What meaning would you put to using tomatoes specifically in the revstar movie as symbolism
no other fruit lends itself as well to looking like blood onscreen while also being red...like the stuff with juice that looks red is blue or purple in color. and other red fruits and berries are too small. just from the perspective of creating the best visuals I think a tomato is the best choice here. other things you might think of carry so much symbolism on their own inherently and revstar gets to sort of create a lot of its symbolism by using tomatoes...but from an external point of view, tomatoes are fruit that fall off the vine when ripe, which in itself is another perspective on the leaving the station to board the next train sorta thing, except more violent and less of a matter of choice. a stage girl will leave what is familiar to create something new. no matter how much they try to grasp the old, it will reject them once they've become too much for it to hold, y'know
Yeah, I definitely think it was a choice made with visuals in mind first. It looks the most like blood, red is a very striking color, etc.
Like Revue Starlight is a very visual show. The movie especially, considering it takes scenes from the show, like Kaoruko and Futaba charging at each other in their show Revue, and then amplifies it by making them charging at each other with trucks in the movie Revue instead.
I mean, Tokyo Tower, the most blatant piece of symbolism in the original show, wasn't even part of the original PV. I can't say for certain since I wasn't there and haven't read any interviews, but I'm pretty sure the only reason it was chosen for the show was because it was red and shaped like a triangle, red being the main color of the series and also due to it's association with the Takarazuka Revue (their most famous production is "The Rose of Versailles" and the roof of the Takarazuka Grand Theater is red), and a triangle referencing the famous stairs of the Takarazuka Revue stage as well as how only one vertex stand on the top, supported by the rest of the shape. A red cone was already in the original PV, this was an image they had in mind since the the first announcement.
Similar to Tokyo Tower, I think tomatoes were chosen for the color and shape, the red oval reflection of Top Star's Tiara's was ever present in the background of practically every scene of the original show and in the movie, and now its all over the movie in a more physical form.
There are plenty of fruits and vegetables the Giraffe/Audience is made of that could have been used for fuel. Like you mentioned, Apples, Pomegranates, Plums, or Peaches could have been the the symbol of the movie instead, they're red, round, and full of history already in Biblical, Olympian, Chinese, and Japanese stories, but by using something new Revue Starlight gets to create its own meaning for the symbolism.
The tomato only means anything because they kept using it over and over to the point it stuck in our minds. It's like how the play to inspire Hikaro and Karen didn't have to be Starlight, like Siegfeld has Elysion that did basically the same for Akira and Michiru, it really could have been any play that made them want to stand on stage. But it was this one they stuck with, which is why it sticks with the viewer.
And most importantly, none of the other options are as striking of a visual for this movie as a easily crushable tomato.
I always thought they were chosen as a nod to the old idea of throwing tomatoes at a bad performance. When talking about theater tomatoes are often used as a shorthand when an actor is doing poorly so I think revue starlight used them to represent the girl's past mistakes and how they need to accept and overcome them (whether by eating or crushing them) to be able to move on to their next stage.
