Angela Carpenter

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: NOISE
CONTACT: DatAss
OVER 18? Yes

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Angela Carpenter
CANON: Carole & Tuesday
CANON POINT: End of the series, after performing “Mother” with the artists of Mars
AGE: 16-17

BACKGROUND:
This covers the first half of the series pretty well.
After that, though, some important events are:

- Shortly after the Mars Brightest competition, Angela chooses to sign a deal with the company tied with the competition. In comparison, Carole & Tuesday’s manager, Gus, turns down the same deal because of too many restrictions tied in with the contract. Which implies that Angela is more willing to mold herself however they see fit.

- Her debut single "Breathe Again" debuts at the the top of the Billboard charts and stays there for at least a good amount of time (at least a couple of months). It’s not long before it’s announced that she’s one of the candidates for the Best New Artist in the upcoming Mars Grammys.

- Some anonymous user that went by the moniker of Black Knight starts texting her and describing things in her daily life, which spooks Angela and her mother as it means they had some kind of means of watching her, even inside her own home. The texts get creepier as she spends some time with a business associate and the tabloids rumor that it’s a romantic connection (it’s not). Not long after that, said business associate soon gets into an accident and needs to be hospitalized.

- After unsuccessfully trying to make Tao jealous through the tabloid’s rumors, Dahlia eventually talks about Angela’s stalker problem in a desperate move, as the authorities couldn’t find anything on the offender. Tao quickly figures out that the Black Knight had been spying on Angela through her AI pet and severs that means of surveillance. Around the same time frame, Angela agrees to both provide her vocals on Ertegan’s newest track "LIGHTS GO OUT" and appear as a special guest during his performance in the Cydonia Festival. Tao figures that Angela’s stalker would likely try to carry out his threats against Angela during the performance and manages to subdue him right before she goes on stage.

- However, her troubles don’t stop there as Tao is jailed because of illegal experimentations he did in the past (which were leaked after he declined to provide his AI for the purposes of political manipulation) and leaves only a digital copy of Angela to teach her the latest song his AI made for her. During practice, Dahlia is especially harsh on Angela to replicate the song perfectly. Frustrated in thinking that her mother couldn’t appreciate her for what she was already, Angela gets into an argument with her. Eventually, Dahlia implies in an outburst that she wasn’t her biological child before collapsing from a heart attack.

- Already feeling stressed about her unresponsive mother in the hospital and not being able to even find a birth certificate on herself, Angela begins taking painkillers to try to deal with everything going on in her life. When it’s all over the news that Tao was let out on bail, Angela goes into a further depression when she realizes that he hadn’t even tried to contact her since. To make matters even worse, Dahlia awakens briefly to confirm to Angela that she was adopted, but that she truly did love her (which would be the only time she told her daughter these words) before passing away.

- Angela is understandably an emotional wreck, but still manages to make her way to perform at the Grammys, though everyone in the crowd could tell that something was very wrong with her. After finishing her song, she collapses on stage from an overdose of pills and is brought to the hospital. She recovers physically, but is kept in the hospital as her mental state is still fragile.

- Katy, the manager she previously fired comes back to look after Angela in the hospital and lend an ear to her struggles. But even with that repaired connection and Carole and Tuesday visiting her in the hospital to offer encouraging words (thanking her for pushing them to be the best artists they could be) and ask her to join them in a secret performance, Angela still claims that she could no longer sing.

-After finishing his work on leaking government secrets and being haunted by the cry for help from Angela through a text message, Tao finally brings himself to visit Angela in the hospital. There, he reveals that he was the first designer baby to be created by a scientist and that she was the second, of which the scientist was put in jail for. He then explains that he has to be on the run from the government and that he might never see her again. But assures her that she will never be alone, as he would always watch over her.

- Though Carole and Tuesday were both disappointed in thinking that Angela wouldn’t show up for their big performance, to rally against the proposed anti-immigration policies, she surprises them when she shows up. Angela then explains to them that she had insulted their song, during Mars Brightest, because it reminded her of a time when she enjoyed singing. And that despite their past differences, she wanted to sing with them now as she had more freedom to be the kind of person she wanted to be now.

PERSONALITY:

Angela is someone whose personality has been shaped by the way her entire life has been in the entertainment business. Because of this, she appears to be confident and comfortable in dealing with interviews with the media and having some serious stage presence in modeling and performing. She is also aware of the drawbacks of the industry and has no problem with molding herself however necessary to find success. Perhaps some might think she made it into the music industry a little too easily by being funded behind the public eye by a substantial amount and not having to go through an audition for the talent show, Mars Brightest, but it’s shown several times that Angela is actually working just as hard (if not harder, if the downright torturous methods of improving her singing is anything to go by) as her rivals and competitors on the show. Her drive to truly be the best shines through even when it might seem she’s trying to egg on Carole & Tuesday, when it’s really her own way of trying to push them to be their best, to give herself a bigger hurdle to jump over.

She might seem confident in front of the camera and on the job, but Angela is not without her flaws. Though she never seems to lose her temper on a job, she does sometimes lose it on those either employed by her or the couple of people she values in her life. Some of this anger seems to stem from frustration she faces in her life, whether it be from feeling like she’s being forced to do jobs she finds below her (like having to do a commercial as an animal mascot), seeing other people find success in ways that aren’t as restricting as her path to stardom, or feeling like those she values aren’t giving her any respect as a person. Though this is shown to be a major flaw, in the beginning of the series, it also serves to give her more humanity at times too. For example, when Tuesday was injured on the set of Mars Brightest, Angela was one of the people most angered by the incident, despite her being part of her biggest competition on the show. Mistakenly thinking that her manager, Katy, was the aggressor of the incident, she even went as far as firing her over the ordeal, even if she fit her ideal of what a manager should be the most.

Another major flaw of her upbringing is that because she dedicated her entire life to trying to conform to what she needed to be, she never got to go to school or make any friends her own age. To make matters worse, she never actually had that much of a desire to be a model or actress (and only sang for fun, when she was really young) and everything she’s actually done was in an attempt to please her mother, who was a former actor herself, and try to achieve the levels of fame her mother was never actually able to reach. Thus, she barely has a support system at all, and only really had her mother to fall back on for most of her life. Her relationship with Dahlia, her mom, is also very tumultuous as it’s implied that there was at least one case of physical violence against her in the past and is living on her own at the age of 16 because of it. Though Dahlia does seem to be at least somewhat supportive of her daughter, since then, it does no favors for Angela when she still felt that Dahlia treasured her abilities more than herself, as a person, even if it wasn’t necessarily true.

Thus, Angela is so starved for any kind of approval, that she latches on quickly to her producer, Tao, even if he almost seems entirely emotionless and admits to preferring the company of AI over humans. However, perhaps it’s because he’s able to produce songs that are relevant to her, genuinely believes in her talent, and does occasionally actually support her that she likely holds him in regard on the same level as her mother. It’s made even more obvious how much she values any kind of affection that she breaks her confident mask after a performance on Mars Greatest when the audience gives her a standing ovation, looking a little surprised at first before getting teary eyed out of happiness.

When her mother collapses from a heart attack (right after implying she wasn’t her biological mother) and Tao is put in jail, Angela’s loneliness and lack of a support system is shown to be an even bigger problem than implied earlier in the show. She starts relying on pills to try to numb her pain, and it’s made even worse when the news breaks that Tao was out on bail but didn’t even try to contact her. Though she was already taking far too many pills at that point, the final nail to her going into a mental breakdown is her mother’s death. Despite this, she still drags herself to perform at the Mars Grammys, still trying to live up to her expectations and winds up collapsing on stage and brought to the hospital because of an overdose of pills.

However, even at her lowest point, Angela shows that she can recover from even that when she learns that there are people out there that genuinely care for her when Katy comes back to care for her, Tao makes a brief return to explain her origins (that he and her were “designer babies” made by the same scientist) and assure her that he’d always watch over her, and Carole and Tuesday encourage her to sing with them for an important cause. After all of this, Angela seems more hopeful in continuing her career to have fun with singing again and to have the freedom to do what she wants, without the expectations she had to face before.


POWERS/ABILITIES:
As someone who has been in almost all aspects of the entertainment business (acting, modeling, and singing), Angela excels in pretty much any relevant aspect you could probably think of.

- Very charismatic and comfortable in front of a camera, in personalized interviews, and has shown great stage presence in performances.

- Through tortuous methods, has a very good singing voice.

- Has a room full of awards for acting.

- Is never shown practicing with a choreographer, so she can assumingly come up with her own dance routines for performances or is just well trained enough, at this point.

- Very good at modeling without much direction

Though Tao explains at the end of the series, that Angela is a “designer baby”, he doesn’t give any hint as to what (if any) modified abilities she might have because of her genetically modified DNA, though possibly it has to do with how she excels in the entertainment business.

▶ MISC

IDK where to put this, but there's a profile for her on the official site for the anime that like never gets mentioned in the actual show HERE. Like how metal is her favorite genre of music (in spite of being a pop artist herself) or that she apparently really likes pro wrestling. And you better believe I'm gonna draw from that.