Type-Moon: Fate/stay night, Tsukihime, and Kara no Kyoukai discussion

unfortunately the movies have to squeeze in a lot of information in a short period of time. i'm pretty sure everything that happens is explained within the movie, but it's often explained in one line well before the explanation is relevant.

i dont blame anyone for not really understanding every plot point or the exact details of how everything works, or getting the wrong idea of why people are doing things or what exactly happened. i think it's an unfortunate weakness of translating a visual novel to an animated medium that you don't get a lot of time to linger or thoroughly explain themes of the work.

that being said i do think the movies are a good adaptation, it just requires a bit more participation from the viewers than most movies ask for nowadays and maybe a rewatch or three to catch details you might have missed.

i really don't agree with the interpretation that the movie is saying "You have no moral obligations to anybody you don't personally know", and im honestly a bit perplexed on how you'd come away with that message.

the movie's themes are surrounded in how self-loathing and self-sacrifice helps nobody. a lot of themes about if someone can grow to become a better person. character arcs about how people deserve to be loved even if they've done bad things. sakura's whole arc is about believing that she doesn't deserve love or deserve to be saved, and the movie is about how nobody noticed how much sakura suffered and the sheer agony that made up sakura's life. and how, despite the fact that shirou was trying to save people, the person he loved the most was suffering right next to him and he was too blinded by his ideals to notice. a lot of themes of throwing away your ideals and the "perfect version" of yourself for the people you love and care about most.

i do think maybe "if you care about everybody, then you care about nobody" isn't the worst takeaway from the movie, because shirou's supposed desire to save as many people as possible and be a hero ultimately left sakura, a person he supposedly loved, to suffer more than most people would ever experience.

There was also stuff about how Sakura's abuse doesn't actually justify her behavior and for all her attempts to shift away responsibility, she's the one who ultimately chose to do so many terrible things. Which is kind of a minor running theme throughout like the entire setting.

Edited by Arha on Feb 2nd 2024 at 3:44:37 AM

The entire series also has a running theme of "who's really the hero? The victim? The monster? Can you be more than one?" Sakura is the victim, but she's also the monster of the story, and the VN plays that for maximum discomfort as her and Shirou's selfish choices, made in order to try and preserve the fragile facade of a functional "household," slowly unravel everything around them.

But the anime adaptation lacks most of the horror elements except for the ones that make for the most vivid eye candy.

It's also worth remembering that the three routes operate with different themes and ideas, and provide different answers to the same questions. While you can extract a lot of different themes from the three routes, I would say that one of the main distinctions is what type of love story it is.

The Fate route is an aspirational love story, in the sense that it's a story of a person chasing an ideal of a person. Shirou and Saber's romance is short, passionate, and leaves him with an unresolved image of the person he loved that he'll chase for the rest of his life. Two people, separated across time, who needed each other from the heart.

Unlimited Blade Works is a story of love as a process of becoming a better version of yourself. The differences between Fate route and UBW Shirou is the presence of Rin as a person who is going to hold him to a higher standard of self-acceptance. If Saber is the aspirational figure, Rin is the more grounded figure, the one who's a whole of a person, good and ill, and there for the long haul.

Depending on how you look at it, Heaven's Feel is either a story about love as transformation or love as self-destruction, and I think you can find good arguments for either, but the fact that Shirou loses an arm and dies in every "canon" permutation of the route makes me lean towards self-destruction. While the love is genuine, both of them are also dying as a result of the choices made in the pursuit of it.

tl;dr of a post that was probably made while too mucus-brained to make any sense: The anime misses the forest for the trees and is also adapting part 3 of a three-part VN, and the adaptation assumes you've at least got the cliff notes version of UBW to work with.

Edited by math792d on Feb 2nd 2024 at 11:18:52 AM

Bit of a crash course on the whole "Holy Grail" thing:

In the Fate world, there is this type of higher magic known as "Third Magic" AKA" "Heaven's Feel", which is all about the soul and whatnot, which would lead to immortality. The Einzbern tried to recover the secrets of Third Magic to no avail, until they figured out the concept of Holy Grail War. The Einzbern got the help of Nagato Tohsaka (Rin's ancestor) and Makiri Zolgen (AKA Zouken Matou) to create the Greater Grail, leading to the five Holy Grail Wars. As a side note, "Holy Grail" is sort of a loose term in the setting that might not even be about the actual Holy Grail. Any wish-granting device can be a Holy Grail.

During the Third Grail War, the Einzbern tried to rig the war to their side by trying to summon Angra Mainyu, All the World's Evil. Except that "Agra Mainyu" was not Ahriman, but a nameless man who was made into a scapegoat by his village to draw in all of the evils of the world. Regardless, Angra Mainyu was a weakling who died very early on in the war and was absorbed into the Holy Grail as all Servants would be. The thing is, the Holy Grail received the warped twisted placed onto Angra Mainyu and decided to "grant" the wish, causing the Grail to get corrupted. So now if the Holy Grail ritual were to be complete, it would give birth to an actual All the World's Evil. Kirei is the only one who really knows about it, and wants to have it be fulfilled due to his own personal reasons.

Also Zouken dying so many times is because his body is nothing more than worm familiars, with the one which contains his soul being implanted into Sakura.

Edited by TPPR10 on Feb 2nd 2024 at 12:25:33 PM

Regarding HF's philosophy: My understanding is that the story's stance is that Shirou needs to focus solely on Sakura's wellbeing - "Be a hero for Sakura alone", as Archer puts it in the story - even as Sakura's body count keeps adding on digits and she starts to become a bigger and bigger threat. It's understandable that a person would put the wellbeing over a person they love over a person they don't know, but the story specifically shows it as the best course of action. There's apparently a bad ending in the VN where, if Shirou kills Sakura, he becomes completely unhinged and evil (In a Black-and-White Insanity kind of way).

Thanks for the explanation. I think I understand it a bit better.

It's not that HF is saying what Shirou decided is the right choice, it's that he was put into a situation where there weren't any good choices. Shirou's stated dream of wanting to help as many people as possible came into conflict with his actual desire of wanting the people around him to be happy because that would let him be happy as well. So when he can either save the town or try and save Sakura but risk horrific consequences, he kind of breaks down. It no longer really matters much to him that Sakura is a threat to everyone around her, doesn't really want to be helped anymore and is basically just another of the many villains in that route. He just wants his girlfriend back because what else does he have at this point?

It's ugly but informative when looking into the conflicting desires within his mind. A more mature and experienced Shirou probably would have chosen differently (ie. Archer) but Shirou is fundamentally just a kid and couldn't do it. Once he'd set himself on that path there was no turning back.

Edit: Also, Shirou doesn't kill Sakura in that bad end, he just lets Tohsaka do it. Which would break her as a person. And then for the safest outcome to the war he probably straight up murdered Ilya and Tohsaka about five minutes later. Not exactly "evil" but not someone you invite to parties.

Edited by Arha on Feb 2nd 2024 at 7:01:10 AM

No, the story only progresses if you make those decisions, but that doesn't mean it's blind to the consequences. Archer outright says Shirou Emiya turning his back on the path he laid before himself for ten years will damn him. It's the only route that explicitly ends in Shirou's death in 2004 no matter the outcome.

I don't mean to be rude, and I apologize if I am, but you are literally missing the forest for the trees. A story can have a character make a statement about the meaning of an action and have it be contrasted/complicated/deconstructed by the narrative.

The reason Mind of Steel happens isn't because Shirou decides to do the "right thing," it's because without the instinct to make the people around him happy, without his desire to help, all that remains of him is what Kiritsugu taught him. Might makes right, killing a small amount of bad people saves the biggest number of good people, anyone in my way is a danger and must be eliminated. And two and a half routes' worth of dialogue have already established that Kiritsugu's ideals are incompatible with being a hero or a savior, so the end result is a killing machine who probably unleashes Angra Mainyu on the world.

Edited by math792d on Feb 3rd 2024 at 9:08:10 PM

Let me put it this way: my view of HF was heavily colored by how it was described on T Vtropes many years ago.

And thus, TVT ruins media once again!

Never trust the opinions of people who can't read.

HF is unrelentingly dark, and that really can catch people off guard. I don't think current Nasu would write such a dark story again, he seems to become generally more optimistic with age.

It feels like a cautionary story about dangers of losing yourself because of love. Shirou sacrifices his dream and ideals for Sakura, and it's literally killing him. By the end he's literally falling at the seams, the whole thing is a bit on the nose really.

You don't think Avalon le Fae is darker?

It's definitely the darkest thing he wrote in a long time, but there's a more hopeful tinge to it? Like the whole point is that despite all the literal hurricane of bullshit, Artoria never abandoned her quest because she knew there was something worth fighting for despite all that.

I'm not saying Nasu can't write dark stuff anymore, but it feels like he became less cynical and more optimistic with age.

i don't know if i agree with Heaven's Feel story necessarily being cynical about love causing you to lose yourself.

as mentioned earlier, Nasu very explicitly took a lot of inspiration from Revolutionary Girl Utena and i think it really shows in Heaven's Feel.

and if we look at how Utena ends... Utena's dream of becoming a prince is wholly deconstructed and destroyed in front of her eyes, and her dream of literal white knighting was doing absolutely nothing to save Anthy, the only person she ever was truly happy with. it ends with Utena giving all of that up and reaching out to Anthy not as a prince to save her, but as a person who understands her and wants to be by her side. And at the end of everything she admits that she could never have been a prince after all, and disappears entirely due to reaching out to Anthy despite costing her dreams and her life.

it's incredibly heartbreaking, and yet it ends with Anthy finally being able to escape the literal torture and rape on her own turns, and she pledges to find Utena and to be together again

and like. Utena is definitely a cynical and dark story, but it's a story about love and connection and people finding each other in spite of the end of the world tearing them apart. and in my eyes Heaven's Feel is the same way, with it being a story about people tossing aside ideals that are revealed to only hurt the people that they love the most, and learning to love in spite of how much you believe that you deserve to suffer.

EXTRA Last Encore is pretty dark. The end is hopeful, but by then the cast and humanity have been grinded so much it feels like they were trampled.

Honestly I'd say the Extraverse is overall pretty depressing as well. It's basically the Notes prequel? Even if humans survive there's nothing stopping Gaia from asking the Types to go rough up the Mooncell in revenge. To say nothing of the Velber and their hiatus.

So, I heard that in the VN, Sakura knows that having sex with Shirou is slowly killing him, and she just keeps banging him anyways?

If so, then it definitely sounds like a Destructive Romance.

Well in Utena Anthy also perpetuated the abuse her brother inflicts upon her upon others by helping her brother exploit them. Even manipulating the affection a dead prodigy who is basically Utenas Spear Counterpart to their own ends by pretending to be a boy.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Feb 3rd 2024 at 6:59:32 AM

I mean, if you want to point to Sakura having a destructive and selfish side when it comes to romance you could think about how happy she was when Shirou lost an arm.

And yet Heaven's Feel is the one of the two that has an unambiguous happy ending with Sakura being defeated through conciliation. In contrast, Avalon le Fae has Oberon, who exists as a successful denier of the idea of forgiveness, accomplishing his goal of ensuring that the inevitable end of the world is not a painless one.

I would say the two of them are very different. Heaven's Feel is a sad story that ends in catharsis, Avalon Le Fay is a mad story that ends in reflection.

And whether one is darker than the other depends on how you read the ending of Avalon Le Fay.

I can't speak too much on how HF feels in visual novel format format but even if it's just a front for the dirty center Avalon le Fey's atmosphere being brighter does also lend itself to that effect. Of course there are horror movies that takes place in the day (Midsommar is a popular example) but it's comparitively less common.

There's also has to be kept in mind:

1. How much you even care about Oberon going full scorched earth on the place once everything is over. (I don't reward bad behaviour but I also wasn't really banged up about the whole thing but that's just my own feelings)

2. How much you can connect with the darkness being presented to you (I've found more darkness in far more mundane horrors as far as anime adjacent media goes). Sakura's trauma is over the top but the baseline of it is probably easier to empathize with than all the fuckery in Avalon

Edited by Mami on Feb 4th 2024 at 11:16:56 AM

I read Midsommar and now my mind is distracted by wondering if any mages in TM would be able to get away with such a setup. or is that only allowed for Kiara

🤔

Avalon Le Fae is a climate change disaster movie.