Hawkeye
Just a thought really.
by , April 22nd, 2015 at 08:19 AM (10174 Views)
Well we were over in the history thread, and we were talking about a user named Mike, I never met him, but it seemed there was a certain dissonance of values between him and most others. Anyway, Rockxas posted this;
And it put into my head the question, just how separate are Shirou and Rin from Sakura, and how far could they go honestly justifying staying out of it?Originally Posted by Rockxas
Let's start with Tokiomi and the separation. Knowing of this event before Fate/Zero, I really, and I mean really wanted to hate Tokiomi for this, but when I actually read it, I honestly couldn't bring myself to. From his perspective, this was the best option for Sakura, she would have the chance to be the successor to another magus line, instead of being the forgotten second child of the Tohsaka. If you think about it as a normal person, it's horrendous, and he's a bastard, but when you consider how Magus society functions, being a child of a family, and not the heir, leaves you in a pretty crappy position and it's not like this is hearsay either, we've seen it, with Sola-Ui from Fate/Zero, being married off as if she had no other worth, and the Aozaki siblings are the picture of dysfunction, seemingly stemming back from their contest to be named their family's heir. So all in all, Tokiomi's decision, while appearing rather dickish to the outside observer, appears not only reasonable, but incredibly thoughtful, giving up his daughter so that she could have a better life than the one their society would dictate for her. It's just a shame it was the Matou she ended up with.
Net up, Rin. Sakura is her biological little sister. They were separated in their youth when Sakura was adopted by the Matou clan. Now I've not finished the VN yet, so I've no idea the depth of Rin's emotion in regard to this, I only know F/Z and the DEEN anime, but from what I can tell, while there is some regret, and still affection for her sister, Rin rationalises the situation as a magus, not as a sister. As such, Rin, having very much the values and upbringing of a magus, would most likely share the logical thought process behind this decision, and it's not like anyone truly knew what was going on with Sakura. Shirou didn't even know the full scope of it, and he spent practically every day with her, so Rin, who seemed to actively avoid her, wouldn't have any reason to suspect Sakura's situation was different from her own as the successor. So until Sakura's terrible circumstance was essentially thrust into her face, she had no reason to get involved with Sakura again, especially considering that she was esssentially the heir of a rival family what with the Grail war and all.
Finally, Shirou. I'm still not entirely sure why he sees Sakura hang around and cook for him, but doesn't get the idea that she likes him. I mean there's dense, then there's made of swords dense apparently, Unlimited Dumb Works is what I'm getting at here.
Anyway, that's besides the point here. In whatever chain of events lead to Sakura being a regular fixture at the Emiya house (I assume something to do with the Archery club, given Shirou, Shinji and Sakura's mutual membership at one time) She's spent many hours in Shirou's company, and he's had ample opportunity to realise something is up. On several occasions, he's remarked the presence of bruises on Sakura and has rightfully attributed this to Shinji. Despite this, he had failed to take any action on the matter because of Sakura's insistance, but I won't lie by saying that this sits right with me in any way. Shirou wasn't raised as a traditional magus. He doesn't have the mentality of "Leave them alone and hope they leave us alone" that magus seem to possess, as a matter of fact, he's the exact opposite, being an idealist who wants to be a hero, so the idea that he would allow this abuse to continue, does rather rub me the wrong way, not just from a moral standpoint, but it doesn't seem to make sense for the character, as while I know Shirou is not want to jump to violence, it's no secret that between him and Shinji, there really isn't a contest, and a firm warning about it doesn't seem like it would have gone amiss. Perhaps there's some subtlty of Japanese culture I'm missing here, where they might be more hesitant to take action on such things, but to me, having Shirou, someone who is always trying to balance the scales and such just ignore a problem on thee victim's insistance, seems rather out of place.
So all things considered, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Tokiomi made his decision to give up Sakura and that Rin, a born and raised magus, would see the reason in this and carry on as expected, having no reason to pry into Sakura's circumstances at all. The only one in this situation who doesn't seem to act in according to what I would expect of their moral compass, is Shirou, which rather bugs me.
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