Characters / Fruits Basket - Tohru Honda

Fruits Basket Main Character Index
Main Characters (Tohru Honda) | The Sohma Family (Akito Sohma) | Tohru's Friends and Family | Student Council and Other Characters | Sequel Characters

Tohru Honda

Voiced by: Hiroko Konishi (Drama CD), Yui Horie (2001 series), Manaka Iwami (2019 series) (JP), Laura Bailey (EN), Nycolle González (LA)

The heroine of the story, Tohru ends up in the Sohma household after her mother dies and she sets up tent on their property. She forges friendships with Yuki, Kyo, and Shigure, and eventually comes to befriend the rest of the Sohmas as well.

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A — I

• Adaptation Dye-Job: She had blue eyes in the 2001 anime as opposed to the brown ones of the manga and 2019 anime.
• Adopted to the House: After her mother's death, Tohru is forced to live in the woods because her relatives are remodeling their house and she can't bring herself to ask her friends for help. Yuki and Shigure find out about her situation and after her tent gets buried by a landslide, they let her stay at their house until she finds a new place to live. After her relatives express how much they don't want her living with them, Tohru chooses to continue living with Yuki, Kyo and Shigure.
• All-Loving Heroine: She loves everyone, even Akito, who is disliked by nearly the entire Sohma family. She doesn't hold any grudges toward those who have wronged her, especially in regards to Akito who has made the Sohmas' lives a living nightmare. Later on, it's revealed that she's actually more of a deconstruction.
• Ambiguously Bi: Tohru is definitely attracted to men, since she often gets flustered when interacting with the very attractive male Sohmas and her primary love interests are Yuki and Kyo. However, she also tends to comment to herself how cute or beautiful other female characters are, particularly Rin (who's naked when Tohru first meets her, causing Tohru to think about how Rin is a "voluptuous beauty" while blushing).
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Near the end of the series, Kyo tries to push Tohru away by revealing that he "killed" her mother by choosing to not save her from a speeding car out of fear of transforming in public if he did so. Kyo fully expects Tohru to hate him as he believes the dying Kyoko did. Instead, Tohru proclaims with tears in her eyes that even if her mother wouldn't forgive him, the only person she loves is Kyo.
• Babies Ever After: With Kyo; while the epilogue of the series doesn't show any of their children directly, they do at least have a granddaughter. The sequel Another confirms that they had three children, with their eldest son Hajime being one of the main characters.
• Badass Pacifist: This non-Action Girl teenager manages to calm down Kyo when he reverts to his true form and then she also speaks gently to Akito even when she's screaming and swinging a knife around.
  • To add to the first point, Kyo's true form is not only hideous and reeking of dead human flesh but also super strong and super agile. Kyo, in blind fear of being rejected by her, slashes her arm, which noticeably hurts her a lot. She does vomit at some point from the stench of rotten flesh.
  • And to add to the second: Akito is the God(dess) of the Zodiac. A terrifying mix of Manipulative Bitch, Broken Bird and Yandere, who is in a state of complete terror and anger since the members of the Zodiac are being released from the curse one by one, which she sees as them abandoning her... and it's her biggest fear coming true. So after stabbing Kureno, Akito is at the lowest point of her whole life, screaming and swinging the knife she used on him. And yet Tohru manages to not run away, and offer her kindness... which would eventually kick start Akito's Heel–Face Turn.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine: Sometimes wears shirts that expose her belly, which are meant to be cute and charming on a Girly Girl like her. There are also memes made about it, such as this one.
• Be Yourself: A value that was instilled in her by Kyoko. She also encourages the Sohmas to embrace who they are. Becomes horribly ironic when it's revealed that she was always trying to act like her dad to prevent her mom from leaving her again.
• Betty and Veronica: For Kyo, Tohru is Betty (sweet, gentle, middle-class) while Kagura is Veronica (hyperviolent, overbearing, fellow member of the prestigious Sohma clan). Tohru wins. To be fair, Kyo was never interested in Kagura at all to begin with, but Tohru is the one who breaks through the steel reinforced walls.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Tohru is an All-Loving Hero, kind, polite, and sweet to everyone even if they don't return her kindness, but she will not hesitate to protect her friends and those she loves. When Akito threatens to lock up and torture a terrified Yuki for defying her, Tohru intervenes and shoves her away from him. This is notable for being the only time she ever uses physical force on anyone.
• Birds of a Feather: For all their differences, Kyo and Tohru can be pretty similar in certain aspects as well. They're both outcasts in their respective abusive families for reasons beyond their control, resulting in severe emotional baggage. Both of them had loving but flawed mothers who died, something that affected them deeply. Neither of them can face their respective issues without the other one being there, supplying comfort and support.
• Black Sheep: Due to their disapproval of Kyoko's background as a delinquent, most of the Hondas view Tohru as an outsider to the point where they think she will eventually become a delinquent herself. After some persuasion from her grandfather, Tohru chooses to stay with Yuki and Kyo at Shigure's house since the Hondas don't want her around.
• Blithe Spirit: Tohru's kind heart and endless compassion is what changes the cursed Sohmas for the better. This is lampshaded by Hiro who questions how can Tohru be so special that she makes everyone who meets her feel better about themselves. At the end of the story, Tohru coming into the life of the Sohmas was what finally broke the curse.
• Book Dumb: Though Tohru is quite emotionally intelligent and can be very insightful when it comes to people's feelings, she doesn't have very good grades and often needs help with studying.
• Broken Hero: Tohru lost her father at a very young age, her mother in her teens, and ended up living in a tent. Nevertheless, she is cheerful and bright — so much that other characters who want to help and provide moral support have to figure out on their own that she's in need of it.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: The Gentle Girl to Kyo's Brooding Boy. She doesn't get scared of Kyo's aggressive behavior since she understands he's highly troubled, and approaches him with a lot of kindness and patience as he gradually opens up to her. However, their dynamic is more complex than most examples because the comfort and emotional healing goes both ways. Tohru has low self-esteem issues that she hides behind her Stepford Smiler mask for the sake of not making others worry, and Kyo is the only one who can lower her guard enough to make her admit her insecurities and fears so he can listen to her and reassure her.
• Care-Bear Stare: Subverted. Hiro thinks she can do this because she can love and tolerate the shit out of anyone. In reality, she simply uses her unconditional kindness to befriend people and rarely ever uses any kind of force.
• Character Development: Tohru starts out as a soft-spoken Extreme Doormat who's overly attached to her memories of the mother she just lost, but by the end of the story has left her grieving phase and is a little bit more assertive with her feelings.
• Children Do the Housework: Tohru was raised by her young and widowed mother Kyoko. Since Kyoko needed to work all day to support them both, Tohru quickly learned how to do the cooking, cleaning and laundry at their apartment. After Kyoko's death in a traffic accident, Tohru's experience with housekeeping becomes very useful when she moves in with the Sohmas since none of her male housemates are good at it.
• Chronic Self-Deprecation: She has very low self-esteem hidden under her eternal smile, and a big reason why she focuses on helping others so much is because she doesn't feel worthy of being helped herself.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Downplayed; she occasionally shows that she has an odd thought process due to her naivete, but for the most part she's level headed.
• Companion Cube: She rarely goes anywhere without photos of Kyoko, going so far as to take baths with them and treating them as though they actually are Kyoko. In the first episode alone, she has a Freak Out over her mother's picture being buried in a landslide alongside her tent, speaking as if Kyoko herself was Buried Alive, and when Hiro takes her wallet, which contains one such picture, she reacts as if Hiro just kidnapped her mother. Deconstructed as time goes on, as it's made clear that Tohru doing so is unhealthy and signifies her inability to accept her mother's death and move on.
• Cool Big Sis: Towards Kisa; she encourages the younger girl to step out of her shell. In return, Kisa adores Tohru and follows her like a duckling during her stay at Shigure's house.
• Cooldown Hug: She uses this move frequently to comfort the Sohmas when they're experiencing something traumatic.
• Crash-Into Hello: Kyo falls through the roof, shouts at Yuki, and then Tohru trips and falls on him.
• Curtains Match the Window: In the manga and 2019 anime, her hair and eyes are brown. This is subverted in the 2001 anime where she's given blue eyes instead.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: Many of Kyo and Yuki's transformations are caused by Tohru falling into them. Uotani even remarks that a man she met at work reminded her of Tohru specifically because of how clumsy he was.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Of the All-Loving Hero. While a genuinely kind person who sees the best in everyone, Tohru focuses on helping other people because her low self-esteem and grief over Kyoko's death makes her believe that she doesn't deserve any kindness for herself. As a result, she constantly sidelines her own problems and hides her insecurities behind her upbeat attitude. Part of her Character Development is allowing other people to help her, and to feel worthy of being helped.
  • She also deconstructs the Momma's Boy, albeit a gender-inverted example. Tohru loves her late mother dearly, regularly talking to her in inner monologues, treating photos of Kyoko as if they're really her, and rarely talking about her in the past tense. It's eventually made clear that her doing so is not healthy and is preventing her from moving on in several aspects of her life.
• The Defroster: Tohru's gentle and greatly empathetic nature makes even the most closed-off people, like Kyo and Rin, warm up to her and seek her comfort. She also helped Hanajima and Kisa open up after their traumas with bullying caused them to avoid social interaction.
• Determinator: One of Tohru's many mottos is to "never give up". As such, she continues to press on and on until she achieves the goals she has laid out for herself, including breaking the Sohma family's curse.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Invoked; Tohru is warned by Kagura not to claim she loves Kyo because she pities him.
• Dude Magnet: She attracts a lot of attention from guys over the course of the series: most notably Kyo, Yuki, and Momiji, who all fall for her, though it's later revealed that Yuki's feelings for her aren't actually romantic, but Haru also hits on her when he's in Black Haru mode, and Shigure wishes late in the series that he could have met someone like her in his youth.
• Endearingly Dorky: She's a quirky Cute Clumsy Girl, and she manages to endear almost everyone around her because of her kindness.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: While "hate" is a pretty strong word to apply to Tohru, the only person she shows any resentment towards is her father Katsuya, since his death made her mother neglect her for a time and almost commit suicide, though even then she recognizes it's wrong to feel that way.
• Expecting Someone Taller: When Arisa Uotani found out that the famous "Red Butterfly" she idolized had a daughter around her age named Tohru Honda, she thought that said daughter would be one of the toughest gangsters there ever was and wondered why she hadn't come across a girl like that if they supposedly went to the same school. When she bumped into a sweet clumsy girl and found out she was Tohru Honda, she could only give a Flat "What".
• Extreme Doormat: Tohru tries to be so nice all the time that she won't ever assert herself and never says a word of complaint even if others treat her badly. A good part of her Character Development focuses on her learning to be more assertive.
• Face Fault: Truly, out of ALL the characters, she makes the MOST face faults out of ANYONE. Makes sense though, being the normal person among a family of people who can transform into talking animals.
• Fan of Underdog: She's easily the cat of the zodiac's biggest fan, making her the first person ever to like Kyo for his animal. She's not so much oblivious of his faults as understanding that there are some serious underlying causes. When she heard the legend of the zodiac as it's usually told she explicitly declared the cat her favorite for exactly this reason before she even met him.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: She learned to cook from a young age to help her mother. This is one of the qualities that make others say Tohru would make a good wife.
• First Friend: In middle school, Tohru was the first to happily befriend Hanajima who had been terribly bullied by her peers until that point.
• First Kiss: With Kyo. Unfortunately she was unconscious and injured from falling down a cliff, so she doesn't remember when Kyo brings it up at their second kiss.
• Formal Characters Use Keigo: Tohru's most notable quirk is how she always speaks very politely, even to people she's close to or in situations where it's unnecessary. One brief scene even has her sigh and then add "desu" out of habit. While this reflects her humble nature, she also does this deliberately since her father Katsuya also had polite speech patterns, and since he died when she was three, it's one of the few things she remembers about him. In the dub, this is adapted as her speaking as though she was a parent or significant other. She also deliberately picked up these speech patterns as a way to keep Kyoko from leaving her, since she secretly resents Katsuya as Kyoko's grief over his death made her neglect Tohru for a time and almost commit suicide.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: A blend of Sanguine and Phlegmatic - Tohru is cheerful, outgoing and friendly as well as exceptionally accommodating and gentle.
• Gender-Blender Name: "Tohru" is more commonly a boy's name, but her father gave it to her to emphasize her femininity — "like adding salt to something sweet to enhance the flavor", in his own words. She's also frequently referred to with the masculine honorific "-kun", which Takaya chose both because of Tohru's already boyish name and because she considered it "a more dignified form of address".
• Generic Cuteness: Downplayed: while Tohru isn't unattractive by any means, she's noted to not be a standout in terms of looks, and her status as a Dude Magnet has more to do with her exceptionally caring and endearingly awkward personality.
• Girlish Pigtails: She sometimes wears her hair in pigtails or braids when she's not at school, which definitely fits her feminine personality. Flashbacks show that she wore pigtails more often when she was in middle school.
• Good Counterpart: To Akito. Both girls struggle with the loss of a beloved parent, are secretly afraid of being alone and abandoned, and have traditionally masculine names despite being female. Parallels are also drawn between Tohru's devotion to her dead mother tying her down emotionally and Akito's obsession with the "eternal bonds" of the Zodiac curse. However, whereas Tohru is a Nice Girl who treats others kindly in spite of her issues, Akito is a Yandere who let her issues consume her and is abusive and cruel to everyone around her. In many ways, Akito also serves as Tohru's Shadow Archetype, representing what she could have become had she been raised by an Ax-Crazy, abusive mother like Ren rather than a doting but still wise mother like Kyoko. During the series' climax, Tohru herself acknowledges that she and Akito aren't so different.
• Grew a Spine: Tohru has a bit of a problem with standing up for herself, and she usually puts other people's wants and needs before her own. Most of her Character Development focuses on her learning to speak up and make self-serving requests once in a while.
• Grow Old with Me: With Kyo. The epilogue shows them as a senior couple with grandchildren and still very much in love.
• Hates Being Alone: More than anything, Tohru is afraid of her loved ones disappearing and leaving her alone. She also has suppressed abandonment issues because when Tohru was a toddler and her father had recently passed away, her mother was essentially immobilized by grief and was barely present, leaving Tohru to take care of both her mother and herself - to the point that Kyoko even left her completely alone at the house and went to attempt suicide. Even though Kyoko didn't go through with the suicide and dedicated the rest of her life to raising her daughter, Tohru still held the fear of being abandoned again in her heart.
• Hates Their Parent: Deconstructed. Tohru has very troubled feelings towards her deceased father who she can't clearly remember. When Tohru was a toddler, Kyoko's Excessive Mourning after Katsuya's unexpected death caused her to neglect Tohru for some time. Unable to understand what was happening, the little Tohru interpreted this as her father "taking her mother away" and became terrified that Kyoko didn't love her because "she didn't resemble her father". Ever since, Tohru started using keigo to remind Kyoko of Katsuya, but a part of her was always afraid that could be the only reason Kyoko became such a loving mother. Tohru admits a very dark side of her still wants to think of her father as a bad guy, but she feels terrible for having such a feeling towards her own father who really wasn't at fault for dying so suddenly.
• The Heart: She becomes the moral center of the cursed Sohmas, listening to their problems and giving them emotional support to overcome their traumas.
• Heroic BSoD: After Kureno tells her that he has no desire to see Arisa again as well as the truth about Akito, Tohru stays in the same spot for hours, until Hanajima comes to save her.
  • In the 2001 anime, when she first discovers Kyo's True Form. Akito attempting to break her down further moments later had added to this trauma, and it took a very important crossroads in order to snap out of it.
• The Heroine: The protagonist who is saving the Sohmas from themselves.
• Hime Cut: She has full bangs, bra strap length sidelocks, and waist length straight hair. While she's not an Ojou (being raised by her middle-class single mother), the 2019 anime makes her hairstyle more evenly-cut to emphasize her Yamato Nadeshiko traits.
• His Quirk Lives On: After her father Katsuya died, her relatives on his side of the family insensitively commented on how Tohru looks nothing like him and she began fearing Kyoko wouldn't love her unless she reminded him of Katsuya. Since one of the few things she remembered about her father was his overly-polite speech, she adapted keigo into her speech and has used it constantly ever since.
• How Dare You Die on Me!: Towards the end of the series, it's revealed that she resented her father for dying and causing grief to her mother.
• Human Hummingbird: She'll sometimes flail her arms around when flustered or panicking over something.
• Idiot Hair: In the 2019 anime, some of her more airheaded moments give her one of these.
• Idiot Hero: Downplayed, as she's not an outright idiot, but she's still very naive and Book Dumb. While she may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, she is extremely well-versed when it comes to feelings and empathy, being immensely kind and selfless by nature.
• Inconvenient Attraction: When Tohru finds herself falling in love with Kyo, she feels guilty about it because her mother had always been the person she held the dearest and she fears she's demeaning her memory by placing a new person in her heart. Eventually, Tohru accepts that it's fine for her to fall in love since her mother would have surely wanted her to find her own happiness.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: She's really only made of innocence, kindness and selflessness, and doesn't have a mean bone in her body. She just wants to be there for everyone and is completely unable to do anything evil or morally grey, even when she's cast as the evil stepsister in her class play of Cinderella. While it's gradually revealed that she does have various issues that she hides behind her positive demeanor, she still has faith in people's inherent goodness and never gives in to corrupting influences.
• The Ingenue: She has the pure innocence of a sweet child, never doubts people and any subtext or innuendo goes over her head. This is considered both charming and alarming since the wrong kind of people can take advantage of her naivete.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: In the first anime, her kindness and naivete are emphasized by her blue eyes.
• Innocently Insensitive: After Hiro criticizes her for talking so much about her mother, Tohru becomes self-conscious about it since she already knows most of the Zodiacs have very bad situations with their parents and she's afraid she has probably been insensitive by frequently talking about how great her mother was. Most of the Zodiacs don't really mind, but to Kyo, it's a torture because he believes he killed Kyoko by choosing to not save her from the car accident to not expose his curse. Whenever Tohru mentions her mother or invites Kyo to Kyoko's grave, he's reminded of his "sin" and takes it as if it's his punishment to never forget it's his fault Tohru lost her mother.
• It Was a Gift: She keeps an old baseball cap that was given to her by a boy who helped her find her way home at a time she was lost. The boy in question was Yuki, but the baseball cap originally belonged to Kyo.

J — Y

• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Ever since her mother told her the fate of the cat in the Chinese Zodiac origin story, her favorite animals have been cats. She is so fond of them that if the Year of the Cat existed then she would want to be born in it. It makes sense that she falls in love with Kyo.
• Kindhearted Simpleton: Downplayed. Tohru is spacey, naïve, and Book Dumb, but not outright stupid. She makes up for what she lacks in smarts with her big heart and the wisdom she learned from her mother. She can also be very perceptive about what people are feeling at times.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Tohru is the naive, sweet, and motherly Light Feminine to Akito (dominating and abusive) and Rin (brooding Broken Bird).
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Her mother Kyoko was very similar to Tohru's Love Interest and eventual husband Kyo in her teenage years, being a Fiery Redhead who acted violently because of being raised by an abusive family. Like Kyo, Kyoko grew out of her angry ways by falling in love with a kindhearted person. They even have very similar-sounding names.
• Like Parent, Unlike Child:
  • Tohru is completely different from her mother Kyoko in her teenage years. Kyoko was a member of a delinquent gang due to her bad relationship with her parents leaving her troubled Fiery Redhead. Thanks to Kyoko growing into a loving mother, Tohru is an innocent, gentle, and incredibly sweet girl who bring emotional support to others. Their coping mechanisms are also polar opposites; Tohru is a Stepford Smiler and Kyoko was Sour Outside, Sad Inside. When Uotani first met Tohru, she couldn't believe Tohru is the daughter of the famous Red Butterfly.
  • Deconstructed in the case of Tohru and her father. She's nothing like him; doesn't look like him, didn't inherit his personality. The only thing they have in common is that both speak in keigo and she only started talking like him hoping it would keep her mother from leaving her again because Tohru heard her father's relatives say she didn't resemble Katsuya at all and the little Tohru believed Kyoko wouldn't love her unless she reminded her of Katsuya in some way.
• Living Emotional Crutch:
  • It might not be evident at first, but Tohru was this to her mother. Because of the neglect of her parents, Kyoko always felt desperately lonely and feared that the world doesn't need her. The sudden death of her husband threw Kyoko into suicidal despair because he was the only person who alleviated her loneliness. Just before she took her own life, Kyoko realized that one person in the world did need her very much; her daughter Tohru. From then on, Kyoko made raising Tohru her entire reason for living.
  • With her incredibly kind and patient nature, she becomes Kyo's rock by the end of the series. She offers him nothing but love, comfort, and compassion for his troubles. She is even willing to do everything in her power to save him from his life sentence to the Cat's Room.
• Love Confessor: In chapter 114, she confesses to Rin that her real reason for wanting to break the Sohma curse is to stay together with Kyo because he has become the most important person to her. Kagura overhears this and hits Tohru, berating her that she should be saying that to him instead of someone else.
• Love Epiphany: Shigure confronts Tohru about how she feels about Kyo and the fate that awaits him as the Cat; being locked up and isolated for the rest of his days. Tohru finds herself horrified at it, but most of all, that she can't stand to think of a future where Kyo is gone from her life forever. Tohru finally realizes that Kyo is now the person she loves the most in the world, even though she wanted her mother to always come first.
• Magic Skirt: Courtesy of her school uniform which is so absurdly short she would get arrested for it in other places which makes it all the weirder how it manages to stay in place.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: During Katsuya's funeral, Tohru's relatives openly speculate if Tohru was born from an affair. Their "evidence" was that Tohru didn't physically resemble Katsuya, and that Kyoko was a Former Teen Rebel.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Starts off acting as this for Yuki and Kyo, though with less manic energy and more kindness and empathy. Later subverted as it's made clear that she has serious emotional problems of her own, which they eventually help her out with.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: For the School Play, she's assigned to play Cinderella's evil stepsister (which was engineered by Minami from the Prince Yuki Fanclub as revenge for getting close to Yuki). Because Tohru is such a saint, she can't even try to say one of her lines without breaking down in tears at the awful things she must say for her role. Luckily, after seeing how everyone is woefully miscast for the play, the scriptwriter ends up rewriting the stepsister into a nicer character so Tohru can perform the role more easily.
• Meaningful Name: Tohru's name (透) means "transparent" or "clear." Perfect for a character who sees the best in every person.
• Mirror Character: To Akito. While they have similar traits (Gender Blender Names, attachment to beloved dead parents, and a fear of being alone), they're also as different as night and day. While Tohru is an incredibly sweet and selfless Nice Girl who always puts other people's happiness before her own, Akito is an incredibly cruel and selfish Jerkass who prioritizes her own happiness before everyone else's, especially the Zodiac members'. While Akito envies the unconditional love Tohru receives, Tohru herself has deeply-repressed selfish urges (mainly her desire to have her mother all to herself, hating her father for "taking" her mother even though she knows such hatred is wrong). Over the course of the manga, Tohru comes to terms with the idea that it's okay to be selfish once in awhile, and Akito is able to let go of the curse and accept that not everyone will like her.
• Mistaken for Prostitute: Her relatives not so subtly accuse her of having sex with all of the men at Shigure's house in exchange for letting her stay there, as they can't think of any other reason three handsome men would keep her around. It was overhearing this that caused Kyo and Yuki to barge in and bring her back with them.
• Momma's Boy: Female example. Tohru looks up to her deceased mother as the best person in the world and still holds on to her teachings as a devoted daughter. It later gets Played for Drama as clinging on to her mother's memory is keeping Tohru from moving on in several aspects of her life, particularly feeling guilty about making Kyo her new most important person. At the end, Tohru learns to live her life while still having a special place for her mother in her heart.
• Morality Pet: Kyo behaves like an angry jerk to everyone, but Tohru can easily bring out his nicer and protective side. She's the main reason why Kyo learns to control his temper and learns to act civil towards other people.
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: A good part of Tohru's character development is learning to accept her mother Kyoko's death and that she doesn't have to prevent herself from being happy in order to honor her mother's memory. While her habits of addressing her mother in inner monologues and treating photos of her mother as though they're actually her may seem like cute quirks at first, it's eventually made clear that this isn't healthy and that Kyoko's death is weighing Tohru down emotionally. She also feels guilty about falling in love with Kyo, not wanting to replace her mother as the most important person in her life, but later realizes that she can still love Kyo while also remembering her mother as someone important to her.
• Naïve Everygirl: Tohru is sweet, naïve and idealistic to a fault. Her most notable flaws are that her low self-esteem makes her put everyone else's needs before her own, and that her overly-trusting nature can make her extremely gullible. Her pure-hearted kindness makes everyone love her, but they also worry about how she cares so little about her own well-being and how easily she could be taken advantage of.
• Nephewism: Subverted. After Kyoko died, Tohru was supposed to move to her paternal aunt's house along with her grandfather. However, her aunt's family mistreat her because of Tohru's mother was a delinquent in her teenage years, so her grandfather convinces her to stay with the Sohmas who do want her at their house.
• Nice Girl: Her defining characteristic. She sees good in everyone she meets and is willing to help them no matter what.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: To her mom, before she died. Tohru would almost always say goodbye to Kyoko before she left for work, but the morning Kyoko died, Tohru overslept since she had pulled an all-nighter to study for a test. Tohru even wonders if the reason her mother died was because she hadn't seen her off as usual.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Tohru living in Shigure's house is this for Kyo, as she's a living reminder that he let her mother die.
• Odd Friendship: Tohru's best friends are a former delinquent who's still a bit rough around the edges (Uotani) and a stoic Goth who has psychic powers (Hanajima). The three of them couldn't be more different, but they're all very close regardless.
  • She also ends up being close friends with Akito, of all people.
• Official Couple: She and Kyo become a couple towards the end of the story. In the sequel, they're married and have three children.
• Opposites Attract: With Kyo. Tohru is a very sweet, patient, polite and kind girl, while Kyo is a hot-headed, tough, bad-mannered boy who always wants to fight (though he gradually mellows out over time).
• Orphan's Ordeal: She has a living grandfather and other relatives, but lived in a tent because she didn't want to burden them. Considering how badly her aunt and cousins treat her when she has to move back with the grandpa, she can't be blamed. Kyoko's death also turns out to be more than just a convenient plot device so Tohru can live with the Sohmas; her over-attachment to her deceased mother is keeping her from moving forward in several aspects of her life.
• Parental Substitute: A strange example, given that their age difference is basically none, but Yuki eventually admits to Kakeru that, rather than seeing her as a potential romantic partner, he’s always seen her as the loving mother he never had in his youth. She certainly acts very matronly, doing the cooking and cleaning around the house and shows incredible affection towards all the Zodiacs in a way that’s very reminiscent of a doting parent.
• Penny Among Diamonds: Tohru is a recently orphaned middle-class high school student who ends up living with several members of the very wealthy Sohma family. The family members that she hangs around with tend not to come across as the Old Money family they come from, but they do occasionally treat Tohru to things like vacations at family-owned resorts or beach houses.
• Pink Means Feminine: According to Hanajima, pink is the color that suits Tohru the best because of her girliness and gentleness. Also, it's the combination of the colors of Tohru's mother (red) and father (white).
• Pitbull Dates Puppy: With Kyo. In the early chapters, Kyo was verbally aggressive to her and even accidentally hits her at one point, but he gets better and learns to control his temper around her.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Kyo tries to run away from Tohru after Kazuma forcibly removes his bracelet and he transforms into his 'true' form right in front of Tohru. Immediately after that, Tohru desperately runs after Kyo and despite him literally pushing her away, Tohru clings on to him and begs him to return home with her because she wouldn't stand it if he goes away. Turns out Tohru has a deep-rooted fear at being abandoned because it reminds her of the time Kyoko left her alone in the house to attempt suicide after Tohru's father died.
• Plucky Girl: Eternally optimistic but never delusional. As for the bravery, see her entry on Badass Pacifist.
• The Pollyanna: In the first anime, where nothing at all gets her down, unlike in the manga and second anime where it's made clear that she has some issues hidden beneath her constant positivity.
• Positive Friend Influence: She's had a positive influence on just about everyone she's befriended, being able to see their best qualities and encouraging them to overcome their issues. In the end, she even manages to be a positive influence on Akito, the abusive Big Bad of the story.
• Prone to Tears: Tohru is prone to crying after hearing a sad story or being treated nicely by one of her friends, even for something as simple as receiving a swimsuit as a gift.
• The Redeemer: On top of being The Defroster, Tohru also manages to help redeem some of the worst of the Sohmas. Shigure began as a self-serving Manipulative Bastard who openly admitted he only cared about himself and would do whatever it took to get his way, but Tohru's influence allows him to make peace with himself and become much kinder. In the end, it's because of Tohru's kindness and compassion that Akito, who had spent years being an abusive Yandere to the entire Sohma family, realizes what a monster she's become and changes her ways.
• Secret-Keeper: She's allowed to stay in close contact with the Sohmas after she accidentally finds out about the Zodiac curse because of Kyo. This is taken further in the final stages of the story when Kureno lets Tohru in on the bigger secrets of the Sohma family: that Akito is a woman being forced to pose as a man by her jealous mother, and that the spirit of the Rooster is no longer possessing him.
• Secretly Selfish: While she's genuinely an All-Loving Heroine who cares about all the cursed Sohmas, learning that Kyo will be put in solitary confinement once he graduates from high school eventually makes her realize that of all the Sohmas, Kyo is the one she cares about the most, and she comes to prioritize freeing him from the Zodiac curse over all the others. She's not exactly happy with herself about this, especially when she admits that she wouldn't mind if only Kyo was freed.
• Shading/Colour Dissonance: Tohru's hair has no shading in the manga, which can give the impression that she's a blonde until you see her with brown hair in the coloured pictures and both animes.
• Shared Family Quirks:
  • Invoked; Tohru adopted what she could remember of her father Katsuya's polite speech patterns to remind her mother Kyoko of him after Kyoko had a psychological breakdown when he died, in the hopes it would keep Kyoko from leaving her again. Of course, as noted on the Fridge Brilliance page, Tohru does actually have more in common with her father than it initially seems.
  • Tohru likes to fawn over Kisa, who she dotes on like a little sister. She likely got it from Kyoko, if flashbacks with her cuddling her daughter are anything to go by.
• Shipper on Deck: After realizing the man Arisa has a crush on is Kureno Sohma, Tohru sneaks into the Sohma main estate so she can deliver Arisa's contact address to Kureno because she can tell how sad Arisa is over not knowing anything from Kureno since their two brief meetings.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She falls in love with Kyo after seeing past his angry exterior and discovering the soft, caring and protective guy he really is.
• Spanner in the Works: Akito's abusive mother Ren is revealed to be the one who convinced her to let Tohru stay at Shigure's house as part of a bet to screw over her by showing her that the Zodiac members would rather bond with a kind-hearted outsider than an abusive head of the family, thus proving that the curse cannot truly force them to love their "God." It works exactly as Ren expected... except she, firmly convinced that no one would ever love Akito, didn't count on Tohru also extending a kind hand to Akito herself. Tohru's offer of friendship helps Akito realize her flaws and allow her to let the past go, leading to the curse breaking and freeing her of Ren's manipulation.
• Stepford Smiler: The Depressed type. While she's a genuinely kind and caring person, her perpetual positivity is hiding serious self-esteem issues and an unhealthy inability to move on from her mother's death. Rin even notes that behind Tohru's constant smiles, she's "quietly falling apart". This isn't really explored in the 2001 anime where she comes off as more of The Pollyanna, but the 2019 anime hints at this early on by having her up her usual perkiness at points where it's clear she's not okay.
• Starving Student: She starts out as one, even though she's only in high school. After her mother died, she went to live with her grandfather, but when her grandfather's house goes through renovations she decides to live by herself in a tent while taking up a job as a janitor for an office building. Even after she moves in with Shigure, Yuki and Kyo, she still insists on working.
• Stock Shoujo Heroine: She hits many points for this trope, as she's soft-spoken, emotional and has no issue with helping anyone who needs it. Despite being Book Dumb and rather naive at times, she makes up for it with the wisdom she learned from her mother, and her greatest strength aside from her kindness is her strong will to never give up. However, she's also a deconstruction, since it's later shown that she's hiding some issues beneath her constant positivity and her being an Extreme Doormat can cause problems.
• Sunny Sunflower Disposition: Sunflowers are her Flower Motif in the 2019 anime's fourth ending, which does well to represent her positive demeanor (at least on the surface), and how she symbolizes hope and happiness for the Sohma family.
• Super Gullible: Kyoko raised Tohru into someone who hardly doubts people; while this lets her accept people wholeheartedly, flaws and all, it also means she can be rather gullible at times. She easily falls for Shigure's joke that "Jason" is a newly-discovered species of bear, and when Ayame tells a story of a time he told a teacher he keeps his hair long because he's the son of foreign royalty, Tohru immediately believes it.
• Supreme Chef: She's very good at cooking, due to learning how to do it at a young age in order to help out her mother. According to the official character book, she can cook just about any Japanese, Chinese or western dish.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Towards the end of the series, Tohru sympathizes with Akito who had a miserable childhood, thanks to her insane mother. She even offers friendship to the head of the family while she's in the midst of a Villainous Breakdown and waving a knife around.
• Taking the Bullet: Physically puts herself in the line of fire more than once with Akito, the family head - the first time is when she shoves Akito away from Yuki, who is in the midst of a panic attack from seeing Akito, and the second is at the beach house, when she puts herself between Akito and Momiji to protect the latter.
• Talking to the Dead: She often has inner monologues where she talks to her mother Kyoko. She also keeps a photo of Kyoko in her wallet and will sometimes treat it as though it really is her (like when Hiro takes her wallet and Tohru is incredibly shaken by this, reacting as though Kyoko herself just got kidnapped). As the story goes on, it becomes clear that this habit of hers is actually rather unhealthy; the fact that she almost never talks about her mother in the past tense (aside from quoting things she once said), and her over-attachment to photos of her, shows that she's still unable to move on from her death.
• Tareme Eyes: Her big and round eyes go perfectly with her gentle and meek personality.
• Team Mom: Tohru showers the Sohmas with unconditional love and immense empathy as she helps them work through their traumas and emotional problems. Some of the Sohmas most starved for parental love, like Yuki and Rin, can't help but view Tohru as the loving mother they desperately want, driving them to seek out her affection and comfort.
• Tears of Fear: She has an anxiety attack when confronted by Kyo about her future, admitting her Stepford Smiler status.
• Token Houseguest: Tohru is the only resident at Shigure's house who isn't a member of the Sohma family. She's Yuki's and Kyo's classmate who lives with them because she was recently orphaned and her aunt's family don't want her at their house.
• Tragic Keepsake: She keeps a picture of her deceased mother and never wants to go anywhere without it. On one occasion, she even takes a bath with it. It's later deconstructed, since her attachment to the picture (to the point that she sometimes treats it as though it is her mother) eventually makes clear that her mother's death is weighing her down and keeping her from moving on in several aspects of her life.
• Trauma Button:
  • Hiro pushes it when he inquires why Tohru always talks about her mother but never her father. She brushes it off in the moment, but later that night, she's curled into a ball telling herself "it's okay" as she begins having flashbacks brought up from Hiro's comment.
  • When she hears her injured grandfather say he wants to see Katsuya and Kyoko again, Tohru recalls the time Kyoko said she wanted to see Katsuya again and left Tohru alone to go attempt suicide. Her long suppressed trauma resurfacing causes Tohru to fall to her knees on her way home and only calms down when Kyo appears to comfort her.
  • Her grandpa pushes it again when she was packing up her stuff in a flashback, saying "Kyoko dear, time to go.". In that way, he made it sound like he was allowing her to pass on to the afterlife, which Tohru hadn't accepted yet.
• Understanding Boyfriend: Gender-swapped example. Kyo believes that when Tohru sees his monstrous cursed form, she will be disgusted and scared of him like everyone else who has seen him in that state. Indeed, seeing Kyo in that form scares Tohru. But instead of leaving him, Tohru runs after him and begs him to return because she wants to be together with him. Near the end of the series, Tohru proclaims she loves Kyo despite him choosing to not save her mother from the car accident for his own self-preservation. Even Kyo finds it incredible that Tohru can accept everything bad and ugly about him.
• Unwitting Pawn: Unbeknownst to her, Shigure took Tohru in so she could be the key to his plan to break the Zodiac curse by having Tohru form new bonds with the cursed Sohmas and break them free from the bond tying them to their "God".
• We Really Do Care: Tohru briefly moves out of Shigure's house when her relatives come back to town, since that's what she'd promised to do. While they all make it clear that they don't want her around, the little Sohma outpost of Shigure, Yuki, and Kyo rediscover the fact that they fail at keeping their household running. In the end, Yuki and Kyo show up when Tohru's relatives are being especially bitchy and drag her (not unwillingly) back.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: Tohru wanted to successfully graduate from high school because she hoped it would make her mother proud of her. Sadly, her mother died before she even finished her first year in high school, but Tohru still wants to fulfill her promise to her mother.
• What Would X Do?: She always quotes Kyoko.
• Why Can't I Hate You?: Inverted; when Kyo makes her face her feelings for her father Katsuya, Tohru admits that she can only think of her father as the villain who left her and her mother Kyoko behind and made Kyoko so depressed that she neglected and very nearly abandoned Tohru to join Katsuya in the afterlife. Adding to that, Katsuya's relatives accused her of being the child of an affair because they thought she doesn't look like him, which made it harder for Tohru to remember her father fondly. After spilling her heart out, Tohru tells Kyo that she feels awful for thinking of her father that way because she does remember he was a good father for the short time he lived and he made Kyoko very happy.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Downplayed; she has all the politeness and domestic talent, is very good at cooking Japanese style dishes, and can show some inner iron when it really counts, being able to overwhelm everyone she nicely confronts. At one point, she even has an Imagine Spot about being a Japanese princess, and her design in the 2019 anime changes her hairstyle slightly into more of a Hime Cut. However, she still doesn't quite live up to the trope since she's also clumsy, naive, and has a tendency to be an Extreme Doormat due to her low self-esteem.