I guess I should do what the cool kids are doing and break it down by route. I guess it’d be easier that way too, especially now that my plans to go through HF have been pushed back.

So obviously, with so many people talking about Fs/n and so many opinions about it, it was hard to get into this thing and give it a fair shake. We’ve got the whole Fate/stay in the kitchen thing, CG dragons and mana transfer, and the impression that Fate is the worst route and is terrible and is an abortion. I mean, I’d intentionally avoided the anime because I’d heard Bad Things, and so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to suffer through Fate before getting to the really good stuff.

To my surprise, Fate was actually fairly interesting. I’m actually sort of baffled by the GRAAAAGH WORST ROUTE stuff I’d heard. I mean, I guess it’s vacuously true in that it is the least good of the three routes, but I’m not sure why it inspires the sort of impassioned fury and disgust that I’ve seen. Maybe the anime really was that bad?

I’d heard beforehand that Saber was actually King Arthur and I’d expected this to be a random, thoughtless twist on something that we were familiar with. And it turns out that this twist is the thing that we spend pretty much the entire route exploring. The complications that would arise if it turned out our hero was secretly a girl, if you thought about it hard enough, are actually really interesting. And I’m really glad that the implications that arise from this premise are a pretty big part of Saber’s character.

Here, we have a heroic figure who, through her amazing powers, saved her country at the cost of her own life, both metaphorically and literally. And then we have Shirou, who wants nothing more than to have and do everything that Saber had and did. And when he finally has her power at his disposal what does he do with it? Well, nothing, because she’s a girl.

It turns out the two of them are exactly like each other. Both of them desire to save everyone at any cost, even their own lives. Shirou tells Saber to stop doing that because she’s a girl. Saber tells Shirou to stop doing that because he’s a scrub who can’t do anything. Both of them refuse because it’s the only thing they could do. Saber felt indebted to her country after she pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou felt indebted to everyone after he alone was saved by Kiritsugu. It took the two of them watching each other act in a blaze of self-destructive glory to realize that they were actually the person they were watching.

So, Fate/stay night started off pretty well for me. Well, by the end of the first route at least. Much like Umineko, I found the introductory stuff really tedious to get through. But again, much to my pleasant surprise, when things got rolling, the payoff in the interesting parts was worth it. But I have to wonder just how bad the anime is to cause such loathing for this arc. I can’t really imagine Fs/n without it.