Rin Toosaka

Rin Toosaka is one of the three main heroines of Fate/stay night anime and games.

Rin acts as the Master of Archer in the Fifth Holy Grail War. Rin is the heroine of the Unlimited Blade Works route in Fate/stay night.

Appearance
Rin is a young woman with aqua eyes and long wavy black hair, which she styles with flanking twin-tails tied with black ribbons. 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 socks under brown leather flats.

When she was young, 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.

As an adult, she put down her hair. Two years after the Heaven's Feel route ending, she wears a long sleeve red shirt and a long maroon skirt. Her alternative costume is a long red jacket, a white polo neck jumper, a black mini skirt and long leather boots.

Personality
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, 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. Although she claimed to be not interested in anyone, the Heaven's Feel scenario revealed that Rin has been attracted to Shirou after witnessing his stubborn attempts to finish a high jump that he had no chance of finishing when they were younger. Rin was very supportive of Shirou's relationship with Saber in the Fate route. In the Unlimited Blade Works, they became aware of their mutual crush and attraction which developed to love. In Heaven's Feel, Rin reveals her attraction to Shirou while giving advice for Sakura and their closeness makes Sakura jealous and resentful of Rin.

Her hobbies include admiring jewels.[5] Although wealthy from her family's magical patents, she feels somewhat ashamed of having to rely on the work of previous generations.

Abilities
Rin was born capable of manipulating all five great Elements, an extremely rare trait for a magi. 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. She uses them as disposable, limited-function Mystic Codes. Because the amount of energy a magus can release at one time is restricted by bodily limitations, Rin has been able to accumulate all of the magical energy generated by her body during her lifetime through jewel crystallization. As with practicing of sorcery, 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 sorcery 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 magic capable of countering a spell from Caster's magecraft from the Age of Gods or taking one of Berserker'slives by using five jewels. Their speed of release is great enough that it can match Caster's High-Speed Divine Words. She can also use small statues of amethyst in form of Owls (Fukurō) 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.

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 ended up being a threat to Rin.

Rin is also proficient with reinforcement sorcery, 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 Caster 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. She can also use a degree of healing magic and runes.

Rin practices pseudo-karate as a form of self-defense. Her instructor in martial arts is Kirei, his teaching was responsible for the sequence of moves she used to corner Caster.

Equipment
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. 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."

In preparation for the Fifth Holy Grail War, Tokiomi left her a special inheritance in his will that requires her to solve a special puzzle to find and open a box of his effects. The most prominent items are a pendant and the catalyst, having been smashed at some point in time, he had used to summon Gilgamesh. Opening it also causes all the clocks in the household to immediately become set one hour fast as a bit of playfulness as if to say, “if she can’t even notice a slip-up as trivial and close to home as this, it’s too soon for her to fight in the Holy Grail War.”

Jewels
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. 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.

Rin's Pendant
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 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 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 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 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 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.

Trivia

 * In the Fourth character popularity poll in 2003, Rin was ranked 93rd.
 * In the first Popularity polls of Fate/stay night in 2004, Rin was ranked 2nd. Tsuku Rin (Tiger Dojo) was ranked 33rd. Loli Rin was ranked 55th.
 * In the second Popularity polls of Fate/stay night in 2006, Rin was ranked 2nd. Kaleidoscope & Magical Ruby was ranked 14th. Zhuge Rin was ranked 40th. Rin Tohsaka of a parallel world is ranked 46th. Hetare Rin was ranked 68th.
 * In the Type-Moon's 10th Anniversary Character Poll, Rin from Fate/stay night was ranked 4th and the third most voted female character. Rin from Fate/Zero was ranked 130th.