Characters / Fate/stay night: Shirou Emiya

Fate/stay night Main Character Index | Humans (Shirou Emiya, Rin Tohsaka, Sakura Matou, Kirei Kotomine) | Servants (Saber, Archer, Archer 2)

Shirou Emiya

Voiced by: Noriaki Sugiyama (JP), Junko Noda (JP, young), Sam Riegel (EN, 2006 Anime, 2010 Movie), Mona Marshall (EN, Fate/Zero), Bryce Papenbrook (EN, 2015 Anime, 2018 Movie)

"If you walk down the path that you believe is right, you cannot be wrong."

"I don't want to regret anything. I want to make all the tragedies that happened into meaningful things by believing that my path is right."

The protagonist of the series, Shirou is a rather untalented Magus whose only skill is basic Tracing and Reinforcement magic, which allows him to analyze the physical make-up of an object and then strengthen it. His dream is to become a "Hero of Justice", someone who can selflessly protect the lives of everyone from disaster. He inherited this dream from his adoptive father Kiritsugu Emiya, who had given up on it. He is not really sure what it takes to reach that ideal.

At the beginning of the story, he possesses a Healing Factor that makes him practically immortal, though the source of this is unknown and he did not have it before. Shirou is also an accomplished archer as a side effect of his mage training and, following some training from Saber, is mildly proficient in swordplay.

He is Saber's Master.

For his appearances in other works, see here, here, here, here, and here.

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A - E

• Accidental Pervert: In Fate, he enters the bathroom while Saber is taking a bath twice. While she thinks nothing of it the first time, the second time she feels embarrassed and asks him to leave.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Since the anime adaptations don't adapt most of Shirou's Inner Monologues from the visual novel that explain and justify his actions, his behavior in the anime often comes off as stupid and borderline suicidal to those who are not familiar with the source material. For example, in the Fate route, his seemingly sexist attitude about Saber fighting is because he is trying to find a way to stop her fighting, as he has already fallen for her but hates the fact she is protecting him due to his Survivor's Guilt. In the anime adaptation, since this can't be projected from his thoughts effectively, it makes Shirou look more idiotic and sexist than he really is. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is in Episode 12 of Unlimited Blade Works when Shirou goes out on a date with Rin. While in the visual novel, this was an important character defining moment since his inner monologue showcased the full extent of his psychological problems, in the anime, this comes off more as a Breather Episode that has next to no relevance to the plot.
• Almighty Janitor: In the True End of Unlimited Blade Works, he becomes this. Shirou decides to tag along with Rin to London so that he can learn magic from the Magician's Association. Although enrolling as Rin's disciple means that he's exempt from tuition fees, it effectively puts him at the lowest point on the totem pole. However, this is justified as considering how most magi act, he'd end up on a dissection table if he ever let the secret of his Reality Marble out. Extra points for actually fighting an army of familiars with a powered up broom.
• All-Loving Hero: Deconstructed. Shirou is a fairly cautionary example of how a person would be if they tried to save EVERYONE...at the cost of his own happiness, self-worth, and even humanity if it means he could save many lives. He is described as “warped” by Rin because he CANNOT value his own life, and it's clear that Shirou's desire to help others is more selfish than he presents it. Archer is what would happen if Shirou insisted on taking his ideals to their logical extreme.
• Always Save the Girl:
  • In Heaven's Feel, he decides that saving Sakura is what he wants most, even though he understands the dangers she might pose for the city.
  • Also in Heaven's Feel, he can opt to save Saber after he has her at his mercy. It's really not a good idea.
  • Defied in Fate, as he does briefly consider using the Grail to save Saber, be damned to anyone else or the consequences, but ultimately decides doing so would spit in the face of the ideals they shared together and Saber wouldn't want to be saved in such a manner.
• And I Must Scream: Among the less pleasant types of Bad Ends often leaves Shirou suffering some form of this. A few examples in particular consist of lovely fates ranging from "torn apart limb from limb until only a head is left, and cursed not to die unless the head is destroyed so Illya can torture him indefinitely", to "soul transposed into a doll with the Third Magic", to "transformed into a magic wand for projection magic by Caster", to "soul absorbed by Angra Mainyu and Dark Sakura to be tormented for all of eternity".
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Gives a pretty epic one to Saber in Fate after Gilgamesh beats down Saber and practically cuts him in half. Shirou gets up and prepares for another pathetic attempt while Saber pleads for him to save himself.
  Saber: What are you doing?! It is impossible! Please stop! I do not need you to save me! Why... Why do you not understand that? No, if you die because of something like this, I—
  Shirou: SHUT UP! …just… be quiet for a second… you can rely on others… rely on…
  Saber: You're wrong. You're more important than me, your life is more important, so you should take care—
  Shirou: I want you more than anything else! There's not one thing that can replace you. Sorry, I... I like you the most out of everything. So I'm not going to let a guy like him take you!
• Animal Motifs: Dogs, which take great joy in being of service to others and are comfortable in both peaceful and military situations. The El-Melloi version of Shirou is considered the Edelfelts' "most elegant and fearsome bloodhound", and in Ataraxia he speculates that Sella's zoomorphic potion would give him a dog's verbal tic.
• Anti-Hero: Idealistic as his goal is, it can actually push him in this direction. In Heaven's Feel he ends up here for entirely different reasons.
  • He's also a Classical Anti-Hero for a good part of the stories, considering how weak he is compared to other members of the cast until near the end of the routes.
• The Anti-Nihilist: He realizes the problems of his ideals in UBW, and reconciles them by saying that even if his actions may not be perfect and can be ultimately meaningless, he'll still try his best.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Loses his left arm while protecting Illya from the Shadow, although it's quickly replaced with Archer's arm.
  • In the Unlimited Blade Works route, Rider lops his arm off and leaves him to bleed out if he tries to summon Saber with a Command Spell.
• Attractiveness Discrimination: He doesn't understand why Rin hates Luvia, because the latter has always been nice to him. Similarly, he tragically overestimates Sakura's ability to socialize with people who aren't special to her (because Shirou very much is).
• Audience Surrogate: Most notably when it comes to asking questions the audience would. Him knowing little about magic and nothing about the Grail War is reason for much of the game's exposition.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Structural Analysis only allows Shirou to scan objects and see their inner workings. However, this plays a BIG part of Unlimited Blade Works. UBW is basically a glorified recording device which keeps all the bladed weapons Shirou has seen. Using Projection, he can call upon ANY of these weapons. More traditionally, the battles he partakes in start out shoddily at first, but by Heaven's Feel he calculates movements and plans down to the second.
• Badass Transplant: Archer's left arm in Heaven's Feel ends up being more a weapon than an actual arm, to the point that it's specifically referred to as an "Artificial Phantasm" in a scene's title. Due to being surgically bonded to Shirou's shoulder stump while Archer was still in the corporeal world, it is a part of a Heroic Spirit that has been connected to Shirou's Magic Circuits, and stays in a physical form using his own spiritual energy. It has two practical uses: While unconcious, the arm grants him knowledge on the basis of Projection, as well as Archer's battle experience and battle information. Passively, the abilities of the arm allow him to run fifty kilometers per hour through the uneven terrain of the Einzbern Forest, and when fully activated, it basically acts like an overdose of strength-enhancing drugs, letting Shirou demonstrate both magical and physical abilities beyond his limits... albeit at the cost of the ultimate price.
• Beware the Honest Ones: Shirou's a little too far on the idealistic side for even Saber, so while his allies appreciate him somewhat, they also know he'll do something stupidly reckless if it's the "right" thing to do. Tohsaka at the very end of the Heaven's Feel realizes she has no right to criticize him because she isn't as ruthless as she thinks she is.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Shirou is a legitimately kind, if sometimes snarky, boy who'll go out of his way to help others because it personally makes him happy. But make no mistake: while his ideals and aspirations are heroic, that doesn't mean that he isn't willing to resort to ruthlessness if it means protecting his loved ones or fulfilling his ideals.
• Beyond the Impossible: This guy, and pretty much any Master, has no place fighting Servants. Yet he has been able to defeat FOUR. Granted, the only truly solo victory he has against one is against Gilgamesh (Which is its own order of magnitude of Beyond the Impossible). To wit:
  • In Fate, he manages to eke out a win again freaking Berserker, which is as utterly unbalanced as it sounds, but is nonetheless won due to an 11th-Hour Superpower projection of Caliburn on top of both Saber's assistance and Archer having posthumously taken the rest of Berserker's 12 lives. Shirou outright lampshades that the stars had to align for him to even hope of clutching that win at the last second.
  • In Heaven's Feel, he ekes out two solo wins by himself against a corrupted Berserker and, in one bad ending, Saber Alter when not even Berserker could manage against her. Granted, both wins were only possible with Archer's arm, and Saber Alter was only possible due to the environment they fought in^note they were in a cavern leading up to Dark Sakura's dwelling. As shown by Saber Alter vs. Berserker, Saber Alter's near-unlimited mana supply meant she could spam her Noble Phantasm as much as she wants, and the only reason why she doesn't go all-out is due to the fact a cave-in would likely kill her too on top of being a Pyrrhic Victory that fried Shirou's brain and left him a vegetable, but still. Notably, his solo win against Saber Alter is the only Bad End that is straight-up listed as 'End' in the final title card, given the Ambiguous Ending nature of the final battle between Rin and Sakura undoubtedly is resulting in one of them dying (and if Rin somehow does save the world, it's a hell of a Near-Villain Victory).
  • Lastly, anachronistically with Unlimited Blade Works, Shirou's one and only true unassisted and uncontestable win against a Servant is fucking Gilgamesh, the oldest Servant in existence and a borderline Physical God in his own right. This was done by virtue of an extremely specific scenario where Shirou's Weak, but Skilled swordsmanship and Reality Marble deflecting Gilgamesh's Storm of Blades created the one situation where Shirou could close in and actually defeat Gilgamesh. Shirou outright notes that his strategy would be outright unfeasible against any other opponent than Gilgamesh, who's colossal arrogance not only made him unable to take Shirou seriously in a fight until it was far too late, but as Shirou notes, Gilgamesh is ultimately a king than a true warrior, and is completely clocked in a clean swordfight in the one scenario where that would decide the battle.
• BFS: Berserker's sword traced in Heaven's Feel definitely counts, bonus points for wielding it with a single hand.
• Big Brother Instinct: Towards Illya.
• Big Little Brother: Illya's actually older than Shirou, so she's his older adoptive sister despite her childlike appearance and her calling him "onii-chan".
• Blatant Lies: In the Heaven's Feel route, he tries to conceal from Sakura that his arm was chopped off and replaced with someone else's. It doesn't work.
• Blessed with Suck: Shirou's often-forgotten semi-unknown instinctual internal reinforcement works by protecting vital organs and holding normally-severed limbs together using his own magical energy, which happens to have a "sword" affinity, which means it manifests as thousands of ephemeral blades keeping him stitched together. The downside being that it works by creating a bunch of blades inside his body. The power's track record is a mixed bag:
  • In Fate: It lets him survive Rider's attacks, a dagger to the chest is repelled as if it is hitting metal and a kick that would've gouged his stomach only knocks him away, but also causes him to accidentally stab himself to death when he tries to use reinforcement to survive a three story fall immediately afterwards. However, it also saves him in the same route when it, along with Avalon's Healing Factor, sutures him back together after he has been cleaved in half by Gilgamesh's Merodach.
  • In Heaven's Feel: While his body is fully breaking down, overloading on mana from Archer's arm causes the blades to manifest permanently, slowly skewering him from the inside, but the protruding blades also end up giving him an edge in his last fight against Kotomine. Of course, the magical energy coming from the arm into Shirou's body is similar to pouring 100 units of fuel into a container that can only hold 10, so Shirou is likely only gaining from less than a tenth of the utter agony he has to endure, as Archer's own Unlimited Blade Works disrupts his memories and leaves him with a large blank space after using Projection.
• Body Backup Drive: In the True End of Heaven's Feel courtesy of Touko Aozaki.
• Body Horror: Can happen to him in more than a few ways:
  • Several Bad Ends in Fate shows that Illya is planning to subject Shirou to some form of Fate Worse than Death if she manages to defeat and capture him alive, getting pissed if she believes Berserker killed him by mistake like in Bad End 2: "Canary's Cage". It isn't really clear what she does to him in early Bad Ends, but later ones reveal she transfers his Soul from his body to a doll using a portion of the Third Magic. Ironically, she saves his life with an amped up version of this in the True End of Heaven's Feel.
  • If Shirou fights Rider and Shinji alone in the school in Fate, he will die not to her attacks nor to her kicking him through a third-floor window, but rather because his innate magecraft will project swords inside his body in an effort to keep him in one piece, a magic which goes out of control when he hits the ground and several of those swords puncture his organs.
  • Two Dead Ends in Unlimited Blade Works — "Hazy" and "Artificial Noble Phantasm" — have Caster realize the unique magecraft Shirou is capable of and repurpose him to win the Holy Grail War if she captures him or he surrenders to her. To be precise, Caster turns Shirou into an embryo-like thing floating in a jar that she wields as a wand for Projection magic.
  • He gets digested by the Shadow in several Dead Ends of the Heaven's Feel route. Either by failing an affection score check with Sakura, jumping to push Rin out of the Shadow's attacks, or by simply standing on the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • In Heaven's Feel he undoes the Shroud of Martin used to seal Archer's arm. As a consequence, first his brain begins to burn out and later this trope comes into play when the physical reinforcement of his Reality Marble causes swords to burst from his body in an attempt to hold him together.
  • During his final fight against Kotomine at the end of Heaven's Feel, Shirou's body is quickly turning into a human-shaped mass of interweaving swords and flesh from overusing Archer's implanted arm, making an horrible metallic grinding noise every time he moves. This is also Exploited by Shirou because it makes him tough enough to endure Kirei's attacks, even injuring the priest back with every other blow, despite the fact the swords will surely kill him in a matter of minutes.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In Ataraxia, he sometimes alludes to feeling dead ends ahead when he makes a stupid decision.
• Broken Ace: On paper, Shirou should have made it. Considered the star of the archery club months after having left, technologically savvy, an awesome chef, good-looking, hardworking and thoughtful, lives in a giant Japanese-style mansion with an increasing number of beautiful women who all have a thing for him, and is even a (rudimentary) Magus with little in the way of formal training or a strong bloodline. At the same time, he's got some horrible self-worth issues, his beliefs are outdated and unpractical, and he's such a pitiable mess on the inside that his unscrupulously cynical future self comes to show him exactly what kind of person he will grow into if he doesn't drop it - and then intends to murder him.
• Broken Hero: Even called that in-series a few times. Much of Unlimited Blade Works is devoted to exploring it.
  …It was really fun.
  The town I only used to walk by…
  I didn't know all the things I didn't involve myself in were so meaningful.
  "——"
  As soon as I think so, something like a cage falls on me, and I understand.
  I don't deserve this.
  I'm unworthy of all this.
  It tells me so from deep down within me.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: In Heaven's Feel Bad End #38, drawing on Archer's arm in order to use his super move against Saber Alter leaves Shirou a vegetable. To be sure, he's cut her in two, but she could fully regenerate in 10 minutes. And to think that he could have taken her out with him had he managed to destroy her head or heart...
• Bully Hunter: As a child, he adopted Kiritsugu's basic ideal of trying to help people, but unlike Kiritsugu, he picked sides. Therefore, he decided he would protect the weak. Upon meeting Tohsaka, he thinks to himself that she's exactly the sort of person he would have fought as a kid, though they haven't really met.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Refusing to join the Holy Grail War results in Illya ruthlessly attacking and dismembering Shirou while he's on his way home. When he pleads that he isn't a Master, she promptly replies that it doesn't matter, because she never wanted to kill him, just enslave him.
• The Champion: In Heaven's Feel, Shirou gives up his Chronic Hero Syndrome and decides to become a hero of justice for Sakura and Sakura alone.
• Character Development: All three routes take Shirou's character in different directions. In Fate he maintains his ideals and strives to become a hero of justice, while at the same time learning the importance of trusting his allies even when he'd rather protect them from conflict; in Unlimited Blade Works he faces the shortcomings of his ideals but decides they're worth upholding even if they aren't perfect; and in Heaven's Feel he reevaluates his ideals in order to protect the people he cares about. By the end of all three routes, Shirou is able to come out happier in some way.
• Chekhov's Hobby: The fact that he was in the archery club foreshadowing one of his possible futures and his mastery of Projection Magic.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Shirou's ability to use magic to create fake objects becomes his main combat ability.
  • He's a former member of his school's Archery Club. This foreshadows his class as a Servant.
• Chick Magnet: He starts the story with at least four named female characters crushing at or potentially interested in him to some degree or other; Sakura being the most obvious, plus Rin and Ayako. He's none the wiser. In Fate, Saber falls in love with him and she ends up living with him and Rin in the Good Ending of UBW, and in both Fate and Heaven's Feel, Illya is very clingy and possessive of him. Rider also seems to show a degree of interest in Shirou during Heaven's Feel especially if certain dialogue options are chosen.
  • Interestingly, this trope is played with. A lot of more traditional examples of this trope are men or women who are very attractive for surface-level reasons, like wealth or beauty. Shirou has both, but the women who fall for him do so because he has a number of very attractive features to his personality. Shirou loves cooking and cleaning, is passionate but reserved, owns a large estate that he takes care of by himself, is one of the best members of the archery club (and has a rocking physique to go with it), is very in touch with his feminine side, is serious and determined, and is a good listener. He seems like the ideal man right up you start delving into his complicated and very deeply-rooted psychological issues, which all three of his main love interests work through in different ways.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Shirou's inability to turn people down when they ask for help worries his friends and colleagues. He also tends to jump headfirst into any situation whenever he feels it's the 'right' thing to do.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Shirou's projection magecraft works with this; his tracings break down and vanish if he acknowledges even for an instant that they are but illusions.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Shirou honestly doesn't understand why ordering his male best friend to take off his clothes would be at all strange.
• Covert Pervert: The anime and subsequent franchise materials gloss over his propensity for extremely lewd and bizarre mental tangents when presented with erotic scenarios.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Downplayed, but in Unlimited Blade Works, he gets a little territorial around Rin, and it's heavily implied that one of his reasons for openly disliking Archer is his jealousy over how close Archer and Rin are. He also outright tells Lancer to not be so chummy around Rin when they had to team up together in the same route.
• Crippling Overspecialization: He can only use Reinforcement and Structural Analysis in the beginning. This is justified, as he misunderstood his father's teachings on magic. When he adds projection to that list, that's justified as well, as since his element and origin are both Sword, he is literally made for no other magic.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Pretty much every Bad End that ends with Shirou dying counts to some degree or another, such is the over-the-top violence to be expected of the Nasuverse. But among the most gruesome "highlights", we have "stabbed in the neck and drained of all his blood," "melted alive and then defenestrated only to have swords spontaneously burst out of his body upon impact," "legs cut off and slowly bleeding to death as his last conscious observation is watching Rin get pulverized," "betrayed by his own Servant and killed either via Rule Breaker or failing a Relationship Values check," "stomach slashed wide open in a murder-suicide from brainwashed best friend," "stomach and foot punched out by magically-enchanted fists from a trained assassin," "body is destroyed and soul transferred into a doll", "feet devoured by bugs before being messily eaten by a horde of worms," "petrified into stone before breaking into tiny pieces," all the way to "having his soul absorbed by Dark Sakura to torture both him and Rin for all eternity". Yeesh.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: His own brand of Projection magic. Just using it once causes him a night of pain, and the next morning the entire left side of his body is numb from the forced opening of neglected, but otherwise natural magical circuits. Once he learns the true use of it, he lacks proper training so even the most basic projections cause him horrible pain and the majority of the swords generated shatter easily due to their low quality. He eventually projects both Archer's sword technique and his reproduction ability, but it's also flawed because he doesn't understand that they actually originate from his Reality Marble. Unlimited Blade Works cannot be used without that realization, and even after coming to that conclusion, he does not have the necessary energy to utilize it on his own.
• David Versus Goliath: How do you stop a sociopath Church Militant with superhuman abilities, a mad witch of profane practices, a centuries-old immortal bug-man, two Demi-Gods straight out of myth, and the manifestation of All The World's Evil? Well, there's this high school boy with subpar magical ability and an overwhelming lack of self-knowledge...
• Deadly Upgrade: Archer's left arm. While Shirou and Archer are practically the same person with compatible magic circuits, the power of a Heroic Spirit is not something a human can handle. It is wrapped in a special cloth that seals its power, but even if left like this, it would kill Shirou from power overload within ten years unless he cut it off or became an expert mage to seal it himself. Just loosening the cloth causes excruciating pain and even gradual memory loss; taking it off completely is a guaranteed death sentence, with rapid destruction of mind and body on top of that with every use, due to Archer's arm forcing Unlimited Blade Works on him when he's no longer compatible, causing the body reinforcement to go out of control and begin forcing swords out of his body. He still manages to overcome Berserker, Saber Alter, Kotomine, and (in the "Normal Ending") the corrupted Grail before dying.
• Deadpan Snarker: He tends to snark a lot in his internal monologues, but not often out loud, except maybe around Taiga and Rin. You can think of Archer as what Shirou would sound like if he didn't hold his tongue more often.
• Death by Origin Story: He invokes this trope to impose meaning on his completely random survival of the Fuyuki Fire, and as a self-flagellating way of remembering those who didn't survive it. Surely, those who died horribly will rest happier knowing that the only survivor lived a haunted, barren life.
• Death Seeker: Maybe. While it's initially not clear at first, and doesn't become completely confirmed until midway through Unlimited Blade Works, Shirou is a very disturbed individual. His brazen lack of self-preservation is definitely not a heroic or admirable trait, and many characters discuss how outright disturbing his suicidal pursuits are. It's possible that as a survivor of the Fuyuki fire, he has a lot of Survivor Guilt, or is perhaps suffering from a form of PTSD.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the noble, self-sacrificing hero who wants happiness for all, even at his own expense. The VN takes a lot of steps to show how twisted those ideals are, and how mentally screwed up you'd have to be to be willing to follow them. His single-minded pursuit to sacrifice himself for others is usually viewed somewhere between stupid and horrifically broken.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: It's just what Shirou does, but most notably:
  • He takes down Berserker on his own with the use of Archer's arm in Heaven's Feel.
  • Nearly bulldozing Gilgamesh in Unlimited Blade Works.
• Defusing The Tykebomb: He tries to do this for Illya, and in Heaven's Feel, Sakura. He succeds.
• Determinator: Shirou has shades of this in all three routes, but Heaven's Feel deserves a special mention: After having lost his servant, and discovering that the woman he loves is possessed by the avatar of all evil, Shirou decides that he's going to save Sakura, and he means it. He is supposed to drop dead after using Archer's Arm to project three times. He projects six times. He also fights both Dark Berserker and Saber Alter, both of whom are many times stronger than usual due to Sakura's increased prana, and wins. Oh, and his whole body is slowly being skewered by swords growing inside of him due to overuse of projection, he still keeps going. Then after all that, he still has a fist fight with Kotomine. In the normal ending, with only a shred of his consciousness remaining, Shirou with his final thought projects Excalibur, and pops Angra Mainyu like a zit. Shirou should have been dead five times up this point, and he STILL. KEPT. GOING.
  Shirou: I pour determination into my dying body.
  • This is actually an important part of Rin and Sakura falling in love with him. Before the game began, they once saw a boy who endlessly tried to leap over a high jump that he wasn't good enough to jump, and something about that captivated the girl who easily did everything and the girl who had no hope to try anything. This boy, of course, was Shirou.
• Determined Defeatist: Even when he's fighting opponents he couldn't possibly hope to match like Lancer, Rider, Berserker or Gilgamesh, Shirou never thinks about giving up for even a second. Even if Saber doesn't come to pull him out, he usually finds a clever way out of the situation. This extends to his actions in the later half of Heaven's Feel, where he's repeatedly told that protecting Sakura is tantamount to betraying his prior ideals and that he'll never find peace even in the best-case scenario. He proves them all wrong in the True End of the route.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Repeatedly fights and wins against people he should have absolutely no chance against. Played straight in the Normal End of Heaven's Feel where he destroys Angra Mainyu, the nearly-manifested Zoroastrian god representing ALL evils of the world, using Excalibur.
• Died Standing Up: Normal End of Heaven's Feel, and unleashing Excalibur on the Great Grail after he died.
  • Also in Sparks Liner High.
• Distressed Dude: In Fate and the anime, Shirou is kidnapped by Illyasviel and tied to a chair, in an attempt to make him her servant. He is then rescued by Saber, Rin and Archer.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": He tells Saber not to call him "Master", and she complies unless she's angry with him.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: In his determination to not be a burden on anyone, he almost prevented Sakura (who also didn't know how to relate to people except through work) from returning to his house to help him- and thereby building the friendships that motivated her to continue living. It would be several years before Shirou realized that connections save people just as much as overt acts of heroism.
• Dual Wielding: In Unlimited Blade Works and in Heaven's Feel, he begins fighting with Kanshou and Bakuya while copying some of Archer's technique.
• Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: Helping people is one thing. Helping little girls out is even better. Helping little girls who were just stabbed in the chest by what is damn near a physical god, at least compared to YOU, is not an advisable course of action. And you HAVE to do it or you get a bad end.
• The Dulcinea Effect: Shirou has a tendency to risk his life for people he just met or barely even knows. Saber is a good example early in Fate and in Unlimited Blade Works after he pulls this with Illya, Tohsaka confronts him about his recklessness especially since it was obvious that there was no way he could save Illya.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • In the "Sparks Liner High" Bad End, he takes on and wins against Saber Alter by utilizing multiple copies of Kanshou and Byakuya to perform a chain of simultaneous and ultimately unavoidable attacks. He then dies, having earned Saber's respect and acknowledgment and having been able to give her one last goodbye.
  • In the Heaven's Feel Normal End, Shirou survives the fight against Saber Alter (as Rider was there to help), and goes on to face Kotomine alone. Shirou's mind and body is steadily being corrupted by his 'own' power given from Archer, turning him physically and mentally into a sword, which causes metal creaking sounds inside his own body. The two fight fist to fist, both running on borrowed time. Kotomine finally expires before Shirou, who, having saved Sakura and done everything he set out to, just stops... but not before tracing Excalibur and destroying the Great Grail. By the time he swings Excalibur, he was already dead, but his attack still goes through and destroys the Grail.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • Particularly in Heaven's Feel, where he goes through things that would break a hundred lesser men. It is so worth it all.
  • The perfect ending to Realta Nua where he does the IMPOSSIBLE to get reunited with Saber in Avalon.
• Eccentric Artist: He gets lost in his own world (literally) a lot, never refuses a request for help he can provide, and fervently wishes to spend his life fighting in a place he’s never been and a war he doesn’t care about. There are several scenes where people’s feelings are hurt because he got too distracted to listen to what they were saying.
• Embarrassing Hobby: He considers his skill at cooking unmanly, although he is simultaneously proud enough of it to compete against other chefs.
• Everyone Can See It:
  • In Fate, absolutely everyone can see the Saber/Shirou attraction. Even Issei.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, it's the same for Shirou and Rin as the route continues.
• Expy: Shirou shares a character model with Tomoe Enjou. The two have similar issues regarding what is fake and what is real, as well. Also, Shirou becomes an Artificial Human like Tomoe in the True End of the Heaven's Feel route.
• Extreme Doormat: Because of his obsession with helping others, he does whatever task his classmates ask him to do. Some even warn him that he's being taken advantage of, but he still does it.

F - N

• Famous Ancestor: Possibly. In Fate/Grand Order, the legendary Japanese swordsmith Sengou Muramasa briefly wonders if Shirou is his descendant and believes that if Shirou were to meet people Muramasa knew in life, they would confuse Shirou for him. But so far these are only Muramasa's musings, and not confirmed.
• The Face: Most of his work in Heaven's Feel is social; reconciling with Ilya, reinforcing Sakura's confidence, sharing information with Rin, etc. As a player, the only way to survive the route is to ally (at least temporarily) with everyone you can.
• Failure-to-Save Murder: While he was escaping the Fuyuki Fire, he ran past a lot of people who begged him to help them or take them with him. He didn't, and the guilt has eaten him alive ever since. ^note It may be relevant that he was seven years old at the time, and he would have died too without outside intervention. In the Fate route, [[spoiler:Kotomine tempts him to take the Grail by saying he can use it to save the other children orphaned by the fire (who Kotomine has enslaved and horrifically tortured), and Shirou considers it because he doesn't want more deaths on his conscience.^note 
• Fate Worse than Death: There are a few bad ends like this, mostly involving Caster or Illya. Caster is intrigued by his Projection ability, while Illya just wants her onii-chan... Well, his head anyway. Which she can keep alive with magic.
• Fearful Symmetry: In the Unlimited Blade Works route, he fights Gilgamesh by copying every single one of his weapons before they can strike, whether they be delivered through a Storm of Blades or through melee. However, rather than create a stalemate, he instead gains the advantage, because his Reality Marble allows him to call on his swords faster than Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon can.
• Fearless Fool: Even though Shirou knows Saber is violently opposed to people touching her hair, and that Sakura will be furious if she catches him reading her diary, he does both. It's possible that cheating death as many times as he has has warped his perspective.
• Featureless Protagonist: In the original release of the visual novel, his face would always be obscured during the few times he showed up in cutscenes, as was common with male protagonists of visual novels at the time. His personality, on the other hand, is much more fleshed out than most examples, even though he wasn't originally intended to stand out much so that players could more easily project themselves onto him. Later rereleases of the game would fully show his face.
• The Fettered: Shirou's ideal of wanting to save everybody forces him to make numerous highly questionable decisions, such as flinging himself in front of Berserker's attack on Saber in Fate or offering his arm to Caster to save Taiga in Unlimtied Blade Works.
• Field of Blades: Can summon one in Unlimited Blade Works, and it's not just for show.
• First-Person Smartass: Not very obvious. Then the realization hits that his narration is just as sarcastic as Rin's and boggling occurs. He is more of a snarker than people give him credit for, especially around Rin. Archer is basically what he would be like if he wasn't so polite all the time; is it any wonder he and Rin have such great chemistry?
• For Happiness: Shirou wants everyone to be happy. Deconstructed in Unlimited Blade Works. Unlike normal people who can somewhat create their own happiness, Shirou, thanks to his lack of any concept or sense of self preservation, always places the need of others before his own. He is completely unable to create his own happiness and has to live through others.
  Rin: Shirou. Your way of life is really distorted.
• Full-Contact Magic: An inversion of this trope; the only way he could initially use his magic is to reinforce his martial-arts abilities. This is because he misunderstood his dad's teachings about magic and thus causes himself great pain just with simple spells. After finding out how magic works, especially how his magic works, this changes greatly.
• Future Badass: In the final bonus epilogue of the Realta Nua port, you learn that Shirou takes the same path that Archer did, minus the regrets and eternal loneliness. As Saber says, he no longer needs her to be his sword and shield, he is more than capable of taking care of himself now.
• Future Me Scares Me: He is not happy that Archer spits on the ideals he holds above everything.
• The Gadfly: Some degree of his fearlessness carries over into his romantic relationships
• Generation Xerox: Shirou's primary motivation for being a hero of justice is to honor his adoptive father's own dream, and the "Mind of Steel" Bad End sees Shirou go down the exact same route as his foster father and willingly damn himself for his ideals. Kotomine, who knew his father, even points this out.
• Good Feels Good: Not necessarily a good thing, because he only feels happy when he is helping others, and can't find any satisfaction in anything else.
• Greater Need Than Mine: The general crux of his character has him always selflessly prioritizing, to a dangerously excessive degree, other people's lives and welfare at the expense of his own, and he will almost always willingly put himself in harm's way because he just can't stand it if other people are hurt instead of him. It gets thoroughly deconstructed, and later reconstructed, in Unlimited Blade Works where it's revealed that he can only derive happiness from other people's joy instead of his own, but manages to achieve a compromise after his ideological battle with Archer wherein he comes to realize his hypocrisy over his ideals, but comes to accept them as they are because saving people really did make him truly happy.
• Groin Attack: When using Nine Lives Blade Works against Berserker, Shirou's points of attack are Berserker's upper arm, collarbone, windpipe, temple, diaphragm, ribs, thighs... and testicles. That last one certainly counted as two lives, ouch.
• Happily Adopted: He was taken in and raised by Kiritsugu until his death.
• Has a Type: All of Shirou's love interests can use magic (even if he didn't know that when he fell for them).
  • In Ataraxia, he agrees with Rin's comment that he likes feminine women (which explains his heavily sexual attraction to Sakura), but follows that up by saying he loves her as she is.
• Hate at First Sight: Twice, and for fairly similar reasons both times. Namely that he sees too much of himself in the other person.
  • He and Archer are instantly in opposition because Shirou recognizes that Archer embodies his ideals as a hero of justice, but absolutely despises his methods. Archer, in turn, views Shirou as a naive fool whose insistence on fair play, honor and trying to help everyone will just get even more people killed and will lead him to being crushed by his ideals like Archer himself, who is Shirou's future self.
  • He's also instantly hostile to Kotomine Kirei, though in this case Shirou doesn't really try to think about it too much and just calls him a fake priest. In truth, he doesn't really dislike Kotomine, but feels he must oppose him because like Archer he is someone that is just different enough to merit his instant hostilities. He actually likes Kotomine since they're so similar.
• Healing Factor: Discovers early on in the story that he has one, and Shirou being Shirou, he wouldn't survive without it. It's later revealed that this healing factor is the result of Avalon, the holy sheath of Excalibur, being implanted inside of him by Kiritsugu at the end of the 4th Holy Grail War in order to save his life. Though normally dormant, its abilities activated the moment Shirou summoned Saber and continued to remain active so long as she remains in his presence even when the contract between them is severed in the Unlimited Blade Works route. He loses it in Fate, after deciding to give Avalon back to Saber, and in the true ending of Heaven's Feel, as Shirou had lost his original body at that point and is given a replica version by Touko Aozaki.
• Height Angst: An Ataraxia scene shows that he believes Rin is embarrassed about having him as her boyfriend because he is short. It's never confirmed that either of those assumptions are true.
• Henpecked Husband: If dating Rin, he fully acknowledges that she is in charge of the relationship, and likes it that way (barring a few complaints about her unreasonable demands). Sakura believes she needs to "save" him from it.
• The Hero Dies:
  • The Normal End of Heaven's Feel features Shirou destroying the Grail and dying due to using Archer's arm too many times.
  • The epilogue of Realta nua shows Shirou reuniting in spirit with Saber in Avalon after his eventual death.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: His magical affinity (and Origin) is "Sword", and he has the chivalric ideals you'd expect of someone sustained by an Arthurian artifact. In Heaven's Feel, where he discards his ambition to be everyone's hero, he instead takes up the jagged dagger Rule Breaker.
• Heroic BSoD: At a certain point in Heaven's Feel, after finding out that not only is Sakura in lethal danger but may also be a serious threat to everyone around her, Shirou nearly gives up on everything, simply too emotionally crushed to go on and on the verge of crying. Illya gives him new hope and cheers him on, giving him the will to not give in and try to save her. In the "Mind of Steel" bad ending, he actually rejects Ilya's words and decides to let Sakura die for the greater good.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • There are a few bad ends where Shirou pulls one of these, but since they're bad ends that means they weren't necessary.
  • In the Normal End of Heaven's Feel Shirou burns himself out completely to save Sakura, who spends the rest of her life waiting for him.
• Heroic Seductress: In Heaven's Feel, he sleeps with Sakura partly to alleviate her condition. It's not that he doesn't have feelings for her, but it's clear that the external circumstances are motivating him to do it before he feels ready.
• Heroic Spirit: Shirou pretty much lives and breathes this concept, especially in "Fate" where the levels in badass he takes still aren't enough to close the gap between his Servant foes. No matter how badly he's outmatched, he'll steel himself and push through with everything he has even as his body and soul threaten to give out on him. In the Realta Nua Ending it is all-but-confirmed that he LITERALLY becomes a Heroic Spirit.
• Heroic Wannabe: In the beginning of the story, he works hard every day on the orders of his father because he wants to be a hero like him, and to make sure nobody ever has to suffer like he himself did. More specifically, he wants to be a superhero, as he puts it.
• Heroic Willpower: In Fate, he's actually able to resist being hit by Angra Mainyu's corrupted mud and subsequent curses through sheer mental will before escaping, though it's noted that without Avalon he would have stood little chance of repeating the experience.
• Hidden Depths: Shirou frequently shows he's much more knowledgeable than he looks about heroes summoned in the Grail War.
• Honor Before Reason: For better or worse.
• How Much More Can He Take?: Justified because of his incredible Healing Factor, but his beating at the hands of Rider in Heaven's Feel, where his Healing Factor no longer works, is a prime example of Shirou's incredible willpower.
  • Taken up to eleven later in the same route where his body and mind are breaking from overusing his magic, yet even though he's practically a walking vegetable the only thing that actually kills him, bad endings notwithstanding, is the destruction of the Holy Grail... And he can even survive THAT with a little help from Illya.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, his fight against Archer is this. It's an uphill battle from the start as Archer is so much stronger than him that even when he's at 1/10 of his strength, Shirou can't land a hit. Near the end of the battle, Archer makes it clear that Shirou is a dead man walking but he just keeps on getting up.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Unlimited Blade Works, which is unique in that it not only stores weapons, but weapon techniques for Shirou to use. It also allows him to change the battlefield to a hill of swords ready for all of his weapons to be used immediately.
• Hypocrite: Really shown in the Fate and UBW routes in regards to his ideals. He objects to Saber putting herself in any danger but he'll happily jump into danger even though she's much stronger and thus able to protect herself better than he can. Archer really rips into him for this during their fight when he reveals that their desire to be a hero wasn't out of gratitude or even guilt at first. They simply saw how happy Kiritsugu was when he saved them and wanted to be like him so they could be happy too. Revealing they simply desire to be a hero because that's the only way they can be happy.
  • Another showcase of his hypocrisy is the reveal that Shirou's ideals are borrowed. Shirou doesn't actually believe in his ideals yet keeps following them no matter how much it hurts him. He's well aware of the contradictions in his ideals, yet refuses to acknowledge them.
  • His hypocrisy is truly shown when it's revealed that Shirou's deepest wish is his own personal salvation, but following through on his ideal would require him to condemn himself to save others. It's stated that Shirou himself didn't even know who he truly wanted to save.
• Image Song: "Kogane no Hikari".
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: With a twist towards the end of Heaven's Feel Shirou gets skewered from the inside out by swords slowly growing out of his body.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: As a former member of archery club, he is said to miss his target only once- when he wanted to do so.
• In-Series Nickname: "Fake School Janitor", "In charge of mending", "Vacuum Cleaner of the Archery Club" and "Homurahara's Brownie" among others, due to his self-sacrificial nature, which includes voluntarily doing cleaning work and fixing the school's electrical appliances.
• In Spite of a Nail: Shirou's Alternate Self in Fate/Apocrypha is still a notably moral person despite lacking (?) the Dark and Troubled Past that motivated his original self to become a hero. Also, Rin and Sakura still meet and fall for him, even though he's not a magus and none of them are involved in the war that brought their original selves together.
• Informed Attribute: A possible scene in Unlimited Blade Works reveals that Shirou apparently sounds exactly like Archer on the phone, to the point of disturbing Rin and making her want to hang up as soon as possible. This is one thing in the unvoiced indie release, but in Realta Nua this falls a bit flat since the player can actually hear both voices themselves.
• Invocation:
  • "Trace... ON!" - Spoken when using his reinforcement and projection magic.
  • Unlimited Blade Works: I am the bone of my sword. Steel is my body, and fire is my blood. I have created over a thousand blades. Unaware of loss, nor aware of gain. Withstood pain to create many weapons, waiting for one's arrival. I have no regrets. This is the only path. My whole life was Unlimited Blade Works.
  • Heaven's Feel Bad End #38: Divine skill, flawless and firm. Strength moves mountains. Blade cuts water. Life approaches the Imperial Villa. Two great men, shared life!
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: He's very surprised when Rin tells him that things created by Projection are temporary, because he's been spinning matter from nothing but his own mana for quite a while.
• I Will Find You: Shirou's reaction to Saber's disappearance in Fate; Realta Nua shows that he spends the rest of his life searching for her. They're eventually reunited in Avalon.
• Knight in Shining Armor: His role in the Fate route.
• Knight in Sour Armor: What he becomes in the Unlimited Blade Works route. Hanging out with your cynical future self will do this to you. Essentially seeing Archer's fate makes him realize how self-contradictory his ideals are and even the hypocritical reasons why he believes in them. But decides even if they are flawed and unrealistic, he still thinks they're beautiful and decides to try his best to follow them to the end.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Gets subjected to this in Bad End #16, where he's unable to escape Rin's attack on him at the school. As a result, he loses his memories of the war and goes back to his normal life none the wiser. This is the only ending in the Visual Novel where Shirou can survive the Holy Grail War without seeing it through to the end, and the Tiger Dojo segment even pokes fun at this fact by initially claiming that you've reached the True End of the route.
• Leitmotif: The aptly named "Emiya" is a track that's emblematic to his character, to the point that different variations of it plays in almost every medium and spin-off he appears in.
• Living Emotional Crutch: To Sakura. Her love for both Shirou and Rin is a huge part of what makes her keep her sanity for so long after unwittingly awakening as a Holy Grail.
  • He was also one to Kiritsugu in the past.
• Living Weapon: Zigzagged. Shirou is technically a Living Sheath, but sheaths exist to hold weapons, so he is fascinated by the latter and treats them almost like people. The Fate route involves him complementing Avalon's physical healing of Saber with psychological counselling and firsthand knowledge of her past.
  Shirou: (to Avalon)...Bye. Thanks for everything.
• Loss of Identity: Goes through it during the last half of Heaven's Feel as a side effect of using Archer's artificially attached arm. In the Good Ending, he recovers to some degree.
• Love at First Sight: In Fate, Shirou claims he fell in love with Saber upon first seeing her. However, this is an interesting case since he doesn't comes to understand his feelings for her until two weeks later and in the other routes he never does.
• Luminescent Blush: His cheeks become as red as tomatoes around his love interests to express his growing attraction to them in the anime adaptations.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: His magical specialization makes him really useful to magi, yet mostly unable to protect himself from cruel ones. His appearance in a magical backwater and previously stable political situation gives Fuyuki's magi many unpleasant surprises.
• Made of Iron: Even without his Healing Factor, Shirou is superhumanly tough and repeatedly takes injuries that would kill another man three times over.
• Mage Marksman: He is both an accomplished archer and a magus, though he's largely untrained in the latter and never makes meaningful use of the former during the story. Fittingly, his future self is an Archer-class Servant, but packing several abilities and Noble Phantasms more fitting of a Caster.
• Magikarp Power: The only kind of spellcraft Shirou is consistently skilled at is largely considered to be mostly useless, that is, until it turns out he's got a twist to it that allows him to materialize and use legendary weapons relatively at will.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Has a streak of this over all three routes, from taking one of Rider's nails straight through the hand and then asking Rin, whom he took it for, whether or not she's okay to losing an arm to The Shadow while protecting Illya.
  Shirou: I panicked too much. All I lost was my left arm.
• Martyr Without a Cause: He starts out as one in all the routes, and grows out of it to varying degrees in each. In Fate, he doesn't truly change his worldview, but does learn about the importance of trusting his comrades rather than taking on everything by himself. Unlimited Blade Works takes a sledgehammer to his philosophy by revealing that Archer is his future self who's been rendered bitter and vengeful (towards Shirou himself) thanks to Shirou forming a pact with the world and trapping himself in an Ironic Hell as a Counter-Guardian. And in Heaven's Feel, Shirou does find a cause to martyr himself to, namely Sakura's safety, which only amplifies her guilt complex and leaves her open to Angra Mainiu's corruption.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Has a bit of this dynamic with Saber. Saber spent her entire life playing the role of a man, has excellent swordsmanship skills, and is uncomfortable around her emotions, while Shirou has little combat ability compared to her, is much more emotional and excels at domestic tasks such as cooking.
• Master Archer: A downplayed example — he is only a high schooler and only did archery as part of his high school's archery club, but his hit rate on the school range is near perfect: He only missed a shot once in his entire year, which according to him was on purpose just to see what it felt like to miss. He later quit the archery club because he had nothing to learn from it.
• Meaningful Name: The kanji that spell Shirou Emiya mean, loosely, "Warrior-Son Guards-Palace". It's also quite similar to "amateur" (素人 shirōto), which several characters call him in disdain.
• Mental World: His Reality Marble replaces the outer world with his own mental world.
• Morality Chain: To Rin. When she feels she has to do something unethical as part of her genius magus facade, she always listens to Shirou when he calls her out on it. Likewise, Rin herself is his Cloudcuckoolander's Minder when he is about to do something reckless because of his ideals.
• Motive Decay: In Heaven's Feel, he ditches his ideal to become a hero of justice since he can't do that and protect the people he loves (i.e. Sakura) at the same time, in contrast to what happens in the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works routes. And just so the narrative can make sure of that, repetitive use of Archer's arm results in his brain getting damaged — at one point, it causes him to forget the night Kiritsugu died and he vowed to him to become a hero.
• Mr. Fanservice: He's pretty ripped for a highschooler◊, and definitely not sore on the eyes. In case you needed more proof. And then of course, there's his future self as Tall, Dark, and Snarky Archer.
• Mundane Solution: During the climax of the Unlimited Blade Works route Shirou's reality marble allows him to replicate just about every weapon that Gilgamesh can throw at him, The one exception is Gilgamesh's ultimate trump card, Ea. Ea is effectively an Anti-Magic Sword capable of nullifying any Noble Phantasm. Since it is the one sword Shirou is unable to replicate and encounter, he resorts to the next best thing and just lobs off Gilgamesh's sword arm so he can't use it..
• Muscle Angst: A one-off example in Unlimited Blade Works where he complains that he's a bit short and scrawny looking at 5'6'' (though his musculature and height are perfectly average for a Japanese high-school student). The Ufotable adaptation gives him chiseled six-pack abs, making this even less believable. The revelation of Shirou's future self as Archer means that he's becoming a 6'2'' muscle hunk somewhere down the line.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Works to his advantage. Shirou ends up siphoning skill and knowledge of fighting from his future self due to the time paradox that brought them together.
• Nice Guy: Shirou is considerate, thoughtful, industrious, and easily a textbook example of this.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Inflicts on Shinji in Fate.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: Shirou is apparently not allowed to do anything awesome without first being reduced to a near-dead cripple. Ever.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Shirou spends all of Fate and Unlimited Blade Works hating Kotomine's guts, though he is never able to figure out why. Then during their final confrontation in Heaven's Feel Shirou finally realizes it: he was trying to ignore the fact that the two of them are actually incredibly similar: both felt guilty over the past, and sought to follow paths of atonement knowing they could never actually be satisfied.
  • He says as much to Gilgamesh during Unlimited Blade Works, citing that they're both mediocre warriors who despite trying to embody heroic ideals, wind up having to use underhanded tactics to win against legitimately talented and honorable fighters.
• Not So Weak: His classmates, Shinji in particular, look at him like he's an idiot for his willingness to do all their work. The Servants and Tohsaka look at him like an idiot for being, well, an idiot. He has no real self identity, dreams or goals of his own and as such really views himself as worthless compared to saving anyone and everyone else that he can.

O - Y

• Oblivious to Love:
  • Shirou seems to be trying not to notice how Sakura feels about him, though a fair measure of genuine obliviousness also appears to be mixed in.
  • In Fate, he's surprisingly slow to catch on to the changes in Saber.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, he doesn't notice the obvious hints of Rin constantly wanting to make him happy, or the lengths she goes to to keep him as an "ally", as opposed to an enemy. She goes full tsundere on him quite a bit throughout the story too, long before he admits his feelings for her.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction when he learns that Rin bought a car and plans to drive it in the Unlimited Blade Works Drama CD, Curtain Call ～LET US DRIVE TOGETHER～.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Shirou instinctively can't get along with Archer, even long before he knows his identity.
• Our Souls Are Different: The Heaven's Feel movie depicts Shirou's soul as a vague ball of light, which the Tohsaka sisters keep in a covered birdcage until they can find him a new body.
• Parental Abandonment: Twice. Once when he was orphaned in the Fuyuki Fire, and a second time when Kiritsugu passed away.
• The Perfectionist: A coping mechanism for him. He prefers really precise and open-ended hobbies because the struggle to master them distract him from thinking about his trauma. (When he does master something, such as archery, it ceases to be helpful to him and he drops it.) As a bonus, being really good at a lot of things means he doesn't often need to ask people for help (which inflames his guilt complex).
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Saber, when she's not a Love Interest.
• Possession Implies Mastery: Played With. When he duplicates weapons, Shirou also duplicates the skill of the weapon's wielder. Like with the weapon itself, it's not as good as the original, but it works. It even allows him to semi-replicate Berserker's offensive Noble Phantasm in Heaven's Feel. It doesn't mean he has the muscle memory for it, though.
• Principles Zealot: He can be this in the Heaven's Feel route, should you choose. It's not a good idea.
• Properly Paranoid: In the Fate route, he, Saber, and Rin discuss leaving Illya in the care of Kirei, which Shirou rejects. At this point in time, Illya has just joined and the trio don't have much reason to trust her and Kirei hasn't done anything undeniably suspicious. In hindsight, Shirou's decision probably saved Illya's life.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In Heaven's Feel, choosing to persist in being a superhero instead of protecting Sakura results in Shirou allowing her to die, and subsequently winning the Holy Grail War at the cost of personally killing many of his former friends and acquaintances. The Bad End has Shirou simply recount his victory in a brief monologue.
• Raging Stiffie: Morning Wood variety. Shirou has a bad streak of waking up with an erection, particularly when a girl is also in the room. However given the nature of futons, he always manages to hide it.
• Reality Warper: Shirou was born with the inherent ability to deploy a Reality Marble. Avalon turned it into Unlimited Blade Works. Too bad his circuits are few and bad and he can't use it without help.
• Real Men Cook: Quite the accomplished chef.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Shirou loves and is quite skilled at cooking, and owns a cute pink apron.
• Reckless Sidekick: His insistence on acting normally even during a war gets him hurt (if not brutally killed) and forces Saber into tactically weak, interesting situations. Some of these decisions, like befriending Ilya, actually pay off.
• Sacred Hospitality: He makes clear to Saber that he decides who he lets in her house, not her. Even when that means giving sanctuary to people who wanted them dead minutes ago.
• Say My Name:
  • KOTOMINE KIREI!
  • SABEEEER!!!
• Second Year Protagonist: Shirou is stated to be in his second year, meaning he doesn't have the worries of a first-year or a third-year. This also means Sakura is younger and can go to the same school while there's another year ahead of Tohsaka in Unlimited Blade Works endings.
• Secretly Selfish: His dream of becoming a hero of justice after he gets inspired by Kiritsugu may make one initially think that it comes from genuinely selfless motivations. Ultimately, while Shirou is genuinely kind and heroic by the end of it, Unlimited Blade Works reveals that he wanted to follow his heroic aspirations because of the smile Kiritsugu showed him on the night he was saved from the fire, desiring, and being jealous of, the happiness Kiritsugu experienced on that event, and wanted to experience that happiness for his own by following Kiritsugu's dreams of becoming a hero of justice in his place. It's for this reason that Archer calls him out for being a fake during his climactic confrontation with him.
• Selective Obliviousness:
  • Trying hard not to notice anything in regards to how Sakura feels or how he himself is starting to feel about her since he feels it's inappropriate to be attracted to his friend's sister.
  • It's implied (and stated by Shirou himself, even) that he knew who Archer was all along[[noteeven before Archer uses the "trace on" spell, Shirou recognizes him as someone who embodies his ideals]], but couldn't possibly accept the idea.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • He's forced to kill Saber Alter in Heaven's Feel. Not doing so leads to a catastrophic Bad Ending.
  • And again in one memorable Bad End of the same path, where he lets Rin kill Sakura for the sake of his ideals.
• Simultaneous Blade Spam: In Heaven's Feel, Shirou analyzes and projects Berserker's axe-sword, copying his skill with the weapon, Super-Strength and Super-Speed to perform a variation of Heracles' most powerful attack, renaming it "Nine Lives Blade Works". He proceeds to attack the corrupted Berserker with a pummeling series of eight multidirectional strikes, targeting and slashing the mad warrior's upper arm, collarbone, windpipe, temple, diaphragm, ribs, testicles and thighs all at the same time, pretty much destroying 80% of Berserker's body in an instant.
• Spectral Weapon Copy: The ability Unlimited Blade Works allows Shirou to copy any weapon he sees and instantly understand its structure. It then allows him to project it at next to no mana cost, with the projections being permanent unless they are actively dismissed or broken.
• Spell My Name With An S: Shirou, or Shirō, depending on the source.
• Spider-Sense: Has a superhuman sense of danger, which repeatedly saves him and others from otherwise certain death. This tranlates into having the Eye of the Mind (True) skill as Archer. Aside from that, he has a small ability of smelling magic.
• Stay in the Kitchen:
  • During the Fate route, Shirou is worried about Saber getting hurt and constantly tells her that girls shouldn't fight. This is mainly because she was badly injured in her first fight with Berserker and spends the first half of the story recovering from it, but it's also because Saber insists on fighting to protect him specifically, which triggers Shirou's Survivor Guilt.
  • When Ayako is attacked by a molester and nothing serious comes of it, Shirou says that it will teach her to be more feminine and views it as a good thing. When Rin promptly calls him out on it and threatens to tell Ayako, he tries to backtrack and begs her not to.
• Stronger Than They Look: His muscles are lean and trim, seen only in the CG where he fights Berserker. Sakura compares his physique to a gazelle’s.
• Supporting Protagonist: In Fate. The route is more about Saber than him.
• Supreme Chef:
  • He, Rin and Sakura have a bit of a competition going on with this and each has their own specialty that they refuse to let the others match them in (specifically, his specialty is Japanese food).
  • Saber quickly gets hooked on his cooking despite the fact Servants don't even need to eat. The player can have Shirou tell her they're skipping lunch on Day 12 of the Fate route, and boy, she doesn't take that one well at all.
  • It's easy to miss, but Shirou is also Famed In-Story for his cooking skills. A couple of optional scenes shows that his classmates are very well aware of how good his handmade lunches are, particularly the girls. It gets so bad that he knows from experience that he will end up giving or exchanging half of his food away if he opens his lunchbox in their classroom, so he usually buys cafeteria fare except on the days he can be sure of having lunch in the student council office with Issei.
• Survivor Guilt: At the core of Shirou, this is his primary motivation for his actions. As one of the few survivors of the Fuyuki City fire, he couldn't understand why he lived long enough to receive help while so many others around him died. As a result, he feels he owes all the people who died his life, and fights to become a hero out of the belief that he owes his survival to them. He does later clarify that he wants to save people first and foremost, but its clear that deep down, Shirou feels guilt for surviving and feels like he had to justify why that was the case.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Reinforcement. Want a weapon? Reinforce anything from a paper poster to a Noble Phantasm, and they'll get stronger. Run fast? Reinforce your legs. Super Strength? Reinforce your muscles or your hands. Sniper Sight? Reinforce your eyes.
  • Later on, his perfected tracing. The sheer number of weapons he has allows him a weapon for literally any situation.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In Heaven's Feel, Shirou realizes that the reason he was always hostile to Kotomine is because he actually likes him. Unlike Kiritsugu, Kotomine and Shirou are in fact very similar people. This doesn't stop Shirou from doing what must be done, but it does show that Shirou feels sort of bad about it.
• Taking the Bullet: You could make a Drinking Game counting how many times Shirou jumps in front of an attack meant for someone else.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Subverted. He’s confused by Sakura’s belief that food is good because of the people it’s enjoyed with.

The only emotions that went into my cooking were those of a village chief trying to keep a hungry tiger from descending upon the people of the tribe.

• Team Mom: Before receiving the Call to Adventure, he gave cooking lessons to a latchkey kid, maintained his house at adult standards, and did volunteer repairs for his school. He's not the strongest Master, but in terms of emotional support and omelettes after a night of brawling, there's none better.
• Theme Music Power-Up: His moments of asskickery are usually signaled by "Emiya" starting up in the background.
• They Would Cut You Up: He has to keep his Unlimited Blade Works ability secret because it's an extremely rare ability that appears at random—it cannot be learned or passed down through blood. People with abilities like this get Sealing Designations from the Mage's Association. They call it the "greatest honor" a mage can get, but what it really amounts to is being incarcerated and frozen in time so their ability can be studied.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Lapses into this a couple of times in the anime adaptation of UBW, to showcase how mentally broken and disturbed he actually is on the inside.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Subverted, despite his heroic ideals. Shirou is willing to take the lives of his enemies, and- in some scenarios and Bad Ends- allies if it means he can save the people around him. In the Fate route, he did not hesitate to nearly snap Shinji's neck so Rider would take down the Bloodfort she set over the school, gets in a fight with Archer because the latter didn't want to kill Caster despite the chance given to them and later threatens to have Saber kill him if harms Rin in any way when he kidnaps her. In Unlimited Blade Works, he contemplated killing Rin out of desperation if she made a move to endanger Caster's hostage though he ultimately doesn't go through with it, and in the "Mind of Steel" Bad Ending in Heaven's Feel, he lets Sakura die, Kirei predicting that he'll go on to kill the other Masters once that's over to prevent them from reaching the Grail. In the same route, he kills Saber Alter, though partially out of mercy, to prevent her from recuperating and becoming another obstacle on his way to saving Sakura.
• The Three Faces of Adam: Fate/stay night shows Shirou's progression through these roles over the course of its three routes. At the beginning of each route he is a Hunter.
  • Fate route: He transitions from Hunter to Lord and eventually to Prophet by the end of the Last Episode epilogue.
  • Unlimited Blade Works route: He transitions from Hunter to Lord.
  • Heaven's Feel route: He transitions from Hunter to Prophet.
• Together in Death: Reunites with Saber in Avalon in the epilogue to the Realta Nua version of the Fate route.
• Too Dumb to Live: Less out of idiocy, more out of valuing his life far below that of others. Everybody calls him out on it. Visual Novel-wise, there are 40 main Tiger Dojos and a lot of them call him out- especially 11, 24, and 36 which are Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"! Player Punches. Most of these however, come from the player making choices that would go against his character.
• Took a Level in Badass: Considering how relatively incompetent he is at fighting compared to almost every other major character in the series at the start, Shirou makes amazing progress.
  • In Fate he begins to pick up Projection magic for real, though for the most part he has to rely on Saber.
  • Unlimited Blade Works: Two moments cement this: when using Projection for the first time at a level superior to what he accomplished in Fate as well as learning some decent sword technique and the second when he uses the actual Reality Marble itself against Gilgamesh.
  • Heaven's Feel: He gets Archer's arm attached and gains a mastery of Projection on par with Archer's... but it slowly kills him. At the same time, though, it's turning his body into swords and speeds up the process, but still useful in the middle of hand to hand combat.
• Tragic Dream: His dream is to realize Kiritsugu's dream and become a superhero who can save everyone. He is continuously confronted with the fruitlessness of his endeavour and the disastrous effect it has on his own happiness, to the point where he chooses to abandon his ideals in Heaven's Feel.
• Tranquil Fury: When Taiga is threatened, Shirou speaks in a completely flat tone that belies his anger.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia:
  • Shirou lost all his memories prior to the Fuyuki fire ten years before from which Kiritsugu saved him...or so he claims. He reminisces his old home and family when he comes across the burnt field where his old house used to be and even remembers his mother's smile in a scene in the Fate route, but represses his memories due to the trauma he suffered from the fire in Fuyuki.
  • After stabbing Saber Alter in Heaven's Feel he erases all his memories of Saber over his crushing guilt at killing her.
• Tsundere: In the Unlimited Blade Works route, he's as big of a tsundere towards Rin as Rin is towards him. Interestingly, she's also the only one of his three love interests that he acts that way towards.
• Unluckily Lucky: He's had two loving families, both of which died (or, in the case of Ilya, will die in a few years at most), and all his love interests have a small chance of following suit. He's survived magical "training" that's closer to a nightly game of Russian roulette. He summons an amazing Servant through no effort of his own, but she might kill him to get the Grail. In the El-Melloi series, he becomes one of five people, ever, to win Fem's Casa, but gets kidnapped by a mafia shortly after. That said, some of those inexplicable events are caused by him having Avalon in his body, not luck.
• The Unfettered: In the "Mind of Steel" Bad End, Shirou puts down Sakura for the sake of his ideals and has to kill off Rin and Illya as well to keep them from abusing the Grail. He basically becomes like his father.
• Unique Protagonist Asset: His specialized Projection magecraft. It's completely unique to him, stemming from his Reality Marble Unlimited Blade Works, and it plays a large role in the story, varying by the route.
  • In Fate, it allows him to trace Caliburn and Avalon, allowing Saber to defeat Berserker and Gilgamesh respectively.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, it allows him and Rin to fight after they lose their Servants. Later, it allows him to defeat Gilgamesh.
  • In Heaven's Feel, his Projection gets a Deadly Upgrade from Archer's arm, allowing him to kill Berserker and stall Saber. In the normal ending, he traces a sword uses it to destroy the Holy Grail. In the Sparks Liner High ending, he defeats Saber at the cost of his life, giving Rin a chance to stop Sakura on her own.
• Unusual Eyebrows: Of the kinked type. They're one of the few things he has in common visually with Archer.
• The Watson: Since he's an amateur mage with very little knowledge about magecraft, it's his role to ask the questions about the rules of the Functional Magic in the Fate universe so that other characters can give an explanation to the audience.
• Weak, but Skilled: Unusually, Shirou falls under both this trope and Unskilled, but Strong in regard to his magical ability:
  • On one hand, he was born with almost zero talent as a mage. He was born into a family without a Magical Crest (which would make spells much easier to cast) and has received virtually no education whatsoever. Nevertheless, Shirou made up for his lack of knowledge through relentless practice: by the time of the Fifth Grail War, he was sufficiently skilled with reinforcement to allow a rolled up poster to withstand blows from Servants, if only momentarily. His relative lack of proficiency in magecraft is further compensated for by his basic training in archery and swordplay, which is sufficient to allow him to fight off Caster's puppets in the Fate route. And no matter what the route, Shirou ALWAYS has Awesomeness by Analysis and (depending on the player) excellent split-second tactical decision making.
  • On the other hand, Shirou possesses his own Reality Marble, Unlimited Blade Works, an ability which very few magic users have access to. Essentially a Pocket Dimension which is capable of storing and reproducing any bladed weapon that Shirou analyzes in exact detail, it can be expanded into normal space for a short while, though doing so requires an enormous amount of power (more than he can normally access) because it essentially amounts to imposing the reality represented by the marble into the world. However, this ability is what enables Shirou to create successful projections of Noble Phantasms without expending too much energy, as he is actually projecting a copy of the weapon existing within his Reality Marble.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: One of his defining traits. Eventually, heavily Deconstructed in both the Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel routes. Only gets Reconstruction in UBW.
• With This Herring: Before he really unlocks projection, this happens often. His first real fight is him against Lancer, who is wielding the legendary Gae Bolg. Shirou is using a reinforced poster. It manages to survive several hits.
• Wooden Katanas Are Just Better: His skill in Reinforcement magic is high enough that he can turn pretty much anything into a weapon, provided it's roughly sword- or club-shaped. He parries several direct strikes from Lancer's Gae Bolg with a rolled-up newspaper, and in the UBW route throws down with Rider using a discarded table leg.
• You Killed My Father: In Fate, Shirou finds out that Kotomine killed Kiritsugu, and his original parents by causing the fire in Fuyuki City. He doesn't take that well. He finds out the former in Heaven's Feel as well, but at that point it makes no difference to him.

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