|
Well, let's see.
For one thing, when I was referring to holding out as long as she did, I was not just talking about the days of the Fifth Heaven's Feel that Sakura had been compelled by Zouken to use the Shadow, but to the eleven years' worth of torture and abuse that she had been put through - since she was, what, five years old or so?
There is not much of a guarantee that, had Rin been the one handed over, or Shirou for that matter, that either of them would have held up against the daily assaults on their very selves without cracking.
And even in comparison to Ilya - yes, the Einzberns were cruel themselves, but for what little consolation it was worth, she was already born as a homunculus, borne from the same genetic stock as the ancestor at the core of the Grail System itself.
She didn't have to be forcibly 'reverse-engineered' after birth the way Sakura was - first when shifting her alignment from a Tohsaka magus to a Matou one, then when she was altered to make her more conducive to hosting the Grail herself.
And yet, after all of that horrific treatment, with hardly any hope of something better, she was still able to hold on to enough of a sense of self to be able to function at least somewhat normally in Fate and UBW - and was pushed over the edge in HF alone.
(I'd argue that in Fate and UBW, she deliberately chose to keep her feelings towards Shirou a secret, since she knew all too well what kind of wretched fate he would have been led towards had Zouken got his claws into him. Despite needing help more desperately than anyone, she was still selfless enough - and strong-willed enough - to, as she would have seen it, spare Shirou that burden.)
The deck had been stacked against her by design for a long time.
Throwing the bulk of the blame on Sakura without taking this into account, and considering her weak when it was a minor miracle that her sense of self hadn't been ground out completely a long time ago, is something I just can't agree with.
As an aside, I really hate the idea that the only way to save Sakura is via the events of HF - it might be a conceit at best, but I believe that there must be at least some way to free a post-Fate or post-UBW Sakura, and give her the kind of life that she deserves...
...and not just because I went and tried to write one for her myself.
For what little it matters.
|