#fsn analysis

Emiya Shirou is the beating heart of Fate/Stay Night. Every character radiates outwards from Shirou, shapes and is shaped by him. He fights against foils like Archer and Kirei while growing alongside the three main heroines in each route.

There's really only one character who precedes Shirou in influence, who shapes him near-completely but cannot himself be shaped.

Emiya Kiritsugu is already dead, after all.

It's his legacy that drives the novel - but something oft-undiscussed is that Shirou only has half of it. He inherits his father’s justice, and the one that inherits his ruthlessness is Illya. Thus, Illya’s relationship to Shirou is dictated from the start.

She is everything his father left behind, the first gatekeeper of the moonlit world of death and magecraft that Shirou now finds himself in. In this role she transcends routes, appearing at the end of the third day to deliver a near-lethal attack just as the story branches off.

She seems intent to deliver Kiritsugu’s baggage to Shirou, to make him reckon with the past that he himself never experienced; the truth that a hero can only help those he sides with while many others are left alone in the cold.

In this way her very existence is a far more fundamental challenge to Shirou’s ideals than that of any other character - and yet this challenge is met only indirectly. Much of the information regarding her true identity and relationship to Shirou is elided until the end of HF.

She functions similarly to Sakura, a character who totally changes the reader’s perception of the first two routes in retrospect. The reveals about Illya force us to reevaluate how positive her ending in the Fate route really is.

In the narrative of Heaven’s Feel, both Illya and Sakura are considered ‘doomed’ - able to be saved only by Shirou sacrificing his own life to Archer’s arm.

It’s the crux of their characterisation, in the same way that Saber’s pursuit of the Holy Grail leads her into timeless and uncountable doomed battles. In a route based around that character, you would expect fixing it to be the main thrust of the plot.

And so just as the Fate route is focused on Shirou clashing with Saber over her lack of regard for her safety, and Heaven’s Feel is focused on accepting even the ‘impure’ parts of Sakura, there is no route focused on showing Illya that she needn't give up on having a normal life.

Instead all of her scenes in Heaven’s Feel are about accepting that she cannot have one.

This is the hole in the center of FSN that I’m talking about. Its absence is felt keenly throughout the novel, because Illya has another role besides a specter of Shirou's past. She embodies the prize and object of the Holy Grail War itself - the very same wish-granting device.

Many of the characters in this story are not fighting for the Grail specifically, but nonetheless their strong personalities and desires cause them to clash with one another, in a process Kirei sees as comparable to everyday life.

Their wishes, both in the form of the dead’s regrets and victor’s will, enter the neutral, empty Grail in order to produce a miracle. The only one not allowed a will of their own is the vessel of the Grail, who, in absorbing these desires, must completely erase their humanity.

Illya is not intended to have a reason to pursue the Grail, nor any life beyond obtaining it. The war is premised on the sacrifice of the Servants, yes, but nonetheless they enter as contestants. Illya, like Justeaze before her, enters the ritual only as a sacrifice.

And yet an outside element is introduced. Illya being part-human, the product of an actual family rather than just a clone allows for her to have personal motivations. She holds on to her resentment of Kiritsugu, despite knowing that it’s pointless, because it’s all she has left.

A parallel can be made to the Grail itself. Supposedly a pure wish-granting device, it becomes corrupted through the influence of Angra Mainyu, one small, perverse wish colouring the whole thing black.

The desired salvation of the Einzberns, their thousand-year project relies on being able to reproduce the miracle, to understand every component part of their attempts in order to draw ever closer to the Third Magic, but Illya is a random factor, born to a human parent.

She’s also their greatest creation since Justeaze. Miracles, after all, exist because they are not understood.

The corruption of the Grail with the darkest desires of the world is just the inevitable result of any wish - the price of becoming a human instead of existing as a machine. Live long enough and anyone would turn into Zouken, higher goals suborned by a base desire to escape pain.

Like Illya the Grail is a failed project, a tool that can only provide salvation of a limited nature & only fulfill its purpose incompletely, proof positive that true perfection does not exist in the world of Fate/Stay Night.

In Illya’s case the bug in her programming comes fundamentally from a desire for family, for someone to be close to her. Despite her dysfunctional initial approaches she’s perfectly capable of living normally alongside Shirou.

The issue, then, is the Grail War itself.

Her two sides, two different origins, come into conflict here, and her role as the Holy Grail consistently wins. Not because she desires it in any real sense, but because she doesn’t believe that she can do anything else.

Consider how the Fate route ends with Saber and Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting both the negative and positive aspects of the past without dwelling on that which cannot be changed.

Consider how Illya in the Fate route doesn’t say a single thing about her condition, refuses to burden others with that knowledge, accepting the fact of her death and instead choosing to live in the moment.

Consider how the Unlimited Blade Works route is about Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting that he will not always succeed, that his self-sacrificing nature will hurt him, but nonetheless his pursuit of that goal is worthwhile.

Consider how Illya’s death is used to illustrate this, how she cannot be saved regardless of whether Shirou makes the choice to intervene or not, how his sorrow is used as proof of his brokenness and his ability to move forward regardless is used as proof of his strength.

Consider why the Heaven's Feel route is named after the ritual that materializes the soul, why this is identified with salvation and rebirth by the Einzberns. I would argue that the Third Magic is a metaphor for the process Shirou undergoes throughout the novel.

He evolves from a machine into a human, gaining his own desires and the will to live. And just as Heaven’s Feel, the ritual, requires a sacrifice: Justeaze’s blood forms the foundation, so too does Heaven’s Feel, the route: Illya spends her own life to fully realize Shirou’s.

In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past his belief that his life is worth less than others. He wants to live, wants to let Illya save him, wants to let her sacrifice herself for him. In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past Illya.

I don’t blame him. I just want to emphasize how significant to this novel the existence of suffering is, how important the figure of someone who cannot be saved, how necessary a single person’s sacrifice. And how this falls on Illya in every route.

In the latter parts of the Fate route she quickly disappears from story relevance. Her functions as a Grail offer a convenient excuse to have her sleeping for much of the day, as it does for Kirei’s kidnapping of her, stringing her up as a sacrifice to open the gate.

In UBW we have Gilgamesh brutally ripping out her heart. He values her purely for her core, which holds the Grail, tossing aside the rest of her body.

If her role as the Grail is what drives her doom, though, she is at least partially able to overcome this at the end of Heaven’s Feel.

For a brief moment, Illya escapes the bonds of fate by uniting her deeply personal wish with the impersonal functions of the Grail.

She also dies. She fucking dies, okay? I’m so tired of talking about this as though it’s supposed to be a good thing, as though we’re just supposed to accept it as the best possible option.

It works precisely because we know there is another, because we know for a fucking fact that an Illya route could have existed, that her salvation is possible not just from a meta perspective but directly implied in-universe.

Illya’s power is to grant wishes, but she is incapable of giving voice to her own. She needs someone there by her side to tell her that it’s okay to want to live, and yet- Shirou is so fucking broken that he needs her to do that for him instead.

Illya could have lived, but she doesn’t, and in not doing so she carries half the weight of this story’s tragedy on her back.

In a way this is an excuse for the lack of an Illya route. I really do think its blatant absence adds something to Fate/Stay Night, really sells the tragedy of HF, becomes even more beautiful precisely because of its unattainability.

It’s a comment on how the artistic process, materializing your soul on paper if you will, is an inherently restrictive one, rife with failure and things left on the chopping board.

But it does not, not for a second, mean that we should accept the lack of an Illya route. It doesn’t mean the desire for it is a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that its addition would make Fate/Stay Night worse.

It would, however, become a different game at that point, and here I want to pay respect to the one that has lived alongside me for twenty years.

Here’s the meme in question. The phrases chosen in each case do bear some superficial similarity to the events of each route, so I won’t fault anyone for just sharing it for the funny, but if you think about it for 5 seconds the whole thing collapses.

For starters, why are the routes backwards? If anything, Saber’s route establishes a dynamic of Shirou trying to ‘fix’ heroines, which is then subverted in UBW (note the parallel date scenes).

But I don’t think ‘fix’ is the correct term in the first place. I would say the shared theme of all FSN’s routes is that Shirou gains self-worth through his attempts to save each girl.  

We can see this in the Fate route, where Shirou ends up proud of himself for having loved Saber. He is grateful for the emptiness in his heart that allows him to so easily devote himself to other people, because he wants to devote himself to her.

The hole inside of him is filled by a real, actual person, rather than simply a vague ideal from Kiritsugu. It’s something that he can be happy about, rather than something he bears out of self-castigation and to escape from his past.

Much has been made of their mutual recognition of their own flaws in each other – the way they really do attempt to fix each other - but it should be noted that this is not ultimately successful. Saber is, in some sense, saved in the basement scene, but not from the path of kingship. Shirou can’t give her a life as an ordinary girl because he recognises that the thing about her he finds the most beautiful is that very self-sacrificial and uncompromising nature.

They recognise their own flaws in each other, but, just as importantly, they realise their own virtues in each other. Saber sees in Shirou the way she was when she had just pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou sees in Saber the end of a life pursuing the same unreachable dream – and finds it dazzling.

The implication of Last Episode is that Shirou never stops trying to be a hero, never settles down to a normal life, never gives up on his dream – because his dream is embodied in Artoria herself. She disappears, at the end of the Fate route, but her effect on him remains forever.

I cannot possibly call this a healthy relationship. They did not fix each other, they just realised they were broken in exactly the right ways to slot together.

Saber is a sword, and she perfectly slides into Shirou, her sheath. You could argue they suit each other the best of all three pairs.

But this site is already full of Saberheads, and honestly that part of the meme is the least inaccurate, so let me get into the juicier bit.

Now, Rin tries to fix Shirou in Unlimited Blade Works, she absolutely does. She takes a very proactive approach to it – but what are the results? Shirou still commits to his path of becoming a hero of justice. He says he’ll repeat Archer’s actions despite knowing the result. He says he won’t regret it, and perhaps not, but the habit of self-sacrifice hasn’t disappeared. What he gains from Rin is, again, a sense of self-worth to go along with it.

One of the best scenes in UBW takes place right after Illya’s death. Rin questions what the fuck is wrong with Shirou, jumping in to try and save her like that. Did Kiritsugu do something to him when he was rescued from the fire? Why is his brain so broken?

Shirou has been wondering about a similar thing himself. He’s always had a vague sense of uncertainty about his ideals of heroism. It’s why Archer’s presence bugs him so much, why he can’t provide a convincing counterargument to anything the man says.

But Rin here, seriously worried about him, has provided the answer. It’s because the people who care about him would be sad if he was hurt. His life actually has some value.

And recognising that, he says, ‘Sorry, Tohsaka,” and continues down the same path.

Tohsaka Rin is always a struggle to talk about, because you can quite easily see her as either a victim of patriarchy with severe emotional repression issues, or a Strong Independent Woman who can handle most problems on her own.

Both can be true, of course, but I’d argue that if you look at the VN as a whole (specifically Heaven’s Feel), the latter is deliberately shown to be a façade she has been putting on for so long that she’s forgotten how to take it off. It’s why Sakura at times finds her so unsympathetic and why it’s so vitally important for her to try and sympathise anyway. They both suffered terribly as a result of Tokiomi’s decisions – Sakura perhaps more so, but Rin still had her entire family taken from her as a young child.

But in any case, reading UBW in this light makes it clear that she really does need Shirou, perhaps as much as he needs her. When he describes her as the kind of person who always gets back up and gets even with her enemies, that’s what gives her the motivation to do precisely that.

To her, Shirou is a strange and intriguing person, capable of sticking with tasks that he knows are impossible. She admires that quality, and we notice her developing it herself throughout UBW as she follows Shirou’s example to continue fighting as a Master despite losing her Servant.

Rin and Shirou end up having significant mutual influence on each other, without changing the core of who they are as characters. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the end of UBW, where they are faced by simultaneous dilemmas. Rin chooses to try and save Shinji from the Grail, despite knowing her chances of success are very low, while Shirou chooses to stand his ground and not fling himself into the abyss with Gil.

In this way, Rin displays in part Shirou’s self-sacrificing nature and pursuit of impossible odds, while Shirou must avoid throwing his life away at the first opportunity and choose to live for the sake of potentially reuniting with Rin and his other family.

Archer is the one that bails them out in the end, the best and worst of them both.

Shirou and Rin’s dynamic is an interplay between selflessness and selfishness. They leave a drop of each in the other like Yin and Yang, the twin swords Kanshou and Bakuya.

You could argue that they balance each other out the best of all three pairs.

And finally, some brief commentary on Sakura. She’s put first in this stupid meme, treated as the most obvious and easy to understand of the heroines, ascribed the least agency with regards her relationship with Shirou. She was broken, and then he fixed her. The end.

The thing is, this interpretation isn’t entirely wrong. Sakura is a very passive character (we see what it looks like when she finally takes action in HF. It isn’t pretty and she knows this.)

Shirou is driven by Sakura, his actions all revolve around protecting Sakura, but what does Sakura herself actually do?

I would posit that this is a coward’s question. Sakura doesn’t need to do any more than she already does in order to spur Shirou to protect her. Heaven’s Feel is about Shirou realising what Sakura has already been doing for him, what Sakura already means to him, the implications of what Sakura has been dealing with this whole time. We’ve had two whole routes to get used to her and now the rug’s come from under us!

I think you can critique Sakura’s lack of agency in her own route, but what I want to point out is that she nonetheless has the greatest impact on Shirou of any of the heroines.

Because, and this is really the worst oversight in that whole meme, Shirou gets fixed in HF far more substantially than the prior two routes. Gaining self-worth through saving others, remember? FSN is a cumulative experience, we learn more about Emiya Shirou with each route, and this is the one that we learn his ideal has been a lot simpler than he thought this whole time. He simply wants to protect the people close to him.

His love for Sakura and, importantly, her love for him, is what gives him the desire to live. He realises that his life has value because she cares about him, and if he wants to save her, he needs to save himself too.

Fate/Stay Night is the story of Shirou, a sword, learning to become a human. You could argue that Sakura helps him accomplish this the best out of all three pairs.

Illya, of course! And then the bastards cut her scenes from the HF movies as well.

Okay, but seriously, I want to talk about Gilgamesh. Now you might be thinking, Gilgamesh? What’s wrong with Gilgamesh? People liked Gil in Zero. Well, so did I, but reading the Fate route again, there are some interesting differences. I think examining his introductory scenes in both Zero and Fate makes this clear.

Brief recap for those who don’t remember: In Fate he appears near the end of the route, where he slaughters Caster and establishes himself as the final boss. In Zero he appears near the start of the story, where he slaughters Assassin (well, one of them), and establishes himself as a threat.

These scenes are remarkably similar; I wouldn’t be surprised if Urobuchi’s was an intentional homage (Zero does this a lot, compare the role that Lancer plays as Saber’s initial opponent in both).

The two key components here are that Gil is standing at a position higher than his opponent in order to display his superiority, and that his opponent gets utterly destroyed with no chance of fighting back.

That’s rare in any Fate fight scene, but it serves to establish that if Gil wants you dead, you’re dead. It’s a simple but effective formula, especially paired with his striking character design and Seki Tomokazu’s excellent voice acting.

There are two key differences, though. Firstly, Urobuchi is kind of cheating: Assassin is, by design, expendable. It’s only impressive that Gil dispatches him so quickly until you realise that he’s one of a hundred different Assassins. This was even a trick in-story, the plot concocted by Kirei and Tokiomi to conceal that Assassin is still alive.

Caster, on the other hand, is not expendable. She’s an important character who serves as a midboss in UBW and seems poised to serve the same role in Fate before Gil arrives. She’s in the middle of a tense fight scene with Saber and Shirou and is hinting at the hidden capabilities of her Noble Phantasm and everything! This, to be fair, is something that Nasu can only get away with due to the medium – in a visual novel, you can have the impact of a sudden subversion of expectation in one route while playing it straight in another, ensuring you don’t waste any setup or make readers feel cheated.

The second difference, and I think the more important one, is how we’re supposed to react to the scene as audiences. Zero’s version seems solely oriented around showing off how cool Gil is; Assassin gets about as much characterization as a plank of wood, meaning that the audience, as dispassionate spectators, are much closer to Gil’s point of view than anything.

FSN’s version, on the other hand, has a point-of-view character! And if there’s anything we know about Emiya Shirou by this point, it’s that he’s not a big fan of seeing women getting hurt.

As a result, it’s very easy for us to mentally reframe the scene as a person seeing another person getting brutally murdered. And it is brutal. Caster screams in agony as she desperately tries to escape, in contrast to Assassin who simply accepts his fate. The whole scene is dyed blood-red as she is repeatedly skewered by a barrage of Gil’s Noble Phantasms.

Gil isn’t just portrayed as impressive and powerful in this scene, he’s also cruel and awful. And that’s my first point:

1: Golden Man Bad

Gilgamesh is a surprisingly offputting individual.

From his voice (Shirou describes his laugh as ‘irritating’), to his mannerisms (remember the way he blocks Saber’s blows by just covering his head with his hands?), to his unbelievably weird facial expressions, he’s the epitome of an unlikeable villain.

In Zero, we see Gil at his best: sexy, dominating and intelligent. He’s still not a very nice guy, but his bursts of anger all fall on characters we aren’t particularly sympathetic to. In FSN his casual cruelty is made more apparent and more objectionable. (Need I remind the reader of what he does to Illya in UBW?)

In Zero Gil’s constant boasting asserts his confidence and power; in FSN it just makes him kind of seem like a douchebag.

The core qualities that people like about Gil, and make him a cool character to watch, are still there in Fate, but they’re tempered by a lot of reasons to not like him, which barely show up in Zero.

Basically, in FSN Gil seems to have been conceived as the type of villain you love to hate, while in Zero he leans way into the role of a villain you love to love. The subject of how he's portrayed in FGO, CCC or Strange Fake is beyond the bounds of this post to address, but I do think the popularity of his appearance in Zero had some influence there.

2: Sexism

Strictly speaking it’s a subset of the above point as it’s a big part of what makes him so unlikeable, but I think it’s interesting enough to deserve its own discussion, considering it’s much more noticeable here than in other entries.

Just a quick reminder of some of his greatest hits:

The fact that Gil is objectifying Saber specifically because of her gender is obvious, and interestingly enough Shirou is the one who pushes back against it. There’s a real comparison to be made between the two insofar as they are both trying to win her over in the latter stages of the story.

Gil ascribes to a similar perspective to Saber when it comes to the roles people should play. He just thinks that Saber should abandon her role of king in favour of the role of woman, which in Gil’s view is characterized by a set of obligations that include marrying a man and basically becoming his slave.

On the other hand, Shirou is strongly opposed to denying people’s humanity based on arbitrary categories. That’s why, in the early parts of the route, he . . . repeatedly emphasizes the fact that she’s a girl? It probably sounded better in Nasu’s head.

Regardless, the point is that Shirou sees Saber as a human, while Gil sees her as an object. So, there you have it. Emiya Shirou, ally of social justice.

Now, I don’t think Zero is necessarily a worse portrayal of Gil than Fate. In many ways it’s more interesting, and in fact, I think they’re complimentary. Which nicely leads into my last point (wow, it’s almost like I planned the structure of this post before I wrote it):

3: His defeat

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of an anime-only fan who has started with Zero, just about to watch UBW (yeah, I know, ew).

The main takeaway from Zero seems to be that the bad guys always win. People who pursue their dreams are idiots who will inevitably fail, even if their dreams are really cool (looking at you, Iskandar). A thorough victory for Gil’s ideology of self-centeredness, and a large factor seems to be that he doesn’t care - from his perspective, he already won like three thousand years ago!

So, going into UBW, the characters that we’re attached to, whose stories we really want to see the end of, are Gil and Kirei. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we want them to win – we’d be fine with them losing, just so long as they do something.

And then Gil gets shot in the head and swallowed by a black hole. Shirou wins, but it’s hard to say that Gil loses. After all, Shirou’s whole deal is that he doesn’t need external enemies – the one he must fight is his own image (UBW takes this line very literally). All well and good for the Shirou fans – i.e. the people who began the story at the correct point – but those excited for what they were expecting to be a culmination of Gil’s character arc might understandably be a little disappointed.

To those people I say: read Fate!

In this route, Gilgamesh’s final battle is against Saber, not Shirou. Saber, a person he knows prior to the beginning of the story due to the events of Zero. Saber, the person who serves as his primary motivation and goal during the story. Saber, the person with whom he has significant ideological disagreements about the nature of kingship with!

Just as Ea, embodiment of the cold, hard Truth of the world, proves superior to Iskandar’s dream by destroying Ionian Hetairoi, so too does Avalon, the symbol of everything Artoria fought for, prove able to endure Ea’s destructive power. It’s a perfect conclusion to the questions asked in the Banquet of Kings.

UBW, for the Zero fan, does not reveal anything new about Gil’s character. But Fate does. We get his single best quote!

Not only is Gil implicitly justifying Artoria’s own unobtainable dream as valuable, but he also identifies himself with her, as a fellow pursuer of that which cannot be obtained.

The contradiction at the heart of their conflict is that Gil wanted Artoria precisely because she was the kind of person to refuse him. What attracted him to her was the stubborn idealism of her kingship, not the subservience he expects from a woman. So, there’s no actual way for Gil to end up satisfied, even if he wins.

His plan was to force Artoria to drink Grail mud to physically incarnate her, driving her insane, but even if he could make her submit to him without that, she would still be tainted, still be fundamentally less valuable to him by the mere fact of being his possession.

In realizing this, he accepts his defeat, unlike in other routes. He couldn’t stand the idea of losing to inferior copies of his treasures in Unlimited Blade Works, but Artoria’s Noble Phantasms were never in his treasury to begin with. And after owning everything in existence for thousands of years, the things you don’t have start to look a lot more alluring than anything you already do.

This is the fifth of roughly thirty analytical essays on Fate/Stay Night that I will be reposting here (with some edits) from Reddit.

This wasn’t really sticking for me, though.

The mindset I approached FSN with, encouraged by other fantasy media, was that magic was something like water: a vital substance that exists all around us which can be channelled to accomplish tasks. The results depend on what you use it for: drinking, watering crops, drowning someone. You know, there’s death magic or whatever, but there’s also life magic, and fire magic, and so on for all the Pokemon types.

And then Shirou compares magical energy to poison.

The metaphor is powerful here – what we are dealing with is inimical to life. It’s not evil, but it is dangerous. You can use it for a variety of purposes, but in its base state it will kill you. If you fuck up your spellcasting it will kill you. If you bring a friend along and they don’t know what they’re doing it might kill them. Mages have to deal with this on a daily basis (one of the first hints that these people are not okay and any trace of sanity observed in their behaviour is frankly a miracle).

The way magic is framed from the very start of the story is one of the things that contributes to the dark, tense tone of the visual novel that I don’t think has quite been captured in any of the adaptations.

The closeness of death that you can feel palpably from Shirou’s perspective as he faces off against Berserker gives weight to his decision to throw himself in front of the axe to protect Saber. It helps us understand why Saber and Rin aren’t just shocked, but start to think that there’s genuinely something wrong with him. (There is something wrong with everyone in this story).

But back to magic.

The Bloodfort Andromeda that Shinji has Rider set up around the school is a form of bounded field, seemingly the bread and butter of Nasuverse magi. Its effect is to suck the life force out of anyone within its range to the point of literally dissolving their flesh. This is considered the ‘most aggressive’ form of boundary field.  Not ‘an aggressive’ boundary field. It is a difference of degree but not kind, the logical final extension of the concept.

That is because putting your magic into something, whether it’s an object or an area, is essentially an attempt to assert dominance over that thing. By doing so, you’re poisoning it, overwriting its traits with your own. The default state of trying to do magic to something is to damage it; mages must deliberately compensate for that in order to get other effects. (This is why Shirou needs to understand the structure of an object intimately before reinforcing it, he can’t just shove magical energy in at random.)

Bloodfort Andromeda is also what first establishes Servants as soul eaters. They can drain strength from ordinary people by weakening or killing them. All of them, not just ‘the bad ones’ who actually do it like Rider or Caster. This element of the setting often gets overlooked in later spinoffs, but it contributes a lot, in FSN, to the idea that every aspect of what Shirou has got himself into, from the magecraft to the very method of fighting is inherently perverse and disruptive.

Is it any wonder that the Grail, in the end, turns out to be corrupted?

He’s clearly not just a throwaway character. There’s something there, it’s just being deliberately covered up. This is different from a twist character like Sakura – in her case, we’re not given any strong hints that something is wrong. We’re not supposed to question her role in the story right up until Heaven’s Feel. Archer, on the other hand, does nothing but raise questions.

Why does Shirou immediately hate him for no apparent reason? Why does Archer persist in talking to Shirou multiple times, despite this? How does Archer’s advice manage to be the exact thing Shirou needed to hear in order to help him defeat Berserker?

And, perhaps most importantly, why does he so frequently stand with his back towards the person he’s talking to? Actually, why even bother making a ‘backwards-facing’ character sprite for him in the first place?

The use of a backwards-facing character sprite is really weird. It would be like if a director told their actors to face away from the audience and deliver their lines to the back of the stage. It misses the whole point of the medium!

Character sprites are supposed to tell you how a character interacts and engages with the people around them, through facial expressions, what they’re doing with their hands, etc. The way Archer engages with the people around him is by . . . not engaging with them.

So, Archer’s back is a message to the reader, from the author. He’s being presented as closed-off, aloof, mysterious. He has hidden depths, but you’re not going to get to see them.

The funny part is that in-universe Archer’s back also serves as a message from him to Shirou. He deliberately makes it weird and awkward for Shirou to talk to him, because he wants to come off as aloof and mysterious.

Of course, another element that’s added when it’s a personal confrontation like that is Archer presenting himself as superior. the fact that Shirou is literally, physically behind him also reminds us that he’s behind him in power, behind him in knowledge, and behind him in self-actualisation.

But again, this is only what Archer is trying to convey. And to be honest, it’s very funny that he’s trying at all. Because despite acting as though he doesn’t give a shit, it’s clear that seeing his past self, and his past self seeing him is important to Archer. Why else would he spend so much time talking to the guy? He has a semi-plausible excuse each time, but the conversation keeps wrapping around to personal matters.

By the way, I like to believe the reason why Archer leaves without finishing his line here is because he thought it sounded cringy halfway through and got embarrassed.

Because that’s the thing with a turned back, isn’t it? He’s already put himself in the position of someone about to leave, without actually leaving. He’s not trying to engage with Shirou on equal terms, but he doesn’t ignore him either. He’s conflicted.

You could read Archer as trying to get Shirou to give up, discouraging Shirou and getting him to accept his inevitable death. But the most important lesson that Archer's back gives in this route is that ‘the one you have to fight is none other than yourself’.

Now, that’s true against Rider, it’s true against Berserker. But coming from Archer you really have to interpret that as a challenge, don’t you? ‘The one you have to fight is none other than me.’

That doesn’t sound like someone who wants Shirou to give up. That sounds like someone who, when he comes to kill Shirou, wants Shirou to fight back.

To use an archery metaphor, Archer’s back isn’t a wall, it’s the target.

This is the fourth of roughly thirty analytical essays on Fate/Stay Night that I will be reposting here with some significant edits (although this one didn’t change too much) from Reddit.

I would argue that what’s going on here isn’t a swapping between innocence and ruthlessness, but rather a juxtaposition – both present at once. In her first encounter with Shirou, she’s smiling sweetly, ordering Berserker to kill him in a sing-song tone. Many of her funniest moments are when she seems like she’s behaving and then casually says something insane.

Shirou is initially surprised by her conduct when he meets her during the day, but as she herself says, the rules of the Grail War are that it’s to be carried out at night. It’s not as if the sun going up caused her murder gremlin transformation to wear off – she would be perfectly happy to do all those things in the daylight if she had a good enough reason.

As a result, Shirou hypothesizes that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t really want to kill people, right? She seems so nice . . . (only Shirou would think this about someone who literally almost had his stomach removed from his body)

But after she kills Shinji and threatens Saber and Rin, Shirou realises that this behaviour isn’t inconsistent at all – Illya simply has no reason to believe killing is wrong in the first place.

Here, Illya is described as not seeing Saber as human because she’s a Servant.

But consider Illya’s understanding of the term ‘Servant’: something that belongs to her, stays by her side, and protects her. It's why she asks Shirou to become her Servant, and why she ends up developing such a close relationship with Berserker.

I think her attitude towards Saber isn't specific to Servants - she likely feels that way about most people.

There's actually a really simple explanation for this: almost all of the people she interacted with while growing up were Einzbern homunculi! The kind of person that you would be most justified in not considering a person. When you think about it that way there's a self-deprecating element to it, because of course she's aware that she's also a tool designed to complete the Third Magic.

Her intentions towards Shirou only make sense if she thinks of him as an object, rather than a person. Look at her room in the Einzbern Castle – it’s filled with dolls, and there’s a pretty strong implication that Shirou, tied up in a chair, is just another one of them to her. Her feelings for Shirou are characterized by her wanting him – and if she can’t have him, nobody can.

This initial mindset also explains some of the confusion surrounding her Bad Ends (I will touch on these in more detail in a later post).

 For example, when Shirou jumps in front of Berserker to save Saber, Illya is shocked and leaves, but in the Bad End where he runs away she happily goes ahead and finishes him off.

I think it’s clear that what she was surprised by was Shirou's willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Saber.

It can be interpreted as a flash of empathy from Illya - realising that Shirou has his own internal life and people he cares about beyond the role she slotted him into as ‘Kiritsugu’s stupid kid’ means she can't enjoy torturing him like she planned to.

Now, there is one respect in which it might be reasonable to argue that Illya adopts a different persona from normal.

For ease of reference, I’ll call it ‘Master mode’ and it happens when she makes a face like the following.

The furrowed brow and direct look are characteristic of Illya when she’s acting as a magus, and it’s striking to see her suddenly switching to this mode in the middle of a conversation.

In this mode, she’s capable of both being more demeaning towards others, but also much more formal, curtseying and introducing herself.

It’s important to note that in both cases, she’s talking about matters related to the Grail War and her position as a mage/Master. Indeed, the invocation of her family name is what gets Rin to react to her self-introduction.

This is intimately connected to her role as Master insofar as she’s a Master because she’s an Einzbern – another way of putting it is that she’s interchangeable with any other Einzbern homunculus besides the fact she’s a Master.

In this way the Einzbern name becomes totalizing and turns Illya into a tool.

Illya finds it easy to flip back and forth between Master mode, though. The moment when she threatens Shirou in the shopping district is only a moment, and she instantly goes back to how she was before once he agrees to go with her.

On the subject of how she was before, I suppose we ought to discuss what provokes this change in the first place.

In their first encounter in daytime, Shirou pushes Illya when trying to get her to stop, which results in her making this face.

This is her ‘default face’, the first one that comes up in the VN files.

Usually these portray a character’s default setting, when they’re not expressing any emotion in particular, but Illya is usually so expressive that this one comes off as quite cold in comparison.

Which is what it’s used for!

It comes up when Shirou asks her to stop being a Master, when Shirou ignores her just before she captures him, and when Shirou is about to decide whether he’ll let her stay with him or not.

And in many of these situations, it’s a moment of pause, where she shuts off her emotions before entering Master mode.

Looking at this, it seems clear to me that Master mode emerges here as a defense mechanism. Illya chooses to adopt a persona that’s colder, harsher, and less vulnerable that her usual mode of behaviour – one that she’s learnt as a response to painful situations in the past.

In other words, Master mode is just a mask that she will temporarily put on in some situations. The ‘real Illya’ -  if such a thing exists - is more aligned with her playful and less serious side.

On the subject of Illya's playful side, the fact that what provokes Illya initially is not anything Shirou said, but rather a physical action, is a motif that comes up a few times.

In general, there’s a physicality to interacting with Illya that isn’t there as much with other characters – for example, this sprite seems specifically designed so that it looks like Illya is close up to you and grabbing your hand, trying to drag you around, even.

Saber will get close but mostly just by zooming into her regular sprite. Illya will just directly invade your personal space. So sometimes, Shirou gets fed up and tries to push her away, as we have seen. He repeats this again much later in the dojo, and Illya briefly shows a frightened face.

Another more fun way in which a similar dynamic plays out is when Saber is chasing Illya and trying to get her off Shirou.

The sprites used tell a pretty clear story of Illya playing around, Saber trying to grab her, Illya being frightened, Saber going ‘oh shit did I just hurt this child’, and then Illya smiles like she’s having a great time.

Saber wonders if Illya was just faking her earlier fright, and as if to confirm her suspicions, Illya sticks her tongue out. And Saber’s back to impotently chasing her around.

Clearly, Illya is experimenting with boundaries. She’s not used to being physically close to other people, so she doesn’t know what the limits are, and she’s not used to other people using force on her either.

If anything, this reminds me of an animal that isn’t used to being around humans yet - Shirou even explicitly compares her to one.

This is around where it hit me that Illya isn’t human, exactly. Multiple times Shirou refers to her as a ‘winter fairy’, and there’s definitely something otherworldly about her.

Take the very first scene she appears to warn Shirou and then immediately disappear again. It feels almost like a dream, especially as the narrative transitions right into the next scene without referring to it ever again.

The fact that she’s the child of a homunculus isn’t what I mean by ‘not human’ – homunculi can clearly have a similar experience and range of emotions to humans. Her general strangeness is far more a product of spending most of her time alone and secluded inside a winter castle.

It’s part of the reason why Shirou gives her food in the first place. Look at what they’re talking about directly beforehand. Illya mentions that she was locked up in her room for a long time, so she wants to sneak outside now she’s in Japan.

It’s ‘she swings her legs and it seems she’s having fun just doing so’ that really gets me, though. Like, just that is enough for you?

From the beginning of the story, Illya is presented as both wealthy and powerful.

However, the symbol of that power, Berserker, caused her physical harm and was forced on her without consent.

Similarly, the symbol of that wealth, the Einzbern Castle, is used as a prison to keep Illya inside.

She seems far more authentically free when she’s living at Shirou’s place without any of those things.

This is the third of about thirty analytical essays on Fate/Stay Night that I will be reposting here (with significant edits) from Reddit.

Shirou throws out a few of these lines, largely in the Fate route, particularly the first half, and mostly towards Saber.

He tells her that she can't fight, use a sword, risk being hurt, etc. because she is a girl.

This is the cause (or perhaps more accurately, a symptom) of the main conflict between Shirou and Saber in this route!

To explain, I want to look at a specific case: Saber's assault on Ryuudou Temple. She explicitly contradicts Shirou's orders to not attack and goes alone, a spectacularly stupid decision.

Shirou’s argument for not going that Saber isn’t fully healed from her fight with Lancer, and there is definitely going to be some trap at Ryudo Temple to prevent people from attacking them. He’s not opposed to attacking people, he just happens to be opposed to Saber doing it in this instance.

Saber's argument for going is that it doesn’t matter if she’s hurt or even killed because she’s a Servant, not a person.

Frankly, at this point Shirou is obviously winning the argument. Saber's blatant disregard for her own safety isn't rational. It's not like Shirou is opposed to her fighting in every situation, right?

Well . . .

Shirou doesn't just want to avoid Saber getting hurt now, he wants to stop anyone from getting hurt ever. This seems admirable, but unlike most of us, Shirou is actually willing to do something about this, to the point of sacrificing himself for the sake of other people.

Going back to Saber specifically, the image of her getting hurt to protect him lives rent free in his head for the entire route and is a huge part of him not wanting her to go to the Ryuudou Temple.

The game lets you choose between attacking and not attacking Ryuudou Temple, and comparing the results helps clarify the decision. There are a few different levels to this.

Firstly, not going is correct because Ryuudou Temple is too dangerous and you’ll get killed. Rin points this out as you’re making the decision, and she’s objectively right. This seems to be borne out in the narrative of the game, as Going leads to your death while Not Going progresses the story - except, Not Going ends up with you Going Anyway because Saber sneaks away in the middle of the night.

Both paths end up being equally risky, and the fact that Caster decides to trap you in one path but doesn’t in the other is more about blind luck than your decision-making. The real importance of this decision is establishing Shirou as someone who doesn’t want to risk Saber’s life.

In other words, Shirou's decision may be correct, but that doesn't mean it's right.

He's not making a rational evaluation of the risks, he is using them as a justification to stop Saber from fighting.

Exactly like his comments about Saber being a girl!

Shirou's fundamental motivation here is not sexist in nature. He's just trying to protect Saber, and coming up with any stupid bullshit excuse he can think of to get her to stop fighting.

Going back to Saber's 'irrational' argument from before, then, it starts to make more sense.

Saber isn’t responding to what Shirou is saying, she’s responding to what he’s thinking. The conflict between Shirou and Saber is about whether it’s okay for Saber, as a Servant, to get hurt in battle.

Saber’s position so far has been that Servants are just tools to win fights, and she doesn’t care if she’s hurt if it lets her win the Holy Grail. Even if she dies, it doesn’t really matter to her since she’s not really alive.

On the other hand, Shirou has consistently treated her as a person, even going so far as revealing her existence to Sakura and Taiga so she could eat together with them.

This is the crux of all their conflict in the Fate route, but this particular one about Saber not fighting gets resolved shortly.

Notably, it comes as a result of Shinji attacking Shirou at school, putting all his classmates at threat with Bloodfort Andromeda.

Here we see what will become a recurring theme: the conflict of Shirou's ideals with reality. He doesn't want to risk Saber getting hurt, but without her, he can't protect others from a worse fate.

How, then, does Shirou resolve this contradiction?

He accepts that Saber will fight, but that doesn't mean he will just stand back and watch. In typical Shirou fashion, he wants to have his cake and eat it too - he will fight at her side so that if Saber ever gets in trouble he will be able to save her as well.

I love Shirou's relationship with all of FSN's heroines because of the relationship of mutual trust and partnership that they end up building, but Saber in particular is emblematic of how they both have to save each other, considering how similar their personalities are.

I'll get more into their mirroring in a later post, but to end on a funny example, look at this scene of Saber telling Shirou why they shouldn't go looking for Shinji right away.

(compare their respective arguments here to the position that they took over the Ryuudou Temple affair.)