Fate/Grand Order's Final Chapter Spoilers
Obviously this finale and as a whole Cosmos in the Lostbelt's meta-narrative exploration of the idea of stories and how they affect us are going to hit the hardest for whoever kept playing the game and remained fully invested in its narrative until the end; things like Sion basically inserting herself into FGO out of a desire to help these 'characters', Olga watching the whole story and how that encouraged her to keep fighting her own battle, Mash & the others having to face the end of their adventure and close the game with their own hands no matter how much they wanted it to continue and Daybit taking all the good memories he can with him before the end are going to be more resonant the longer you have been attached to the game, but as someone who effectively dropped FGO years ago and only came back for the finale, what hit me the most was the fate of the Lostbelt characters during the raids.
Their stories already ended long before that of Chaldea; for them, this was just experiencing the game one last time, their last rebellion to the world, all while knowing that victory will mean deleting everything: their lingering presence as servants, every trace of their existence, every possibility of them still appearing through events and so on. Until now the idea that let us and them cope with these bad ends was that even if their worlds ended we would still be carrying the memory they existed, shouldering it all ourselves, but if Ritsuka is letting go of that weight and these memories are going to disappear, then what was the point? They existed and died virtually for nothing. The Lostbelts never mattered. This is a resolution that might feel unsatisfactory, but from a meta-narrative standpoint, looking at the Lostbelts as stories you have read more than parallel universes, stories that were allowed to become concrete and touch you even if just for a fleeting moment, the game argues that the mere fact they existed and we've read them is important - even if they're forgotten. There's plenty of stories I have read as a kid or as a teen that meant the world to me at the time or that affected me in some way, and even if my tastes changed and I stopped thinking about them or grew to dislike them or even straight up forgot everything about them, they still shaped my tastes and acted as building blocks for the person am I today. I probably don't remember a good part of the experiences that made me who I am, and yet I wouldn't be the person I currently am without those, even if they're no longer relevant and no longer reflect me.
I had already put most of FGO behind me these last few years; it was already becoming something of the past, I was already becoming a different person compared to who I was at the time, hell, it even stopped being my favorite gacha game. I wasn't invested in it enough anymore to be the main target for Mash and Ritsuka's finale. And yet, just by virtue of being a story that accompanied me for years, that managed to touch and influence me, it still became a part of my identity and is the reason my tastes are what they are now, and that's why closing the Lostbelts like that worked so well on me. Even if many years from now I became someone who stopped caring about FGO completely like what happened to some other things I'd been insane about once, it still will have shaped me in some form. I could magically forget I was ever influenced by it tomorrow, I could start hating it more than anything, I could simply stop caring, but that influence wouldn't disappear; the fact that it happened, that these stories existed and I loved them, would remain. Despite everything, the Lostbelts mattered, even if their existence was ephemeral.
Fittingly, as LB6 is the one story that accompanied me the most no matter how much I tried to leave Grand Order behind, Morgan had the perfect goodbye to close this whole rambling.
