#onk asks

Who is Ruby as an idol (as a person) when she's not using Ai as a template? Because the answer can't be Tendouji Sarina. Who is Ruby as a person (as an idol) when she's not falling back on her experience as Tendouji Sarina. There needs to be a secret third thing, and I don't know that Ruby as we know her has one. There's a lot of time in OnK spent on Aqua self-actualizing separate from his past self(ves) and Ruby, i feel, doesn't get much time to even try. 2/2

This this and this, basically. It's really bizarre because the first half of the manga already very openly lays out exactly the idea you're suggesting here - during the Private arc, it's noted that Ruby is not really all that compelling as an idol because of this sense that she's just copying someone - and that someone the reader implicitly knows is Ai.

But then of course, this all comes to nothing because (as I've pointed out before), the manga is so hung up on this idea of having Ruby 'surpass' Ai as an idol but the only metric by which the manga seems to be able to measure and/or demonstrate her success at this is how much Ruby resembles Ai in the process of doing so. She strikes Ai's iconic poses, sings songs that are associated with Ai in the narrative, Mengo gets to a point where she basically draws Ruby as a blonde Ai... and by the end of the series, Ruby barely has her own identity as a character, full stop, let alone an idol. It's incredibly bizarre - but more than anything, it's disappointing.

Some of my pals recently blitzed thru the OnK manga for the first time and one of them had a really fascinating reading/suggested arc for Ruby that I can't stop thinking about... we both 100% acknowledge that this is kind of reading against the intended text but also the intended text makes so little sense that i think we can have a bit of death of the author as a treat.

The real problem is the yawning, gaping void in the center of Hoshino Ruby. She's tried to fill it with so many different things and none of them work so she turns outward and puts her heart into everything she does at 200% to ignore how hollow the organ that pumps blood through her body really is. Even B-Komachi wasn't enough to find the one connection she had that briefly bridged that gaping void. Her wholehearted obsession with revenge was another tenuous straw she used to grasp at Ai yet that gap is forever doomed to widen because she's refusing to see Ai as she was, and so that sense of connection can't even be found in her memories. Aqua at least has a sense of his own identity via denial of it. "Ruby" is a girl that doesn't exist, not even to herself. "Sarina" doesn't either. Ruby is backfilling her with what she and Aqua want out of "Sarina" since that's easier than being "Ruby" at this point.

(lightly shortened and reformatted for readability, thank u lily sorry i gave you and cobalt secondhand brainworms)

I think this an extremely interesting reading of Ruby, not just for self-evident reasons but also because it's something the text itself kind of sets up (only to end up forgetting all about it because of course lmao). But during the private audition, when Ruby thinks about what 'lies' mean to her, she ends up expressing a very similar sentiment - that both "Ruby Hoshino" and "Sarina Tendouji" are roles that she feels it necessary to play in order to contort to other people's expectations but that her 'true self' is something different.

This is a fascinating aspect of Ruby's psychology for many reasons but the manga never really iterates on this idea and never returns to it. This is especially strange given the way the manga will later try to push parallels between Ruby and Ai - contorting the self you present to others for survival and to match their expectations is something that defined Ai's life but the manga never seems to make this very obvious connection. More broadly, we never learn what Ruby's "true self" supposedly is outside of some vague snapshots of her negative feelings and ultimately, as I've said before, we reach a point where the story stops ever entertaining the idea that Ruby might be anything less than Literally Perfect, Flawless and Ontologically Blessed and Inherently Special in every way that matters.

It's mostly Akane associated with the Moon; I think it's just to contrast Kana who is repeatedly compared to and associated with the Sun.

I think the OP is meant to be Ruby-coded, as we see Chanmina with a star in her left eye just like Ruby in the official MV. The main vibes are of a seductress who wants someone to test/catch/chase her while acting differently than how she really feels and is quite impatient.

I think that feels like Ruby desperately wanting Hikaru to find her so Aqua can enact her revenge. She's not really actively looking for him. She tries more to lure him in, in contrast to Aqua. She lies this season and wants to get her revenge (which is for him to go or die as in the lyrics).

I think the official anime visuals can recontextualise the song, but those are the vibes I get from it now. For example, for B's revenge the song is integrated in the visuals and story which make it easier for me to analyse and talk about but the OPs and EDs of Oshi no Ko can be a lot more broad in their texts which make them more ambiguous to interpretation. But I don't think there is anything really stopping you from associating the songs with other characters or even multiple characters.

I'm about where you are with it. Broadly speaking, I don't think it's an inappropriate comparison in isolation - OnK really wants to equate Aqua and Hikaru and Akane obviously has All That going on with Ai, so the text is absolutely inviting the reader to draw parallels, if nothing else. Akane's talk of "carrying [his] burden" is echoed later when Ai talks about her desire to do the same for Hikaru and just the broad strokes of the "damaged sadboy and his endlessly supportive gf" dynamic is obviously at play with both pairs. And ofc, AquAka and KamiAi are the two 'canon' ships of Oshi no Ko (i.e, the two ships in which the characters actually enter an official, committed relationship) which invites comparisons. So again, I wouldn't say this is an off-base or inappropriate comparison to make, when approached in good faith.

The problem, of course, is that, well... if the text is intentionally equating AquAka and KamiAi, then that's really not a good look for AquAka but that's not a conversation most people making this argument are ready to have!!! KamiAi was a dysfunctional and unhealthy relationship, one in which both parties did genuinely and earnestly love each other and want to be together, but still one that was stifling and codependent and so obviously going in a bad direction that Hoshino Ai, Earth's most autistic and poorly socialized fawning bunny rabbit, got the hell out of there and refused to get back together with the boy she still loved even when he offered. KamiAi is framed as a tragedy of two deeply damaged people who were simply not capable of having a healthy relationship with each other, or possibly anyone, at that stage in their lives. To compare AquAka to this relationship dynamic unavoidably suggests that AquAka shares these same dysfunctions and is on track for a similarly tragic ending... but of course, most people making this comparison do just kind of avoid that anyway lol.

From what I've seen, there's mainly two avenues this takes - one suggests that AquAka is a sort of "redo" of KamiAi, or a "corrected" version of it, where Akane is succeeding where Ai failed or Akane is able to offer Aqua the support Ai wasn't able to offer Hikaru, etc etc. I think this by and large ignores the actual text, which is that Ai was 100% in the right to cut off her relationship with Hikaru and her only failing in this scenario was her inability to properly communicate why she was leaving. To frame her decision to escape a toxic dynamic as some kind of failure of spirit that Akane is 'correcting' just feels kind of gross to me - it feels like it's part of a pattern that a lot of pro-Akane fan discussion falls into, where her tendency towards self-destructive, self-annihilating devotion to Aqua is framed as some kind of admirable virtue (as previously discussed in this post). It can also lead to some really victim-blamey rhetoric towards Ai to suggest that getting yourself out of a dysfunctional relationship with a partner who is making you feel stifled and unhappy is some kind of skill issue that Akane totes would never fall prey to! Akane is simply just built different!

That's the take I see most frequently but the other one, which I see less often but am driven to Lovecraftian madness whenever I am forced to engage with it, is the absolutely unhinged assertion that ackshully, KamiAi was a totes happy and healthy relationship and Ai was 100% happy and thriving in it and everything was perfect and the only reason anything bad happened was because of the breakup. Oh, er, why did Ai break up with him if everything was hunky-dory? Don't worry about it, kitten. You see, the breakup was bad and that's why Hikaru is the way he is so the relationship was actually fine and perfect and thus, any similarities AquAka shares with it are only good things that make AquAka a good, happy and healthy ship. This is obviously a completely insane reading of the text that requires you to fundamentally ignore everything about both characters' motivations and expressed emotions and a frankly weird amount of the plot of the story, but it's out there and it haunts me!!! I have straight up had certain genres of militant AquAka shipper say to me with their whole-ass chests that Hikaru becoming an actual serial killer cult leader off the back of their breakup doesn't indicate that there might've been some problems in paradise before that because he only turned evil after the breakup and if they hadn't broken up he wouldn't have turned evil so ONCE AGAIN THIS IS ALL AI'S FAULT FOR NOT BEING HER HIGH SCHOOL BOYFRIEND'S MOMMY-HE-CAN-FUCK THERAPIST GF FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE OH MY GODDDDDDDDD

I chewed on this for a bit because something about it was kind of hitting my brain funny and what I ultimately came to was that I think any trouble you might be having in working with this premise is that it's conflating two different ideas from the text that aren't quite the same thing - that is to say, Ai's dissatisfaction with her own "falseness" and, separately from that, her experiences as an idol. Obviously, within the wider context of OnK's themes and overall narrative, these are more deliberately intertwined and 'idolhood' is often used as a microcosm of societally imposed ideal/acceptable womanhood, but in the context of Ai's personal character arc, I think those are two distinct struggles that simply happen to intersect a lot.

Broadly speaking, Ai is dissatisfied with herself because she feels she has a fundamental inability to connect with people or understand genuine emotions - even her own - without lying and her idol persona is something she uses to manage that as an idealized self. As such, I wouldn't really say that her dissatisfaction with lying is something she needs to come to a realization about because it's already something she's extremely aware of - that self-perceived 'lack' is something she'd been struggling with her whole life and something she expresses knowledge of and frustration with a few times across episode/volume 1. In the sidestory 45510, she also expresses a desire to be seen and accepted as she truly is, without having to perform, and it's the center of her little monologue that leads directly into her opening the door to Ryosuke. So I wouldn't say that Ai needs any real impetus to confront this part of herself, because she already very much understands what the problem is, she just can't imagine a reality where she can successfully resolve it.

And to a degree, she's right! A consistent part of Ai's story is this pattern of her needing to be everything that everybody asks of her, succeeding against all odds and being punished for it anyway. There's a certain futility that she has to wrestle with where, fundamentally, the problem isn't that she doesn't know how to be honest, it's that society by and large is uninterested in letting her. Even when Ai does try and make the effort to open up, she's misinterpreted (sometimes in spectacularly bad faith) or made to feel like she's still doing it wrong somehow.

When it comes to her career as an idol, I also think it's worth keeping in mind that within the text of the story, Ai doesn't seem dissatisfied with her work - she even expresses to Miyako that she likes the lifestyle and the moments that we see her struggling are, again, more to do with her already established internal struggles. From a narrative perspective, her career as an idol is a vehicle to exacerbate and externalize that pre-existing dissatisfaction, not its root cause. She's proud of B-Komachi and seems to enjoy the work of performing and the satisfaction she derives from seeing people happy. B-Komachi and her idol work are not inherently the problem - her dissatisfaction comes from it not being a solution to the root cause, and how it becomes an extension of the already extant pressure she experiences to mask and perform the most socially digestible, idealized version of herself at all times.

It also doesn't help that, like... even if we do get Ai to a place as a character where she feels dissatisfied with her career, there isn't really a whole lot she can do to resolve that. This is something I've discussed before, but Ai really is kind of trapped in the entertainment industry by both obligation and material necessity. She sacrificed her formative years to the entertainment industry and was rewarded for it with nauseating success, but it also means that she has no other real experience, education, or job prospects to fall back on if she wants to leave. Viewpoint B discusses how difficult it is for idols who've graduated to find their footing in everyday society and that's for girls who aren't neurodivergent abuse survivors with no high school diploma and two mouths to feed. It's not like she has any friends and family to support her - she's not really on everyday speaking terms with Hikaru, she's not close to anyone in B-Komachi and the closest thing she has to a parent is her boss. She doesn't really have a future or support network outside of the industry.

It's a lil hard to articulate exactly what the issue with because obviously a big part of what's going on with Dark Ruby is that she is, in universe, behaving in ways that are uncharacteristic of her. But the issue I have with Dark Ruby is that this intended 'out of character'-ness doesn't really feel emergent from or reflective of Ruby's actual personality traits as they've already been established in the series. The anime so far has made her feel a bit more consistent thanks to her character acting and voice work (similar to Akane), it obviously can't fix the core issue.

Basically, I think the biggest stumbling block in making Dark Ruby feel like Ruby is simply an absence of her interiority as relates to her new outward facing behaviour. The six month timeskip that leads into Mainstay prevents us from seeing how Ruby adapts to her new normal and the changes in her mindset that lead to this behaviour and the lack of insight into what's happening in her head mean that we're never given any way to thread the needle between regular Ruby and Dark Ruby. How does the Ruby who so deeply cares about her friends and so cherishes B-Komachi justify her mistreatment and exploitation of them to herself? Does she even bother to try? Are her actions always deliberate or is some of her cruelty accidental? Are there any lines she won't cross? All of these are interesting questions that the story never explores and so we never learn anything about Ruby because of them. And ultimately, there are no long-term consequences to her behaviour - all that really happens is 'wao ruby is so famous now' but the personal and social fallout from her behaviour is nonexistent. It ends up making Dark Ruby feeling much more separate from Ruby than I think was intended, as if she's an entirely different character who just superficially resembles the Ruby we know and thus Ruby never has to actually answer for her behaviour.

There's also just the fact that she stuff she pulls off is lowkey absurd lmao. Like I've said before, isn’t that Ruby is stupid but that but that this degree of 4D multidimensional long term manipulation seems beyond, quite frankly, her or anybody to pull off with the apparent ease and lack of friction Ruby does. And then the manga suddenly decides to pretend she's actually so dumb that "omg my mom... had feelings?????" is some kind of character redefining realization for her. So that again makes Dark Ruby's manipulative uber intelligence feel all the more out of step with the (supposed, lmao) continuity of Ruby's character.

So in the end, what we get is a character that looks like Ruby but is completely missing everything that makes her tick in a way that is neither interesting nor compelling. She has no interiority, no motives aside from "revenge for Mama and sensei" but she seemingly has no complex feelings about the methods she uses to achieve this, her family or her career or basically anything up until the last 10 chapters she's in Evil Mode. It's less a case of a character who has been forced into a corner and is making extreme choices as a result and more like the story has given her a new set of priorities without doing the work to justify or explain how she got there.

Imo, a more convincing (and interesting!) take on Dark Ruby would be one that actually made meaningful use of Ruby's actual strengths and flaws, just twisted up by her grief and anger and channeled towards much more destructive ends. She could have exploited her natural charisma and her emotional intelligence, her deep understanding of fan culture, her ambition, and her complicated love for the entertainment world that killed her mother. Her darkness should have been a perversion of her light: a desperate attempt to recreate the love she lost by manufacturing it on a grand scale, to control the narrative so she could never be hurt again. I've even thought before about a version of Dark Ruby where the sentiment she expresses towards Meiya is legit - Ruby seeing Meiya being talked down to and objectified but having to put on a smile for the camera leads to her projecting Ai onto Meiya and using Meiya as an excuse to lash out at and 'get revenge' on the systems of power that also hurt her mom.

I've also thought about an alternate version of Scandal that would have served as a sort of climax of Dark Ruby's callous behaviour towards Kana and Mem but also would have really smacked Ruby in the face with some of the real depths of scumbaggery in the industry she still hasn't gotten her head around yet. So in this version of Scandal, it would've been Ruby who is propositioned by Shima-D and gets caught by the press - Kana gets his number like in canon but Ruby realises what she's up to, sees the opportunity for more clout chasing and sneaks the number from Kana's phone and undercuts her to meet him herself instead. This makes textual what is subtext in that arc (Ruby stealing opportunities for growth from Kana and Mem), actually has Ruby's inflated overconfidence in her epic sigma female manipulations blow up in her face, makes Ruby have an actual encounter with the sorts of misogyny and exploitation of girls the series wants to talk about & gives Ruby a chance to actually, meaningfully draw a line in the sand as to where she will and will not compromise her morals and personal integrity.

(For future reference, this ask was submitted and answered after episode 9 aired but before the last two episodes of S3 were released - if the material in question is used at some point in those last two episodes, obviously what's said here won't apply anymore)

It's interesting to see that even anime only fans picked up on the weirdness there, lol. I think the scene progresses... relatively smoothly with the way it's rearranged but the absence of any real discussion of this massive six month period of silent treatment is increasingly weird to me the more I think about it. Something that can be a bit offputting about OnK sometimes is the way it seems kind of unaware or unwilling to acknowledge when Aqua is really, direly in the wrong with regards to how he treats the girls around him - and even when it does, it's not super common for the text to properly call him out on it without it getting undermined in someway; i.e, when Akane rightfully dresses him down for bugging her, the conversation is quickly swung around to Akane's behaviour and the matter is largely dropped. Compare that to this...

Kana calling Aqua out both over that ghosting nonsense and the horseshit excuse he gives her for it is one of the few times in the manga a character gets to just straightforwardly say to Aqua "this thing you did was shit, it made me feel like shit and I'm angry at you about it" without it being undermined or deflected in some way. My friend Mala also pointed out while we were chatting about this that Kana is generally established as the girl who will actually be strict with Aqua in this way, which follows through to some of her behaviour in future arcs. Removing this makes Kana feel a lot more of a pushover and a lot more... I guess grovelling, for lack of a better word, towards Aqua. At the very least, it makes her feel like a much more passive character.

Because observing the debates about the "themes," the "messages," and other things, it really seems to me that a part of the fandom only focused on what they wanted to take seriously, ignoring the inconsistencies and the parts where the plot contradicts itself. Honestly, it seems to me that because the story progressed in an improvised way, the author's burnout, and other factors, ended up sinking what was once a great manga.

Possibly a hot take, but I think he mostly did - which is a big part of why the ending comes off as so disconnected with what came before it, because Aqua and Hikaru's confrontation and the events that unfurl from it basically has zilch to do with what the manga had mostly been concerned about up until that point. Hikaru abruptly decides he has to kill Ruby not because of anything that has to do with OnK's established themes of toxic parasocial relationships or misogyny or hostile masculinity or anything like that, but because Hikaru has this one extremely specific unhinged and detached from reality belief about the woman he was in love with, the formation of which is never explained to the reader, that just happens to cause him to behave in ways that put him into conflict with Aqua and necessitate him being murder-suicided immediately.

What does any of that have to do with, say, OnK's commentary on how the entertainment industry exploits its most vulnerable workers - women, children and especially young girls - and how that exploitation speaks to the wider societal ills of misogyny and the systems of power that both maintain and are maintained by it? Or, perhaps, OnK's early volume commentary on the nature of perceived authenticity vs. manufactured persona and how that intersects with the fan-idol relationship, or the dangers of loving a performance more than you love a real human being? What about OnK's discussion on the difficulty of wanting to create art within an industry that views the things you make as disposable commercial products and the struggle of balancing lofty artistic ambitions with the ugly reality of having to pay rent and put food on the table? What about the story's engagement with the concept of inherited trauma, both literally (Aqua & Ruby's past lives) and figuratively (the cycles of abuse that are passed down through the industry)?

In the end, absolutely none of those things had any real bearing on why Hikaru had to be stopped. Instead, he had to be stopped because he has this one single incredibly specific, out-of-nowhere, character-defining motive that just... exists and happens to put Ruby, the most special sugoi amazing perfect girl ever to breathe, at risk and Aqua's relationship with her is soooooo special and amazing and wao destined and important (despite them basically having very little meaningful interaction over the entire course of the plot) that him killing himself to protect her( career) is clearly the only solution here.

And the thing is, you could absolutely make an ending following the basic beats of "Hikaru targets Ruby, Aqua murder-suicides him to stop it" and have it tie back into the manga's themes! You could make a version of this ending where Hikaru's motives are more explicitly founded on the story's ideas of misogyny and toxic parasociality or even just where Aqua's murder-suicide is the tragic-but-inevitable outcome of two men fighting over a woman's autonomy without ever once stopping to ask her what she wants and is framed as something ultimately futile and self-aggrandizing rather than the manga validating it as the ultimate expression of fraternal love. You could make a version of this ending where Hikaru's attack on Ruby is actually, properly built up and framed as a direct parallel to Ai's death - the industry's exploitation creating yet another perfect storm of conditions for tragedy to strike again, where Aqua's sacrifice is a desperate attempt to break that cycle but ultimately fails to address the root cause, leaving Ruby to grapple with the aftermath and the question of whether it's even possible to truly escape the industry's toxic grasp, or if she's doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Or, fuck! Just have Aqua and Hikaru's confrontation actually be about Ai!!! The title character!!!! You know, the woman whose brutal murder and Aqua's resulting desire for revenge is the entire plot of the preceeding manga and that straight up doesn't even get mentioned by name in the confrontation with her murderer even while the manga is trying to reheat her nachos by shallowly copy/pasting her mannerisms onto Ruby!!!!!!!

It's annoying, because there are glimpses of good ideas that peek out of the clusterfuck that is the ending we have. Hikaru was sexually abused by someone with power and influence in the industry and goes on himself to be a cog in that same system of exploitation. Ruby's final ascension to Ai-level fame ultimately doesn't come about from her own efforts but because the public are fascinated with vouyeristically devouring every gory detail of the immense and private tragedy that befell her family. But all that stuff feels like the backdrop to what the story really wants to talk about in its ending, which is apparently that Ruby is the most bestest perfect special amazing idol evar!!!111!!!! and uhhhhhhh i guess that's it.