Ananta

A Guide To: Ending 5 Amiya

Like so many people have convinced themselves Kinoko Nasu somehow hates powerscaling and the hyper-nuanced and variable nature of Type-Moon fights exists to make fun of people interested in it and meanwhile he spent decades writing thousands of words about his power systems and how different characters would interact in a fight and is always clear about whether someone is supposed to be a Crazy Strong Guy Who Can't Normally Be Defeated and makes super elaborated powers all the time. When he makes a stronger character lose he goes out of his way to come up with in-story justifications to why that happened or why they have that kind of compatibility. In FGO you literally see him having so much fun with the whole power escalation thing even when it's literally not needed; hell, he goes on about it even in his supposedly calmer and more down-to-earth works like Mahoyo. When he makes Gilgamesh lose despite building him up as the strongest servant it's not because he's making fun of the idea of making characters fight altogether but because he agrees that it's cooler if the underdog wins after you've established the power difference; it wouldn't hit as hard if there wasn't an entire framework telling you who would normally be expected to win that fight. He knows that when battle shonen characters defeat their opponents because of their superior determination or the power of friendship or whatever that shit only works because they're overcoming a supposedly quantifiably stronger opponent thanks to it and went out of his way to maximize that sensation at all times.

I love that post about how powerscalers would react to the tortoise beating the hare so much because not only it shows what's wrong with the way so many of them tend to reason (complete inability to contextualize, excess of categorization, taking outliers as the baseline, unwillingness to discuss nuance in any way, completely ignoring the narrative in favor of an out of context result) but it's also a pretty good metaphor for me to voice my criticism towards people on tumblr who overcorrect too much in the other direction ("the winner is whoever the author wants to win" "none of it matters in the slightest because every fight is actually decided by what would make the most thematic sense" "it's impossible to discuss Fate matchups because anyone can beat anyone there so it's all bullshit" "if whoever wrote the story thinks that Goku needs to lose against the kid from Home Alone then that's what will happen" takes).