Fate/Zero S2E12: "Fate/Zero" (continued even more)

The scene that looks like it's going to be the most painful yet opens on a grim, corpse-laden battlefield in pre-Saxon England. Arturia kneels atop a pile of corpses, crying, as she monologues about how much she sucks.

She failed everyone and let everyone get killed all over again, just like last time. Apparently.

Is the implication that she spends all of eternity grieving over the bodies of her knights until someone summons her? Or is she just here now because of what was on her mind when her last incarnation had its completely dismissive, arbitrary, offscreen death to the lava while everyone else in the room survived it?

...

Seriously, it was bad enough that Iri got such an anticlimactic, dismissive, matter-of-fact death. Arturia though? Isn't she, like, the flagship character of this entire franchise? The mascot? The icon?

On top of being arbitrary and inexplicable given Kiritsugu's survival, Arturia's death was treated as even less important than Iri's. It wasn't even onscreen. It wasn't even apparent until after the fact that she had died at all, and no other characters acknowledged that it even happened.

Like, that goes beyond the just not liking the character. This finale feels like it hates the entirety of Fate.

Zero's popularity definitely flies in the face of my own experiences with fandom culture. How were people who liked the original story able to even tolerate this, much less praise it?

...

As she kneels on the corpses in heroic spirit hell or whatever, she recounts some more of Berserker-Lancelot's final words to her when she slew him. Apparently he quit the Knights of the Round Table and lived out the last of his days as a mad hermit because he couldn't stand how magnanimous Arturia was about his thing with Guinevere. If only Arturia had judged him, or punished him, or even just gotten angry at him, he would have been able to forgive himself as well. She didn't, though. She was just impassively virtuous and forgiving. And because of that, he ate himself up inside and went mad, and that's what he wants revenge on her for. If only she could have been pettier and more cruel, she wouldn't have alienated him and the other knights like that.

...

If you heard something splash against your roofs just now, don't worry, it's not raining. That was just Gen Urobuchi's semen.

Seriously, is the story actually expecting us to buy this?

I can believe that this is something that Berserker!Lancelot might say, due to his mind being clouded with irrational rage and malice due to Darth Matou's tampering. I can maybe even believe that Arturia wouldn't see through that, given how much has just gone wrong for her and how emotionally beat up she already is by this point. The story is putting a lot of dramatic focus on it, though. It's framing it as something really important.

Which means that we're either supposed to believe Lancelot, or just find it very important that this lie is causing Arturia to suffer more. Or both. Probably both.

This story Lancelot told doesn't make any psychological sense. It doesn't make any narrative sense (if he wanted to be judged for what he did, couldn't he have just found a priest or something? Or hell, just let the other knights tell him what they thought of his behaviour?). Not in any culture. Not in any human social dynamic.

The author doesn't believe that this is how anyone would actually act either. He wasn't thinking at all when he wrote this. He just wanted to dunk on Arturia and prop up Alexander's inane argument from the Banquet of Kings, so he wrote a combination of words that did those two things.

...you know, I almost feel like Alexander was Urobuchi's idea of how to "fix" Arturia. What he thinks she should have been.

...

The Berserker's final words were that she truly was a perfect king. All of her subjects agreed. She was perfect. Then he vaporizes, and we go back to Arturia on the corpse mound, crying hysterically and screaming about how she never deserved to be king, she's not worthy of anything, etc.

We then return to Kiritsugu's POV. Apparently, the Einzburn patriarch - whatsisname, the Gandalf looking dude from the pilot - is so angry at Kiritsugu's failure that he refuses to let him back into the castle. Many times, Kiritsugu tries to penetrate the enchanted snow forest surrounding Castle Einzburn, but he is never successful.

I guess old man Gandalf didn't think having one of Ilya's parents around to help raise her would be helpful? You know, his heir?

Also...there's been three Grail Wars before this one, and Gandalf is old enough that he must have been alive for at least one of them. Did he really have this high of an expectation for round four?

I guess he's just that spiteful and shortsighted. Out of the three clan patriarchs, it looks like Tokiomi Tohsaka was somehow the least awful. Impressive.

Kiritsugu grieved yet another lost loved one, in Ilya, but he resolved to not lose any others. And, he succeeded in this. Turns out that not being an assassin for hire and surrounding yourself with other assassins for higher gives you a MUCH lower probability of losing loved ones, who'd have thunk it. He settles down into life as an upper middle class bachelor and raises Shirou, the boy he rescued from the fire and definitely hasn't been raping ever since just like the last kid he rescued. Five years later, Kiritsugu and Shirou are sitting on the porch watching the evening sky, just like Waver and that one guy did. Shirou points out that his foster father is falling asleep sitting up. Kiritsugu chuckles, conceding that he's right, and then out of nowhere starts telling him about how he used to want to be a hero when he was a kid.

Total non-sequitur. But the dialogue in this series has hardly been a stranger to those, I suppose.

Kiritsugu tells Shirou that as a boy, he wanted to be a hero. Cue voiceover from his stupid conversation with stupid Shirley on that stupid island. When Shirou then asks him why he gave up his dream of heroism, Kiritsugu tells him that heroism has an expiration date, and you just can't be one after you've grown up.

How does this conclusion in any way, shape, or form derive from Kiritsugu's life experiences, or from what he learned in the series?

What correlation was ever made between youth and heroism? Or hell, even youth and idealism for that matter?

Oh...I see what it's trying to do. Fucking...

...

The intent here is that Kiritsugu wishes he could have stayed that kid who didn't stab Shirley when she was begging to be killed. But the thing is, I don't know that there was ever an obvious change in who he was.

He didn't refuse to stab Shirley because he hadn't yet embraced the grim path of the Greater Good. He refused to stab her because he had no idea what the consequences of not stabbing her would be, and the most reasonable conclusion based on the available evidence was that she was delirious and talking nonsense. Adult Kiritsugu would have done the exact same thing, in that situation, with that knowledge deficit. He wouldn't kill someone asking to be killed if he thought they were just sick and delusional, unless he was really, really behind on his daily edgelord quota and desperate to catch up.

Conversely, child Kiritsugu did kill another human being within just hours of that incident, when he had all the facts and was able to determine that the killing was justified. So, if he didn't have that knowledge deficit when facing Shirley and the knife earlier, would he have still been unwilling to euthanize her? Maybe, but also maybe not.

There's no clear ethical difference between adult Kiritsugu and child Kiritsugu. The only reason they'd act different in the Shirley scenario is because adult Kiritsugu knows about vampires, and child Kiritsugu doesn't.

It's a lot like Ahriman's idiotic boat scenario. It's trying to say something about idealism vs. pragmatism, but it fails completely because there's no actual moral decision to be made. The boat thing fucked up the trolley problem by turning it into a positive sum game, thus giving it only a single correct answer (which it then tried to say was wrong). Now this whole framing of Kiritsugu's alleged lost idealism is fucking up the rule vs. act utilitarianism question by giving one side access to more information about the potential outcomes.

It's starting to feel like a philosophy professor gave Urobuchi a bad grade once, and he wrote this entire story just to troll them.

...

Shirou accepts Kiritsugu's baseless assertion that grown up = no heroism with a sad nod of his head. There's a break in the conversation, as the two take a moment to admire how pretty the vampire god looks tonight.

When the dialogue picks back up, Shirou tells Kiritsugu that even if he's too old to be a hero now, Shirou is still a kid, so he should be one while he still can. Kiritsugu looks meloncholy for a long moment, but then reluctantly agrees, and gives Shirou his blessings in his goal.

Back in Arturia's hell dimension, the clouds break. A beam of sunlight comes down, illuminating her and encouraging her to stand up and dry her eyes. Foreshadowing Shirou's future summoning of her, and presumably (I don't know how the original Fate ends) succeeding where his foster father failed.

Okay, I kind of like this. Not just because the story isn't dismissing Arturia for once, but also because of what it's implying that she represents for her two summoners.

I've been told that Arturia in the original Fate is a very different sort of hero; pragmatic, emotionally repressed, ruthless in doing what she believes must be done. Here in Zero, she maps to the sort of spotless, utopian optimism that Kiritsugu regrets losing his faith in. Going back to the implications about a Servant's manifestation taking as much from the summoner's heroic ideals as it does from the actual historic figure, I feel like this works.

Kiritsugu could never fully abandon that knight in shining armor ideal, even though he convinced himself it was bad and stupid. Thus, his Arturia embodied that side of the queen's legacy, and he had a toxic, contrarian relationship with her.

I've barely seen Shirou, but in this one scene of his that I *have* seen its clear that he idealizes his foster father (wanting to be a hero seemingly just to cheer him up for having failed at it himself). His heroic ideal is probably heavily inspired by Kiritsugu. Thus, his Arturia embodied the more pragmatic, militaristic side of her original self's career, acting more like Kiritsugu himself.

Thus, while Arturia's next incarnation might be angrier and edgier, Shirou's more honest and healthy belief in his vision of goodness - even if it's a flawed vision - is as a ray of sunlight calling her back to life.

Was this the author's intent? I don't know. If so, then - like many other scenes that I had similar musings about - it makes some of Zero's Arturia-bashing more justified, but it's at the cost of making her parts of the story less about her and more about Kiritsugu. And of course, that only helps with SOME of the Arturia-bashing, not all of it. Maybe not even most of it.

That's the end of Fate/Zero the episode, and of Fate/Zero the series.


Well, I guess I need to say something here, don't I?

I feel like I probably could weave together a full analysis post, with thematic breakdowns and analyses of the characters arc by arc, if I worked at it. The problem is that I'm not really sure that this story deserves it. There's a fine line between applying death of the author, and being wilfully blind. So, while there's a lot of interesting stuff that I WANT to think is in the story, I'm afraid it really might all be in my head, and that attributing it to the text would be turd-polishing at best.

Fate/Zero might be about aspirational ideals and how they reflect both the virtues and the flaws of the people who hold them. I want it to be about that. But for every plot thread that I thought was doing something with that theme, there's also another, much dumber and uglier, explanation. Was Arturia's characterization (and general poor showing) supposed to be a window into Kiritsugu's moral confusion and self-loathing, or did Urobuchi just feel like stomping on a powerful woman character that he thought people liked too much? Was Gilgamesh really meant to be a mirror held up to the monstrosity of Tokiomi's ego, or does Urobuchi just like writing assholes? Etc, etc. In each case, there are details that point toward the former, but also many other data points that suggest the latter.

It also feels like the pieces don't really fit together. I commented repeatedly on how, at least much of the time, Alexander and Waver felt like they were the stars of a completely different show with a completely different tone and set of themes. Another example that occurs to me now, looking at the last few details, is the whole thing with Angra-Mainyu and Kiritsugu's "wish." Is the problem supposed to have been that Kiritsugu was a butcher whose vision for the world was inherently tainted, or is it that the Grail had Persian Satan in it and would have corrupted anyone's wish?

If the latter, what meaning was there to the stupid boat problem and other vapid "deconstruction" of Kiritsugu's methods and motives? Why did any of that matter if the problem was the Grail itself rather than the supplicant?

If the former, why did Angra-Mainyu even exist in the story? If the story is about Kiritsugu realizing that he himself is the problem, then what relevance is there to the Grail having an evil spirit in it?

It kind of reminds me of the big issue I took with the Westworld season 1 finale. The show had a whole arc about the robots slowly gaining humanity and turning against their abusers due to whacky consciousness theory. But then there was also the twist reveal that Anthony Hopkins just sneaked a "destroy all meatbags" directive - complete with detailed plans for a revolt - into their programming. Both of those are perfectly fine premises for a robot uprising story, but they're mutually exclusive, and their cooccurrence makes it seem like the creators were just flailing around blindly.

There's a lot of stuff like that in Fate/Zero.

I feel like the most intuitive thesis and takeaway for this setup is that the evil of the Grail should have been obvious to Kiritsugu all along, but his moral myopia prevented him from seeing it. This is a wish-granting artifact that can only be conjured through the crushing of six other people's wishes and the total destruction of an innocent homunculus' identity and life. Entry into the competition requires you to trick the Servants into fighting and killing each other in the hope of a prize that you'll never actually let them share in. The Command Seals are a blatant tool of subjugation and abuse, built right into the system. The three families who have historically taken part in the Grail Wars are three different flavors of absolutely vile. When you look at all those warning flags, well, of course the Grail is actually Satan. What the hell kind of entity did you THINK could be at the bottom of this fractal atrocity? What kind of person does it take to NOT see the bright flashing warning signs and make it through the entire war thinking the Grail could be a force for good?

In fact, I have a suspicion that that might have been part of the takeaway of the original Fate S/N. I don't know that, of course, but that's the message that all the pieces seem to be assembled for delivering.

...come to think of it, why didn't Kiritsugu tell anyone about his encounter with the Disaster of Zoroaster in the Grail? Was it just a matter of no one believing him?

I digress. I'll have to see or read some version of the original Fate at some point, just to see how many of Zero's flaws are its own and how many are inherited from the original. As well as curiosity about which of my inferences about what things are setting themselves up for were correct and which ones weren't. Someday. I guess.

Zero does have some good spectacle, I'll give it that much. If you just watch this type of thing for the pretty colors and the zany fight scenes, then sure, this could be a fun series for you. The production values here are pretty impressive, at least most of the time. I also still do think Gen Urobuchi is good at comedy; when Fate/Zero tries to be funny, it almost always succeeds. However, my reviews have always and will always be primarily on writing rather than production values, and the comedy scenes got fewer and further between as the series went on.

My most negative surprise about Zero was the sheer extent of its hatred for women. I knew Urobuchi has a checkered history in this regard. I knew that Nasu also does, or at least did early on in his career (there were some parts of Kara no Kyoukai that gave me incel-lite vibes). I knew that the kinds of anime that weebs get really into often have issues with sexism, to varying extent. I went in knowing all of this, and Fate/Zero still surprised me. I know I have a reputation of having an axe to grind about misogyny, but in this case it really does objectively, fundamentally hurt the work. Arturia's quest is center stage. Her relationship with Kiritsugu is arguably the one that gets the most screentime. Say what you want about moral deconstruction or dark themes, but it's impossible to disentangle Arturia's treatment from the work's ambient misogyny, whatever else it also has to it.

Every female character. Literally every female character. Except Rin, but even that was just thanks to studio changes. Learning about how "Rin's Big Adventure" was handled in the original light novel, and about the...stuff...with Natalya that Ufotable also wisely left out, makes me really morbidly curious about what other Elliot Rodgers shit might have been cut out. Fate/Zero might actually be the most misogynistic thing I've ever reviewed. A list that includes JJBA and (years ago, under another name) Metroid: Other M. To go lower than Fate/Zero, you might have to dig all the way into Shield Hero territory. I've definitely lost a lot of respect for Urobuchi after watching this series. I had mixed feelings about his work before. I still do now. But, they lean much further toward the negative now.

I think Fate/Zero's problem ultimately comes down to two factors. The first, of course, is the spiteful hangups and compulsive 14-year-old-on-4chan edginess of its author. The second is that this probably just wasn't a story that needed to be told. The events of the fourth Grail War only ever existed to be the background for those of the fifth. The mandatory plot points weren't designed to support a compelling story of their own. Much of Fate/Zero felt like aimless treadmilling, and I think this was at least partly because the stations it needed to stop at didn't lend themselves to something more structured.

So, that's that. Fate/Zero is not good. It looks better than it is if you squint from a certain angle, but even that falls apart once you hit the finale.


I'd still watch the Alexander and Waver show. Seriously, even with all the respect I've lost for Urobuchi over the course of this LW, I still would.