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She dies within the first arc, yet she is arguably the most structurally present character in the entire series — nearly every major decision made by Aqua, Ruby, and even several antagonists traces back to her. What makes her unusual within the idol-fiction genre is that most stories built around a tragic idol treat the death as an ending or a climax; here it is the starting gun. Her defining trait, repeated as a near-mantra, is that being a 'genius idol' means being a perfect liar — smiling on command while concealing exhaustion, loneliness, and eventually a literal secret pregnancy. This framing turns her from a typical 'pure idol' archetype into a case study in compartmentalized identity, which the story then hands down to her children as an inheritance: Aqua absorbs her capacity for calculated performance, while Ruby absorbs her craving for genuine connection with an audience. One could argue that Ai never actually gets a satisfying interiority of her own on the page — she is filtered almost entirely through how other characters remember or theorize about her — and this could be read as a deliberate structural choice rather than an oversight, since the entire series is preoccupied with how public figures exist primarily as an audience's projection rather than as themselves. Compared to tragic-idol characters in adjacent manga/anime who function mainly as motivation fuel for a single protagonist, Ai's influence is unusually distributed: she shapes two children's opposing worldviews, an obsessive fan-turned-killer's psychology, and the industry-wide plot threads that follow. Her unresolved murder also keeps her functioning less like a departed character and more like an active mystery engine running underneath the whole narrative.

Underneath a child actor's growing resume is an adult's memory and an adult's grudge, and the gap between those two ages is where most of his characterization lives. Unlike revenge protagonists who stay morally legible — righteous anger channeled into a clear villain — Aqua's methods drift steadily toward manipulation, emotional exploitation of the people around him, and long-con patience that occasionally costs the people who trust him. This makes him function less as a conventional hero and more as the reader's cynical lens into how the entertainment industry actually operates: contracts, image management, scandal manufacturing, and the commodification of grief are all filtered through his analytical, faintly detached narration. His relationship with Ruby is where this framing gets tested most directly — she remembers nothing of their shared 'previous' family circumstances, while he remembers everything, and that asymmetry means he is constantly managing her emotionally while withholding the full truth from her, a dynamic that generates much of the story's slow-burn tension rather than resolving it quickly. It could be argued that his arc is less about achieving revenge and more about how corrosive a life organized entirely around a single obsessive goal becomes, since several of the story's most uncomfortable moments come from watching him treat people he cares about as instruments. Compared to similarly premise-driven 'secret identity' protagonists in industry-set dramas, Aqua is unusual in that his disguise is not a costume but an entire second childhood, which forces the story to spend real time on the mundane texture of growing up twice — a device that lets the series critique child stardom specifically, not just showbiz in the abstract.

She carries the same reincarnation premise as her brother, but without his memories intact in the same way, and that imbalance is arguably the single most load-bearing relationship mechanic in the series. Where Aqua processes their mother's death analytically, Ruby processes it as an inherited ambition — becoming an idol herself, assembling a group, and chasing the specific kind of adoration Ai once had, seemingly without fully grasping the darker mechanics her brother is protecting her from. This positions her as the story's emotional and idealistic counterweight to Aqua's cynicism, and the series repeatedly uses the contrast between them to ask whether pursuing the idol dream sincerely is naive, admirable, or both at once. Her arc with her idol unit gives the series room to depict the collaborative, community-building side of the industry, which functions almost as a deliberate tonal contrast to the surveillance-and-manipulation side that dominates Aqua's storylines — the two siblings essentially split the franchise's dual thesis about entertainment being both genuinely joyful and structurally exploitative. There is also a case to be made that Ruby's cheerful public persona mirrors Ai's 'perfect liar' idol mask more than she consciously realizes, which would mean she risks repeating her mother's exact psychological pattern, though the text treats this more as a lingering possibility than a settled conclusion. Relationally, her partial blindness to Aqua's true agenda keeps their sibling bond loving but unequal, and much of the story's quieter tension comes from the audience knowing more about that imbalance than she does.

By the time she is properly introduced, her career has already peaked and cooled — an unusual entry point in a genre that more often treats child stardom as a stepping stone rather than something to recover from. This inverts a common industry-drama trope where rival actresses are framed primarily as antagonists to the lead; instead, Kana's storyline humanizes the specific bitterness of being professionally 'aged out' of a role while still being a teenager, and her prickliness toward Aqua reads less like rivalry for its own sake and more like defensiveness earned through real disappointment. Her working relationship with Aqua, formed through a stage/drama production arc, gives the series a vehicle for depicting the collaborative grind of professional acting — rehearsals, ego management, director politics — in more procedural detail than the idol-focused storylines allow. Structurally, she also serves as a control case for the series' central question about performance and authenticity: unlike Ai, whose curated persona was built around concealment, and unlike Akane, whose skill is disappearing into other identities, Kana's struggle is comparatively straightforward — talent that peaked too early, colliding with an industry uninterested in slow rebuilding. This relative simplicity is not a weakness so much as a deliberate contrast, letting her stand in for the more mundane, less mythologized casualties of the entertainment system that the rest of the cast's more extreme arcs might otherwise overshadow. Her gradual professional rapport with Aqua also quietly humanizes him, since she is one of the few characters who pushes back on his detachment rather than simply being managed by it.

Ask what her personality is outside of a role, and the honest answer the story keeps circling back to is that there may not be a clean one to point to. Her defining talent — total immersion into whatever character she is playing, to the point of unsettling co-stars — makes her a distinct variation on the series' recurring theme of performance versus authenticity, approached from nearly the opposite angle of Ai's arc. Ai's mask was a deliberate act of concealment over a fixed private self; Akane's case reads more like an absence of a stable private self to conceal in the first place, which is a subtly darker premise once the story leans into it. This makes her useful less as a rival to any single character and more as a thematic pressure point: she is frequently positioned opposite Aqua's calculated performances and Kana's guarded authenticity, and the contrast forces the narrative to ask whether total immersion into other people is a genuine artistic gift, a coping mechanism, or an early warning sign of something more troubling. Later plot developments push her toward a personal and professional crisis that could be read as the series testing that exact question directly, though how deliberately tragic or redemptive that arc is meant to land is something reasonable readers could interpret differently. Her presence also raises the stakes of the show-business arcs generally, since she demonstrates that total commitment to craft — the trait the industry explicitly rewards — can be inseparable from a loss of personal footing, which ties her thematically back to Ai without either character's situation being a direct repeat of the other's.