>>57055132Started with Red. I was young enough to the point where I was sure I liked Sabrina, but I didn't have a justification beyond "she's pretty to look at and that's that". The anime came around. Seeing her behave the way she does in the anime didn't affect me. It made me internally question why she was doing what she was doing, but only out of a sense of curiosity. She doesn't behave that way in game, after all.
I'd say she's had a more profound influence on my tastes than I'd realised. The hime cut and long hair, the mysterious snippets of her in-game character that fosters imagination, her psychic powers. Between her and maybe two or three different non-Pokémon characters, I've tended to gravitate my general preferences towards magical or fantastical girls.
It's a shame that HGSS made Sabrina a bit more partisan - not that I necessarily dislike the design, it just doesn't say "Sabrina" to me more than it does "Karen". It doesn't help that you meet Karen first and see her design, then meet Sabrina after. She loses a little of what actually made her unique from a design perspective, at least to me.
