Tsukihime/Fridge

A reminder of the rules of Fridge Brilliance:

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• There is a brilliant parallel between Kohaku's backstory and her role in the story.
  • Up until her role in the plot becomes clear during the Wham! Episode, her appearances and interactions with Shiki, as well as his thoughts about her, have been entirely superficial; the size of her role in the story is vastly smaller than that of every other heroine, even when they are not the main characters in the route (Arcueid in Far Side notwithstanding, but she doesn't really count). How is this brilliant? In every route before Hisui's endings, since she gets so little character development, Shiki basically doesn't think too hard about her, and if we're playing in the recommended order, the reader probably does not either. So, she's mostly relegated to the background, which is exactly what happened in-plot during in her backstory.

• Tsukihime is one of my favorite games, even to where I never really found anything wrong with the game's (apparently infamous) H-scenes...well, with one exception. With Arcueid, the sex is a natural conclusion to their slowly blossoming relationship. With Akiha, it's a desperate act of love with a girl fully convinced that she's doomed to die or go insane. With Hisui or Kohaku, it's a life-saving measure that turns into a true expression of love. With Ciel, Shiki's got one of those longer-than-four-hour erections the commercials warn you about, and he needs her help to come down...buh? Whatever flaws Nasu's sex scenes have in eroticism they tend to make up in story, and Tsukihime had up to then seemed free of the nonsensical excuses for sex so often found in other Eroge. It bugged me for quite a while, until I remembered several things. Ciel's mentioning that she'd gone through something similar when she was Roa's incarnation (which the encounter with Dark Ciel in Kagetsu Tohya reinforces), the rather disturbing (especially in retrospect) Bad End where Shiki gives in to the urges and rapes Kohaku, the dream image where SHIKI does the same, and even Satsuki's unnatural obsession with Shiki after she's turned into a vampire. It struck me suddenly that, far from being a flimsy justification, Ciel's task of suppressing Roa really was a sensible genuinely needed act of Intimate Healing. - Drow Lord
  • Shiki has a lot of memories that are covered in sepia tone. This is a reasonable way to represent the fact that they're memories, so you don't think much of it... but it's also to disguise the fact that Kohaku is the one in the window, because it hides eye colors. I just realized that. - Curtmack
  • Not so much Fridge Brilliance as a Fridge Crowning Moment of Funny, but the way Ciel squees at Arihiko mentioning her bustiness during one of the lunch time scenes made this troper realize that Ciel could have used her power of suggestion to make her cover just an Ordinary High School Student with no particularly noteworthy attributes. Instead she made herself the School Idol since she's vain and/or wanted to have some fun. Not that her breasts have anything to do with hypnosis so much as the incident highlighted a vain and mischevious aspect of her character. - Nothingface
• It's established that Makihisa has the ability to alter a person's memory. This is how Shiki forgot about SHIKI and thought he was always related to the Tohno family. All well and good, except I asked myself: "Why does Makihisa not use this power on Kohaku?" Makihisa knew he was basically destroying her life by using her how he did. Why not erase her memories of every incident? Then I realized that Kohaku isn't just a toy for Makihisa, she's also the person being trained to be his personal doctor. We don't know how specific or general the 'memory loss' power really is, but he probably did not use it on Kohaku because if she forgot all of the skills she was learning he wouldn't be able to depend on her for medicine. -Cally