"Always Coming at Her with Everything I Had": Voice Actor Haruka Shiraishi on Building Her Character [TV Anime The Oblivious Saint Can't Contain Her Power Interview]

Carolina, the heroine of the TV anime The Oblivious Saint Can't Contain Her Power, which began airing and streaming on June 30, has long lived with a sense of inferiority after being mistreated by her accomplished older sister, Flora. The story begins as Carolina is bound in a political marriage to Edward, the second prince of a neighboring kingdom, and sets off alone for the Marcosias Empire.

For this article, we interviewed Haruka Shiraishi, the voice actor who plays Flora Sánchez. Shiraishi says Flora is far from a simple villain — we asked her how she came to understand the character and how she approached playing her, tracing the process behind building the role.

—— We watched episode one at an advance screening, and Flora's hatred toward Carolina came through with tremendous intensity. The heart of the story seems to be Carolina's liberation and growth after being mistreated, and in a sense her older sister Flora is her counterpart, isn't she?

Shiraishi: At first glance, Flora reads as the villain of this story, but if you focus on her, you can see she also carries a kind of suffering that comes from being celebrated as talented, beautiful, and the next Saint. To me, this is a story of human growth in many different senses.

She's always had perfection forced onto her, unable to show weakness or shed tears. The one person who ever reached out to her — her mother — passed away, and because Flora believes Carolina was somehow the cause, her hatred turns toward Carolina, and she lashes out at her so harshly.

—— So it's precisely because Flora has her own reasons for treating Carolina as an enemy...

Shiraishi: I imagine the real Flora would have turned out quite differently, but since she ended up this way, I wanted to express the kind of hardship she carries because of it, so I put a twisted edge and a sense of resentment into every line she speaks.

—— By leaving the Kingdom of Celestia, where Flora remains, and marrying Edward, Carolina gradually regains her confidence and becomes more positive, doesn't she?

Shiraishi: Carolina had a very self-deprecating way of thinking, but that kind of mindset really does depend a great deal on how it was formed and what environment a person grew up in — something I've felt in my own life as well, and this work made me feel it all over again. But that environment can be changed through some kind of turning point, or through meeting people.

Edward and the others watching over Carolina are, for the most part, warm people overflowing with love, and I think she was blessed with people like that because her true, essential nature is itself so warm. I felt this is a work you can also read hopefully — that if you keep facing forward without giving up, good things like this can happen.