the LUCA of concerning characters to kin

okay so there’s this game release in 2001 called tsukihime. I played through it with a friend and promptly had my fucking mind blown. the game is structured as having 5 routes, one for each heroine where the main character Tohno Shiki develops a romantic relationship with each and the adventure plays out a little differently each time, gradually doing this strange de-escalation; you start with a vampire queen (Arcueid), then an immortal nun (Ciel), then a half demon (Akiha), and then two regular people (Hisui then Kohaku). A big part of the game’s fun is the mystery and tone which kinda gets spoiled if I go any further so I’ll just say this rn: please go try the game! IF. you’re okay playing through a very explicit and gross game about bad people written by a dude so exhausted by the development process that he wanted to remake the game like two years later (still being worked on to this day!!!). it’s an eroge so there’s sex but also a lot of very dubious or just outright no consent. It’s icky and gross is my point but if you can stomach it this is genuinely an experience like no other. go try it!

okay, that out of the way, there’s one character I wanna focus on: kohaku, specifically her extraordinarily famous scene at the end of the Hisui route. famous that is, in the sense that you’ve seen this scene at least once or twice in another piece of media without realizing, and everyone seems to not know the origin of it. yuri’s suicide in ddlc, Joshua’s farewell in trails in the sky FC, fuck idk man zenos’s whole character in ff14 and im pretty sure the dark knight quest dude too i just didn’t read it. At the end of hisui’s route, wherein most main characters are dead or never showed up, shiki figures everything out. kohaku is the true antagonist of the game, and all he needs to know is why. the reason is, she isn’t human; she’s just a doll after the horrific life she’s lived because of the tohno family. tsukihime has a theme of monsters being human, but Kohaku in this moment is presented as a human made monster. it isn’t true, but even still her whole life hollowed her of identity and left her with nothing but self preservation tactics.

cool! holy shit she’s fucking EVERYWHERE. Sakura in fate stay night, the sonozakis in higurashi, the servants in umineko, like just everyone in subahibi, all the interesting mihoyo characters, at least half a dozen kiseki characters including Joshua and Renne, and probably at least double these I can’t think of rn. tsukihime’s influence is crazy!!! I think about it literally all the time it’s so awesome. jjk would have one too if gege didn’t hate women. is it mai? idk i guess.

the best one is just the entire cast of fate extra CCC though. fuck you nasu if you didn’t make fgo we could’ve had fate extra record ccc by now but instead we get ordeal call 37. anyway ccc is the best I love characters whose stories involve sex trauma. shoutout to my goats Elizabeth bathory and BB. kill kiara sessyoin NOW