Fate/stay night: A Retrospective

 Introduction:

I just watched the Heaven’s Feel trilogy of movies, and in preparation, I rewatched ufotable’s Unlimited Blade Works series and Fate/Zero. Fate/stay night and Fate/Zero are probably some of my favorite works of fiction ever, and I’m absolutely enthralled by all of the characters and their journeys. 

In this essay, I’m going to be going over several main ideas behind Fate/stay night (and to a lesser extent, its masterful prequel Fate/Zero). Some of the themes I’ll be exploring are how each route relates to time, dreams and altruism; how the heroine and Servant protagonist of each route transforms Shirou’s worldview; how the VN’s three routes form an ideological and tonal spectrum; how each Servant wrestles with their trauma; and how each Master wrestles with their identity. 

To me, the most interesting part of the original stay night visual novel is the three routes, so I’ll be engaging in a bit of comparative analysis and talking about how different themes are interpreted and reinterpreted across the three routes. I didn’t really know what a visual novel was until Fate/stay night introduced me to them as a medium, so I didn’t really understand how common routes were, but I love the concept. In real life, the choices we make (such as who we befriend, how we view the world, who we fall in love with, which battles we pick, the opinions we hold etc.) dramatically alter our own lives in tiny ways that we can’t often understand until months, years or decades later. In Fate/stay night, Shirou’s story branches in three completely different directions depending on his personal relationships, and the small, tiny choices he makes in the first three days of the Grail War has massive ripple effects that can only be truly understood in retrospect. 

The different routes are also interesting to me because I’m a writer as well, and I often come up with the characters before the story, which leads to me agonizing about which characters should do what things in what order. So it fascinates me that Fate/stay night (and many other visual novels) embraced that indecision to craft three different stories with the same starting point but wildly different ending points. It was also why I got so into Tsukihime and it's five (soon to be six) routes. Plus, the three routes fit perfectly with the often-touched upon idea of a multiverse, giving the impression that we’re not merely watching different possibilities of the same story, but three different stories in three different timelines. 

Dreams and Fate/Zero:

Dreams are probably the single biggest theme in Fate. Almost every character in Zero is driven by some dream of theirs, and these dreams linger heavily over the cast of stay night. Waver dreams of equality between all magi, Tokiomi dreams of reaching the Root, Kayneth dreams of fame and asserting dominance over less skilled magi, Ryuunosuke and Caster dream of death and destruction, Kariya dreams of rescuing Sakura and taking Tokiomi’s place in the Tohsaka family, and so on. 

Iskander plays an interesting role in all of this. He’s dedicated his entire life to the dream of conquest, and his sheer dedication to this dream empowers him tremendously. Those who’ve read my essay “My Problem With the Banquet of Kings” know I have some…beef with Iskander. I think he’s a fascinating character, but I greatly dislike how he’s used in the narrative as a voice of reason to shatter other characters' dreams. Namely, he criticizes Waver and Saber for having childish dreams, but also seeks to convert them to his…own equally childish dream. His reasoning is inconsistent and hypocritical at best, but the narrative (and Urobuchi) treat it as truth, with Waver pledging his life to Iskander and Saber rethinking her entire life choices because of him. 

Don’t get me wrong, Iskander has an undeniably positive effect on Waver, inspiring the boy to live confidently, freely and without regrets. But his life (and rebirth) should also be treated as a cautionary tale, showing the problems that come from dedicating your entire being to a dream without a second thought. 

With that being said, I actually love his relationship and final battle with Gilgamesh, a character who basically has no dream in all of Fate/Zero. In many ways, Gilgamesh’s character grounds Iskander and prevents him from getting too carried away, reminding Iskander that he’s just as much a slave to his dreams as everyone else. 

Kiritsugu and Saber’s dreams are the two that receive the most focus, as they are actually quite similar and they both feed into Shirou’s characterization in Fate/stay night. Both desire salvation of their people through self-sacrifice and altruism, but they diverge in two main ways. First, the scale of their dream: Saber longs for Camelot’s salvation specifically, while Kiritsugu’s ambitions are broadened to save all of humanity from itself. The fact that Saber only cares for Camelot adds to Kiritsugu’s belief that Servants are needlessly self-centered beings. Second, the underlying methodology of achieving their dream: Saber is a more mythical and chivalrous hero who believes in the importance of honor and oaths on the battlefield, while Kiritsugu is a ruthless utilitarian who believes the means justify the ends. 

In the end, though their dream is a beautiful one, their methods of going about it are flawed. Saber’s problem came from her personal attachment to the object of salvation. She came to believe she alone was responsible for saving Camelot, so Iskander’s words hit that much harder, and by the end she comes to believe she alone is responsible for dooming Camelot. Both of those beliefs are explicitly contradicted by the narrative, but Saber is unable to untangle her personal issues from 

Kiritsugu’s problem came from a focus on the large-scale, which leads to his small-scale actions being inconsistent with his motive to be a hero. On the large scale, Kiritsugu wants to save all of humanity, so he’s capable of excusing any amount of bloodshed and ruthlessness to reach that goal. The problem with this “ends justify the means” mentality comes about when he cannot reach that end: the Grail is flawed, so all of his bloodshed is for naught. He wanted to be a hero, but all he did was leave behind a trail of bodies.  

In a sense, both characters entrust their dreams to Shirou while also letting Shirou grow on his own. Kiritsugu instills in Shirou the idea of heroism, but he leaves the specifics of the dream vague enough for Shirou to come to his own conclusions. Meanwhile, Saber’s sheath Avalon (a physical manifestation of hope throughout Fate/stay night) is literally inserted into Shirou, rewriting his body on a physical and spiritual level. Shirou acts as the culmination and fusion of Kiritsugu and Saber’s ideals, wanting to save all of humanity like his father but doing so with methods and motives closer to that of his Servant. This context is crucial to understanding the subsequent themes of the story, and each route deals with Shirou’s dream in some way. 

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All in all, this theme of dreams leads to a very interesting parallel in the Fate series: the confrontation on the bridge between Iskander and Gilgamesh in Zero, and the final battle between Shirou Emiya and Gilgamesh in UBW, and 

Let’s start with the first fight. Here, Iskander is backed by both Waver (who has been fully swept up in his dream) and the Reality Marble Ionioi Hetairoi, physical manifestation of his idealism. Reality Marbles are not only extremely powerful, but within Fate lore, they’re used almost exclusively by people with warped views of the world. Even so, it’s not enough. Gilgamesh’s Gate of Babylon represents the cold, hard truth of reality, and Gil’s ability to effortlessly defeat Iskander and all of his men is the final nail in the coffin for our beloved Rider. 

I love this battle because, in his final moments, it shows Iskander for who he really is. Despite all of his talk and his attempts to shatter the dreams of Saber, when confronted with an adversary like Gilgamesh (who already got everything he wanted in life), Iskander is left with two harsh truths: he was just as much a slave to his ideals as Saber, and it cost him everything; and chasing a dream without the appropriate power to back it up is meaningless. 

Iskander is one of the first people Gilgamesh ever truly respects after being summoned because he’s so authentically, unapologetically himself, and Gil absolutely loves it, even going so far as to sacrifice his higher ground to fight Iskander on even footing. It’s a subtle bit of characterization that Gilgamesh enjoys people who act like themselves: it’s why he tries to break Kotomine out of his shell, and why Tokiomi bores him so much. Even so, he makes it absolutely clear that even if he respects Iskander as a person, he does not respect Iskander as a combatant because he lacks the power to match him. 

Compare this to Shirou in UBW. Shirou is another naive boy with a warped view of the world, which manifests as a Reality Marble. However, Gilgamesh hates Shirou for being a faker. Unlike Iskander, who was blatantly, unapologetically himself; Shirou’s entire life has been crafted on a dream he inherited from someone else. His life isn’t his own, it’s just him trying to live the life he wanted for his father. 

We can even see this in their respective Reality Marbles. Each soldier of Ionioi Hetairoi represents an authentic bond Iskander handcrafted, whereas each sword of Unlimited Blade Works represents someone else’s blade that Shirou thoughtlessly copied. 

Even so, Shirou of UBW acknowledges his dream is flawed. Unlike Iskander, a slave to conquest until the very end, the Shirou of UBW stops being a slave to heroism. Even though he’ll keep being a hero because it makes him happy, he learns to take care of himself and prioritize certain loved ones (like Rin) over the lives of strangers. 

Thematically speaking, this is why he beats Gilgamesh in the end. He’s a naive idiot, but at least he has the self-awareness to recognize he’s an idiot, and he can learn and grow as a result. This is also why it would’ve been thematically inappropriate for Shirou to beat Gilgamesh in the Fate route: that route doesn’t challenge his ideals nearly as much, so he doesn’t develop as much self-awareness as in UBW. 

Though Gilgamesh cannot respect Shirou as an individual because his entire life is based on an ideology he copied from someone else, he can respect Shirou as a combatant because he possesses the strength to beat him; the inverse of what happened with Iskander. 

Central Conflict and Heroines:

The next several things I’ll be discussing are all very intertwined. Each route of Fate/stay night possesses the central theme of heroism, but each route has a new conflict related to heroism that Shirou must overcome, which is tied to the genre and love interest of each route. In turn, the overall tone of the route is affected.  

Fate is a romance/melodrama about Shirou and Saber falling in love. In some ways, Saber is a great companion to Shirou. She’s literally King Arthur, a perfect warrior who never gives up, which makes her not only a Servant for Shirou but something of a role model. The problem is that both possess the exact same martyr complex, intensified by their respective survivor’s guilt, and each are slaves to their moral compass, benefiting others at the cost of their own safety. The central emotional conflict comes from the fact that they want to protect the other at the cost of their own safety. Even though those ideological similarities cause friction, they also give them common ground to bond over. Because Saber and Shirou have similar worldviews and trauma, and their character arcs come from learning how to work together. In the end, Saber forgoes a chance at happiness to fulfill her dream, and Shirou lets her go to pursue his own. 

Whereas Fate merely introduces Shirou’s heroism, UBW seeks to attack it at every corner. It’s fitting that the heroine of this route is Rin. Unlike the calm and heroic Saber, Rin is more human: she’s selfish, irritable, hotheaded, indecisive and equal parts attracted to and infuriated by Shirou. It’s also fitting that the Servant protagonist is Archer, a cold, pragmatic warrior who views altruism as naive and pointless. These two challenge Shirou every chance they get, so the central conflict of the route is the friction between the heroism Shirou wants to follow and the reality that unchecked heroism will lead to his demise. The philosophical clash between the ideal and real is symbolically reflected in the literal clash between Shirou and Archer, making UBW more of an action-packed thriller instead of a romantic melodrama. In the end, all sides agree the other has a point. Shirou recognizes his dream is flawed but he refuses to let it go, Rin never stops being pragmatic but she allows herself to save others move, and Archer acknowledges the beauty of altruism. 

(On a bit of a side note: part of why UBW needs to come after Fate is because Archer canonically came from a timeline similar to the one in the Fate route. For the audience to truly understand the future he represents, they must first be familiar with his circumstances. To truly know the heroism he opposes, they must familiarize themselves with that heroism in its entirety.)

And then we have Heaven’s Feel. This is the darkest route of the story, and it’s perfectly represented by Sakura, an abuse victim filled with bitterness and rage at the world for not giving a damn about her. The central conflict of the route is the friction between Shirou’s worldview and Sakura’s unique circumstances: the “heroic” thing would require saving the town by killing her, but he can’t bring himself to kill someone he cares so much about. As Shirou forsakes his heroism and spares Sakura, the consequences of this enable several of the route’s most horrifying individuals, such as Saber Alter, Zouken and True Assassin. Thus, Heaven’s Feel is a psychological thriller and horror story. 

As we can see, not only do the three routes have their own genres, heroines and central conflicts, they also form a changing tonal spectrum. Fate is optimistic in regards to Shirou’s optimism, ultimately affirming it as a good thing. UBW is more realistic but still fairly optimistic, pointing out the flaws of heroism but also its power to change lives. HF is still pretty realistic but sliding towards cynicism, and the unfairness of Sakura’s situation dominates Shirou’s mind. 

Time:

Each route has its own ideas, but viewed together we can see all of them deal with time in some way. 

Fate focuses on humanity’s struggles with the past, represented by Shirou and Saber. Saber believes she failed as a monarch, and this feelings rose to the surface with Iskander’s speech and Lancelot’s demise in the Fourth Grail War, In Fate/Zero, she wants to undo Camelot’s destruction—which she views as her biggest mistake—but by stay night, she wants to undo her entire existence as a monarch, because she now believes her whole reign was a big mistake. As Saber tries to unwrap these feelings, Shirou must learn to live in a world without Kiritsugu Emiya, another man who feels like his entire life’s dream was a mistake. Kiritsugu inserted Avalon (a relic of the past and a symbol of hope and perseverance) into Shirou, and with it, he also inserted his dreams of heroism into Shirou. It takes both Shirou and Saber coming to terms with their past for them to overcome Gilgamesh and Kotomine, as represented by Shirou finally pulling Avalon out of him and giving it back to its rightful owner. 

Unlimited Blade Works focuses on humanity’s struggles against the future, represented by the relationship between Archer and Shirou. All of us strive to be someone that our younger self would be proud of, and as humans, we’re prone to feeling regretful when we can’t make that happen. Unlimited Blade Works takes that idea and runs with it: the revelation that Archer is a cynical future version of Shirou from another timeline disgusts Shirou, who is still clinging to Kiritsugu Emiya’s notions of a “hero for justice,” but the irony is that Archer’s attitude greatly resembles Kiritsugu. Archer has truly “become his father,” and Shirou hates that because he doesn’t truly understand who his father even was. By the end of the route, we’re left questioning how similar Shirou will become to Archer (both in this route and the previous route) and his own father. After all, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. We get far more closure, and Unlimited Blade Works does feel like its own complete story (hence why ufotable’s adaptation worked so well), but it also has a few plot threads dangling, which necessitates a third route. 

Heaven’s Feel pushes Shirou to the breaking point, and he is taught to cast aside his beliefs in favor of focusing on the present and the people that matter the most to him right now, whether it be his lover Sakura, his sister Illya, or his comrade Rin. Shirou is rejecting his previous anxiety over the past and future, and this feels emblematic of humanity as a whole: all of us need to live in the moment to some extent, or we’ll never be happy with what we have and we’ll never grow. 

We can see that, viewed altogether, the three routes are essentially having a conversation. Whereas Fate builds up Shirou’s optimism, naivety and heroism, bridging the gap between Kiritsugu’s War and Shirou’s; Unlimited Blade Works challenges that optimism, asking not where it came from but where it will lead him. Heaven’s Feel is the implementation of Shirou’s ideas in a difficult, murky, morally gray situation. Shirou Emiya evolves very little as a character in the first route, and he starts to understand more nuance in the world in the second route, but only in the third route has he completed his transformation as a character. 

Fate/Zero touches on a lot of these same themes, oftentimes with the same characters. Kiritsugu gets an entire two-episode miniarc about his past, Saber is fixated on her failure from 1500 years ago, Tokiomi Tohsaka is obsessed with expanding his bloodline for future generations, that sort of thing. But for the most part, Fate/Zero doesn’t deliver nearly as cohesive of a message about time due to its lack of a central protagonist. 

Trauma:

Kinoko Nasu and Type-Moon explored a multitude of ideas in Fate/stay night’s diverse cast. I know I said earlier that the Fate route is all about the past, but this extends beyond just that route. The main theme Nasu explores with each Servant is trauma, and trying to reconcile the pain of their past lives with their militaristic role in the present. Some Servants embrace their role, as it is all they have ever known, like Lancer; others use it as a chance to reclaim control they lacked in their previous lives, such as Caster. The theme of trauma is most evidently seen with the Servant protagonists of each route:

• Saber struggles with her failures as King of Camelot. She is only just beginning to internalize her conversation with Gilgamesh and Alexander from Fate/Zero, but the shock of that conversation combined with the fresh trauma from killing Lancelot and destroying the Grail has made her swing too far in the opposite direction; she believes all of Camelot’s ruin was her fault, and she has trouble accepting that the failure was not her burden alone to bear. When viewed in the context of Fate/Zero’s ending, Saber is also struggling with the weight of being responsible for the fire that killed Shirou Emiya’s biological parents. 

• Archer struggles with the weight of what he did as EMIYA, and the realization that his entire life philosophy instilled in him by Kiritsugu was self-destructive and pointless. He’s an interesting example, in that his past is actually Shirou’s future. Instead of making us ponder his circumstances, we’re left to ponder the fate of our own protagonist. 

• Rider struggles with her sins as Medusa. Even though she died in her past life after giving into bloodlust and anger, she tried to rationalize it for so long as protecting her siblings. Only now does she comprehend the full gravity of her sins. 

• Initially, Fate/stay night was going to incorporate a fourth route with Illya as the main heroine. From this, we can presume that Berserker would have been the fourth Servant protagonist. While he is obviously insane due to his Berserker status, he actually fits into this theme really well. Underneath all his insanity, Berserker still struggles with the fact that he killed his family as Heracles, and he tries to make up for it by protecting Illya in the present. 

One detail that I only recently noticed on my rewatch is what the phrase “hill of swords” means for Saber and Archer. Saber and Archer have a special relationship: like I said, Archer canonically comes from a route similar to the Fate route, and that route was all about Saber and Shirou bonding over their shared trauma, survivors guilt, and their childish devotion to unrealistic ideals. 

To that end, the phrase “hill of swords” represents the Battle of Camelaan, where Saber met her end. But for Archer, this same phrase represents his Reality Marble and the endless suffering that comes with being a soldier and a Counter Guardian. In the end, Saber feels like she didn’t do enough for something that was never her problem to begin with, and she longs for a second chance; but Archer, who did get a second chance as a Counter Guardian, feels like he never should have bothered saving people in the first place. The hill of swords is both of their greatest failures, and each wishes they had acted differently. 

Identity: 

Across Fate/stay night, the major Masters all struggle with legacy and identity, which form the next themes of this retrospective. Once we go through all three routes, learn the backstory of everyone and take the dreams of Fate/Zero into account, it becomes obvious that each of the major Masters struggle with their identities because of their predecessors’ dreams. All of these characters eventually reject their legacy and create a new identity for themselves, but this transformation doesn’t occur until the final route, akin to a coming of age story. 

As I’ve said numerous times, Shirou’s identity is being a “hero for justice.” It’s an unrealistic dream that leaves him exhausted, ragged, and arguably isolated from the world around him. That’s partly because it’s not his dream. It’s the failed dream of Kiritsugu Emiya, which Shirou clung to as a child in an attempt to ease his own survivor’s guilt and bring him some morsel of happiness. Kiritsugu literally inserted this dream into Shirou, as symbolized by him inserting Avalon into Shirou to save his life. Though all the routes challenge him, it isn’t until HF that he becomes an adult and fully rejects the notion of being a hero for everyone in favor of being Sakura’s hero, condemning the citizens of Fuyuki in the process. This is the inverse of the choice his father made at the end of Zero: whereas Kiritsugu forsook the needs of his family to save the world, Shirou forsook the needs of the world to save his family. Takahiro Miura, director of the ufotable UBW anime, stated that he viewed UBW as a coming-of-age story for Shirou, but Nasu disagreed because he doesn’t believe Shirou went through a character arc. That statement by Nasu makes sense if we consider that he hasn’t fully rejected his narrow worldview until the following route. (This is explained on page 5 of the Fate/stay night Unlimited Blade Works Blu-ray Disc Box I Booklet, released by Type-Moon in 2015.)

Rin holds onto the identity of being a perfect magus and the last member of the Tohsaka family. Both of those things crumble away: UBW reveals that she tends to botch up important things at the last second (like defeating Caster), and HF reveals that she isn’t the last Tohsaka at all because Sakura is her sister. Her father instilled in her the idea that being a magus requires ruthlessness and heartlessness, and she tries her best to apply that to her own life, but she often finds her emotions getting in the way. This internal conflict forms the core of her tsundere character, where she simultaneously craves close companionship but also pushes away possible companions in pursuit of becoming the “perfect magus” Tokiomi taught her to be. Sakura is the biggest example of this, as Rin craves a relationship with her but looks for every excuse to push her away to uphold archaic magus traditions. Throughout most of HF, Rin constantly demonizes Sakura and refuses to sympathize with her to make killing her easier, but she can’t go through with it. This all comes to a head in the climax of HF, where she “botched” the job by saving Sakura instead of killing her. She made the same choice Shirou did earlier in the arc, choosing to forsake the world and save her loved one. In the end, she rejects her ruthless magus identity to become the compassionate older sister Sakura deserves. 

Illya is the last member of the Einzbern family, a homunculus whose body has been modified to maximize her Magic Circuits, leaving her with only a year to live. She's in a unique situation, in that nobody directly forces an identity onto her, but Kiritsugu adopting Shirou has led her to hate both of them. She became determined to hunt down and kill them, and she crafted a sadistic, unempathetic and childish alter ego to facilitate this desire. However, underneath that false persona, she’s really a confused, scared, lonely kid who just wants a family. Fate has her throwing away her sadistic side but still clinging to her childishness, becoming something of a younger sister to Shirou. It isn’t until HF that she throws away both her sadistic tendencies and her childishness, completing her character arc by becoming a mature, protective older sister instead. (This is also an interesting parallel between her and Rin, as both are exceptionally gifted Magi who sacrifice themselves in the climax of HF to let their younger siblings live.) 

Sakura’s identity is that of a timid, submissive, secretive girl. This identity was crafted as a defense mechanism in response to her environment, specifically Zouken and Shinji’s abuse. (That abuse only occurred because Tokiomi gave her to the Matous—yet another example of children suffering because of their parent’s dream.) After Kariya’s failed attempt at saving her in Fate/Zero decimated what little hope remained in her, she resigned herself to this fate of abuse and torture, and she constantly lies about her circumstances to keep people from worrying. However, her friendship with Shirou has her slowly regaining her hope, and when this friendship blossoms into a romance in HF, she begins opening up about her abuse, accepting help and taking control of her life. In a lot of ways, HF is the story of an abuse survivor trying to regain agency, and all of the messiness that comes with that. But by the end of HF, she accepts Shirou’s help to get rid of Angra Mainyu and reconciles with Rin, and she chooses to live an authentic life with her friends and family. 

The Role of Servants in Fate/stay night (and Illya’s Route):

Throughout Fate/stay night, there’s a recurring motif across the routes as they pertain to Shirou’s character development. In each of the three routes, Shirou falls in love with a heroine (Saber, Rin and Sakura), and he either becomes more like the heroine herself (Saber) or more like the heroine’s Servant (Archer and Rider). 

In Fate, Shirou becomes more like Saber, who is both the Servant and the heroine. Much of the melodrama in Fate comes from Saber and Shirou being too similar, with both of them trying to protect each other at the cost of their own safety. In the end, the two learn to work together as a pair, as symbolized by Saber teaching Shirou how to swordfight, and Shirou tracing Caliburn and Avalon. 

In UBW, Shirou becomes more like Archer, who is the Servant of Rin. He uses Archer’s fighting style instead of Saber’s, he masters the tracing style that Archer is so reliant on, and after witnessing it for himself, he’s able to completely recreate Archer’s Unlimited Blade Works. Much like how Saber and Shirou being similar drives the conflict of Fate, the commonalities between Shirou and Archer drive the conflict of this route. Plus, by the end of the route, both characters admit the other has a point: Shirou acknowledges his dream is flawed and impossible, but Archer acknowledges that their dream is beautiful regardless. 

In HF, Shirou becomes more like Rider, who is the Servant of Sakura. This may seem strange, considering that a running theme in the route is Shirou taking on Archer’s mannerisms and powers, but think about it. Rider (who is revealed to be Medusa) feels ultra-protective of Sakura because of their shared experiences, and this protectiveness defines Rider. HF is also the arc where Shirou puts aside his beliefs to protect Sakura. They both share the same defensiveness towards her, and will do anything to help her, even if it makes the rest of the world their enemy. 

Had an Illya route been made, I’d like to think this motif would’ve been carried, and Shirou would have become more like Berserker. Not in terms of powers or personality, but in terms of goals. Berserker’s primary objective is to protect Illya at all times, a trait born from the guilt he felt after killing his family as Heracles. This guilt calls to mind Shirou’s survivor’s guilt, and I think that in this route, Shirou should develop similarly, becoming singularly focused on protecting Illya no matter the personal cost. Heaven’s Feel alludes to this trait in Shirou, but it would’ve been cool to really expand on it. 

Saber Alter vs Shirou and Rider

As a bit of a sidenote, I want to touch on that wonderful battle between Saber Alter, Shirou and Rider. 

That occurs during the climax of Heaven’s Feel, where Shirou casts aside his long-held convictions to defeat Saber Alter. If Shirou were to have stuck with his ideals, he would’ve killed Sakura earlier in the story, which is obviously unacceptable. When Shirou is fighting Saber Alter, he’s also fighting a corrupted symbol of the ideals he once held. 

In this battle, Shirou is reliant on Archer’s arm and Rho Aias. That’s a brilliant writing decision, because this is the only route where Archer seems truly content with Shirou’s situation, openly telling him and Rin that he’s cast aside his grudge to help Shirou instead. That makes sense: Kiritsugu’s dream made Archer into the man he is, so if HF!Shirou rejects Kiritsugu’s dream, Archer would obviously approve. 

Narratively speaking, Archer giving his arm to Shirou is both a reward for Shirou’s change in heart and a representation of how Shirou is becoming more like Archer. (Which is a bit ironic, considering Archer’s timeline is very similar to Fate, yet the Shirou Emiya that ends up most like him is from Heaven's Feel, the ideological opposite of Fate.)

Finally, Shirou isn’t alone. As a side effect of combining Illya and Sakura’s routes into Heaven’s Feel, the whole route has this theme that to protect the people you love, you also have to work with them to bring about change. In this fight, Shirou is joined by Rider, the Servant protagonist of this route. As Medusa, Rider was so obsessed with protecting her sisters it drove her to a murderous rampage. By helping Shirou save Sakura, Rider is redeeming herself and proving that she still has the capability to save others without falling back into violence or cruelty.  It’s a great fight scene, because it touches on all of the symbolism and themes I’ve been discussing so far all in a single battle! 

Fate/Prototype:

The final thing I wanted to discuss with this essay is Fate/Prototype. For those that don’t know, this is the name given to the original Fate novel Kinoko Nasu wrote in high school, and it served as a template for the Fate/stay night we know and love today. Nasu has talked about it in guidebooks, and supplementary materials have showed us what some of the characters and conflicts would’ve looked like; this served as inspiration for an OVA made by Studio Lerche in 2011. 

Fate/Prototype is set in Tokyo, focusing on the Second Holy Grail War, with the previous War being 8 years prior. In that war, the exceptionally skilled magus Manak Sajyou summoned Arthur Pendragon as Saber and easily steamrolled the competition, only to become obsessed with summoning a hidden entity inside the Grail. She killed her father Hiroki, and tried to kill her sister Ayaka before Saber betrayed and killed her. Hiroki’s last words to his daughter were, “You have no choice but to enter into the Heaven’s Feel.”

In the present day, Ayaka—an untalented magus mourning the death of her family—gets roped into the Second Holy Grail War after she is attacked by Lancer (still Cu Chulainn). She flees to her house and ends up summoning the very same Servant her sister used 8 years ago: Arthur Pendragon. From there, she has to fight against Rider (Perseus), Archer (Gilgamesh) and Berserker (still Heracles). Eventually, it’s revealed that the Holy Grail is an artifact designed to summon the Beast from the Book of Revelations. The Beast resurrects Manaka, and she emerges as the final antagonist of the story. 

Obviously, we have some notable lore and setting changes. The Holy Grail Wars are a relatively new phenomenon in this universe, with a smaller gap in time between them, and there are only two instead of five. Furthermore, the Three Families don’t seem to exist in this universe. Plus, instead of the Holy Grail summoning a malevolent entity as an accidental byproduct of an earlier corruption, it’s an artifact that was corrupted from the get-go. 

To put it succinctly, Fate/Prototype is a simpler version of the story we ended up with. It was only a single novel, so there was only one linear story instead of three routes. Servants are replaced with more fitting and well-known mythological counterparts, such as Perseus replacing Medusa and the Beast replacing Angra Mainyu. A lot of Fate/stay night’s more confusing and shocking plot twists are gone, such as Gilgamesh being a participant in the War from the get-go, not a holdover from the previous War. We don’t know what the Assassin and Caster would’ve been for this story, but I have to assume they would’ve followed this simpler design philosophy. Caster probably would’ve been someone like Merlin, Mephistopheles or Faust, while Assassin might’ve been another Hassan. 

Interestingly, the Sajyou sisters seem to have been split apart into several of stay night’s main characters. Ayaka was seemingly split into both Shirou and Rin. Like Shirou, she’s a novice magus who summons and falls in love with King Arthur, and who has to slowly learn a new type of magic (in this case, Formalcraft); but like Rin, she’s a non-combative magus who prefers to fight from afar, and Lancer had a crush on her. Manaka was seemingly split into both Illya and Sakura. Like both of them, she is the exceptionally talented sister of the main character. Like Illya, she is silver-haired, adorable and incredibly sadistic; and like Sakura, she emerges as the final combatant and tries to summon the dark entity in the Grail as her Servant. Consequently, Hiroki was seemingly split into both Kiritsugu and Tokiomi, in that he was involved in the previous Grail War but died tragically, orphaning his children and haunting them with his final words. 

With that in mind, analyzing Fate/Prototype gives us some interesting insight into how certain characters ended up the way they did, and we can hypothesize how this led to some of the story decisions in the final product. 

• Shirou having a lot of love interests is a holdover from Ayaka. In the original novel, Saber is her designated love interest but Lancer and Gilgamesh both express an interest in her. Once the MC was genderswapped from female to male, that writing decision probably led to the large increase of both female Masters and female Servants. 

• Rin being a deuteragonist for the whole VN is likely a holdover of the fact that she was split off from the original protagonist. 

• Illya and Sakura both having a connection to Angra Mainyu is likely because they were descended from the same character. Also, that’s probably why Dark Sakura has white hair, just like Illya and Manaka. 

• After Rin was split off from Shirou and became her own Master, I imagine that this had a ripple effect on the narrative, and it probably necessitated one more Servant be made. EMIYA was likely created as Rin’s Servant and designated as the Archer-class of this war, which forced Gilgamesh to be a holdover from the previous war, bringing the total to 8. 

• After the Sajyou sisters were split in two (the Tohsaka sisters and the Emiya/Einzbern siblings), this necessitated the creation of new families, which is probably how we ended up with the Three Families in the final product even though they’re not mentioned once in Prototype. 

Looking at Fate/Prototype, it seems obvious from what little we know that some of the series’ key themes wouldn’t have been present. Ayaka is, by her own admission in the OVA, cowardly, average and self-centered, so it seems unlikely we would’ve had a large focus on altruism and its philosophical implications. But at the same time, considering how Ayaka was haunted by the tragedy 8 years prior, I feel confident in saying that the themes of trauma, identity, time and legacy would’ve all survived. It would’ve been interesting to watch/read this story, and I hope that Type-Moon makes it official one day.

Conclusion:

I hope all of that was comprehensible. Fate is obviously a very thematically dense work, there’s no way around it. But to broadly summarize what I’ve said thus far: each of the Servants in Fate/stay night struggle with the trauma of their past, while their Masters gradually abandon the expectations of their forefathers to forge new identities. 

Because Saber is both the heroine and primary Servant of the first route, her trauma and survivor’s guilt plays a huge role in that story, so her route naturally focuses on the past, and she and Shirou enable one-another’s worldviews. 

Because Rin is the heroine of the second route, her realism and pragmatism challenges Shirou’s optimism. Shirou and Rin both change slightly, finding compromise in their views of the world. Archer is the Servant that receives the most focus here, and his past occurs in Shirou’s future, so Unlimited Blade Works is a story preoccupied with the future. 

Finally, Sakura is the heroine of the third route, and her hellish situation makes Shirou reconsider what he’s believed. He abandons the ideals he once held dear and forsakes utilitarianism in the process, but this has horrifying effects on the narrative, as represented by Saber Alter. His alliance with Rider gives her a chance at redemption, and it inspires Illya and Rin to abandon their restrictive identities, and all of them work together to save Sakura, bringing the themes of Fate/stay night to a close. 

Anyways, I had a hell of a great time putting all of this together. I hope you all enjoyed reading this, and have a great day!