Their Value to the Series
I chose to cover this in more detail than I did on the character pages, because I feel that many, if not most, fans of Fushigi Yuugi have misinterpreted Suboshi, or have at least failed to see that he does have value as a character and a human, whether or not he is always kind and sympathetic.

To expound on this, what is most often said of Suboshi is that he is the cruel, unfeeling side of the twins; the one who lapses into furies and is purely irrational in his behavior. Suboshi has a reputation as an animal, a murderer, and a monster. There are people who recognize him as something else, but not very many. He is imperfect in the way a human ought to be imperfect, which is why those who do like him believe that he has received an undue infamy. There is nothing about Suboshi that makes him anything less than human. He acted on emotions, therefore he is not emotionless. He acted out of love as much as hatred. He did what he did because he wanted to see the death of his one true friend and family member brought to a just end. And while Suboshi's vision of "just" is more than a little askew, it's also one that was based on feelings of loneliness, sadness, and pain, not just rage.

Amiboshi tends to be more popular than his brother, and it's not hard to see why. He was not a vengeful or viscious person. He wanted to forget that side of his existence and live in peace. There's a softspoken, beautiful quality to him that overcomes his rare moments of violence, most of which were committed in self-defense. Generally viewed as the "good" twin, Amiboshi is a very ideal person. Perhaps a little too ideal. His desire for freedom from the constraints of destiny was something that a hero wants. Heroes, at least in the literary sense, very seldom exist. So at the risk of getting flame mail, I'm going to propose the possibility that Suboshi received superior characterization. Not to say that Amiboshi's character isn't attractive (in more ways than one), but I do feel that Suboshi was a more realistic person.

Comparing them -- which is inevitable in any page devoted to one or both -- can be a tedious task because as a part of human nature, people simplify them. Amiboshi is nice, Suboshi is mean... right? Not necessarily. Recalling the scene where he smiled and seemed quite jubilant while presenting fresh water to Yui, I find it hard to view Suboshi is a bad person. The grinning, laughing, childlike traits he exhibited there were unmistakable. In that scene he was just a handsome fifteen year old boy with a crush on a pretty girl whom he was trying to impress. Conversely, when Amiboshi interrupts the ceremony to summon Suzaku, be openly brags about sacrificing the life of the Kutou assassin in order to deceive the Suzaku Seishi into believing he was the real Chiriko. Nice people don't do that sort of thing, do they?

Well, nobody's perfect.

The above sentence sums up my point, in case that isn't obvious. They were both flawed in very similar ways. It brings up the question of how they would have acted had their situations been switched around. Would Amiboshi have taken revenge if he believed his brother had been killing while slipping into the ranks of the Suzaku Seishi? He's capable of killing human beings in defense of those he loves. He kills several Kutou flunkie assassins when they tried to kill Miaka, and did he so much as bat an eyelash? No. He understood what he was doing and he did it with a clear mind. He and his brother are two sides of the same coin, essentially a single mind working in two different bodies under two different circumstances. That may seem like a broad statement, but when Suboshi died, Amiboshi observed that it felt as though the half of him that was lost had returned to his body.

None of the above should to taken to mean that I condone Suboshi's (or Amiboshi's) actions. As a general rule, killing people isn't a nice thing to do. Killing invalids and children tends to be especially frowned upon. There is no excusing the inexcusable, but there is some understanding that ought to be granted at times. But at the moment before Suboshi's death, what did he see? Apparitions of Tamahome's dead family, or manifestations of his guilt? Tamahome and one of his younger brothers are almost identical in appearance. Seeing Tamahome at his last moments must has been like looking at his brother. And there may have been something in Suboshi that took him back to that moment -- back to the fear and boldness in the child's eyes -- and that something could have been his guilt over the murder of an entire family to atone for the death of his brother.

And now we get to the attempted rape from the later episodes. This, too, falls in with the philosophpy of "an eye for an eye." Hammurabi's Law states that if a man pokes out one man's eye, the man who committed the assault should lose his own eye. There are holes in the law, such as rich men being able to buy their way out of punishment, but that's not the point. Actually, it's just stupid trivia... The point is that many people believe this, though often they will not admit it. If a father's daughter is molested, a part of him will usually wish that the molester would know the pain of being unable to save his daughter from the pain and humiliation she went through. That doesn't mean he would want the molester's own daughter, assuming he has one, to suffer that way, but the vulnerability and insecurity is something he could very well want the other man to see from a crystal-clear point of view so that he could grasp how badly he had damaged the victim and her family.

Relating this to Suboshi's attack on Miaka, he was under the impression that Yui had been raped because Miaka ignored Yui's pleas for her to help her the way she had helped Miaka. Suboshi wanted Miaka to experience those emotions that were clouding Yui's mind. Rape is a way to destroy a person without killing her, and as much as Yui talked about wanting to see Miaka pay for her ignorance and abandonment, Suboshi felt he was only doing what his beloved Yui would have wanted. Had Yui been present, I don't hesitate to say that she would have been appalled at Suboshi the same way she was appalled when Tamahome crushed Miaka's arm. Beneath all her jealousy and rancor, Yui still loved Miaka as the friend she'd known for most of her life. But Suboshi didn't understand that because he had never heard anything of it. He only knew one side of the story, that which stated that Miaka was the cause of all Yui's and his pain. So he wanted revenge. But good ole Tamahome showed up and started slapping Suboshi around again (or trying to, at any rate), so nothing happened. The intention was still there, but there was a part of Suboshi that felt he was doing the justifiable, right thing. He was doing it for Yui because he loved her, just like Amiboshi killed the Kutou assassins because he wanted to protect someone.

The above can be viewed from yet another perspective, too. Suboshi is neurotically fixated with punishment. Maybe because he was not punished as a child. Note that in almost any image showing the two together, it is Suboshi and not Amiboshi who is hugging his brother. He shows a great deal more affection than an "evil" character would, and he showers it upon those he cares for. The fact that he spent several years being raised by his brother may account for some of this. He had no adult rolemodel during several of his formative years, and so he spent them with a brother of the exact same age and similar interests, tendencies, et cetera. There were probably very few rules, if any, and so Suboshi developed an obsession with the concept of justice. His idea of justice is not a typical idea of justice because he does not know what justice is; he just thinks he does. His justice is a very harsh, sadistic sort, perhaps stemming from a feeling that he was partially responsible for the death of his parents.

Many children feel aliented and disoriented when this happens, along with the natural grief they encounter. Suboshi, though, had an identical twin brother to whom he could cling and look for reassurance when things went wrong. Rather than a slap in the face or a reprimand when he did something he should not, Suboshi probably received a carefully worded "it wasn't your fault" lecture from his brother, if anything at all. All they had was each other, and soon Suboshi became so dependant on his brother (theoretically and somewhat factually) that living without him meant that his whole family - mother, father, and brother rolled in to one - would be stolen from him. That demands penalties, the sort with which Suboshi had very little experience. So he subscribed to an ancient formula practiced by many even today: An eye for an eye. Discipline was not a part of his life for several years, so his system of such was bizarre, at best. At worst, it was cruel. But did he even realize how cruel it was? Or was he so used to the comfort from his brother to whom he clinged so desperately that any notion of cruelty was utterly askew? You have to wonder what he thought he would accomplish by killing Tamahome's family. On the one hand, he obviously wanted to use the "eye for an eye" method, but on the other hand killing off Tamahome's family may have seemed like the only sort of punishment Suboshi could comprehend because it was the only kind he remembered. If he knew how twisted this was, he didn't show it, at least not until the end. By then it was too late and his repentence was wasted.

But as we already know, nobody's perfect.