Spoiler warning: it includes the ending, and a lot of it. If you haven't watched it yet, shoo, shoo! Go watch Ribbon Hero first and come back!
Sapphire and Velvet are trying to end the same catastrophe. But Sapphire believes no one should be sacrificed anymore, while Velvet thinks that to prevent greater harm, some sacrifice has to be accepted.
Both want to change a reality where the Nergal ruin people's lives, but one refuses sacrifice, and the other looks first for a realistic solution that includes it.
The most interesting conflict in Ribbon Hero lies in this difference rather than in a fight between hero and villain.
✦ Sapphire's Journey
From Silverland to the Ribbon Hero
After her homeland Silverland falls to the Nergal, Sapphire flees with Zirco to the neighboring kingdom of Goldland. Arriving in a strange land having lost her home and family, she begins building a new life with new people, working in the mines.
But the Nergal appear in the mine again, and in a place full of crystals, Sapphire awakens the power of the ribbon and transforms into the Ribbon Hero.
From the moment she gains the power to save the people in front of her, she stops at nothing short of fighting so that others don't go through the same thing, rather than just running away and surviving.
✦ The Two Types at a Glance
This post's reading of the scenes
In this post, I'll set their types based on the choices the two actually make. In my reading, Sapphire is an ENFJ 2w1, and Velvet is an INTJ 1w9.
Sapphire Is an ENFJ 2w1, a Hero Who Gathers People and Builds Hope
What makes Sapphire an ENFJ is that she doesn't stop at getting stronger alone. After she transforms into the Ribbon Hero and defeats the Nergal, what she gains isn't only combat ability.
She gives people who gave up resisting under fear a reason to stand against it again. Sapphire's courage moves the people around her, and they start joining the fight in whatever way they can.
This character isn't a hero who drifts away from people once she gains power; she's a hero who reconnects people through her own actions.
✦ Type Notes
ENFJ, INTJ, 2w1, and 1w9
The core of Enneagram type 2 is recognizing other people's needs and helping directly. A 2w1, with the 1 wing added, is a type whose wish to help comes attached to a strong standard of right and wrong.
Sapphire regards Goldland as her own home because she can't treat the people suffering from the Nergal as someone else's problem. Because she knows the loss she has suffered, she can't accept a choice that makes someone else repeat the same loss.
Of course, this trait also gets Sapphire into trouble. Velvet persuades Sapphire that destroying the Pillars of Creation is a way to atone for what happened in her old homeland.
She touches on the fact that Sapphire doesn't merely want to protect people, but also carries guilt over having survived.
Sapphire's good intentions are real, but precisely because of them, she risks taking on everyone else's pain as entirely her own responsibility. The stronger the wish to save someone, the easier it is to push yourself with the thought 'I have to do more.'
Velvet Is an INTJ 1w9, a Cold Reformer Who Counts Sacrifice into the Plan
Unlike Sapphire, Velvet doesn't rally people by putting emotion first. Moving around Goldland's mines and its religious power, she first calculates what must be broken and whose power must be used to end the threat of the Nergal.
What she wants to end is the system that keeps peace by offering children as sacrifices to the King of Ash. Velvet's approach to Sapphire is also hard to explain as casual kindness.
She uses Sapphire's power to eliminate the pillars the Nergal come through and tries to break the cycle of repeated sacrifice.
That's why Velvet reads as an INTJ 1w9. The INTJ's strategic side shows in the attitude of removing the structure that keeps producing the problem, rather than winning the fight right in front of you.
Enneagram type 1 struggles to bear the gap between how the world should be and how it actually is, and the 9 wing adds an air of pushing that conviction in a calm, controlled way.
Velvet wants to get rid of a cruel system, yet she moves while calculating the cost of tearing down the order that has been running all this time.
✦ How the Two Relate
From a shared enemy to different philosophies
Her problem lies in the method more than the goal. Even knowing the sacrifice system is wrong, Velvet sees that not everyone can be saved at once, and uses Sapphire's guilt as part of her operation.
Sapphire sees in her own power the possibility of saving other people, but Velvet sees that power first as a means of solving an old problem. The moment a plan to save people treats people as tools, a strategy aimed at justice becomes dangerous too.
✦ Sapphire vs Velvet
Same goal, different starting points
The difference between the two doesn't end at 'warm person versus cold person.' When people are suffering right in front of her, Sapphire first rejects the rules that sacrifice them. Velvet judges that to change a rule, you must first use it.
Sapphire starts from people's pain and moves toward the system, while Velvet tries to change the structure of the system and ends up putting people inside her plan. They head for the same goal from completely different starting points.
The Final Choice Splits the Two
✦ Sapphire's Final Choice
What happens in the ending
In the ending, Sapphire faces an illusion in which her lost parents and homeland seem to have returned. If she stays there, she could enjoy the comfort of having everything that vanished back, but that peace is an illusion standing in for a real life.
Sapphire refuses that temptation, destroys the King of Ash's core, and returns to the survivors. Then, together with Zirco, she faces the sorrow of losing her parents and homeland, heading toward the ruins of Silverland.
It isn't that the sorrow disappeared; she simply chose not to pick a false world in order to get rid of it.
This choice shows Sapphire's ENFJ 2w1 most clearly. What Sapphire protects isn't a perfect kingdom of memory, but the people alive now and the possibility that they can build their lives again.
Velvet counted sacrifice into the plan to reduce sacrifice, whereas Sapphire rejects, from the start, a peace that can only be kept by offering someone up.
If Velvet is a strategist looking for a way to solve the problem, Sapphire is the one who keeps asking who that solution sacrifices.
To me, Velvet is a more interesting character than a plain villain. Her aim isn't to torment people; she's closer to someone who, searching for a way for more people to survive, adapted to a cruel order for too long.
That's why Sapphire's arrival raises an uncomfortable question for Velvet too. Is there really no other way? The moment you accept someone's sacrifice as a given cost, doesn't even a plan to bring that system down start to resemble the system's own logic?
So I think many people are drawn to Sapphire's choice. Velvet's calculation may be realistic, but 'realistic' doesn't mean a cruel rule may be kept forever.
Sapphire doesn't believe she can perfectly solve everything alone; she rejects, from the start, the idea that sacrificing someone is the only answer.
The ribbon seems to be both an ornament that makes Sapphire strong and a sign that she'll step out of a predetermined fate and role and fight her own way.
The moment that ribbon shines brightest isn't only when she defeats an enemy, but when she refuses to accept the rule of sacrifice that everyone took for granted.
That's all for this post. See you next time.
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🌐 Korean version: 공주 사파이어와 벨벳, 서로 다른 선택의 이유 — 《리본 히어로》 성격유형 분석
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