Was Tamamo reincarnated 'by' humans?
Time for a long discussion on Tamamo's backstory.
In CCC, in Chapter 2, you can ask the ever wonderful Andersen to analyze your Servant. If you bring in Tamamo, then after some initial snark-to-snark combat between the two Casters, Andersen will confess how the expectations and assumptions of humanity weighed him down and transformed him, before saying to Tamamo:
"It's the same for you, fox ears. Right? Although you were adored by humans, even reincarnated by them—in the end, you were seen as a monster."
That is… kind of weird. Does this imply she was reincarnated by humans? As in, humans were the agents that caused the reincarnation? What does that even mean?
Or, at least, this is what he says in the translation patch for CCC released by Iwakura Productions. But if you browse through, say, Reddit, you can find older translations by other folks that differ slightly. For example:
Translation by WaifuHunter:
"You and I are the same, kitsunemimi. You longed for human, incarnated as a human, in the end you became a monster perceived by humans."
Translation by Invictasaur:
"After all, you're the same, aren't you, fox-ears? You who admired humans, went so far as to reincarnate into a human, and finally were considered as a monster by humans."
These instead suggest that she (re)incarnated into a human, not that she was reincarnated by humans. Oh dear. Which is it? This sounds like it's going to be some particle related shenanigans with the original Japanese. And on that note, what does Andersen exactly mean by "reincarnate"? What is the original term used there? Perhaps we should look into the original Japanese text in more detail.
But before I do that, I want to spend a moment talking about just how extraordinarily significant this random unassuming line of dialogue is in order to piece together Tamamo's convoluted backstory.
Tamamo might have one of the most confusing backstories in Fate. Part of that is because her lore is confusing on its own. It requires you to understand the concepts of bunreis (Divided Spirits), Divine Spirits, Heroic Spirits, Servants, and the distinctions and relationships between them.
But mainly, it's because everyone involved is an unreliable narrator.
Here's the issue. In order for a character to be considered a reliable narrator, they would need to pass two checks. First, the "incentive" check. The character must not have an incentive to lie, in one direction or the other. Second, the "knowledge" check. The character must actually know what they're talking about in the first place.
Tamamo is an unreliable narrator. She passes the knowledge check, obviously, because who's going to know more about the pink fox than the pink fox herself. But she absolutely has an incentive to lie and paint herself in a positive light, specially in front of a Master she's trying to court, and even more so if we take into account that a big part of her character arc in many stories is her gathering the courage to reveal her name at all. (I'm not saying she must be lying. I'm saying she could be. So we need a third party to confirm anything she says.)
Amaterasu herself is basically in the same position, because although she probably knows Tamamo's past well enough, she also happens to openly despise the one-tail, so she has an incentive to lie in the opposite direction, to make her look worse than she is. Also the things she says are… ambiguous at best, and border on the prophetic at times. So she also fails the incentive check.
What about characters that don't have an incentive to lie? I figure Li Shuwen or Nezha wouldn't have a reason to lie. Whatever they say is likely what they genuinely believe to be true. The question is whether it actually is. Would they know about Amaterasu? Would they know about bunreis? What's more, most of these characters never actually met Daji, or Bao Si, or any of those fox-ladies that Tamamo is sometimes compared to. Notably, Katsushika Hokusai has this to say about Tamamo (note that Toto-sama is how she refers to her father):
"No, that's a celestial maiden. It would be insulting if we made a mistake. It's true that Toto-sama painted Dākinī, and Daji of the Yin Dynasty, but they were probably copied from illustrations that came from Karakuni. They are probably a figment of the artist's imagination too. Chaldea sure is stranger than any fiction I know of."
So many of these characters might be basing their "knowledge" in hearsay and art. Then who do we have left? Taigong Wang? Well, at least he did meet Daji. But while he's a step above the rest in that regard, he still wouldn't know much about Tamamo or Amaterasu. His educated guesses about Tamamo are better than the rest, but educated guesses they are.
Basically, the fact that Tamamo is Tamamo means that very few people can actually pass the knowledge check. So where do we go from here…?
Enter Hans Christian Andersen.
No, really. This absolute dude. Where do I even begin.
Andersen has the ability Human Observation A, which allows him to perfectly understand someone at a first glance, simply by observing them. Per his CCC Matrix:
人々を観察し、理解する技術。
ただ観察するだけでなく、名前も知らない人々の生活や好み、人生までを想定し、これを忘れない記憶力が重要とされる。
(…)
彼にできる事は物語を紡ぐ事だけだが、だからこそ、誰よりも語る事だけに真摯であろうと誓い続けた。
The act of observing and understanding people.
It's not simply observing but also hypothesizing the manners, likes, even the lives, of people he might not know even the names of, requiring incredible memory.
(…)
The only thing he can do is spin stories, and that's exactly why he swore to continue to speak more sincerely than anyone else.
That "lives" in the description is 人生 (jinsei), which refers to a person's life, their story. So this dude, at a glance, just magically knows everyone's past.
You might worry about that "hypothesizing … the lives" in the description. Does this mean it's just an educated guess he's making? I don't want to bore you too much, but there are many ways to write "hypothesis" in Japanese. One is 仮説 (kasetsu), which would indeed mean hypothesis in the sense of a tentative theory, of something that might or might not be true and that needs to be tested. Another is 予測 (yosoku), which is like a prediction or estimation.
But the one used here is 想定 (soutei), which has a sense of expectation or anticipation. Like you're envisioning and creating a profile. It could mean assume, but it would make more sense to use one of the other two nouns if that's the intention. So this isn't theorizing or even predicting, it's more like mentally constructing a profile of someone's life. The other interpretations don't make much sense in this context.
Am I reading too much into this? Yes, obviously. I'm rereading those two previous paragraphs and I'm so close to deleting them. But, look, I don't imagine a fantasy character would have a magical ability that grants them the power of… assuming.
But even then, you might still reasonably question whether an ability named "Human Observation" would work on a non-human like Tamamo. But the description mentions that it allows him to observe and understand 人々 (hitobito), which just means "people" or even "everybody", not specifically humans. And, I mean, Servants are not human in the first place, they're Spirits, so it would make no sense for Andersen to have a skill that has no use against opposing Servants.
Besides, the ability's name is 人間観察 (ningen kansatsu), and while 人間 (ningen) does mean human, it can also mean "character" as in a person's character. So this could alternatively be translated as something like "Temperament Observation" (it would be a little too poetic, but this is an ability name and not a description, and those tend to be fancier. I still would keep this as Human Observation though).
So, regardless, I think it's safe to assume that this ability would work on Tamamo too. I mean, Andersen says things about Tamamo's past that he should have no business knowing otherwise, and that no other character has even alluded to.
Then there's that last line, about Andersen swearing to "speak more sincerely than anyone else". Truth is his main motivator. Sure, literally the first thing Tamamo does when Andersen is about to analyze her is threaten to send him flying. But do you think this guy knows fear? If your Servant is Gilgamesh, not only does Andersen have the huevos toreros to critique him to his face and call him a bad king and barely a hero, but he then demands payment.
What I'm getting at is that Andersen passes both the knowledge check (Human Observation A) and the incentive check (he cares only about speaking the truth). So it is, in a way, extremely fortunate that this woefully underused character just so happened to cross paths with Tamamo of all people on his very first appearance.
So Andersen is, quite likely, one of the most reliable narrators when it comes to Tamamo.
About multiple backstories
As a quick note, something that worries me is that, canonically, the same Heroic Spirit can have multiple alternative valid backstories. This is for example a pretty big plot point in FoxTail, where Suzuka explains that she has at least two differing possible backstories: a happy one where she gets to be with her boyfriend Tamuramaro, and a tragic one where she is slain at his hands. And she explicitly talks about how there could be other versions of her out there with a different backstory from hers.
This affects other Servants too, but I specifically mention Suzuka because she's a Divine Spirit just like Tamamo, which confirms that even Divine Spirits can have multiple backstories. And both exist within the Extraverse, because another added worry is that perhaps different summoning systems have different specific rulings for this kind of thing. So maybe the Fuyuki Grail, and the Moon Cell, and Chaldea all have differences in what they can and cannot allow (this necessarily is the case, but I don't know to what extent).
So what I will talk about next might only be true of the Extraverse's version of Tamamo, or even specifically of CCC's Tamamo (which should be the same as EXTRA's and FoxTail's, but a different one from EXTELLA's, kind of, it's complicated). Canon and timelines confuse me. Look, I just want to translate what Mr. Andersen has to say here, and you can decide what to do with that information afterwards.
What Andersen actually says
おまえもそうだろう、狐耳。人間に憧れ、人間に転生までしたというのに最後は人間に怪物視された。
My attempt at translation:
"It's the same for you, isn't it, fox ears? Although you admired humans and went so far as to reincarnate as one, in the end, you were seen as a monster [by humans]."
So the first thing you might notice is that the construct 人間に (ningen ni) appears three times, as a form of poetic repetition. Therein lies the problem, you see. I talked before about how 人間 (ningen) means human(s). So we have:
The first uses a verb like "admire" or "long for". The second uses… let's just say, "reincarnate", for now. And the third is something like "perceive as a monster" or "see as a monster". All translations basically agree that these are the verbs involved, just disagree in the direction, as in, whether it is Tamamo or the humans doing the verb. Since all three of these are the same form 人間に and use the same particle に (ni), you would assume that the direction must be the same in all three, right?
人間に憧れ = "You had an admiration for humans" or "You longed to be human"
人間に転生 = "You reincarnated as/into a human"
人間に怪物視された = "You were seen as a monster by humans"
Kind of, actually. While に corresponds to many different English prepositions, it is always a destination or target particle. It always indicates the target of an action, not the person doing the action. The one exception is if the verb is in passive form, like in the third case, because in that situation に does mark the agent.
So Tamamo is the agent in the first two, but the target in the third one, because that last one is passive. If I put them all into active voice for ease of reading, it could be something like: "You admired humans. You went so far as to reincarnate into a human. But in the end, humans saw you as a monster."
So it's the older Reddit translations that are actually more accurate here. Tamamo was not reincarnated by humans. She was the one to reincarnate into one. (This is also direct confirmation that she did in fact adore humans).
This girl's backstory is a nightmare to follow. Don't some versions say she's a bunrei or Divided Spirit of Amaterasu? And don't others suggest that she's literally Daji? Or maybe even both at once? Where does reincarnation figure in all this? What does even "reincarnation" mean in this context?
Okay, the term Andersen uses here is 転生 (tensei or tenshou). If you check any EN-JP dictionary it will indeed tell you that this means: "transmigration; reincarnation; metempsychosis". But that's still pretty ambiguous. Maybe we can check a JP one?
「転生」の意味は<p style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><!--AVOID_CROSSLINK-->読み方：てんしょう<!--/AVOID_CROSSLINK-->生まれ変わること。Weblio国語辞典では「転生」の意味や使い方、用例、類似表現などを解説
［名］(スル) 生まれ変わること。転じて、環境や生活を一変させること。
［Noun］(suru-verb) To be reborn. By extension, to completely change one’s environment or lifestyle.
So it has both a literal "reborn" meaning, and a more figurative "change who you are" one. However, there are many, many other ways to say "change your lifestyle". If that was the intention, Andersen (and by extension Nasu) would have picked any other term. Because 人間に転生 (ningen ni tensei) is going to be interpreted by any Japanese person as "reincarnate into a human". Because that kind of usage is widely extended, both in, uh, weeb culture and religion.
Fantasy works love this term. For those keeping track, 転生 (tensei) is often used in isekai manga/anime:
転生したらスライムだった件
(tensei shitara slime datta ken)
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
転生したら剣でした
(tensei shitara ken deshita)
Reincarnated as a Sword
And then there's the Buddhist/religious angle. Surely you've at least heard of this idea of a cycle of death and rebirth, driven by karma, that is a core concept in Buddhism? They call this "Samsara rebirth". The Japanese refer to this as 輪廻転生 (rinne tenshou/tensei). The first half is for 輪廻 (rinne/samsara), the karmic cycle. And the second half is the same 転生 (tensei) we've been talking about until now.
There's also this idea of the six realms in Buddhism. A being can exist in six realms of existence: deva (gods), asura (sort of demigods), humans, animals, ghosts, hell. Karma determines whether you are reborn in one realm or another. Well, the Japanese can use 転生 (tensei) to refer to the process of moving between realms, or being reborn in a different realm. So, for instance, it's a term you could use for a god being reborn as a human.
(My knowledge of Buddhism is very barebones, so this is like Buddhism 101. Or even less. I'm sure there are much deeper meanings and connotations that I'm missing.)
What I'm saying is that, both in fantasy and religion, this term is often indeed associated with "reincarnation" or "incarnation".
Which, uh, actually only confuses me further when it comes to Tamamo.
I actually talk about Tamamo now
Tamamo is supposed to be a bunrei (Divided Spirit) of Amaterasu. I don't want to get too deep into this right now, but gods in Shinto (technically kami but let's not go there) can divide their souls in a way that doesn't minimize the original. The usual metaphor is to imagine a big candle being used to light up a smaller candle. The new lit candle is not the same as the original one. And the original candle is not destroyed, or significantly affected. Nor does it have control over the new candle. They are two independent candles. And yet there's still some fashion in which their flames are "the same".
A bunrei is that same idea, but with souls instead of candles. So the process of creating a bunrei isn't exactly reincarnation. It's closer to spiritual division, it implies a simultaneous existence, rather than a continuity across lives. Amaterasu doesn't become Tamamo. She creates Tamamo from herself, as a separate entity.
Which leads to another issue. Because Tamamo isn't really the one that reincarnates into a human, then. If anything, it is Amaterasu that reincarnates into a human, that human being Mizukume (Tamamo's birth name). So what in the world is Andersen talking about here? Is he talking about Tamamo? Amaterasu? Both?
Here's the problem: Servants talk about other versions of themselves in first person. Tamamo will constantly refer to Amaterasu in first person (I fought Velber, I reincarnated as a human), even though Tamamo and Amaterasu are unquestionably two separate characters, as per her third SG. Just like, you know, a big candle lighting up a smaller one, such that their flames are still "the same".
Even worse, do you recall what I said about Suzuka in FoxTail talking about different versions of herself? She normally uses 私 (watashi) to refer to herself, which is a standard first person pronoun. But when she's talking about the hypothetical version of herself with a different backstory, she also uses 私 (watashi) to refer to that one. That is to say, Servants will talk about other versions of themselves in first person.
At least, sometimes. Because other times, Tamamo does make a distinction between her and Amaterasu and speaks about Ammy in third person. They're not even consistent in their inconsistency.
By the way, no one said a god is limited to creating one bunrei. Take Vishnu, which creates both Rama and Krishna. So Amaterasu creates Tamamo, and we know Tamamo refers to Amaterasu in first person. But here's my question: if Amaterasu created another separate bunrei (Daji?), would Tamamo refer to that other bunrei also in first person? Perhaps in a way similar to what Suzuka does? Their flames too would be "the same", after all.
So, in the end, even assuming Andersen is talking about Amaterasu here, would he use 転生 (tensei) to refer to the creation of a bunrei? It's… unorthodox, but plausible. At the very least, this josses the idea that Daji one day just decided to move to Japan and change her name to Tamamo. That isn't in any way, shape, or form a "reincarnation". Andersen would be using a different term if that was the case. So two theories come to mind:
Ammy creates Daji as a bunrei. Daji dies. So Ammy reincarnates her as a new bunrei, say, Bao Si. Bao Si dies. So Ammy keeps reincarnating her as new bunreis, until eventually she decides to try something new and reincarnates her into a "human" with no memories, Mizukume (Tamamo).
Ammy just creates a bunch of different bunreis. That one's Daji. That one over there's Bao Si. Then maybe we drop Lady Kayō in India. And eventually she decides to try for once to create a "human" bunrei with no knowledge of her divinity, Mikuzume (Tamamo).
In both cases, Tamamo is and isn't the other fox ladies (they share the same "flame"), and in both cases, I'm pretty sure Tamamo would at least be tempted to speak of the others in first person. Which would explain some of the… peculiar word choices about her past she has sometimes. Those are the only explanations I can come up with that are at least somewhat consistent with the evidence seen here. Saying "maybe Tamamo's just lying about her past" is actually not an easier explanation, because it fails to account for Andersen's words here. I can believe Tamamo lying. I cannot believe Andersen lying. And in this case, they just so happen to concur.
That, or again, she might have multiple mutually incompatible backstories. But I think you can almost see a common shared thread here, if you allow a bit of open interpretation here and there.
tl;dr: She wasn't reincarnated by humans. Ammy, you cannot pin this one on us, we're onto you.
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