects the viewer from what they're watching. Aside from Mayakuro being fairly popular as a pairing bc of they dynamic, the most popular characters are usually Nana and Mahiru (at least from what I noticed when looking at new fans). I insist that this is only an impression, but it feels like beyond than just feeling bad about them, their motives and emotions seem more relatable to those unfamiliar with this universe, Nana having trouble moving on from her past and Mahiru's insecurities spilling out on someone else with love. Unlike that, people don't usually share a promise with a childhood friend who moves away soon after with no news for a decade.

The movie showed us sides of Karen we never saw before that makes her seem so much more human than we thought back then. One thing that people might have wondered was “how did she keep thinking so naively that Hikari would still remember their promise? That was when they were only 5”. Well, the movie clearly showed it: she was very conscious of that possibility and it scared her. And she didn’t want to give up on it, because that’s all she ever did. Every choice she made ever since that promise had been for it. She took vocal lessons for the promise. She took on roles in plays for the promise. She didn’t even initially have any interest in acting until Hikari came into her life and completely disrupted it. The movie also showed us that she wasn’t that naive either, she’s able to hide things and act naive. That was probably the one thing that was the most shocking about her character when I first watched the movie. This might not be a situation that everyone can relate to, but fear is an emotion we all understand. The fact that they showed us so much about her past also helped the viewer understand that she was an ordinary student in everyday life, which joins the whole argument about the scene at the fast food (or donuts?) restaurant with her classmates. We were used to seeing her hanging out with very talented actresses which isn’t common, so seeing her in an environment mostly recognizable by the viewer unconsciously shifts the opinion.

Coming back to the “classic anime protagonist” argument, I always want to insist on how different she is from what people usually think of, aka naive girl suddenly has a very ambitious goal and keeps running towards it until eventually facing a wall and realize "aw man its not as easy as i thought", or "guys we can all do this together!!!". Karen’s behavior in the anime would deserve a post on its own, but the movie alone helps us understand how she is actually not that naive and once we hear how her own classmates saw her, we truly understand how genuinely remarkable she is, which the anime didn’t help with at first since she was only portrayed as a lazy bum suddenly acting selfish and displaying plot armor.

I might have lost myself around the end…but what I mean to say is how important realism in a character’s personality plays a lot in how likeable said character will be, and that was especially noticeable when it came to Karen, who went from “annoying anime protag” to a genuinely even more complex character than we thought