Fate Stay/Night and Disempowerment Fantasies

 A million years ago, in the early 2000s, just a few years when skeptical reviewers were amazed Perfect Blue didn't have tentacles, when hentai was much more synonymous with anime than shonen, scifi anime had a larger presence. But as Susan Napier wrote in her Anime book, a lot of it was fueled by bubble era and post bubble era pessimism. A lot of dystopia. The technology was there but the bright Astro Boy future was not. Films like Akira, Evangelion, films like Princess Mononoke and even hentai like Urotsukidoji basically showed heroes not coming to save the day, or failing when they did. Does anyone remember the Rintaro X film that ended with the villains defeated but absolutely everything lost in the process?

In my Jujutsu Kaisen writeups I touched on that I love this kind of disempowerment fantasy. It's all great when everything ends happily but sometimes I want a piece of media that shows other people dealing with failure. There's a comfort to that, over the falsely tidy way Disney villains always fall off a cliff, murdered in a way that's technically gravity's fault, tying up every lose end and making everyone happy.

And Fate Stay/Night is very explicitly all about that, coming I guess at the very end of the 1990s and inspired by Evangelion and Utena more than the Isekai power fantasies where you're reborn with a cheat code.

I never really paid much attention to TYPE MOON stuff, and I don't remember entirely why. A lot of it is probably simply because things weren't available. I also recall being interested in the Tsukihime anime but was told it was bad and worse than the visual novel, and "visual novel" sure was a warning sign. I do recall "visual novel" being considered some prestigious euphemism for "dating sim" and such dating sim anime were always been trashed. So when a dating sim history pokemon like Fate Stay/Night appeared with it's incomprehensible name and weird fans it seemed easy to dismiss. Seeing "people die when they are killed" memes I thought were making fun of Shirou's pathetic character writing instead of translation errors, so sometimes you don't pay attention to a thing for 25 years.

In the wake of Madoka Magica, I did watch Fate Zero which I liked, and clearly this is because Urobuchi was a great writer and could take some silly dating sim and actually put in adult characters and themes, so I viewed that as an exception, even though I would find most of the ideas from that in Fate Stay/Night as well.

So I will try to break down my thoughts on the routes as follows.

Fate

This is the shortest route with I think the most traditional story. The mysterious identity of Saber is pretty much common knowledge at this point, as is the fact that Kirei Kotomine is a priest you can't trust. Gilgamesh's desire for saber and the big reveal about Excalibur's sheath are all good writing but the real meat here is basically setting up all the lore and rules for the other arcs to do more interesting things with. This arc even has a Valentine's Day date with Saber so it's definitely kind of the most low key.

The Grail War I think is a great idea, and not just because History Pokemon makes a lot of money. You can get a lot of archetype thematics out of it in your story, and a bunch of old rich corrupt wizards summoning Alexander the Great and Gilgamesh to fight each other definitely feels like something people would do. There's clearly a big D&D nerd game going on here but unlike something like Quidditch which is a waste of time, it's thematically relevant and builds the kind of self important people mages are. Once the rules are set up they can also be subverted in interesting ways to draw further commentary from it.

A big thing that turns me off a lot of media is how they deal with the wish granting macguffin. The Holy Grail can grant any wish, but of course that can't actually happen. The story can't go back and rewrite the story of King Arthur. But the justification for why, the kind of pop theodicy of why the good things can't happen is often frustrating for me. (Or you can make like Abenobashi Shopping Arcade and grant the wish and you realize how unsatisfying that actually is when a happy ending is cheated.) Will it be a technicality? Oops, Saber had to wish to resurrect Shirou so she doesn't have another wish! Maybe next time. Or does she learn some trite lesson like "without sadness you wouldn't appreciate the happy times?" I dunno I'd like happy times even if I don't appreciate them.

But no, the "grail is a lie and is also corrupted" feels like good old post bubble cynicism giving a realistic answer to why this can't work, and that's nice. If you're going to stand on the stage talking philosophy and ethics of heroism and deliver some corny "life also needs to have hard times" platitude it feels fake. You've introduced a magical item that can apparently grant any wish except oops not that.

Anyway, that does not happen, and I am glad. Also this is the arc with the most Fujinee so Fate also gets points for that.

Unlimited Blade Works

So after I remembered Gilgamesh had the infinite swords power at the end of Fate I thought, wait... Why isn't that Unlimited Blade Works? But Nasu was already far ahead of me.

I recall hearing that this was the most popular arc of Fate Stay/Night and that tracks considering it has somewhat of a happyish ending? The reveal of Archer's identity was spoiled for me when the anime came out so I knew that going in. In some ways I feel this is also just setup for the superior Heaven's Feel, but it layers on more complexities.

The contrast between Lancer's living by intuition alone and Shirou's more analytical ethics reminded me of the bicameral mind theory of Julian Jaynes whereas heroes from old myth don't seem to have much interiority, they just act as commanded by gods or their pride, and it's such a striking contrast to me.

I also appreciated the bizarre, largely unexplained relationship between Caster and her master which made intuitive sense even though the teacher's thoughts are basically never explained. He is a complete blank slate and honestly that is the right choice.

I also appreciated the ambiguity of it all. Sure Shirou doesn't give up and all but Archer's warning is still a valid one. All of the bad stuff can still happen, the self defeating nature of it all. It could have tied a much prettier bow on it all and it refused to. That's great. Ambiguity is always the best!

Also this arc also reveals how Jujutsu Kaisen is absolutely pulling a lot from Fate. Many of the things I liked there were absolutely here first. The sex scene replacement here was also a pretty convincing rendering of a hallucinogenic trip, with the sea imagery and all.

Heaven's Feel

I knew about the worms from Fate Zero but I knew the least about this arc, except it was reputed to be the best but less popular than UBW which definitely makes sense. Here the disempowerment fantasy is in full bloom with much less combat due to the early loss of Saber. So much heroic media imagines it's all going down with a bunch of punching and kicking although the arc does end that way, it's also just a lot of uncomfortable conversations with abusers who you cannot just punch in the fucking face, no matter how much you want to.

The "so you wanted to be a hero, but here is actually an evil that has been going on under your nose, and you're actually going to have to handle it like a real world problem" is excruciating, as it tracks with real life experience. Here the action sequences and worm horror are reliefs from the oppressive domestic scenes with it's uncomfortable silences.

Ilya is also a very good character, an authentic feeling homunculus murder child, a thing that would never exist but still feels real in this context.

Kirei Kotomine is a great villain, a guy who brags about how much he loves seeing people suffer but is never actually happy when people do, so it reads as the old "haha, the joke's on you. I actually LOVE suffering" meme. His feeling out of step and unsureness about morality is much more relatable to me now. Shirou was definitely me at that age but reading his optimism and naivete is very obnoxious, even though I know it, especially because I know it. The Shirou/Kotomine relationship shows just how pathetic the phony villainy of Snape was, where the mutual loathing between Shirou and Kotomine is earnest and true.

The nameless assassin and the big bad being revealed as a scapegoat archetype were great, and showed Nasu did his anthropology research. The idea of a scapegoat as a kind of hero, and of the whole hero system being twisted around that worked very well to invent a Big Bad, which is where the series could have easily dropped the ball. The story's scapegoat having a hero of the most powerful Scapegoat of them all, her Beetlejuice dress, how damn nasty Rin was in their showdown, all very good stuff.

The magical crystal sword and it's crossdimensional power definitely would have been awesome 20 years ago but so much multiverse shit has happened in the interim that it didn't do much for me. Same as the final fistfight between Shirou and Kotomine. The action scenes were always the slowest parts of this, as it always drags out the plot developments, although compared to so many other VNs, Fate is very tightly written.

In Conclusion 

Fate Stay/Night was good, and actually set up everything I liked in Zero. The name even makes much more sense how since the game is basically a big sleepover where you sneak out at night to do fighting and murders. Action was slow, but the comedy was either actually funny or knew when to just stop and move on. This seems like a good place for people to start with visual novels since it's well paced and not too meta, and now actually available.

So it's actually good, and all of the memes were wrong.