SoraTori

SoraTori is the femslash ship between Sorawo Kamikoshi and Toriko Nishina from the Otherside Picnic fandom.

Canon
Sorawo and Toriko are both university students. The two of them explore a mysterious alternate dimension called “the Otherside,” an uncanny realm full of creepy monsters and supernatural phenomena. Throughout the course of their adventures in the Otherside, the two of them get to know each other and gradually begin to fall in love, and overcome their own traumas. Sorawo, for example, is a cult survivor. In the wake of this trauma, Sorawo tries to move forward with her life by attending university, but she has a hard time relating to other people. As a result, she isolates herself from everyone and when the reader is first introduced to her she states that “even if I up and vanished, nobody would care much” and that “dying here on the Otherside wasn’t so bad.”

This is why Sorawo is hesitant to share the Otherside with Toriko when she first meets her. But she slowly finds that sharing her world with someone else and accepting support allows her to thrive even in scary situations. Sorawo states that she worries about being “victim or victimizer” in relationships because those were the two options framed by her experience with the cult. But when Toriko cheekily refers to herself and Sorawo as “accomplices” in their adventures, she gives Sorawo a space to exist outside that rigid binary she’d set up for herself.

The two of them face some difficulties in their relationship. Toriko sometimes crosses Sorawo’s boundaries and shows affection in a way she isn’t ready for. Meanwhile, Sorawo sometimes fails at communicating or makes dark comments that Toriko is uncomfortable with. But importantly, they both always try to understand each other and work together at the end of the day. They give each other room to grow. Thanks to Toriko, Sorawo sees that relationships don’t have to be unbalanced and that people can truly rely on each other and love each other as equals.

It’s this realization and Toriko’s support that allows Sorawo to face her traumatic past. During her encounters with the “Red Person,” a haunting Otherside creature who represents Sorawo’s trauma and traps her in an abusive relationship, after Sorawo lost her relationship with her family and began exploring the Otherside alone, the “Red Person” preyed upon her loneliness and desperation to be loved. Sorawo describes the “Red Person” as watching over her “with mercy. And tolerance. Like a mother.” The creature used this maternal connection to manipulate Sorawo and convinced her that the only way she could escape the cult’s control was to burn down her house with herself and her family in it. Sorawo’s family died in unrelated circumstances before she could carry out this plan, however, and the “Red Person” vanished. But like any sort of bad relationship, the creature eventually returns and attempts to destroy Sorawo’s life again.

The difference this time around is that Sorawo has Toriko supporting her. The “Red Person” tries to lure Sorawo to her death by tempting her with a world where her mother is still alive, but Toriko calls Sorawo back to reality and helps her fight the creature. After defeating the “Red Person”, Sorawo is finally able to open up to Toriko, and only then does she realize what this creature wanted from her. Despite this realization, Sorawo still struggles to forget the “Red Person” and can’t shake their assertions that she can never move on from her losses and that she’s just “desperately scraped together from the pieces left after [her] mother died.” She begs Toriko to slap her in order to snap out of it. However, Toriko kisses her lovingly instead, and this expression of tenderness helps Sorawo realize she can move forward without hurting herself.

Fanon
is the most popular ship within the Otherside Picnic fandom, due to the fact that the entire story revolves around their relationship, and that they are the main couple of the series.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

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