The Main Four
As a whole
- Barely-Changed Dub Name: While there is no dub of Envy Phantom, some of their official English names fall under this.
- Yuuhi's official English name is Yuhi, which is practically the same as her original one.
- In Japanese, Spica's name is Supika but in English it's officially Spica. Understandable as Supika is just Spica converted into katakana.
- Meaningful Name: All of the four girls names are meaningful in some way.
- Mikage's name has multiple meanings depending on how it's written.
- Mikage's name is one letter away from Mirage, the official translation of the first song in the series' title.
- Mikage's name as it's written in Kanji means beautiful shadow.
- Since mi can also mean three, it could possibly mean third shadow, likely a reference to the Third Shadow.
- Spica is named after the brightest star in the Virgo constellation and one of the 20 brightest stars in the sky, Spica. It's very fitting, as Spica is a very bright person.
- Urara means serene or beautiful, which fits her soft personality well.
- Yuuhi's name means setting sun, which inspired the design of her eyes, along with it being sunset when she drags Mikage to Toyko.
- Mikage's name has multiple meanings depending on how it's written.
Mikage
Mikage
A quiet girl with few friends.
- Childhood Friends: Her and Yuuhi are childhood friends, having known each other since kindergarten.
- Darkness Von Gothick Name: Mikage's name when written in Kanji means beautiful shadow.
- Don't Call Me "Sir": Inverted. Mikage never refers to anyone with any honorifics.
- Loss of Identity: Mikage frequently struggles with her identity and not knowing who she truly is in Envy Phantom.
- Innocent Blue Eyes: Averted. Mikage has blue eyes but isn't particularly innocent.
- Inconsistent Coloring: Mikage's hair despite being brown is drawn as black many times, along with her eyes appearing to be green at times.
- No Social Skills: Mikage often struggles with social interaction and such.
- The Quiet One: Downplayed. Mikage isn't very talkative.
- Thousand-Yard Stare: Implied. Friend says it almost seems like Mikage is always looking at something far away and asks if she's always been like that.
- Troubled Teen: Mikage is one of these, having to deal with her own mental health issues and her phantoms.
Spica
Spica
A cheerful girl who gets along with everyone.
- Curtains Match the Windows: Her eyes are the same light green color as her hair, save for the yellow star-shaped pupils, although her hair is sometimes drawn as fading into yellow.
- The Cutie: Spica is very cheerful and sweet, coming across as very lovable.
- Significant Name Shift: Before she moves away in the manga, Spica stops referring to Mikage as Mikage-chan and starts referring to her as just Mikage.
- Stellar Name: Spica is named after the star of the same name.
Yuuhi
Yuuhi
A serious but absentminded girl.
- Badass Adorable: She's the shortest in the friend group, wears Girlish Pigtails, and has inviting round eyes. She also gets Mikage to go to Tokyo by force, and deliberately tears her main phantom's arm off in the process.
- Beware the Nice Ones: While Yuuhi is a genuinely nice and caring person, when someone makes her angry she is a force to be reckoned with.
- Childhood Friends: Her and Mikage are childhood friends, having known each other since kindergarten.
- Determinator: In the manga, she goes out of her way to get Mikage to hang out with her friends again, chasing her down and dragging her to Tokyo to apologize to Spica.
- Little Miss Badass: Yuuhi is this at the end of the manga when she upon discovering Mikage's main phantom, tears her arm off, while not even looking at her!
- More than Meets the Eye: It's lightly implied that she may have known about the phantoms from the beginning, or at least for a long time. The way that she immediately turns to the phantom upon seeing the vine on Mikage's wrist, as well as looking generally content on the train ride despite what just happened, makes it seem like she may know more than she lets on (or at least, what Harumaki Gohan lets on). She also never asks Mikage about the phantoms or even mentions them after the incident, and the last page - an image of Spica hugging Mikage while they are both tangled up in vines - is implied to be seen from her perspective.
Urara
Urara
A girl who's always sleeping.
- Flat Character: Urara's main character trait is the fact she's always sleeping and there's not much more to her than that.
- Long Hair Is Feminine: Averted. Urara has the longest hair of the group but isn't particularly feminine.
- She Who Must Not Be Heard: Urara never actually speaks within Envy Phantom, except in the secret room in Gen'ei AP-Empty Heart, and even within it she doesn't have any voice clips.
- Sleepyhead: Always has her eyes shut and falls asleep quite often.
- Vague Age: Downplayed. While it's clear she's around the same age as Spica, Mikage and Yuuhi, her exact age is never given.
Mikage's Phantoms
Created as a result from Mikage's trauma from her mother's abuse, Mikage's phantoms are dedicated to helping protecting Mikage, although they reside within the mindscape the majority of the timenote . As a whole
The general appearance of all the phantoms
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Mikage and her phantoms experience bears striking similarities to the experience of systems, particularly those with partial dissociative identity disorder.
- Icy Blue Eyes: Downplayed. While the Third Heart fits this trope well, being cold and an emotionless girl the other phantoms do not seem to display the same traits collectively.
- Never Given a Name: None of the phantoms were ever given names.
- Pink Means Feminine: Subverted. Pink is a prominent color in their color palette but none of them are shown to be particularly feminine.
- Split Personalities: Exaggerated. There are countless amounts of phantoms.
The Third Heart
The Third Heart
Mikage's main phantom, always watching her every move from her mindscape home. Wants to help Mikage, but her methods are... questionable, to say the least- Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Is very dedicated to protecting Mikage, to the point of actually hurting her in the process.
- Anti-Villain: While not truly qualifying as a villain, she counts as this, due to the fact all of her actions are driven by genuine care for Mikage and just wanting to protect her, for nothing in return.
- Bloodless Carnage: When Yuuhi tears her arm off, she does not bleed. Justified in that it happened in the mindscape and thus her not bleeding makes sense.
- The Cynic: She's quite pessimistic, believing it to be Mikage's destiny to suffer.
- Dark Is Evil: Downplayed. While she certainly isn't evil, her actions tend to hurt rather than help.
- Declaration of Protection: In the manga, she tells Mikage not to cry, because her and the other phantoms will protect her.
- Emotionless Girl: She displays little to no emotion the majority of of the time.
- Freudian Excuse: The Third Heart, while she does only hurt Mikage and keep her from growing as a person, does have her heart in the right place. Mikage and her phantoms have been consistently traumatized by their controlling mother, and even if her attempts to help Mikage are misguided at best, one can't fault her for simply reacting to trauma the only way she knows how. It's worth mentioning that The Third Heart has a lot of remarkably similar parallels to persecutors
, an alter role common amongst DID/OSDD-1 systems. - Gone Horribly Right: She is so dedicated to protecting Mikage, that she ends up hurting her in the process.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While at first glance she appears to just be an asshole hurting Mikage, in truth she only wants to protect her.
- Not So Stoic: Near the end of the LV, she cries after being unable to turn Mikage into light.
- Obliviously Evil: While not evil, she is oblivious towards the actual harm she's causing.
- Undying Loyalty: Has this towards Mikage.
- The Unfettered: Is dedicated to protecting Mikage at any cost.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: While her efforts to protect Mikage are extreme and hurt her more than they help, none of her actions were out of maliciousness.
- Uncertain Doom: It's unknown what happened to her after Yuuhi tore her arm off, but going off of the fact that we never see or hear from her again after this, she may well have not survived the attack.
Friend
Friend
Mikage's new friend after ghosting Spica, Yuuhi and Urara. Implied to have been created by Mikage's main phantom, being based on and made to replace Spica, Yuuhi and Urara.
- The Blank: She does not have any facial features, only a swirling ring around her head - a feature which many phantoms, as shown in the game, seem to share with her.
- Flat Character: Friend is defined by being sweet and kind towards Mikage.
- Nice Girl: Friend is characterized as being kind and sweet.
- Satellite Character: Pretty much only exists to serve as a Replacement Goldfish for Mikage's friends. After Mikage reunites with her friends, not much else is heard about Friend.
- Replacement Goldfish: A variant in which the lost loved ones haven't passed away - Mikage is simply avoiding them out of fear of being hurt again. Friend is a phantom who exists simply to fill the void left behind by Mikage's friends, and is thus meant to be an imitation of them. It should be noted that Friend's role as a phantom is actually pretty similar to that of introjects in real-life plural systems; see
Watched It for the Representation under the YMMV tab for a better explanation.
The Third Shadow
The Third Shadow
The third phantom created, who ran away and subsequently disappeared before the events of Envy Phantom.- Everyone Calls Them Barkeep: Downplayed. While they're referred to as the Third Shadow, it's unlikely they were actually ever called that to their face.
- The Ghost: Downplayed. The Third Shadow is only explicitly mentioned once.
- You Are Number 6: Downplayed. While they're referred to as the Third Shadow, it's likely that was never their name and they had no name, just like the rest of the phantoms.
Other
Mikage's Mother
Mikage's Mother
Mikage's strict mother.- Abusive Parents: She is an example of these, being strict and excessively controlling.
- My Beloved Smother: She tries to micromanage every single part of Mikage's life, such as brute-forcing her way into making decisions for Mikage (ex. deciding which school she'll go to, even though Mikage wants to attend a school in Tokyo with her friends). Her controlling behavior is what leads Mikage to isolate herself and ghost her friends.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Despite only appearing once and even then not being shown, her actions heavily impact the story, by making Mikage the way she is and being indirectly responsible for the creation of the phantoms.
Wavy-haired Girl
Wavy-haired Girl
A mysterious girl from one of Mikage's nightmares.
