>>536659243
Alignment rep and heroine aren't mutually exclusive roles, NINE has alignment rep heroines and so does VV.
The criteria for being considered a heroine would just mostly be a female character of some form of significance. Obviously being an actual playable character is a fast-track but as said not necessarily the end all be all.
Yuriko is without doubt the principle chaos female character in SMT1 and shes even just straight up called chaos heroine by the game near the end when shes larping as a gaean, so there's no argument against her being a heroine.
Honestly I think what qualifies as heroine is pretty clear cut for 90% of the games in the series, the only game that really gives me pause for a bit is nocturne. Atlus seem to consider chiaki the heroine based on that original FE X SMT teaser that showed her and demi-fiend alongside all the other mainline pairs. I feel like as a principal character in that game though, yuko would probably stack higher on the priority totem pole? Shes more important to the core of that games plot and is the MC's main motivation for a huge chunk of it.
And I mean, multiple heroines exist in plenty of games right? We're even talking about law, chaos and neutral heroines right now. But nocturne not having traditional alignments also makes it a bit more muddy.
Chaos heroine, law heroine, neutral heroine, puts forward a sorta clear expectation within the framework of the series. But if you say chiaki's the yosuga heroine and yuko's the freedom heroine it doesn't really read right. But maybe thats a semantics thing.