#caenis fate

Caeneus and Caenis

Left - FGO

Right - Attic black-figure lekythos, 520–510 BC.

Left - FGO

“The lady Heroic Spirits sure are makin’ themselves busy today, yeah?”

“So what’re you doing here immersed in the simulator?”

“Get your ass back out there. You womanizing bastard.”

“Well, maybe you’re not a bastard. But you seem to be pretty popular.”

“Well, I’m in a similar boat, actually. I’m not gonna tell you to shut it.”

“Is it because there are so many people here who don’t care about looks?”

“Ever since I got this form, both men and women have been hounding me.”

“Honestly! It was so annoying!”

I mean there are a lot of good bits (like him complaining that his Summer Form is too sexy, and so he ran into the simulator because both men and women were trying to romance him for Valentine’s and he got annoyed), but there’s a specific, kind of plot-relevant bit that I like.

Furing his Valentine’s scene he compares his new ‘life’- all the new friends that he’s making, and all of the connections that he’s rebuilding with the Argonauts, to “anoyo” (あの世) or basically “Heaven” or the “other world”.

Before taking a moment to look at Ritsuka and going “Oh, that’s right. You’re here.”- while he was sort of smiling passively throughout his discussion, this is where his expression turns serious. And after Ritsuka replies like “As in, I’m what?”, Caenis shoots back- “You’re you”.

And basically points out that while Ritsuka’s here- while Chaldea’s here, after fighting ‘that person’ (Wodime) and pushing forward, there’s no way this can be ‘Heaven’. It’ll always be humanity struggling to survive. And he’s not mad about it- he basically tells Ritsuka to perk up afterwards and says ‘It’s not like this is a surprise. We knew this wasn’t Heaven to begin with’.

And then finishes by going “Right, this isn’t Heaven yet.”

Which is such a good line coming from Caenis, because at that point he’s essentially speaking as a Servant of both Ritsuka and Wodime. They both dreamed of a better world for humanity, and while Ritsuka is essentially trying to save the world and return it to normal, and Wodime was literally trying to create a ‘heaven’, both Wodime and the protagonist want to see the struggles of humanity lessened. 

He’s still carrying that dream and that duty that Wodime passed on to both him and Ritsuka at the end of Olympus, which isn’t a detail I was expecting from a Summer Variant of a Servant.