I kind of see the concert as a metaphore, but the fight as being real.
As the heiress of a major company, all eyes are on her all the time. It is very much a performance, hence the metaphor of performing in front of a huge crowd.
The armor metaphor is more complicated, but I think we've been over that one plenty.
What if the audience symbolized the desire to be accepted by others so she kills off her older, innocent personality (the armour)
"Tell me, can a heart be turned to stone?"
"Mirror mirror, what's behind you? Save me from the things I see. I can keep it from the world. Why won't you let me hide from me?"
Just listened back to Mirror Mirror, one thought that never occured to me before:
What if her parents aren't neccessarily forcing her down these paths, but she just feels like she it's her duty to take over the company since she's an only child? Even if it makes her own life a misery. As Chishio quoted she seemingly has deeply ingrained feelings that she is hiding from the world, possibly from her parents because she personally believes that they might be distraught if they learn that the SDC has no future heir/heiress in the family?
What if her battle with the Suit of Armour is quite literally her dreaming of the life that she wants to pursue? Perhaps the concert is a real thing after and throughout her performance she comes to the realisation that her parents wouldn't judge her for wanting something different? Maybe she already told her parents that she didn't want to become president of the SDC and that they have since let her choose her own path, that of a huntress?
And the reason that she wants to perfect her craft at being a huntress (she studied seemingly constantly, trained vigorously and the only reason she doesn't want Ruby as the leader is because she believes that Ruby may drag the team down as leader) is because she wants to make her family proud and prove to herself that she is doing the right thing in potentially letting the SDC fall into someone else's hands (After all if she doesn't inherit it: Who will?)
Lol, the idea that the performance is a metaphor is a new one. The Schnees are practically royalty (hell, since they live in "kingdoms" they may be for realz nobility) and so it is not absurd for them to have a big-ass concert hall on their manor. She may not have been the main attraction for the concertgoers, but her family simply wanted to get her out there to indulge her.
so i believe the fight with the armor DID happen because her semblance gives her the ability to summon a defeated foe. had the fight never happened she would not have been able to summon the sword against the paladins in volume 3 or been able to use the armor freely in volume 5. however, in regards to the scar, it does actually appear before she got punched in the armor fight. i dont have a screenshot but you can rewatch the white trailer and see for yourself. unless its been stated on an offsite page i dont think the scar's origin has been told whatsoever and is just a mystery for now that they will likely reveal later if at all
We know from the weiss character short before V5 that she did not have the scar. So that gives us a timeframe.
1. This thread was started in 2013.
2. She did get her scar in the White Trailer fight. Her scar being there during the fight was an animation error.
Throughout the first half of the fight, she did not have a scar on her face, at all.
There's no reason for Monty to have made a version of her model without a scar for that trailer if he had meant for her to already have the scar during that fight. Him using the version with a scar in some shots was a mistake.
Here's a collage of screenshots of her with no scar with timestamps so you can see for yourself: