#fsn 2014

[climbingonroofs]

Aesthetics: tiny knight casually stepping on her opponents’ weapons

honestly all ubw has done for me in terms of shirou relationships is turn me very far away from rinshirou and make me appreciate shirou + saber all that much more where is the big reunion hug ufotable make it happen

[kurozu501]

same, i wanted a hug so bad. i was pretty happy with the face touching and the end where she took his hand tho.

and yeahhhhh, i think rin said that she owned shirou and saber/they belonged to her like, three times or more throughout the good end?

And im just like, jesus rin, please stop. It's clearly supposed to show through that rin genuinely does care about them, but its so uncomfortable. Stop trying to hide your care for them behind unhealthy dynamics! just grow up and be emotionally honest.

Shirou "past trauma compels him to do anything people ask him to" Emiya is left in the hands of Rin "ok so from now on you are my servant and literal possession" Tohsaka. It's a very uncomfortable situation in my eyes.

[kurozu501]

One Less Loss

I just had to ramble a little about Shirou and his bond with saber because the Good End gave me the feels man.

Shirou’s faces freaking destroyed me in this epilogue, like it was just really nice to see my son again in ufotable quality but just. His expressions were really good??

The way he’s so quiet and sad in the beginning! He’s so quick to jump to “Tohsaka must have left me here and gone home.” Even though it makes no sense she would ditch her comrade who just fought a battle with her! He still doesn’t value himself and he cant really see any reason why other people would. He‘s so fast to assume that too, it makes me sad. Shirou, please learn to care about yourself oh wait, that only happens in Heaven’s Feel whoops.

Ufotable continues to do a fantastic job with the friendship between Shirou and Saber, that was the bit that honestly moved me the most in this epilogue. Shirou so desperately wants to believe that Saber’s home, that she’ll still be sleeping there in the next room like always, because when they spoke on the battlefield she said they would talk later.

Both of them kind of knew when they had that talk, that it was a lie. They both knew they probably would never see each other again. In the True End, she does die and they don’t.

Look at my sad son ahhhhh. I’m very very happy with how ufotable did his expressions in this epilogue. He’s so quietly resigned to it. Shirou’s whole life has been so much tragedy, from the fire, to losing his father, to the grail war. He knows better then most that miracles don’t often happen. That sacrifice is often necessary and unavoidable. The plan they made with Rin fueling his UBW meant he knew going in that Saber would probably be that sacrifice, since she was getting less mana from rin.

Still, though, he allowed himself to hope for just a moment. To call out to her and open the door to her room as though it was any other day, and they’d get up and he’d make her a big breakfast.

It kills me that in the True End this all still happened but Saber really is dead and gone. Shirou just keeps that quiet sadness, carries it with him for the rest of his life.

What i love the most though, is how this melancholy look that begins to settle into him all through the start of the Good End completely disappears, instantly, when he sees saber:

The shock, the widening eye, the way he dashes over to her so fast that he trips and just keeps crawling forward because taking the time to get back up on two feet would be time that might make this saber hallucination disappear, the way he keeps asking if its really her because he just cant believe that she’s still alive.

And then when saber touches his face and he can confirm, physically, that this isn’t a dream or a mirage, she’s real, saber’s alive, still here, and Shirou just melts

look at those precious faces ahhhhh

He’s just so happy that one less person was lost, that he didn’t lose this knight who has become such an important person to him.

at this point with those faces i am reduced to yelling MY SON!!!! at increasingly loud volume, but you get the idea so i’ll stop here.

[kurozu501]

Really, what all the little mistakes make clear is that ufotable’s ubw anime was entirely intended to be a series for the hardcore fandom who had played the Visual Novel, and wasn’t really conscious of all the new viewers it had drawn in with the popularity of Fate Zero.

Its not necessary to make it clear to new viewers that Kiritsugu died the night Shirou promised him he’d follow his ideals, because the fandom will already know that

Even though new viewers will be over to the side going “well that was a cute father son moment i guess, wonder why they keep acting like it was some serious thing. Hey, they mentioned that Kiritsugu died in the 10 year gap, but are they ever going to show us how he died? That’d be cool.”

Its OK to do a really abbreviated summary of Saber’s backstory and how she relates to Archer/Shirou. The details of how Saber grows from watching their battle can be not really in depth because the fandom already knows Saber’s story from fate route. (to be fair the VN does this too, but in the VN you can’t get to UBW without finishing Fate route, so the expectation is that you do already know Saber’s whole deal.)

New viewers on the other hand, have only seen Fate Zero. ufotables Fate Zero anime delightfully cut out all of Berserker’s backstory from the novels, so all they were really given was “she was King Arthur and was maybe not that good of a king i guess because everybody died and this one knight of hers is crazy and hates her because Reasons.” Since ufotable is apparently not going to do fate route ever, it would have been better to incorporate some of her character bits from Fate into the UBW anime. Really flesh her out while they had the chance since HF is Not About Saber.

(^ this one isn’t as bad as some of the others, as they did do a decent job of fleshing out Saber in UBW, i just wish they’d have given us some of the backstory in Zero or UBW. How could you pass up the chance to do flashbacks set in nasuverse King Arthur’s Britain ufotable?!)

Its OK to make hints about Bazett and mention “Lancer’s female master” without ever following up on it or explaining why instead of a woman, Kotomine Kirei is revealed as Lancer’s Master. Fandom will already know that they were making a reference to Bazett, whose existence was explained in Fate Route and who gets to be a main character in Fate Hollow Ataraxia, so no need to explain.

Meanwhile new viewers are going “wait the priest is his master??? but i thought they said his master was a lady, wtf?” Since there's no fate route it would have made sense to bring that route’s explanation for Bazett into UBW.

Medea’s backstory about her life in ancient greece, how Aphrodite cursed her to love Jason and betray her family for him, how she was used and then tossed aside and then blamed for everything and forced into the role of villain and Evil Cackling Witch and then finally decided fuck it, if that’s all the world will allow me then so be it………is completely cut out. Because the fandom knows all of that already. So instead lets do something ~new~ the fandom doesn’t already know and flesh out her former master and what happened there!

……even though none of the stuff with her former master really matters. What really matters is the Ancient Greek backstory and without it her character is left a very flat and confusing mess. We are repeatedly told that her wish is to go home, but then at the end as she is dying she tells Kuzuki that “her wish was coming true this whole time.” Leaving new viewers completely lost and in a hideous twist of irony unable to see her character as much more then “Evil Cackling Witch”……………

Bonus points for not only removing Medea’s backstory but having all the men in her life talk about her motivation and desires for her, and for giving her unimportant Master more backstory than her. :///

Sakura is given a decent amount of focus in UBW part 1, and then dropped for the rest of the anime. Fandom knows that Sakura’s spotlight is in HF, so no need to show any more of her or explain why Rin cares about her.

new viewers on the other hand are alternatively wondering why this random girl got so much focus for nothing, or wondering why the traumatized girl they saw in fate zero is now smiling cheerfully and not involved in magic stuff at all.

Aoi, mother of Tohsaka Rin, is still alive at the end of Fate Zero. Ten years later in FSN UBW, she’s just. Not Around.

Not a single line is dropped to make it clear to new viewers that she died in the intervening ten years.

Waver Velvet, Master of Rider and popular main character in Fate Zero, makes a cameo in the UBW epilogue episode………only no effort whatsoever is made to make it clear to new viewers that it IS Waver. Because fandom already knows about Waver becoming Lord El Melloi II, so theres no need to make it clear.

Probably leaving more than one new viewer thinking that was just a random teacher dude. Not exactly the biggest problem in the show, as Waver’s appearance was just an easter egg cameo but still geez, how hard would it have been to add one line with his name?!

[kurozu501]

related to that crit post olox made about rin/shirou, one thing that bugged me in the fsn ubw epilogue

Shirou: I’m going to spend the rest of my existence following the hero path, which implicitly means giving up any stability in my life. I will live the rest of my days traveling the planet, helping people where i can and saving those in need. i will be in countless battles, risk my life endlessly, and probably end up having to kill many people to save others. This is a path that ended in execution for one version of my future self.

Rin: In the end I’ll probably settle down at the clock tower. Regardless, having fun, suffering, seeing the sights, and eventually having our own happily ever after. That’s the future in store for us.

Narrative: FURIOUSLY TRIES TO PRETEND THESE STATEMENTS DO NOT CONTRADICT EACH OTHER BY PLAYING HAPPY MUSIC

[climbingonroofs]

· Ladies of Fate/Stay Night - Epilogue

[kurozu501]

ive been through like 10 damn pages of the fate stay night tag and still havent seen any gifs of Shirou in the CCC outfit in the final scene. Am i going to have to do this myself.

[kurozu501]

defenestrations replied to your post: ok so i finally watched the last ubw e...

YEAH I thought it was cute but was wondering about how they portrayed the Mages’ Association. I was like RIN WHY ARE YOU TELLING HIM TO JOIN THEY’LL GET HIM

YEAH, like it made no sense? Rin is very aware that if the Association found out about shirou’s trace power they would probably kill him or turn him into an experiment. It was ridiculously ooc for Rin to be like “being a member of the mage association is a great gig Shirou! you should join and let them scan you!”