Re: not exploring reincarnation in OnK: honestly, I think it's a missed opportunity for Ruby in particular. We've established that Ai is The Idol and Ruby is doing her level best to be The Second Coming Of Idol Jesus, and i think there's something interesting out there where pre-reveal Ruby hits a stumbling block in her career because the template for Ruby's idol persona is Ai, which can be construed as Ruby imitating her by those not in the know. 1/2
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.
Ultimately I think a lot of this comes down to an issue in OnK's writing that I've mentioned before that Akasaka never seems to have had a super strong grasp on Ruby as a character beyond her surface level behaviour and backstory, which is why we get so many abrupt and seemingly inconsistent takes on her personality and psychology that never resolve into a coherent whole. Her motivations can change at the drop of a hat if it's what the plot demands and even then, the plot never demands very much from her - she's almost always reactive to what is going on around her rather than proactive in her own right. Much of her behaviour and motivations are defined in relation to other characters and while this is not bad in a vacuum, she's never really given the space to define herself and as such, ends the story less defined and less realized than she was when we first met her.
