Rin Tohsaka | The wrong girl to tease

Rin is one of the three main heroines of Fate/stay night. She is the current head of the Tohsaka family and the biological older sister of Sakura Matou.

Two centuries ago, the Tohsaka House, in collaboration with the estates of Makiri and Einzbern, helped found the Fuyuki Holy Grail Wars. The land of Fuyuki City, which possessed the second greatest spiritual power in all Japan, was owned by Rin's ancestor, Nagato Tohsaka; at the behest of the Einzberns, he provided his property as battleground for present and future wars. Nagato was a kirishitanWP, as well as a pupil of Zelretch; these titles gave him considerable influence in both the Mage's Association and the Holy Church, allowing the Tohsaka family to participate in the Holy Grail Wars, free from harassment by either organization.

Rin was brought up as the successor to her family's magecraft, and was instructed by her father to prioritize magecraft over her own interests. Ten years ago, Tokiomi Tohsaka was selected as a Master in the 4th Holy Grail War, and Rin was entrusted to take care of the Tohsaka estate until his return. Her mother, Aoi Tohsaka, was left in a debilitated state from the war, so her care was left to her guardian, Kirei Kotomine. After her father was killed, Rin continued to improve her sorcery with some guidance from Kirei Kotomine. She also had a maid working since back when her father was alive, but left when Rin entered middle school, leaving her uniform behind. To divert attention from her private life, Rin has diligently strived to earn the admiration of her peers, even though she is secretly stingy, tomboyish, and a perfectionist. The rights to the Tohsaka lands were inherited by Aoi after Tokiomi's death, and subsequently inherited by Rin after Aoi's death. Kirei managed them as Rin's guardian, and because of his foolhardy and coarse management, the majority of profitable properties ended up in the hands of others. It is possible that he believed the wealth was bad for her upbringing due to following the principles of humility and poverty.

Although Rin resents the sacrifices she has endured for the sake of tradition, she is fiercely competitive and eager to prove herself as a skilled and capable magus.

Rin is a young woman with aqua eyes and long wavy black hair in a two-side-up hairstyle, which consists of part of her being made into twin tails tied with black ribbons, while the majority hangs loose. During school, she wears the standard Homurahara uniform, which she sometimes accompanies with a long red coat. Her casual clothing consists of a red turtleneck, a black skirt and long black stockings under brown leather flats.

When she was young, she did her hair up in twin tails entirely, and her clothing consisted of a white shirt with a red necktie, a red skirt and long black socks, much like when she becomes older. In the fifth Holy Grail War, she prepared a plain skirt and shirt for Saber, though it was originally a birthday present from Kirei.

Rin is a perceptive, serious, resourceful, and very competitive person. Though she is widely admired at school as a prim and proper honor student, it is a front she puts up in order to prevent others from prying into her life. In private, she is notably loud, shrewd, stingy, and bossy but usually means well for those she cares about. She is known as a model student and idol of her school. Her manner of speech is often hostile and dismissive of other people, but deep down she has a caring, big-sisterly disposition. Her tendency of making trivial mistakes at the worst possible moment is a hereditary curse. Though she really is a lot nicer than she seems, she claims to always make her decisions based on cold, rational logic in the end. In her own words, it's "not a very cute personality". In fact, her choice in personal clothes is probably an overreaction to that. Despite claiming that she would do anything in order to win the Holy Grail War, no matter how underhanded, she has a deeply rooted sense of honor, seen refusing to dispose of Shirou despite numerous easy chances of doing so, simply because she owes him and deem disposing of him without clearing her debts to be cheap. In short, Rin is a tough, fiery, perceptive, judicious, mischievous, and considerably aggressive tsundere who shows both sides of the trope.

During her childhood, she understood the Fourth Holy Grail War about as much as Shirou understands the Fifth, seemingly understanding while not actually comprehending it. She saw her father as a great magus who must be respected and loved, but failed to understand the negative aspect of his personality, the coldheartedness that accompanied such an ideal. If he had lived until Rin could actually understand his personality, it is likely that it would have greatly affected the development of her own personality. It is unknown if she would have opposed such inhumanity and left the path of a magus, or if she would have become a “perfect and coldhearted” magus like her father. Either fate for Rin would have been one far away from happiness. Due to Tokiomi's early and untimely death, she was not aware of the original goal of the Holy Grail War to open a “hole” beyond the World.

For the sake of her deceased father and her family's name, Rin seeks to obtain the Holy Grail, though she has little personal desire for it. Unbeknownst to her sister Sakura, Rin feels guilty and believes that she has abandoned Sakura after she is adopted into the Matou household, so much the guilt was what driven her to revive Shirou, Sakura's target of affection, at the brink of death. While Rin eventually admits that she has always watched Sakura from afar, she never realized how much Sakura suffered under the Matou and fooled herself into thinking Sakura was happy to alleviate her own guilt.

She spent just as much time quarrelling with Shirou as she did cooperating with him. She's a mischievous girl at heart, so she loves teasing serious people such as Shirou. However, Rin did want to kill him when she saw his Gradation Air in his shed, thinking that he lied to her.

Her hobbies include admiring jewels. Although wealthy from her family's magical patents, that were crested by Tokiomi, who developed a magic formula that simplified magic, however it is becoming obsolete making Rin receiving less money than before. She feels somewhat ashamed of having to rely on the work of previous generations.

Rin was born capable of manipulating all five great Elements, an extremely rare trait for a Magus. Her potential is such that she will eventually be considered as one of the top one hundred ranking magi throughout the entire history of the Mage's Association. Compared using simple numbers, someone with an abnormally high potential like Ciel is at one hundred, someone who is eternally at apprentice-level like Shirou is at ten, and Rin falls from seventy to one hundred.

As the successor to the Tohsaka family, Rin excels in Conversion of power, which includes storage of Magical Energy in objects, typically jewels for Jewel Magecraft, as they are easy targets to transfer Magical Energy into due to being 'places' that easily store people's thoughts. Additionally, crystals that have been in the ground for a long time carry strong Nature Spirits. She uses them as disposable, limited-function Mystic Codes. Because the amount of Magical Energy a Magus can release at one time is restricted by bodily limitations, giving them unused excess of Magical Energy at the end of the day, Rin has been able to accumulate all of the Magical Energy generated by her body during her seventeen years of lifetime through jewel crystallization, using a syringe to draw out her blood and drip it onto jewels to accomplish the process. As with practicing of magecraft, charging these jewels has become a daily process for her turning them into powerful bullets. However, in the end, they are merely disposable items. Because their magecraft reduces expensive jewels to ash after a single use, the Tohsaka Magi are fated to be chronically afflicted with a lack of funds. When Rin's stored power is needed, she can utilize the jewels for an instantaneous release of A-rank magecraft capable of countering a spell from Caster's magecraft from the Age of Gods, or taking one of Berserker's lives by using five jewels. Their speed of release is great enough that it can match Caster's High-Speed Divine Words.

When she gets older, Rin is able to take advantage of her Average One status and Jewel Magecraft to be able to imitate Flat Escardos's magical hacking using a giant pentagram with jewels at each end: being an Average One means that, unless her opponent had one of the rare, weird Elements, Rin would be elementally compatible with anything a Magus could have. She has the ideal talent for magecraft hacking, even though she doesn’t have any reliable way to read the opponent’s wavelength and formula yet and needs Lord El-Melloi II to assist her in finding the enemy's data on the Luxcarta. She further evolves as a "counter-based fighter" when she devises the Pseudo-Edelsteine counter-spell with Lord El-Melloi II's help. She can also use small statues of amethyst in form of Owls as familiars for reconnaissance purposes.

Her most common offensive spell is a Finnish technique known as Gandr, which concentrates Magical Energy into Rin's forefinger, resulting in a hazy black orb to be subsequently fired like a bullet. Originally intended to be a Curse, Rin's variation on Gandr takes on an unusual, corporeal form. Additionally, Rin has bypassed any need for a verbal component to initiate this spell due to having inherited and infused Magic Crest of her family, and she can fire as many Gandr shots in an instant, even set up a barrier and rain them on an opponent if she so chooses. Since Rin's Gandr Shot was particularly violent, capable of punching through and disintegrating a large portion of a concrete wall with just a single shot, it could be considered on the level of Finn Shot, or Finn Gatling Gun.

Rin knows the "popular spells", being able to make a Bounded Field the size of a classroom. Rin is also proficient with Reinforcement magecraft, allowing her to strengthen her legs so much that she can run over one hundred meters in less than seven seconds, fast enough to be perceived as a blur to a regular human. She is also able to use it on herself for a few seconds to deal critical damage to even a Servant like Medea with physical blows in a situation where Rin has her off-guard. She can also make use of one of her jewels for a large amount of protection, and by placing it on her stomach to form a protective cover, she can even last a long duration of time being crushed in Berserker's grip. With two gems protecting her, she can wade through the Mud of the Grail and wading through a lake of fire would be no problem. She can also use Healing Magecraft to a degree, curing a girl who had her Life Force drained by Rider, healing Shirou's dead nerves, and treating her own wound sustained from Kirei, but unable to heal the wound made from Saber running Shirou through. She can also repair Shirou's broken window, hide her presence, and has knowledge of runes.

Rin practices pseudo-karate as a form of self-defense. Her instructor in martial arts is Kirei, and his teaching was responsible for the sequence of moves she used to corner Caster. Thanks to her combat expertise, she is able to do things like sneak up on Gray despite her enhanced senses and throws a punch in 0.2 seconds that might have fractured Shirou's cheekbone. As she gets older, Rin also mixes her martial arts with her use of magecraft, with each and every of her movement having a purpose in adjusting the flow of Od inside her and preparatory steps for an explosive drive on her joints and muscles. And in the alternate World of Fate/Apocrypha, she invents a style of martial arts that combines magecraft and Chinese Kenpou.

While statistically superior to Kirei Kotomine, he would win eighty percent of the time by psychologically exploiting her past traumas to keep her from fighting at her full potential. Even without such knowledge, Kirei would still have a substantial combat advantage over Rin due to possessing over ten years of experience as a professional killer of Magi. If Bazett Fraga McRemitz had been able to participate in the war, she would have ended up being a threat to Rin.

Despite being Japanese, all of Rin's incantations are recited in German, because the first head of the family, Nagato Tohsaka, was a pupil of Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, hence why the family still uses German. When‌ ‌Rin‌ ‌uses‌ ‌Jewel‌ Magecraft,‌ ‌she‌ ‌uses‌ ‌incantations‌ ‌to‌ ‌designate‌ ‌the‌ ‌gemstone‌ ‌and‌ ‌effect‌ ‌to‌ ‌be‌ ‌activated.‌

Rin has inherited everything that belonged to her father, including heirloom jewels, jewels inherited from Zelretch, and the wares and knowledge to manage her workshop, the basement of the Tohsaka household. She originally would have had possession of all the commercialized spiritual lands that brought in more money than most Second Owner families elsewhere, but Kirei's mismanagement as her legal guardian has caused the most valuable properties to have been lost to others.[16] She still obtains royalties from magical patents held by the Tohsaka family, "*0,000,000 yen" annually without including additional revenue, so she can be considered relatively wealthy. She obtains jewels for her craft through exclusive channels used by her family, leaving her each day wondering "whether she could've gotten a better price from the buyer if she had just become friends with that lady."

When she was younger, Rin was gifted a magecraft compass by her father on her birthday. It looks like an ordinary compass from its shape and structure, but it doesn't point towards the north, instead pointing towards the direction where strong amounts of Magical Energy emanate out instead. She uses it to locate places with high-mana footprints in order to find her disappeared friend Kotone. Even years later, she still uses it, albeit one she made herself from scratch.

Rin buys a variety of jewels, and those she utilizes in combat can reach prices of 500,000 yen each. Those that are made of crystals that are naturally able to easily store mana are made of precious metals and come with a very high price. She usually visits high-class pawn shops in the shopping district's back alleys for old gems that have been released by their former owners. As of the beginning of Fate/stay night, her savings consists of twenty jewels containing the energy she has saved for over ten years, each costing ten million yen to create in total. She uses ten during Archer's summoning ritual, and uses the remaining ten during the battles of the three routes. Among the jewels she uses, she is shown using a topaz for a wind spell and to blow up Caster's Dragon Tooth Warriors, obsidians to create blinding silver lights, amethyst to make owl familiars and jade to make bird familiars, and a ruby and a sapphire releasing thorny vines to physically and magically restrain an opponent, with the sapphire's vine draining Magical Energy from the target and using it to power the binding spell on the ruby.

Rin's Pendant is a powerful, one-of-a-kind jewel pendant left to Rin as part of her inheritance from her father, which she considers to be her father's memento. It is a one hundred year old Tohsaka family heirloom that is the greatest jewel within the household, far stronger than anything else with the equivalent of ten years worth of Rin's Magical Energy. As one of the best artifacts of its class that she believes Tokiomi left to allow her to win the Holy Grail War, Rin decides to utilize it as a last resort, believing anything to be possible with the amount of Magical Energy it possesses. It contains enough Magical Energy to revive a human being on the verge of death, which she uses early in the war to revive Shirou Emiya by restoring his damaged heart. She lacks the skill or ability to perform such a feat on her own, so it requires using the great Magical Energy of the pendant to make up for that. She creates a new heart to use as a substitute, believing the feat exemplary enough to be accepted to the Clock Tower instantly.

After it is drained, it loses much of its weight and only retains a small amount of Magical Energy, less than her ten remaining jewels for battle. She leaves it by Shirou by accident, deciding not to retrieve it because it has no true worth without any remaining magical energy. It is simply an ordinary, expensive jewel like that, even though it has some value to her as a memento. Shirou picks it up after regaining consciousness, keeping it as a memento of his unknown savior. Archer, a future version of Shirou from another timeline, kept the jewel all his life, making it a catalyst that connects him to his summoner. The jewel she holds during the ritual has no worth as a catalyst, but the jewel held by Archer allows for him to be summoned. It is one of the objects materialized with him, allowing him to give her his own pendant after they arrive home with Rin not knowing the difference. The pendant held by Shirou has a small amount of Magical Energy left, not even enough to use a single Reinforcement spell according to him, while the one held by Archer has none.

The connection is never discovered during Fate. Both pendants are revealed during Unlimited Blade Works after Shirou finds Archer's pendant at Rin's house and tells her of the one he kept, allowing for the connection between Shirou and Archer to be deduced due to that there should only be one such pendant in existence. Shirou eventually connects it to Rin during Heaven's Feel when thinking that she is the only person who could have saved him at that time. He brings it with him to the final battle with Sakura, later saving him by allowing Rider to use it as a landmark to locate him.