The idea of domesticity, security, settling down, living within a comfortable home, possibly having a family one day are the dreams of many people, if not most of them. Even if someone wouldn’t want a traditional family of their own, the need for shelter and a place to call home is a universal need that many can suffer from if they don’t get it. A place for loved ones to gather and live safely from the outside world.
Yet, what brings almost everyone else comfort is the stuff of nightmares for Itto.
Itto, when he was barely out of his toddling years, lost his parents and his home to a violent night raid of hunters that sought his father’s head. But, even from infancy, their family was impoverished and Itto was born into a lifestyle of insecurity that defined his formative years and altered his mind forever. From there, he lived alone in the wilderness of Chinju Forest for many years until he befriended Sara when they were still preteens. While their relationship was mostly antagonistic because of how mistrustful he was of others due to how common it was for him to be slandered, abused, and beaten, it was still the real first bond he made after losing his parents, but before he was adopted by his aunt, Onibaba.
However, even then, Itto was rarely home. Of course, it wasn’t seen as an unusual thing: as he was generally ostracized from his peers, didn’t go to the local school outside of Onibaba homeschooling him in what she could, he generally spent time outside. He played, learned a lot about Onikabuto, tried learning street games, but he was often alone. He didn’t mind it, though, as he’d spent most of his life alone and ostracized. In fact, the only true encounters with the villagers he had were when he was sometimes ganged up on, blamed for ill omens, and the like. Coming home and needing to be bandaged was a common thing for him.
Then, when he hit his teens, he was no longer young enough for any troubles to be written off as childish antics. It was then the arrests began chronically, and often brutally and by surprise. It happened so often that it instilled Itto with intense paranoia and a kind of claustrophobia that wired into his already maladapted mind where the abuse he suffered at the hands of parents within the village married with it. And because of it, that phobia became one and the same.
Essentially, Itto wound up developing a crippling sense of oikophobia. The place that many associate with care and comfort is a nightmarish hell for Itto. It’s bad enough that there came a point where he couldn’t remain at Onibaba’s any longer and took to the streets and forests and anywhere open because being inside any place feels immensely unsafe for him, and can act as a trigger to his past trauma.
The same can go towards starting a family, as not only does Itto think he’s incredibly unfit for it, but it also is wired into his past trauma of the parents of children he tried to get to know would abuse him severely for being an Oni. The idea of having children of his own can induce a panic attack and make him shut down, and isn’t something he’d be able to broach anytime soon.
Simply put, between his severe oikophobia and tokophobia, a normal life that many would aspire to is simply out of his reach due to how severely it terrifies him.
