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What does Karen mean when she says "I am Reborn"?

Revue Starlight takes place in a time loop.

For over 60 years, eight students from Seisho’s acting class continue to audition to be the lead in the Starlight Gatherer, each hoping to use the brilliance awarded to the top star to fulfill their wish to perform on the Stage of Fate. And in each of those loops, very little changes. The same leads are chosen, the same wish is made, and Aijou Karen is at the bottom of the rankings every time.

Nothing changes until one loop where Kagura Hikari transfers to their school from London and replaces Karen as one of the eight participants in the audition, and suddenly everything is changing.

Hikari’s return lights a spark in Karen. The childhood promise they made to perform on stage together is the closest it’s ever been to happening, and Karen refuses to waste this chance.

In the first episode, we don’t get a very flattering picture of Karen. Her roommate struggles to wake her up to get to morning practice, Karen is stiff as a board while stretching, she’s not taken seriously by her classmates at all, and she can’t even picture herself ever beating Maya or Claudine for the lead roles in the play. Don’t get me wrong, her classmates all like her and honestly she’s really funny to watch, but everyone is here because they want to be the star, not to fool around.

It comes to a head when the giraffe who runs the underground auditions points it out. She’s not desperate like the other girls so she has no chance of winning. He says that there is no place for someone like Karen to have a chance at that dream stage.

But Karen doesn’t care. She ignores the giraffe entirely and jumps on stage to join Hikari. And as she falls, she undergoes a transformation, going from her school uniform to the revue outfit.

There’s a lot to be said about the transformation sequence, like how quick and mechanical and impersonal everything is. Machines sew the costumes and get everything ready and makeup is briefly applied. It’s all the work that would usually be given to the school’s Class B, which works on all the backstage stuff, like the props and the sets and the costumes. They’re out of focus a lot of the time and we only really focus on two characters from Class B, but they still exist! They’re friends with the main class A actors and in the movie it’s because of a speech the director of the play gives that the main characters decide to stand up on stage again. But they don’t matter to the audition. It only cares about the top star.

There’s also how the uniforms are mass manufactured and the very important star buttons, which signify victory or defeat so basically life or death, are unceremoniously tossed in a box, showing how disposable the rest of the stage girls are in creating the top star. Honestly the whole thing is kind of sinister in hindsight once you understand the true nature of the auditions.

But the part that’s all Karen is when she jumps and in the background it says: I am reborn.

Because Karen completely reinvents herself. She goes from getting sweeped in a low dip by Junna in their daily life to doing the same to her in the revue. In the following episodes, she starts waking up early, taking practice seriously, she changes her classmates' worldviews after defeating them, and she even beats Claudine and Maya to earn a lead role in the Starlight Gatherer. Nana specifically says that all the changes in this loop stemmed from Karen, despite Hikari’s appearance being the first major difference.

And in the climactic final revue of the show, Karen is only able to reach Hikari by stating that she will constantly be reborn if it means she can stand on stage with her. That Karen doesn’t mind getting her brilliance stolen or being trapped in the stage of fate or whatever terrible fate might befall her if she sticks with Hikari since each time she will get back on stage, born anew.

But what exactly does it mean to be reborn as a stage girl?

Well first, in order to be reborn you need to die, so let’s start there. And in the show, we see two dead stage girls.

The first is Hikari after she lost the audition in London and had her brilliance stolen. As a result, she loses all interest in the stage and can hardly remember why she bothered trying so hard to become the lead in her school’s play. But what snaps her out of this is remembering her promise to stand on stage with Karen, and how disgusted she is in herself that she almost forgot it. In a desperate attempt to reclaim what she lost, she goes to participate in the Tokyo audition since the winner will steal the brilliance of all the participants to make the stage of fate and become the untouchable top star. Unfortunately the one flaw in her plan is that Karen is also in the audition, so even if Hikari did win, she would also be stealing Karen’s brilliance, making it so their promise could never be kept regardless.

Hikari continues to be dead as a stage girl despite being a participant in the Tokyo Auditions. Although her technical skills are perfect, Maya in the first episode mentions that her heart’s not in it, which we later find out is because Hikari had lost her brilliance. This can be seen in her revue outfit in London compared to now. Over there, she had a sword and a red cape just like everyone else. But now her blade is shortened to a dagger’s length and her cloak is blue, the color of her promise which is her true desire here instead of the red of the top star that everyone else desires.

But Hikari is eventually reborn. By the time of her revue with Nana, Hikari has changed. She’s no longer pushing everyone away and has actually started to make friends with everyone and told Karen how dear their promise is to her as well. Even though Hikari only came here as a step on her path to become a top star and one day fulfill her promise with Karen, she’s instead inspired by Karen that the two of them could shine as top stars together here. Her entire worldview is completely changed, and in this Revue against someone who is in the audition not for a love of acting, but to instead use it as a stepping stone for her own ambitions, just like Hikari, her brilliance is reborn. Hikari’s weapon transforms, not back into the sword from before, but into a new dagger with a string that Hikari can use to maneuver herself and a star shaped hilt, similar to her hairpin, a symbol of her promise with Karen.

She’s not the same as she was before she died as a stage girl, but she’s reborn as someone new with a brand new outlook on life.

And the next dead stage girl we see in the show is Karen herself.

After Hikari wins the audition, she refuses to use the brilliance of the other participants to create the stage of fate, and instead offers to create it herself. This doesn’t really work and Hikari is trapped there for months in a Sisyphean effort where she attempts to build the Starlight Tower but it is destroyed over and over again because it’s impossible to put on a play alone.

But outside the Stage of Fate, no one knows what happened to her. Life goes on, but Karen is constantly searching for Hikari but has no luck. In the meantime Karen has lost the motivation she had back when Hikari transferred in. Even though she can say her lines perfectly during practice, there is something missing that everyone can tell. Her heart’s just not in it anymore. Karen even wonders why she’s been trying so hard all this time. It’s the spitting image of Hikari in London after she lost her brilliance. Even though no one stole it from her this time, without Hikari out there, Karen has no motivation to stand on stage.

But with no clues left to find where Hikari has gone, Karen instead has to understand Hikari. She reads Hikari’s Starlight Gatherer book in the original English like Hikari did. It’s hard and she needs a dictionary to translate it, but she puts in the effort to understand Hikari and why she left.

And on her way to confront Hikari once more with this new understanding, she is guided by her classmates. In the background the song “Knowledge of a Stage Girl” is played as each of them tells Karen what being on stage means to them.

Karen is reborn and ready to face Hikari after being dead as a stage girl, and it’s only because her worldview changed after understanding everyone else. Karen at the end of episode 10 couldn’t have convinced Hikari, she was absolutely blindsided then and had no idea what Hikari was doing. But now Karen was ready after having understood a variety of perspectives.

Because that’s what being reborn is, to change yourself. You will never be anyone other than yourself. But every time you understand someone, learn from someone, or get inspired by someone, you are reborn. You suddenly see a path someone else took that you hadn’t thought of before. You’re suddenly given a whole new way of life to live. You can be reborn as someone brand new. And even if you choose to stay exactly the same, you’ve still grown since you now know they exist.

When the stage is reborn in the final revue of the show, it’s only because Karen offered a new ending: that after falling, Flora ascended up the tower once more to meet the trapped Claire. Karen couldn’t change the past, she can’t make it so Flora and Claire never ascended the tower in the first place, she can’t make it so the two of them never took part in these auditions, but she can change what's gonna happen next.

This is also seen in the movie. Throughout the movie, Karen is wandering along a train track and reminiscing on how she became a stage girl. We see Hikari and Karen’s first meeting and the first play they saw with each other. We see how Karen had been the lead in her middle school plays and took dancing and singing lessons ever since elementary school. We see how she had to give up video games and hanging out with her friends so she could get into one of the best acting schools in the world. We see how scared she was that Hikari might have forgotten their promise.

And once Karen arrived at the end of the tracks, she decides to give up on the stage, having realized that she had fulfilled her dream to shine as the lead with Hikari and now there is nothing left for her future on the stage. So Karen dies as a stage girl, for real this time. It’s still a metaphor but it’s real, her body goes limp in front of Hikari and there is tomato juice everywhere.

It’s real bad. Hikari starts crying and cradling Karen in her arms, which is a big departure from how stoic she usually is. But Hikari is finally truthful about why she left, having been symbolically reborn herself, and she tells Karen her true feelings, that she wants Karen to come back to the stage where she is waiting.

Karen falls again, and just like the first time she transformed, it even has the sign behind her that says I am reborn.

Her body rides down the tracks on a train, reliving the memories and burning up everything she already gave up before. But this time when she returns to the end, she is alive and reborn. The circumstances are all the same as before, she still fulfilled her dream and has nothing left. As she later says, she’s the emptiest she’s ever been. But she’s here now, all because Hikari said she was waiting for her, and that’s enough of a reason to stand on stage.

This is just like the first episode, where the only difference from all the other loops was that Hikari was there, and that’s all Karen needed to change and be reborn.

Because Karen can’t redo her whole life. Even within the time loop everything happened more or less the same each time. Karen already gave everything she had into acting and fulfilling her promise. Like the song playing in the background says, “I would be reborn as myself.”

It’s not like she ever acted differently to try and become the top star, she doesn’t imitate Maya or Claudine or any other top star. She is unabashedly herself, always kind and energetic. The only difference is that she’s just more focused and motivated and understanding with each rebirth because the only thing she can change is what she is going to do right now, and that’s what it means to be reborn.

Karen is transformed over the course of the revue, her sword snaps and her future is changed. She gains a better understanding of herself and why she stands on stage. And instead of desiring to stand beside Hikari on stage again, or longing for the stage that had already passed, she finds a new ambition, and chooses to stand against her as rivals who won’t lose to each other. And as established in a previous revue (that Karen wasn’t there for), the revue of rivals never ends, no matter how far apart their stages are. So instead of giving up on the stage like she said prior, we see the reborn Karen auditioning for a brand new role during the credits.

Revue Starlight is all about these little transformations. As the stage girls take part in each of the revues, they learn a little bit more about each other, which helps them learn more about themselves. They grow and change because they clash with each other, and become stronger for it. The giraffe changes from the proctor to becoming a bunch of fruits and vegetables, symbolically the fuel they need to ascend to the next stage instead of using each other’s brilliance. The revues themselves change from being part of an audition to being entirely for the girl’s satisfaction, with previous win conditions such as cutting the brooch or claiming position zero becoming worthless as they move on to bigger things.

And all of this was a choice. The first choice was that Hikari didn’t want to give up on her dream with Karen, so she got back on stage. The next choice was that Karen wanted to stand on stage with Hikari, even if she wasn’t part of the auditions. In the movie, everyone else gets the chance to see themselves as a dead stage girl. At first they are in shock, but then they hear a speech from the director about how they are all scared together. And after that, each of them chooses to get back on stage despite the risk, because they aren’t facing it alone.

In the final revue of the show, Karen said that every time she gets on stage, she is reborn. And we saw that! Before every revue, Karen had her “I am Reborn” transformation sequence. And it’s not just her, in the recap movie, the other stage girls didn’t get the full transformation sequence, but they did get an “I am Reborn” card before their revues. Because everytime a stage girl chooses to stand on stage, someone else is there. Someone else is going to be facing them in the revue. Someone else will be acting across from them, or will be supporting them off the stage. And even when they are apart, they are going to be thinking of each other.

Even from the very beginning, the reason that any of them chose to stand on stage was because of someone else. Maybe they were inspired like Karen, Hikari, or Junna. Maybe it was expected of them like Maya, Kaoruko, or Mahiru. Or maybe it was because someone else was already there, like with Futaba, Claudine, or Nana. And sometimes it’s a mix because people are complex and have so many different reasons for doing anything they do.

But still, they chose to do it, to change and to take a risk and put it all out there and accept whatever comes with it.

And that is what it means to be reborn.

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