The Half of It analysis

Aster

This is going to be a long one. In this chapter I refer to a deleted scene set just after the Yakult scene that you can watch in the video above. As this is a long one it will be very out of order and mismatched, and you should know that this had been mostly writing this late at night, so I haven't been my most coherent self. 

I haven't written anything about Aster being an ethnic minority because I'm white and feel that it wouldn't be right for me to talk about it, but if you want to look into it, Alice Wu has gone into detail about it in interviews. 

I should begin this saying that Aster is my joint first favourite character (the other being Ellie), so this is biased (also the first few bits are going to be really obvious, just go with it). 

Main character traits
Aster is the popular girl, dating the richest guy in town and daughter of the deacon to the local church. She is adored by everyone, and every girl wants to be her. However, this is just what people see. In reality she is thoughtful and intelligent. She is so much more than what people tend to see. She reads some really obscure, but enlightening literature and can bring out really complex philosophical ideas from them. She used to paint, but gave up after the pressure of turning a good painting into a great one came too big. 

It's clear that her parents want her to be a traditional house-wife to Trig. Her always being told what to do, how to behave, and she just goes with it. If she just does what she's told, what she believes God wants her to do, then she will be rewarded. That she'll feel what she's supposed to feel when the time comes. That getting married to Trig and having his children will be her life. This is something she has just accepted, or is in the process of accepting at the start of the film. She has already done what she's been told, how is marrying Trig any different, right? However, she clearly doesn't want to. She's desperate to break out of this cage her family and Trig's has put her in. She prayed to God, probably for months, asking for a sign to show her there was a way out. Whether she got Paul's letter or not, before the start of the film she was trying to get out of the inevitability of marrying Trig, however had she not got Paul's letter, she would have just married him.  

It is obvious from early on in the film that she is different to the other students. In the band scene, she is the only one (other than Ellie) who doesn't look at her phone when someone in the the class is being cruel to someone else on social media. Given that she is the popular girl, you would expect that she would get involved with something like that, but she doesn't. Instead she just sits there reading her book, as if she knows what's going on and simply doesn't care. "Aster always has her head in a book," clearly this is something she does often, ignoring what is around her in favour of something actually interesting. Also in this scene you can see that she isn't just ignoring her phone, but also Trig (more on this below).

This is small, but Aster's difference from the people around her is physically represented in the scene where Ellie asks Aster to use ghost messenger. Aster is watching Trig and someone else do mudding, and all of the girls there are wearing blue jeans, a blue jean jacket and a pink top, but Aster is wearing her normal green jacket, a cream button-up top and grey trousers, visually separating her from everyone else. This appears to be a conscious decision, like her decision to sit on a rock behind everyone else looking at her phone instead of paying attention to what's going on.

Her relationship with Trig
I'm just going to get this out of the way early on, but feel free to skip it.

I'm gonna start this by saying that (I don't believe) Aster loves Trig... at all. It's clear, even in the first scene she's in (the band scene) that she's just with Trig because she has to be. As described above, she isn't paying any attention to him at all, and only pays attention to her surroundings when she sings, in which she still just stares off into the distance not really focusing on anything, and definitely not him. This is not just seen in the band scene, but in every scene she's in with Trig. She has a noticeable look of distance, as if she'd rather be anywhere else than there, only being there to make appearances for Trig. In the scenes themselves there is very little dialogue (if any at all), and the focus is normally on the letter Aster is currently writing or reading, drawing your attention away from Trig, and toward what Ellie and Aster are saying in voice-over (the letters). This showing that while Aster is with Trig, she is thinking about Paul.