I get what you mean, but my point is that fundamentally, what's happening in the LoRA and in the human artist is conceptually similar - each learns through exam

I get what you mean, but my point is that fundamentally, what's happening in the LoRA and in the human artist is conceptually similar - each learns through examples what it is about a character that makes that character distinctive, and then attempts to reproduce it within some set of constraints. Neither is capable of doing so without first being exposed to what it is that makes that character distinctive. Human brains are obviously far better at interpretation than current AIs are (and have the advantage of actual will and intent), but I don't know why one'd expect a model that's never seen a character to be able to reproduce the essential nature of that character. I rather suspect that you can get more variation than you'd think from a homogenous dataset, though - I've trained a LoRA on myself that can produce photorealistic renderings of me, as well as anime, Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks styles, all of which actually feel pretty "me"; I don't have any human-produced drawings of myself as a Disney character or renderings of me in a Pixar movie, but the model does a good job of projecting what I'd look like given what it knows about "Disney-style" drawings, plus what I've taught it about what I look like.