Sora Takenouchi

AGE: 11 (Digimon Adventure); 14 (Digimon Adventure 02); 24 (As of 2012).
PLAYED BY: Colleen O'Shaughnessey
Sora; what can you say about her that hasn’t been said? She’s sassy, caring, capable, athletic, energetic, mature for her age, smart, and able to help counsel a whole group of ‘tweens and little kids (counting the Digimon that act accordingly with their human mate’s age). She’s also played by Colleen O’Shaughnessey, a voice actress who has voiced witty, sassy, and intelligent characters (brilliant for a woman who hasn’t really grown up watching cartoons). She’s also very sensitive, can get set off by a group sing-along where she bursts into tears thinking about home; this can be a good thing, for her role as, what TV Tropes called, “The Heart” [link] or a bad thing, like when DemiDevimon prayed on her insecurities as a part of keeping the group apart. Of course even when she doubts herself as a person, Sora still cares enough about her friends to sneak about keeping the dastardly little turd’s influence away from her friends which soon leads to her relationship with her mother getting mended, a development that predated Pixar’s “Brave” by a good few 12-13 years. Plus in a move that is very bold and, dare I say, feminist for the show itself: she isn’t pitted against her girlier counterparts, Mimi and Kari and they with their Digimon have helped the first and second seasons ace the Bechdel Test and have proven that women and girls, be they girly or tomboyish or geeky like Yolei, have rich complicated personalities that make it clear that no one should be ushered in to fill a narrow role defined by their gender. In a disappointing move for the show, in the second series, Sora went from a feisty, capable, and quick soccer-playing tomboy to a more placid, girly (not even the hyper-girliness of Mimi), tennis-playing (weird, because it isn’t a wimpy sport) damsel in distress that couldn’t move when that rock was going to hit her! This piece of crap chickification even was referenced in this brilliant drawing [link] by General Kefka. It didn’t get better in the Christmas episodes, when she and Yolei went to Russia and had to be saved by the rest of the gang and then were reduced to crying over not being able to eat Russian delicacies with the Russian DigiDestined. I like to think she reclaimed her old self by this time and appeared like this in her early 20’s. NO SHIPPING WARS!