Personality

[willing_sheath]

 

There are many facets to Tomoe’s personality, but first and foremost she is an extremely private person. The way this is perceived by other people is a cold aloofness in her behavior. She rarely emotes and usually the only real clue to what is going on inside is to read her body language, which is still a feat because those changes are subtle as well. Ultimately she comes off as an uncaring emotionless ice queen because she is so guarded on all fronts.

The sad part of this is that the opposite is true for her. She feels things very deeply whether she shows it or not. The reason behind this is multifaceted: first and foremost she has very traditional and conservative ideals regarding social norms and always holds herself in check to what she perceives an ideal for a proper Japanese woman—which is quiet, reserved, organized, in control. The second factor that has contributed to this aspect of her personality is the fact that she essentially took control of her family from the age of nine when her mother died, going from a child to an adult in the span of a few weeks in order to care for her new born brother and keep their household standing while their father couldn’t. She has been forced from a young age to be a pillar of strength to keep everything running, keep everyone fed, ensure that the finances were in order, all of it. She couldn’t afford to be emotional, she couldn’t afford to “crack” or lose control of herself through those times because she had to be strong when no one else would. She has kept herself like that for so long that she no longer knows how to be any other way.

But she does have emotions, whether she is able to display them or not, and she becomes consumed and blinded by them at times. Tomoe can be extremely biased when it comes to people she cares about and develops tunnel vision, seeing the positive aspects of those people rather than the negative. The best examples of this include how she sees her younger brother: she describes him to Kenshin as a ‘good kid’ despite his obvious issues—for god’s sake, he bit the man twice earlier in the day completely unprovoked, that is not a ‘good kid’, that is a child with some issues. Likewise this ‘forgiving’ tunnel vision falls on Kenshin as well. Once she sees him as human and starts developing feelings toward him she is able to look past the fact that he is a hitokiri and the fact that he killed her fiancé. On the flip side of this she also easily becomes biased against ideas, situations and people that grate against things she cares about—people or otherwise—until she is proven wrong. It was this bias and tunnel vision, combined with her negative emotions (grief and guilt) utterly consuming her with no outlet that drove her to abandon everything in Edo to seek revenge on Kiyosatto’s killer in Kyoto. Her view of ‘Battousai’ was only repealed once it was made clear to her that he wasn’t a demon but just a man—a boy to be more precise.

Stepping away from the more volatile aspects of Tomoe’s personality, there are several key points that are always there and subtly affecting her. First: Tomoe is very proud. She does not like admitting when she is wrong and she does not like being insulted. She is also extremely stubborn, set in her ways and has difficulty bending. This can be interpreted in different ways, but the key thing to remember with Tomoe is that everything is subtle and normally under the surface and unseen. She can’t bend her demeanor to tell Kiyosatto to stay in Edo—to do so would break the image she had of herself, it would insult his honor, it would trod on her own pride, it would turn most of the things she held dear on their head. Expanding on her stubborn nature, Tomoe can be controlling as well and this, like her repressed demeanor, comes from running a household from a young age. She keeps order in her house, bottom line. She is an assertive, hard worker and in most situations she slowly becomes the person in charge for that reason alone, even if it is a hidden control. This is not difficult to accomplish with men like her father or Kenshin (or likely Kiyosatto if he hadn’t died).

Tomoe is a strong woman, despite her many, many flaws. Her strength is mostly strength of will: as stated repeatedly, she is not assertive verbally or physically, but that certainly doesn’t make her weak. She holds a quiet strength and tends to become the pillar supporting those around her. She is self-sacrificing in this way to those she cares about. She gave away her childhood to raise her brother and support her father when he was weak. She reached out to Kenshin when she saw him floundering under the weight of his crimes. She left to meet the Yaminobu by herself, hoping to spare both her brother and her husband from the repercussions and willingly sacrificed her life to try to right it when she failed.

Tomoe is very multi-facetted and it is difficult to cover everything that makes up her personality without almost being contradictory in places: but ultimately she is proud, altruistic, stubborn, conservative and above all else, reserved to the most extreme degree possible.