Read­ing Eternal’s review on the themes of Fate/stay night has got­ten my brains crank­ing again regard­ing this epic sto­ry­line that Nasu (and Urobuchi in Fate/zero) have envi­sioned and brought to life before us. Eter­nal high­lights how the three paths of Fate/stay night — Fate, Unlim­ited Blade Works, Heaven’s Feel — are brought together to con­cep­tu­al­ize the ques­tion of “what is the def­i­n­i­tion of a hero”. Although, this same com­par­i­son may be made to sev­eral other themes within the Fat­e­v­erse. To broaden out the scope, one can say that Nasu’s writ­ings are a crit­i­cal analy­sis by sto­ry­telling on “the def­i­n­i­tion of ideal within dif­fer­ent scopes of black and white”.

Typ­ing this reminds me of the days when I played Fate/stay night before it was trans­lated, rely­ing on a dic­tio­nary and lots of guess­work… result­ing in migraines and a desire to never do so again.

Fate/stay night

In Fate, the ideal is shel­tered. It is care­fully pre­served within Saber and Shirou’s dreams. Through­out the route, the Holy Grail War revealed only one of its hideous traits — the taint of the grail itself. In this sce­nario, the path that Shi­rou and Saber walks is a black and white one, where the bor­ders are clearly defined between what is right and what is wrong. Hero­ism faced only the impos­si­bil­ity of per­fec­tion, of sav­ing every­one, but not the con­tra­dic­tions that will drive home the themes of the two lat­ter paths. In my opin­ion, Fate ended with the least impact on Shi­rou. Yes, he made Saber aware of both her efforts and her lim­its, and he was given a dose on becom­ing the “Ally of Jus­tice”. But the fact he has yet to tackle and over­come the dark side of hero­ism means that the Archer of Unlim­ited Blade Works was still bound to hap­pen. This leads us to…

In Unlim­ited Blade Works, the ideal is dis­il­lu­sioned, bro­ken, and then renewed. Here Archer real­izes the true despair of a Heroic Spirit — “sav­ing” was the equiv­a­lence of “clean­ing up”, the cleans­ing of the most pro­fane of messes. The World will always require sav­ing when things go wrong, and heroes will con­stantly be exposed to the dark­est and foulest prod­ucts of the World. UBW brought the first true cracks in Shirou’s resolve, for he was fac­ing him­self, a far more expe­ri­enced ver­sion who has seen the truths of the World. In other words, his ideals were finally brought against its first true philo­soph­i­cal chal­lenge — the despair of a for­mer hero, echo­ing the pain and sor­row that he cleans from the World, over and over again. How­ever, what Unlim­ited Blade Works does not do, is break the bar­rier. The bound­ary may have been blurred, but black and white were kept as sep­a­rate enti­ties. Archer’s ordeals, after all, were still kept as the prod­ucts of Worldly evils. Both Shi­rous gain a renewed sense of deter­mi­na­tion, but noth­ing has yet to break through the bar­ri­ers pro­tect­ing Shirou’s dreams, to force him to ques­tion his fun­da­men­tal determination…

This brings us to Heaven’s Feel. Where the bound­aries between black and white were not merely blurred, but com­pletely shat­tered. The con­cepts of moral­ity were taken from its nor­mal, ide­al­ized, and com­fort­able posi­tions, mashed against each other and blended together. It is here that Shirou’s ideals were laid prone, truly unpro­tected against the onslaught on harsh real­ism — life in its full scope. It is also here that Shi­rou betrayed his ideals, real­iz­ing that while one form of hero­ism is pro­pelled by pure ideals, the other is dri­ven by self­less desire…

Com­par­ing to Fate/zero:

“True. We are tyrants, there­fore, we are heroes.” — Alexan­der (Rider)

Fate/zero really does a won­drous job of reit­er­at­ing this entire argu­ment once again. It may have been lim­ited to one scene, a scene filled with as much humor and action as it does on philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion, but it did an excel­lent job of putting Fate/stay night themes into per­spec­tive once again.

In Fate/zero, book 2, Act 8 Part 5–6, the Feast of the Kings com­mences between the three of the most leg­endary kings in World His­tory and Mythol­ogy — Saber/Arturia, the King of Knights; Archer/Gilgamesh, the King of Heroes; and Rider/Iskandr, the King of Con­querors (bet­ter known as Alexan­der the Great — the King of Kings). As godly wine is served with Gilgamesh’s Gate of Baby­lon, the three pro­ceeds in a bat­tle of ide­olo­gies. What starts off as a con­test of “who has the most legit­i­mate wish for the Holy Grail” devolves into a clash of “What it means to be King”.

Saber’s ideals on King­ship is one all Fate/stay night fans are famil­iar with — the King should be incar­nate of per­fec­tion judg­ment — fair, unbi­ased, and untainted by human emo­tions, yet at the same time cold and inhu­mane. Saber believes that it is the des­tiny of the King to walk alone, to be lonely for eter­nity. It’s Fate all over again, and Alexan­der was quick to ridicule her “King­ship”, com­par­ing it to the shel­tered dream of an naive lit­tle girl — one that did not know the mean­ing of ruler-ship, one whom is unfit to be “King”.

“Tonight was a ban­quet among kings. How­ever, Saber! I do not rec­og­nize your king­ship any­more!” — Alexander

Gilgamesh’s beliefs are the exact oppo­site. Once again, as we all know from Fate/stay night, Gil­gamesh fol­lows a nar­cis­sist view that the King is the sun. The peo­ple, the king­dom, the state — they must all revolve around the wishes of the King. If Saber’s ideals of the King were the white, then Gil­gamesh cer­tain rep­re­sents the black, although with some blurry bor­ders once again. His ruler­ship were that of a tyrant, and I for one fail to see any real mer­its in Gilgamesh’s King­ship. But one fact is unde­ni­able — he is a Hero. Real­ity proves this today, as what­ever one might say of his rule, his accom­plish­ments, the man­i­fes­ta­tions of his desires, are sang as achieve­ments beyond the realm of ordi­nary men.

This brings us to Alexan­der, who bridges the gap between Saber and Gil­gamesh. His view of King­ship was best summed up by a para­graph of his own:

“As king, you must have stronger desires than any­one else. You must be more mag­nif­i­cent, more eas­ily angered than every­one else! You should be both pure and chaotic, a man who was more real than any other man. Only through this, could your sub­jects be impressed by the king, and only this, would the mes­sage of ‘if only I was king, that would be won­drous’ would be imprinted upon the people’s heart”

To Alexan­der, King­ship is about both “self” and “the peo­ple”. It is about both “ideals” and “desires”. It is an art, of chan­nel­ing one’s desires (like Gil­gamesh) to inspire the will of the peo­ple, thus becom­ing the embod­i­ment of their ideals (like Saber). He then proves the legit­i­macy of his state­ment by sum­mon­ing his army — the real­ity mar­ble Ion­ian Het­airoi. It is an army that truly belonged to him, each rank and file filled with sol­diers whom once fought and ate with him, who shared his vision and dreams, who chose to fol­low him into death by becom­ing heroic spir­its themselves.

Such proof shook Saber to her very core… as once again, the bound­ary of black and white had been com­pletely shat­tered, its con­tents mixed…

Alexan­der (Rider)‘s army tram­ples over his ene­mies along­side Saber’s ideals.

Saber, and Fate route itself, is about the pure ideals of man, of the ide­al­ized per­fect ruler. Where moral­ity is clearly defined, and where dreams are kept pro­tected. Is such naivety a bad thing? Not nec­es­sar­ily. Just as Gil­gamesh falls in love with Saber over her virtue of purity, man still dreams of the days when their ideals held true.

“Try harder, O King of Knights. Some­times, I think you’re still pretty cute.” — Gilgamesh

Mean­while, Unlim­ited Blade Works and Gil­gamesh cracks the moral­ity bar­rier by offer­ing an oppos­ing opin­ion. Then, sum­ming it up with Heaven’s Feel and Alexan­der, who puts things into per­spec­tive by bridg­ing the gap between “ideal” and “desire”.

I’m not even going to go into Kiritsugu’s actions. You can find out about that your­self in the nov­els by read­ing just how inhu­mane Shirou’s sur­ro­gate father and role model really is…

In the end, I guess our favorite paths in Fate/stay night also reflects our view of the World, of moral­ity itself…
How do you want your Black & White? sep­a­rate? lightly-mixed? or stir-fried?

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Jus­tice May Not Be For Heroes: Kir­it­sugu of Fate/zero
• Eien no Aselia Strat­egy Visual Novel Review
• The Cir­cle of Hate in the Visual Novel Com­mu­nity: Eden’s Irony

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 11:31 and is filed under Anime, Crossvision, Light Novels, Visual Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.