Akito Sohma

## Voices

**Akito Sohma** (草摩 慊人, *Sōma Akito*) is one of the antagonists. She is the only daughter of Ren and Akira Sohma.

Akito is the head of the Sohma family, and fulfills the role of a "God" of the Chinese Zodiac. Akito is depicted as short-tempered and abusive, and has physically and emotionally scarred many Sohmas. On the other side, Akito herself is a victim, as Ren forced her to live as a male because she was afraid Akito would replace her in Akira's heart. Akira, in an attempt to give Akito solace, unintentionally brainwashed her into thinking that she was "special" and would be loved by the Zodiacs no matter what she did.

## Appearance

Akito is a tall, very pale, beautiful, slim young woman with an androgynous appearance. When Tohru first met Akito she noted that Akito was as beautiful as Yuki. For the majority of the series, Akito is seen to have fair skin with short, nape-length black hair and long, messy bangs framing her thick eyelashes and sharp purple eyes. To cover up her female body figure, Akito usually dresses in many layers or male clothing; sometimes normal or oversized. In the Sohma house, she usually wears robes worn by men.

According to Shigure, if Akito had been raised as a woman, she would look exactly like her mother, Ren. Akito shares the same black hair-color and brown eye-color as her mother, as well as the feminine features, though Akito manages to hide them well.

Because of Shoto, she currently has a scar on her stomach.

## Personality

Aside from her occasional bad temper tantrums when she was young, Akito was a nice, gentle, pampered, and sweet girl. Due to her father spoiling her, Akito grew believing that she was born to be loved by everyone and that everyone must do as she says. On the other hand, her mother's psychological and emotional abuse lead Akito to be desperate for displays of affection, and she would go around the household asking everyone if they loved her. However, after Akira's death, after Kureno's curse broke, and as a product of Ren's psychological abuse, including being forcefully raised as a boy and being poisoned with hatred and insecurity by the latter, Akito snapped and changed to a mentally and emotionally unstable person whose kindness warped into insanity and cruelty.

In the present time, even though Akito appears as a frail, level-headed, mysterious, and composed woman at first glance, Akito has horribly abused many of the Zodiac members to take out her anger over her father's death and her mother’s insistence that she is unneeded, worthless and that no one will ever truly love her. She is shown to be an incredibly arrogant, manipulative, selfish, immature, angry, and cruel young woman, who rarely shows any sympathy and can be calm one moment and having a screaming tantrum the next. Akito also insists the male Zodiac members are obligated to only love her because she believes the Zodiac animals should direct all their affection to their God. So whenever one of them directs their attention to anyone other than her, Akito is overcome with fear that she's going to be abandoned like her mother predicted she would. In connection to this, she is extremely misogynistic despite being a woman herself, since she projects her own mother onto every woman she meets. As a result, she gets very jealous of women who "steal" the male Zodiacs' attention. Notable examples are when she threw Rin out of a window because she was dating Hatsuharu, beating Kisa bloody because Hiro is in love with her, and guilt-tripping Kana for wanting to marry Hatori by practically blinding him in one eye. Despite this, Akito cannot fathom being to blame for anything and justifies her controlling and abusive treatment by claiming that a God can do whatever they please and no one can punish them for it.

Despite such things, behind her intimidating and cruel personality, Akito is incredibly insecure, lonely, and terrified of being abandoned and unloved. Because she had it instilled into her mind that she was “God” and that her bonds with the Zodiacs defined her entire existence, she doesn’t think she has any self-worth beyond the said title. She desperately clings onto her position as the “God” only because Ren convinced her she is worthless and will never be truly loved by anyone, and to enforce her belief that she will never alone if she keeps all of them with her, even if she has to resorts to physical and mental torture to make everyone too afraid of her to leave her. Additionally, exactly because she is the “God” and the head of the family, no one reprimanded her or corrected her behavior; the only people who “helped” her either fed her unhealthy issues, ignored her, or abused her; some maids even enabled her to do as she wished, which prevented Akito from ever living normally and learning right from wrong. For this reason, Akito cannot stand the mere prospect of being rejected and unloved by the people in the outside world, let alone live in an outside world she doesn't know anything about, full of strangers.