Honestly though, big shout out to Scarlet Nexus (again) for the Karen dlc. They literally looked at Karen, who up until that point had just a fridged not-quite-girlfriend, and gave him the explicitly stated and multiple times repeat goal and wish to save Alice and protect Fubuki
And with that they made him one of the most tragic characters I've ever met.
I just keep thinking about how much this man has hurt over the years and the many time lines he's traveled through, how heartbroken he had to have been in any time line where he couldn't save either of them
I just can't get over how much love he carried with him
Like, the first time Kasane makes a time jump she meets him while literally carrying Fubuki's corpse through the ruined city. And Fubuki is already cold, which takes a while, so Karen was just aimlessly wandering around Suoh with his best friend's corpse in his arms. Because he couldn't let go, couldn't leave him behind somewhere.
The only one he could trust with Fubuki was his sister who once dismembered herself trying to protect him.
And then there's the time lines where he's kept Fubuki completely safe only for Alice to die while he isn't around for just a moment.
The woman he loves and his best friend are equally important to him, he refuses to accept a world where he can't have them both at his side and I absolutely love Scarlet Nexus for doing this
Often times romantic love is put above platonic or familial love. Somehow in our society romantic love has become synonymous to "truest form of love" when it's just a different kind of love and Scarlet Nexus has been really good about making all kinds of love important
The love between siblings, between parent and child, between friends, between lovers...
Many of the characters had someone they loved deeply and the game never treated one as truer than the other
But Karen was so full of love he took two people, loved them in different ways, loved them so deeply that he would've become a monster to save them
His one and only wish was to live in a world where both Alice and Fubuki were alive
And the only time line where that was possible was the one where he never existed in the first place
It hurts to think about this, about how the only way he could achieve his dream was to let go. He's spent countless years, life times, holding on so tightly that it warped reality around him and the only way to save them was to let go of them completely, to never see them again, be with them again
You could even say that Karen loved Fubuki and Alice so much reality itself couldn't handle it.