Characters / Fate/stay night: Sakura Matou

Fate/stay night Main Character Index | Humans (Shirou Emiya, Rin Tohsaka, Sakura Matou, Kirei Kotomine) | Servants (Saber, Archer, Archer 2)

Sakura Matou

Voiced by: Noriko Shitaya (JP), Sherry Lynn (EN 2006 Anime), Cristina Valenzuela (EN, 2015 Anime, 2018 Movie)

"No, you are strong, Senpai. It's not because of your Magic Circuit or your talent, but because your mind is pure... I knew that from the first time I met you. I knew you would never betray anyone."

Sakura is Shirou's timid underclassman and the third and final heroine of the story. She has been friends with him since the previous summer when he was injured in an accident and she began visiting him with the excuse of taking care of him while he couldn't care for himself. Even after he recovered, she continued to visit him and attempts to do all the chores at his house due to her massive crush on him, which he attempts to ignore. Despite coming from the Matou family, Shinji claims she has been kept in the dark regarding magic. Though she is respectful of her brother and defends his misconduct, he is in turn an abusive ass towards her. Further, despite her upbeat attitude with Shirou, she is actually nearly silent and much gloomier when away from the Emiya household or Taiga and has no real friends apart from them.

In Heaven's Feel, Sakura becomes the love interest of the story and secrets about her life and the Matou family are slowly revealed.

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A-L

• Adaptational Heroism: In the second Heaven's Feel movie. Originally, Sakura's transformation into Dark Sakura begins when she accidentally kills Shinji and realizes she feels nothing about it because Aŋra Mainiiu has worn away at her mind, causing her to embrace her dark side now that her inhibitions are gone. In the movie, Sakura's morality is still intact so she's horrified by what she did, and she has to be forcibly taken over by Aŋra Mainiiu to complete her transformation.
• Adaptational Jerkass: In Carnival Phantasm, the jokes made about Sakura are either mean-spirited or even larger flanderizations than normal. The result is Sakura's characterization changing from a Shrinking Violet who struggles to suppress her dark desires to a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing with heavy Yandere undertones.
• Apocalypse Maiden: Her body has been modified to be a fake Grail and absorb the souls of Servants.
• Becoming the Mask: She joined the archery club to be close to her crush, but something must have happened, because she stayed in it even after he left and eventually became its captain.
• Beneath the Mask: Portions of Heaven's Feel are narrated from her perspective and provide an alternate look at her personality. For a relatively spoiler-free example, she invokes the Yamato Nadeshiko image as a way of appealing to Shirou.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sakura is very calm and gentle, but in Heaven's Feel, years of abuse make her snap, making her very powerful and dangerous.
• Big Eater: Shirou notices that she eats quite a lot although she tries to restrain herself out of fear of looking unladylike.
• Big "NO!": She has two of these after she accidentally stabs Shirou with a spell she, in a bout of crazy caused by Shinji, shot at Rin. She feels extremely guilty about it for the rest of the route.
• Born Winner: She's just as talented as her sister Rin since she was born with the same amount of Magic Circuits, as well as an extremely rare Elemental Affinity. This comes back to bite her because mage families can train only one successor, so her father gave her to the Matou family as not to waste her potential.
• Break the Cutie: First, she's taken from her parents and sister and dumped into an unfamiliar but supposedly allied household, the Matou family. Her parents die soon after as well as the one decent Matou, leaving her with no advocate. She is then 'trained' in Matou magic, which involves infesting her body with man-eating worms and having her brother rape her because he's envious of her status as the Matou heir. Things are looking up when Shirou enters the picture and inspires her to keep trying and gives her a resolve that Zouken cannot break, but then Heaven's Feel happens and things just keep getting worse until she finally breaks down.
• Broken Bird: She has next to no friends or decent family and in front of people not named Taiga and Shirou, she tends to be nearly silent and very submissive.
• But Not Too Foreign: Like her true sister Rin, she's quarter foreign through their father Tokiomi, as his mother was said to be a foreigner herself.
• Butt-Monkey: Not in the visual novel at least, but she's mercilessly mocked and made fun of in spin-offs and comedic material for not having as much screentime and exposure as the other two heroines, much to her chagrin.
• Cain and Abel: Shinji resents her for being the true Matou heir.
• Caring Gardener: In Ataraxia, she tends to a cherry blossom tree at her house, and enjoys the experience so much she considers becoming an arborist. The scene is a metaphor for how she’s becoming an independent, well-adjusted member of society.
• Casting a Shadow: Her Hollow Element allows her to summon Living Shadows.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Because of the torture she's endured for so long, she has a very high pain tolerance. In Ataraxia, she easily wins a breath-holding contest with Shirou, and Word of God for the Heaven's Feel movie confirms that she doesn't take the cold of a snowy winter day seriously.
• Cherry Blossom Girl: Named Sakura, has a flower-themed ending, is the final love interest and is working hard at being a Yamato Nadeshiko. However, things aren't as pleasant as they seem.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She does NOT like the idea of Saber living in Shirou's house, even outside of Heaven's Feel, doesn't like having Tohsaka around because Shirou admires her and is generally very possessive of Shirou (especially when Rider is with them). lost butterfly illustrates this in two instances. First, realizing that Rin shares the same memories as her of seeing Shirou the first time (i.e. his attempt at the hurdle) is enough to drive her catatonically afraid she's "taking" him from her. Second, Zouken weaponizes this and her genuine love for both Shirou and her brother to eventually cause her to snap by putting too much pressure on her.
• Club President: In the True End of Heaven's Feel, it's revealed that she becomes the next head of the archery club.
• Consummate Liar: To give one example, she knew for over a year that Shirou was a magus, but acted as if she didn't so their comfortable status quo would be preserved.
• Cool Aunt: In the Normal End of Heaven's Feel, Sakura teaches magecraft to her grand-niece, tells her stories about "the old days", and adds a garden to the old Emiya mansion.
• The Corruptible: Throughout Heaven's Feel, there's a constant fear of Sakura succumbing to the corruption. She resists more than seems humanly possible, but eventually she does.
• Covert Pervert: A very rare instance of the trope Played for Drama. Because of the crest worm she gets sexually aroused very easily, and hates herself for that. Even in Ataraxia, when the worm has (probably; Ataraxia amalgamates many timelines' events) been removed, Rider believes that Sakura feels ashamed by Shirou being more restrained than her in bed.
• Curtains Match the Window: Sakura has unusual, purple-colored eyes and hair. This is revealed to be because of the "conditioning" imposed upon her by Zouken in order to make her into the successor of the Matou brand of magecraft.
• Damsel in Distress: In the DEEN anime, Sakura is kidnapped by Caster as part of her plans, baiting Shirou, Saber, and Rin into her trap. This is how the anime reveals Sakura's relationship with Rin.
• Dark and Troubled Past: She had by far the worst life out of the three heroines, but the extent of the bad things that have happened to her is only revealed in her route. Her biological family, the Tohsakas, gave her away to the Matou family who abused her emotionally, physically and sexually for eleven years.
• D-Cup Distress: She's quite embarrassed about her bust size (which Taiga takes great delight in revealing to Shirou).
• Deal with the Devil: Rather involuntarily, Sakura becomes outrageously powerful by virtue of drawing on the power of Aŋra Mainiiu due to Zouken having her make a contract with it.
• Defiled Forever: Thinks of herself as a woman unworthy of Shirou due to having been raped and violated throughout her life. Essentially she internalized a Madonna-Whore Complex.
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: The objective of Heaven's Feel is to stop the Crest Worm from going haywire and subsequently, the destruction of Aŋra Mainiiu without killing Sakura.
• Despair Event Horizon: An implied offscreen one. In the main route, Sakura flees the church while Rin and Shirou debate whether they should kill her. In the Superhero ending, Rin apparently kills Sakura without difficulty after Shirou agrees with her that Sakura should die, the implication being that hearing Shirou wants her dead kept Sakura from resisting.
• Determinator: In her backstory, she kept coming back to Shirou's house until he agreed to accept her help with his injuries- something which took a while, since Shirou has no small amount of stubbornness himself.
• The Dog Bites Back: Her Superpowered Evil Side, once fully established, decides that it's not going to put up with her grandfather's abuse anymore...
• Dogged Nice Girl: Unlike the rest of Shirou's love interests, Sakura has been on close terms with Shirou since middle school and spends as much time together with him as she can. She has always loved Shirou, but is too shy to make an overt advance at him. They only get together in her route where Shirou reciprocates her feelings early on.
• Driven to Suicide: She never kills herself, but she does consider it. On Day 9 of Heaven's Feel she mentions several previous attempts at suicide, though she never went through with it. After her My God, What Have I Done? moment, she attempts to kill herself out of remorse, only to be prevented by Aŋra Mainiiu long enough for Shirou to free her with Rule Breaker.
• Eating the Eye Candy: At one point when she has to help treat Shirou's wounds, she sits there for a good three minutes blushing and staring at his muscular chest.
• The Eeyore: She's real gloomy and pessimistic about the future. She hides it well on a surface level, but it doesn't take much prodding before the mask begins to crack.
• Elemental Motifs: Two layers:
  • The Matous' torture changed her magical element to water, which is symbolically reflected in her difficulty swimming. Her personality is also water-esque, relying on subtlety and persistence over assertiveness.
  • During Heaven's Feel, she regains her true element, the shadowy void of "Imaginary Space". This is where her feelings of emotional emptiness and talent for intimidating people come to the fore. Word of God says the latter is even clearer in the Fate/Apocrypha timeline, where Sakura was adopted by the Edelfelts.
  "[Apocrypha Sakura] would be cool and dark, yet good-natured.''
• Empty Eyes: The first hint that she's not quite happy as she appears. They were even worse two years ago, before she met Shirou◊.
• Empty Shell: How she was before she met Shirou. Leave her alone, and she'll revert quickly back to this state.
• Everyone Can See It: It's obvious to everyone that she loves Shirou.
• Exposed to the Elements: Downplayed. In the first Heaven's Feel movie, she goes to talk to Shirou in the shed wearing a short-sleeved dress that should be too cold for a chilly February night, with the implication that she did it just to look good for him. Word of God elaborates on this in the Animation Material booklet:
  Takeuchi: Yup, that concept is an upgrade from miniskirts in the middle of winter. Was she not cold? Of course, she was cold!
  Nasu: A scary thing is... that level of cold, compared to the torture she routinely goes through, is merely "cold" for Sakura. It probably isn't "hard" for her.
  Takeuchi: SAKURA!
• Expy: She is similar in appearance and personality and shares some aspects of her back-story, with Fujino Asagami from the earlier Nasu work The Garden of Sinners.
• Extreme Doormat: Before she fell in love with Shirou, she felt empty and was resigned to her fate. Meeting Shirou made her feel alive again. She's still pretty morose when she isn't around Shirou.
• Eye Colour Change: In Spring Song, her release from Zouken's magic gradually reverts her eyes to their previous colour- a bright teal-blue like her sister's.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Subverted in most endings. She fears that she will repay Shirou's kindness by hurting him, but manages to avoid doing so.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: A few years back, she was even quieter and more withdrawn, but after noticing Shirou she resolved to make herself more girly and appealing and thus learned to cook from Shirou and kept practicing to the point where she's roughly as good at it as he is.
• Fill It with Flowers: In the Normal End of her route, she atones for her sins by planting flowers- something she can do even when her mental clarity or ability to socialize with people is impaired. It's also her way of giving back to the household that gave her so much, even if Shirou isn't there to see it.
• Formal Characters Use Keigo: In the Japanese dub of the VN or anime, Sakura speaks in a formal language to everyone, even to her close friends, as she has been raised in a rich family.
• Freak Out: After killing Shinji, she finally succumbs to the corruption and willingly enters the villain camp out of despair and resentment. It takes a lot of work for the good guys to get through to her again, thanks in no small part to Tohsaka's distant attitude.
• Friendless Background: Shirou notes early in the Heaven's Feel route that she doesn't really have any friends at school and didn't really hang out with anyone but Shirou in the past. Nasu in Presage Flower's Animation Material booklet confirms that "Sakura is very gloomy in the classroom, so no matter how pretty and how dangerous a body she has, she is alienated from the boys and slightly avoided by the girls."
• From Nobody to Nightmare: After her breakdown, she becomes a threat to the world itself because she contains All Evils Of This World, which can either enter the world as six billion curses or, at the end of the route, can instead come out as an evil god. She doesn't seem to mind too much - or at least not until Rin snaps her out of her self-deprecation. Good thing for her, too, because even the material books, never mind some of the sequels and whatnot, make it clear that she was otherwise on the verge of becoming a threat of such scope that the Earth's world-spirit and its Counter Force was going to intervene against her, which would have made the Fuyuki Fire look like a firecracker in comparison.
• Girl Next Door: She plays the role of the "cute and homey girl" for Shirou. She has been his close friend for years, goes to his house every day, is almost like family to him, a good cook, and much easier to talk to than his other love interests. However, her route subverts pretty much all which seemed wholesome about her character.
• Go-Go Enslavement: In the 2006 anime, Caster puts Sakura in black leather BDSM wear after she captures her.
• Gratuitous German: In Heaven's Feel only.
• Grew a Spine: The epilogue of Unlimited Blade Work implies she becomes the dominant one in the Matou household, having successfully browbeaten Shinji into letting her take care of him.
• Hates Being Alone: Reveals in her confrontation with Rin that the thing she'd resented the most was how her birth family left her alone to the Matou. Even her time with Shirou is less about her crush (which she believes is unattainable) and simply about being in his presence.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: To say Sakura resents herself is an understatement; she sees herself as a disgusting abomination who doesn't deserve love from anyone, yet paradoxically cannot help but feel resentment at people not showing her any affection - which in turn makes her resent herself even more for said selfish feelings, creating a literal feedback loop of self-deprecation. She even flat-out confesses that the only reason she hasn't killed herself is because she's too scared of death to go through with it.
• Heroic Willpower: Despite her gentle demeanor, she has an insane amount of mental resilience, rivaled by only Shirou himself. Lesser Grails such as Illya and Sakura are designed to prioritize keeping collected Servants inside them over functioning as a human being, hence why their bodies begin breaking down as Servant casualties begin racking up. Illya claims that she would be able to only four Servants before she ceases to exist as a human and turns into the Lesser Grail full time. By the time she tells Sakura this, Sakura has already taken in a full seven Servants thanks to Gilgamesh's abnormally large soul, yet Sakura is still alive and somewhat lucid, and this is on top of Aŋra Mainiiu constantly bombarding her with his hatred and trying to corrupt her mind over the course of the Grail War. This trope is also the only reason why she's able to function on a day-to-day basis despite her horrible past; when Dark Sakura puts Rin through a simulation of what she endured, the latter manages to take only a single day in Sakura's life before she breaks from the pain.
• Hidden Buxom: Taiga says she's actually an E-cup^note  DD in the west, though her rather large bust isn't visible when she's not wearing her casual clothes or in the H-scenes. Art Evolution and later animated adaptations make her bust more visible.
• Hope Is Scary: Sakura's capacity to repress her trauma hinges on convincing herself that her pain doesn't matter, that she has no right to expect anything better, that she can't do anything about it anyway, etc. Once she is given hope of being freed, her emotions become less easy to control and she knows it. The fact her uncle Kariya threw his life away in a futile attempt to save her probably contributed to this mentality as well.
• Horror Hunger: It turns out that sex with Shirou just isn't enough to supply the mana to power TWO servants at the same time, therefore The Holy Grail within Sakura compels her to go on a cannibalistic rampage across Fuyuki, ripping human beings apart and feasting upon their corpses.
• I Am Not Pretty: In the Normal End of Heaven's Feel, she alludes to being concerned about her weight. The writers, and all characters in-universe, never describe her as anything but stunningly beautiful.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Pretty much her reaction to Shirou falling for her in Heaven's Feel, having long resigned herself to being the silent admirer. When he decides to protect her over the world, she's initially in disbelief and tries to drive him off from starting a doomed love. When Shirou persists in liking her even after learning about her "condition", she's left at a complete loss on whether she's happy to be with him, terrified of losing him or angry that he'll probably get himself killed because of her. Later on when Gilgamesh tries to kill her, she even comments that the surreality of having Shirou finally notice her feelings makes her even more scared to die, which in turn contributes further to her eventual breakdown.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Unlike Rin and Saber, she has no grand wish to seek, nor any sort of magus pride and traditions to uphold. She only wants to have friends and family to love her, and would rather leave the world of magic and its inhumanity behind her forever. She confesses to Shirou that even though she feels guilty for lying about her true status as a mage, she couldn't end the lie because she enjoyed her time with him and Taiga too much.
• Image Song: "Egao Hitotsu de" ("With One Smile").
• I'm a Humanitarian: In the Heaven's Feel route, she rips people apart and eats them under the influence of Aŋra Mainiiu, even before transforming into Dark Sakura.
• Incompletely Trained: She was pawned off by her father because he could train only one child and he felt it was a waste if she never reached her full magical potential, so he gave her to the Matou family who lacked an heir with working Magic Circuits. Unfortunately, Zouken isn't interested in training her at all, and spends more time torturing her as part of his schemes.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Matou, Matô or Matō depending on the source/transliteration paradigm used.
• In Love with the Mark: A variation; she fell in love with Shirou before Zouken ordered her to spy on him. Given that Zouken later overestimates Shirou's familiarity with magi culture, it's likely that she fed the former false information so he would let her keep going to Shirou's house.
• Insecure Love Interest: Due to her severe self-esteem issues, she's constantly scared that Shirou will fall for some other, "better" girl and leave her alone.
• In the Blood: She has a remarkable ability to intuit what her sister Rin feels, despite the latter's harsh facade and their lack of recent time together.
• I Will Wait for You: In the Normal End of Heaven's Feel. Sakura promises to wait for Shirou after his Heroic Sacrifice, though it eventually becomes clear that he never returns to her and she eventually dies of old age.
• Killing Intent: In an Ataraxia scene, Shirou finds a silently angry Sakura in his bedroom, and immediately apologizes and tries to leave. It's a pretty impressive display of intimidation, especially since she's wearing a pink jacket at the time.
• Laughing Mad: When she first becomes Dark Sakura, she laughs hysterically.
• Leitmotif: "All the Evils in this World", a remix of Kirei's "The Church on the Hill".
• Lighter and Softer: In the Fate manga, many of the horrible things from her backstory seem not to have occurred or, at least, are not mentioned.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: The light to Rin's dark.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Shirou (and Rin, to a lesser degree). If he goes, so does her sanity, so she does terrible things (to herself and to others) to protect him.
• Living Shadow: Due to Zouken tampering with her, she can morph into the Shadow, a premature form of Aŋra Mainiiu, but she initially has no control over it.
• Locked into Strangeness: Sakura's purple eyes and hair are the result of the parasitic worms Zouken implanted in her body, that feed on her mana and carnal impulses, greatly boosting her magical power and sexual aggression. In the epilogue of the Heaven's Feel movie, her eyes return to their previous blue colour, but her hair remains the same.
• Love Interest: To Shirou in the Heaven's Feel route.

M-Y

• Meaningful Name: In the myth of the cherry blossom tree, Sakura, it used to have pure petals, but they were stained pink from the blood of the soldier who died at its roots (short version of the myth). It is used as both a metaphor for life, and for death. Sakura made her transformation after killing Shinji, and ate people, similarly to how the tree roots drank blood.
• Mood-Swinger: She instantly switches from happy to depressed and vice versa several times through her route. It gets ever worse when she becomes Dark Sakura, whose emotions and personality are highly unstable.
• The Mourning After: Through the rest of her life in the Normal End of the Heaven's Feel, Sakura stays in Shirou's home constantly waiting for Shirou to come home after his Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the Grail War.
• My Girl Back Home: Serves as Shirou's during the first two routes, representing his connection to the ordinary world, or so she would have him believe.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Subverted when she kills Shinji in Heaven's Feel. She thought she would feel bad, but Aŋra Mainiiu's influence means she's temporarily lost the ability to do so. This starts her transformation into Dark Sakura since she thinks if she can't feel remorse anymore, then there's no reason why she shouldn't lash out at others. In the movie, it's played straight in a case of Adaptational Heroism.
  • Played straighter later on when she stabs her sister Rin and nearly kills her after realizing that Rin has always loved her all this time. This turn of events is what eventually causes Sakura to snap out of her rampage as Dark Sakura, loosening the hold Aŋra Mainiiu has over her, thus allowing Shirou to finish the rest with Rule Breaker and completely free her.
• Necessarily Evil: While gradually progressing through much of the Heaven's Feel route with increasing despair, Sakura kills Shinji and Zouken, the former was her brother who raped the girl to maintain her dark side, and the latter was her grandfather whose treatment of her led to her corruption. Both incidents actually contributed to her post-Fifth Holy Grail War self being happier- she would have died otherwise because of her Dark and Troubled Past.
• Nervous Tics: In her "worried" sprite, she grabs the middle of one of her sleeves.
• Nice Girl: Subverted. While far from a bad person, she's only really friendly and bright around Shirou, while at school, she's moody and silent. Thanks to Zouken, her mind is heavily fractured, and her mental and emotional instability causes her to occasionally behave badly towards the people she cares about, like Rin and Rider, despite her best efforts.
• The Nondescript: A downplayed example. Even though she always rings the doorbell as she enters Shirou's house, he sometimes takes a while to realize she's there. Even Dark Sakura has difficulty keeping people's attention, being overshadowed by Shirou's concern for Rin (in the Heaven's Feel movie) and him arguing with Shinji (in Hollow Ataraxia). The emotional torque of her route is enhanced by the fact that many readers overlooked her until then.
• Not Quite Back to Normal: In Heaven's Feel's true ending, she retains her connection to the Holy Grail and possesses a limitless supply of Prana, allowing Rider to remain after the end of the Holy Grail War.
• Not So Weak: A plot point. Zouken Matou can't break her by himself, and she won't fight back. At all. It takes a great deal of manipulation of outside factors and a good deal of stupidity from the heroes to actually make her snap. Until then, she was far more resilient than you'd expect for someone that's essentially broken inside. Still mostly sane after being raped constantly by Shinji at least, plus violated by worms, plus worms living inside her, plus excruciating pain and who knows what the hell else. But the crack that breaks her is how she tries to settle things herself to keep Shirou safe. And even after she is corrupted, she still doesn't obey Zouken so much as work alongside him, and ultimately leaves him fatally wounded out of spite and whimsy.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Being a Master herself, Sakura immediately understands what it means when a foreign girl named Saber suddenly moves in with Shirou. In each route, Shirou introduces them to each other and Sakura's demeanor completely changes as soon as she hears Saber's name, but Shirou doesn't notice and Sakura continues feigning ignorance.
• Oblivious to Love: Although she is a victim of Shirou's denseness, she herself doesn't notice that Minoru loves her.
• Oh, Crap!: Before the beginning of the story, she accidentally saw Shirou practicing magic, and the very painful and dangerous way he did so. She was horrified, but couldn't do anything about it for fear of revealing she was also a magus.
• Out of Focus: Compared to Saber and Rin who are both prominent in all the routes, Sakura doesn't have a significant role in the visual novel aside of her own route despite being one of the three main heroines. In the first two routes, Sakura seems like a side character who represents Shirou's ordinary life, similar to Taiga. This is why her very dark backstory and massive importance in Heaven's Feel are a big shock.
• Perky Goth: The Apocrypha version of her is a bondage-themed wrestler described as being cheerful and having a Noblewoman's Laugh.
• The Power of the Void: The theme of a Craft Essence in Fate: Grand Order that shows Sakura's apex as a magus.
  Imagination is proof of one's freedom. The imaginary numbers of shadow dance spritely [sic]'' upon the wind.
• Property of Love: In her Image Song, she refers to someone ^note probably Shirou as her "treasure" who gave her hope.
• Protectorate: In Heaven's Feel, Shirou and her Servant Rider want to keep Sakura alive and safe no matter the cost, even though they know Sakura's existence is a danger to the entire world.
• The Quiet One: Sakura only really talks when she's with Shirou. Around everyone else, she's very much the silent type.
• Raised as a Host: The whole reason Sakura was adopted was so she could host Zouken's own spirit. Following the Fourth Grail War, Zouken inserted Crest Worms imbued with Aŋra Mainiiu's cursed black mud into her, enabling her to become its avatar in Heaven's Feel.
• Rape and Revenge: In Heaven's Feel, the moment where Sakura snaps completely is when Shinji boasts about how he will tell Shirou everything about the horrible fact that he has been raping Sakura repeatedly for years. Sakura's shadow slices the despicable bastard's throat. However, Sakura only ends up horrified at seeing she just killed her foster brother.
• Rape as Backstory: Over the past eleven years, she has been raped on a near daily basis by Zouken's worms and Shinji. And maybe by her adoptive father Byakuya, but that is never made clear.
• The Resenter: While she does love her sister Rin, she also resents how Rin has seemingly had a much happier life and never even really bothered to find out her situation. It isn't until the very end that Sakura learns of Rin's own scars ^note dead parents, struggling financially, only having the likes of Kotomine to rely on, etc that she realizes how unfairly she'd judged Rin.
• She Is All Grown Up: Shirou begins noticing in the intro of the story that the girl he befriended years ago is now blossoming into a beautiful young woman, which makes him uncomfortable since he wants to keep thinking of her as just his kouhai he needs to take care of and a friend's little sister. In the first two routes he's successful at suppressing his attraction to her; in Heaven's Feel he gives in, kickstarting the events of that route.
• Shower of Angst: During her Heroic BSoD, she stands in the rain, perhaps subconsciously trying to wash off the aphrodisiac that was splashed on her.
• Shrinking Violet: She's rather hesitant and shy, though not particularly subtle with how she feels.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: With Shinji and Rin. She's overtly sweet and helpful to Shirou, while Shinji's a jerkass who pawns off his responsibility of cleaning the dojo onto him and Rin, of course, is tsundere. Plus, obviously, they don't look much alike, due to Sakura not actually being a Matou by birth, and gaining purple hair thanks to Zouken messing with her biology—she's a natural brunette.
• Signature Headgear: Always wears a ribbon in the left side of her hair. It is a Memento MacGuffin since it was the first ribbon Rin ever made, and one of the few signs of their true feelings for each other.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She loves Shirou because he's honest and hardworking.
• Space Master: She was born with the extremely rare Elemental Affinity called Hollow or Imaginary Numbers, which allows her to access Imaginary Number Space, which is very dangerous and near impossible to do so normally. She can potentially use this ability to store objects or redirect attacks, but she's never been trained how. When the Shadow possesses her, it uses this ability to deflect Caster's fireball and store the Blackened Saber Alter and Berserker.
• Split Personality: As she becomes more aware of the Shadow, she begins showing signs of this before eventually succumbing to it. One notable example is a scene that occurs should you choose to care for Sakura after Archer transplants his arm onto Shirou; she matter-of-factly points out the inadequacies of Rin's protection magic, and as Shirou leaves the room, she flat-out states that he should remain on guard against her, as if the Shadow's taken over and is warning him about their next meeting. Kotomine later clarifies as it being part This Is Your Brain on Evil and he thinks she's pathetic for only acting on those feelings when she hit a massive Power High, explained in Dark Sakura's section below.
• Stepford Smiler: Played with. At school, Sakura is more or less her "true self"; quiet, stoic and never smiles in front of people. Around Shirou, she's cheerful, happy, lively and always has a smile on her face. The latter is usually not an act, but this trope still applies to some extent because of everything she's hiding under that smile, and her efforts to downplay her problems early on in Heaven's Feel. The only other times she smiles for any other emotion, as is shown in Heaven's Feel II: lost butterfly, it's her negative possessive and jealous traits leaking out in private, a sign of her mental state struggling with the creeping influence of The Shadow/Aŋra Mainiiu.
• Superpowered Evil Side: When Sakura accepts her bond with Aŋra Mainiiu, she transforms into Dark Sakura. Unlike the normal Sakura, she has control over the vast mana reserves inside the Grail or at least the ability to use them. They're more than she could ever possibly and enable her to do such actions as self healing and summoning of massive shadow familiars. Her personality, on the other hand, is highly unstable and switches between near catatonia and violently lashing out at her loved ones.
• Super-Power Meltdown: Sakura loses the ability to control the Grail's energy, nearly resulting in the rebirth of Aŋra Mainiiu, a potentially world destroying monster. Resolving this first requires the use of Rule Breaker to separate Sakura from the Grail and then either Shirou or Illya's Heroic Sacrifice to keep from getting worse.
• Supreme Chef: Taught by Shirou, which makes him uncomfortable when he notices that she may be becoming better than him (and he flat out considers her to be better than him at Western food).
• Taken for Granite: In Ataraxia, a moment of shock partially turns her body to stone. Apparently it's backlash from her strong magical bond with Rider.
• Tareme Eyes: To emphasize her (usually) soft and kindly personality.
• Through His Stomach: She decided that if she wanted Shirou to like her she had to be more appealing, so she started reforming her personality into that of a Yamato Nadeshiko. She's especially determined to outdo him at cooking.
• Town Girls: The Femme to Rin's Neither and Saber's Butch.
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: Before befriending Shirou and Taiga, she was small and very thin- both because of this trope and because her food was sometimes poisoned by Zouken. On the day she realizes Shirou has been conscripted into the War, she doesn't eat breakfast even at his house.
• Tyke-Bomb: For eleven years, Sakura has been forced to act as a host for magical worms that allow Zouken to control her at will.
• The Un-Favourite: Considers herself as such in regards to Rin.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Big time in Heaven's Feel. Zouken implanted the remnants of the last Holy Grail into her body, enabling her to unknowingly summon a Shadow that kills and maims hundreds of people in the city. Even as she grows increasingly aware of the Shadow's presence, and the fact that it's being fueled by her darker desires, she desperately tries to deny all responsibility right up until Shirou fully commits to protecting her even at the cost of all his prior ideals. After that, her Guilt Complex causes her to sneak away to the Matou household in a desperate bid to resolve the issue herself, and as a result, she plays right into Zouken's hands and fully succumbs to the Shadow's influence.
• Walking Spoiler: While Fate/Zero blowing the twist "early" has made this somewhat less of an issue, the way Sakura's handled in the first two routes of the visual novel means that she is very very difficult to talk about without getting into spoilers for Heaven's Feel.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: In this case, "Well Done, Sis" Girl. The only thing Sakura always expected from Rin was for her to show some sororal love.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In the Fate route, Rin tries to prevent Sakura from entering the Emiya house, saying that Shirou doesn't need her anymore and her presence is an inconvenience. After falling silent for a moment, Sakura replies that Rin isn't making any sense and walks right past her.

Shirou: H- hey, Sakura-
Sakura: Excuse me. Senpai, I'll be using the kitchen.

• Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer: When Shirou falls ill in the Heaven's Feel route, Sakura asks if she can skip school to care for him. Since Saber is there to do so and Shirou rarely accepts any sort of help, Sakura takes a while to realize he acceded.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: After her breakdown she basically decides "Eh, screw it. If I'm screwed anyway the world going with me is okay." Realizing that everyone she abandoned not only had always cared for her but were still trying to the very end to save her is what ultimately helps her come to her senses and resist the Shadow's influence.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Invoked. When she grew interested in Shirou, she resolved to reform herself to be more appealing.
• You Are What You Hate: One reason she's so vehement that nobody take advantage of Shirou's good nature is that she fears she's doing the same thing herself.
• You Said You Would Let Them Go: She allowed Shinji to take her place as a Master on the condition that he wouldn't hurt Shirou. Shinji breaks his word in all three routes, though Sakura only witnesses it firsthand on the ninth day of Heaven's Feel.

Dark Sakura (Unmarked Spoilers)

Sakura's corrupted form, the result of her accepting and embracing her bond to Aŋra Mainiiu and becoming its avatar. She possesses effectively limitless mana and seeks to spread destruction and despair by completing her transformation into the Holy Grail and giving birth to Aŋra Mainiiu.

While her Servant contract is with Avenger, through it she has control over Saber Alter and Dark Berserker.

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• And I Must Scream: Briefly experiences this once Aŋra Mainiiu pulls a Villain Override and seizes control of her powers. Sakura is effectively left a prisoner of her own body, unable to do more than stand there and scream in horror as she attacks Shirou against her will.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Her only strategy in battle is using her absurd mana reserves to conjure as many Shadow Giants as she can before throwing them at her enemy. Once Rin manages to close the gap in power by using the Jeweled Sword of Zelretch, Dark Sakura can't think of any other way to win other than throwing even more Shadow Giants at Rin, which naturally fails.
• Ax-Crazy: Dark Sakura is the blackened version of Sakura, being extremely unstable and violent.
• Battle Aura: She emits wisps of black and red mana.
• Berserk Button: Don't make light of her suffering. Kotomine doing this earns him a crushed heart, and when Rin does it Dark Sakura goes absolute batshit insane with rage and promptly puts Rin through a Fate Worse than Death should the player spare Saber Alter.
• Big Bad Wannabe: While she replaces Zouken as the main antagonist for a short while, she was never truly in charge; Kirei outright admonishes her for only acting out when she had all this potential to take out her hatred for everything, which is the main reason he thinks she's pathetic and a non-threat to himself. Everything she did was only because Aŋra Mainiiu allowed her to do so; once she pulls a Heel–Face Turn, it simply hijacks her powers and continues on where she left off.
• Breakout Villain: Like Saber Alter, she's popular enough to be a playable character in spinoffs like Fate/unlimited codes and Fate/tiger colosseum.
• Casting a Shadow: Her Hollow Element has been greatly augmented, allowing her to summon massive Shadow Giants.
• Combat Tentacles: She can extend the hem of her sleeves and dress into tentacles to attack enemies.
• The Corruption: She can use Aŋra Mainiiu's black mud to corrupt Servants, and can control the corrupted Servants as her own.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: In her arcade mode in Fate/unlimited codes she undergoes Sanity Slippage and completely forgets about Shirou as Aŋra Mainiiu begins to destroy her consciousness. A similar situation happens in Bad End #40, where Saber Alter's intervention allows Sakura to defeat Rin and subject her to a brutal Mind Rape. When Shirou arrives on the scene, she coolly informs him of what she's done before absorbing him as well.
• Deal with the Devil: She is technically still a Master, with her Servant being Avenger, Aŋra Mainiiu.
• Death Seeker: Turns into this after she regains her sanity and tries to pull a Redemption Equals Death by killing herself and Aŋra Mainiiu, seeing it as the only way to atone for all the lives she took. Shirou changes her mind by saying the only way to properly atone would be to live on so she can take responsibility for her actions.
• Demonic Possession: She is the result of Sakura accepting her bond with Aŋra Mainiiu and becoming its avatar.
• Dragon Ascendant: She kills Zouken and becomes The Heavy for Aŋra Mainiiu.
• Drunk On Power: After a lifetime of serving as a punching bag for everyone else, Dark Sakura is addicted to being the one in charge and revels in rubbing her newfound power in everyone's faces. Illya easily manipulates her by appealing to her newfound ego, and Dark Sakura willingly goes along because she's too busy indulging herself.
• Evil Counterpart: As an avatar of the Holy Grail, she is Illyasviel's evil counterpart, which is what Zouken intended her to be.
• Evil Laugh: She's prone to letting out maniacal cackles.
• Evil Makeover: Her magic and her outfit turn black and red while her hair turns white.
• Fusion Dance: With the Shadow. Sakura wears it as her outfit, and can use its powers. In lost butterfly the actual fusion is shown when Shadow wraps itself around her.
• Going Commando: She only wears a dress made of shadow magic and nothing underneath. Once Shirou cuts her connection to the Shadow with Rule Breaker, her dress disappears and leaves her naked.
• Healing Factor: The power of Aŋra Mainiiu gives her regeneration even more powerful than that of Avalon. Showcased when she pulls the Crest Worm attached to a third of her nerves out of her heart and crushes it without suffering any damage, and when Gilgamesh impales her with several weapons but does no lasting damage.
• Humanoid Abomination: Dark Sakura is essentially the avatar of Aŋra Mainiiu, and if left unchecked would become so great a threat that the Counter Force would have to intervene. Later spin-offs, such as Fate/Grand Order, would begin to insinuate that there's even more going on here than F/SN itself lets on.
• I Hate Past Me: The person Dark Sakura hates the most is herself, which is why she eagerly looks forward to her Mirror Match in Fate/unlimited codes.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
  • In order to break Zouken's hold on her, she rips the Crest Worm out of her own heart and crushes it.
  • Gilgamesh impales her with several weapons, to the point of cutting her in half, but she regenerates.
• The Infested: Obviously.
• Magical Barefooter: After coming into power, she wanders everywhere barefoot.
• Marked Change: Red marks appear on her face.
• Monster Is a Mommy: As the vessel of the Holy Grail, her purpose is to "give birth" to Aŋra Mainiiu.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After Rin (seemingly) dies at her hands in the Heaven's Feel route, Sakura realizes that not only had she always had people who still loved her, but that she'd destroyed them all with her own hands out of misguided despair.
• Mood-Swinger: Even more volatile and unstable than regular Sakura thanks to her regular emotions, her suppressed resentment, and Aŋra Mainiiu's Hate Plague all fighting each other in one explosive concoction. She can easily go from catatonic to possessive to violent within seconds.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In a funny ol' way. As the vessel for The Shadow, Sakura was actually more or less unstoppable and could even defeat the likes of Gilgamesh. She wasn't fully aware of her actions, but this actually worked to her advantage, because it helped make the Shadow so alien it was basically undefeatable. Embracing her connection with Aŋra Mainiiu and forging a true contract with it means Sakura can now engage in more outward displays of power, and gets the satisfaction of rubbing it in the faces of the people she (thinks) she's come to hate, but it means she can't be The Shadow anymore and can actually be communicated with - which ultimately proves to be Aŋra Mainiiu's downfall.
• Omnicidal Maniac: She desires nothing less than the total annihilation of everyone who stands in her way.
• The Ophelia: A barefoot, tragically beautiful young lady who vacillates in and out of consciousness.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Her direct connection to Aŋra Mainiiu and the Grail gives her more mana than she could use in a thousand lifetimes, which she uses to summon building-sized shadows that melt and absorb anything they come into contact with, and to fuel her blackened Servant, Saber Alter.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Sakura's purple hair turns white as Dark Sakura.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Dark Sakura wears a long dress made of black ribbons that are trimmed in red - or which glow at the edges with such. In the game's art, it isn't too clear.
• Red Baron: She is referred to as Makiri's Black Holy Grail.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Dark Sakura's eyes are a dull, bloody red.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Zigzagged. Sakura as the Shadow was much deadlier because of how unpredictable it was. Dark Sakura possesses the same powers as the Shadow but is not nearly as dangerous because her lack of proper training makes her a very poor and predictable combatant. On the other hand, Dark Sakura is more efficient and goal-focused, unlike the Shadow which was driven by hunger and near-uncontrollable.
• Slasher Smile: She is frequently shown with an unsettling grin halfway between this and a Psychotic Smirk.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Subverted. She seems to be the result of Sakura fully succumbing to Aŋra Mainiiu's corruption and claims that she's actually a split personality from the normal Sakura formed from her trauma, but Kotomine quickly disabuses the notion, saying she's just trying to cope with her actions and dodge responsibility. Her crushing Kotomine's heart as a response to this only reinforces his words. Even after being freed from Aŋra Mainiiu's influence, Sakura remembers every action she took while under its sway.
  • This is confirmed in a Hollow Ataraxia scene where she changes into her Dark Sakura form to punish intruders.
• Tainted Veins: Her legs are covered in crimson veins and tendrils, which also creep up her neck. Some unlimited codes art insinuates that her otherwise-unseen torso is entirely covered in these.
• This Is Your Brain on Evil: She is the result of Sakura's suppressed inner resentment boiling over and amplified by Aŋra Mainiiu's hatred. In essence, she's throwing a massive temper tantrum and is stuck in a constant state of rage, blinding her to the good feelings of others that she would normally notice.
• Transhuman Treachery: After accepting Aŋra Mainiiu's rage and hatred, Dark Sakura expresses utter contempt towards humans.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Her direct access to the Grail means she has more raw mana then every Master combined, making her one of the strongest foes in the story as a whole. However, she lacks formal training with Magecraft, which means that while she is incredibly powerful and can easily kill most Servants and humans, she isn't outright stronger than most Servants without her regeneration and ability to devour them, and it's noted that someone like Gilgamesh could have killed her if she had not devoured him quick enough. Her lack of skill also means when she encounters Rin armed with the Jeweled Sword of Zelretch, which gives Rin enough of an edge to even the playing field, she has no way of defending herself beyond merely throwing her raw power at her, especially when it is revealed Rin never intended to kill her. It's thanks to her raw mana though that both Rider and Saber Alter become so powerful and dangerous as well.
• Villainous Breakdown: She's effectively dancing on the strings of her negative emotions, which have completely overridden her personality by thinking all the power it's given her will prevent her from ever being scorned or scarred again and let her punish anyone who does. But then Rin proceeds to cut down everything Dark Sakura sends at her and shatter this sense of superiority, while Rider and Shirou's killing Saber Alter leaves her bereft of her trump card. This sends Dark Sakura into a resentful tantrum at how nothing she did could ever leave an impact on her sister and that everything would get either taken by her or be casually trampled by her. However, the worst of it comes when Rin takes a panicked attack from Sakura and reveals that not only could she not bring herself to kill her sister, but that she'd kept herself so aloof because she thought Sakura was better off without her and convinced herself she was doing fine to assuage her own guilt over that. Learning that Rin had suffered all her life as well, combined with the realization that she too had blinded herself to the feelings of those around her and ruined their lives because of what had basically been a despair-induced tantrum, utterly breaks Dark Sakura as her sanity comes back with a vengeance, rejecting her connection to Aŋra Mainiiu and causing the cave to start collapsing from the unstable energy. Sakura's self-conflict manages to let her fight the corruption long enough for Shirou to arrive and free her from Aŋra Mainiiu - which in turn destroys both the Shadow and the Dark Sakura persona.
• Villain Teleportation: She can now open portals to Imaginary Number Space freely. Her most frequent application is to teleport around by diving into Imaginary Number Space and then surfacing in the real world wherever she wants. Fate/Grand Order shows how impressive this actually is by showing how dangerous and troublesome it would be for someone without the Hollow Element to travel via Imaginary Number Space, especially since unlike the Zero Sail method Dark Sakura doesn't need a connection to her starting point or destination.
• Walking Spoiler: She is the corrupted and malevolent form of Sakura who takes center-stage as one of the final major villains in Heaven's Feel.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Dark Sakura's hair turns white to show her great magic power.
• Who's Laughing Now?: She's intent on paying back the world for doing nothing to help her in the past. She's also determined to show her new strength to Rin, since she always resented her sister for being the stronger of the two. When Rin instantly catches up by using the Jeweled Sword of Zelretch, all Dark Sakura can do is whine how unfair it is.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: In the "Femme Fatale" Bad End, Sakura informs Shirou that she's defeated and absorbed Rin and is slowly torturing her to death. And she goes into plenty of detail.
• Yandere: She wants to Mercy Kill Shirou as a twisted way to show her love for him, and she's more possessive of him than ever. She gives him one hell of a Death Glare in spring song when Shirou ignores her in favor of checking on Rin, and then demands to know why the hell he isn't paying attention to her.

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