Fate/Zero S1E10: “Rin's Big Adventure”

Now there's a title guaranteed to get my attention! I didn't expect Rin Tohsaka to play any more of a role in this story, given her age and apparent removal from the situation. I'm definitely not sorry to be wrong though, as Rin was my introduction to this franchise and a big part of why it made such a positive first impression. Granted, this is a much younger Rin being written by a different author, but still, I'm optimistic.


Open on a spooky alchemy lab, where someone unseen is arranging some glowing crystals over an arcane diagram. A wind blows through the room, the flames of the candles turn an eerie blue, and the camera repositions itself to reveal that the caster is Babby Rin.

It just now occurs to me that Rin has kept the same hairdo through elementary, middle, and high school. That's some dedication right there.

She reshapes the crystal shard in the center of the glyph into the beginning of something, but then loses control of the spell and causes it to collapse into a pile of dust. As she pouts at her failed experiment, Goatee shows up and addresses her by name. Then the OP.

That's really not much of a teaser, I've got to say. It just reminds us that Rin is Goatee's daughter, and establishes that she can't really magic just yet, which I would have sort of expected anyway given her age.

What follows honestly would have been a more grabbing teaser. A little girl being bullied in the schoolyard, and Rin interposing herself to talk down the two boys doing the bullying.

"Bullying is to be done one on one or else not at all! Do I make myself clear?"

The bullies try to save face, but are clearly terrified of her. She might not be any good at crystal sculpting once, but her classmates aren't going to forget that time when Kenji stole her lunch and she made his eyeballs eat him anytime soon.

Flash back (or forward? Not sure which of these events is supposed to have happened first) to her bemoaning her broken crystal. Goatee tells her that it looks like she used too much mana at once and over-energized the crystal. It's important to remain calm and suppress the heat of your emotions while casting, to prevent this from happening. Sort of a Jedi-like process, I guess.

That squares with what I've seen of this setting. Wizards always seem to maintain their cool in stressful situations, with real emotional outbursts only occurring just before defeat. I assumed they were getting emotional because they were loosing, but maybe I had the causality backwards to some extent? Getting under a Fate wizard's skin might be the best way to beat them in a fight.

Bard with vicious mockery, got it.

He gives her a little speech about poise and temperance, not just in magic but in all things, while doing some impressive bullshit with the crystal. She watches, entranced. Then we jump back to her talking to the bullied girl, and trying to teach her the opposite lesson.

To be fair, it's not like bulliedgirl was being poised and collected anyway. Crying isn't any more controlled than anger. But still, it's an amusing juxtaposition; using versus suppressing emotion.

Bulliedgirl praises Rin for her iron will and ability to always speak her mind regardless of circumstances. Then we jump back to Rin watching Goatee recompose the crystal and then shape it into a realistic horse statuette. He warmly encourages her to keep practicing, and tells her that as a daughter of the Tohsaka family he knows she can do just about anything.

The obvious cognitive dissonance regarding an individual whose name rhymes with shmakrulah does not need pointing out.

There's a montage of Rin being the bestest at school, with her classmates lining up to have her help them with their schoolwork, all while she continues practicing magic. It's pretty over-the-top, but well...in retrospect, it's exactly how she was portrayed in UBW too, so it's consistent if nothing else. Then we catch up to the events of this series, with Goatee telling her that she and her mother need to relocate until the Grail War is over, and Rin objecting that she should be able to stay and help.

Sorry, Rin. The Vatican looked into this, and they decided that you're overpowered. Them's the rules.

She gets frustrated with her father's insistence, and with her mother's Stepford Wife agreement. This leads to her poking around in the family library looking up stuff about the Grail War, but even her prodigy self is just not able to grock this advanced material.

She tries book after book, and finally opens one that covers its own pages in inky black handprints before her eyes and speaks German in a creepy voice. She tries to close it again, but it keeps itself open, and then a pair of ghostly arms reach out and grab her.

Goatee comes into the room (I think this is the same cellar that she later uses to summon her own Archer in the next Grail War, come to think of it) and makes the book stop eating his daughter. He warns her that some magical artifacts have their own internal mana supply, and in some cases agency with which to use it. She should avoid such things until she's better at magic. He then gives her a compass of detect magic whose hand always points to the nearest mana supply besides the user.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGE0P_jWWSg

This should enable her to continue researching his library safely, as it'll warn her about dangerous objects. One assumes that he could also just relocate the dangerous stuff to create a safe home environment for his daughter, but that would be work and he doesn't like work.

He also tells her that after the Grail War is over, he'll start teaching her real "gem magic." The Tohsakas seem to have a gem motif. Wonder if that indicates a penchant for geomancy? I don't recall seeing any earthbending from them, but both Goatee and Rin tend to be pretty low-key with displays of personal magic (part of their "poise and temperance" ethos, presumably), so it might be a thing they can do.

Jump ahead to Rin staying with the whoevers while her dad does his ridiculous bullshit with Kirei. She starts hearing about a rash of child disappearances in Fuyuki, including some in neighborhoods close to her own. Culminating in the death of a classmate of hers.

She tries calling her BFF, Kotone, to ask if she's okay, and is unable to reach her. So, she does the Rin Tohsaka thing and gets on a train back to Fyuki. She's a bit young to be taking an intercity train on her own, but even as a novice sorceress I imagine that slipping through muggle boundaries isn't much of a challenge for her. She gets back to her home city, despite her parents' instructions, and finds the side of it she's seeing now rather alienating and creepy.

She takes out her compass of detect magic, but its hand is spinning around wildly and erratically. With the Grail War going on, there are just too many high-powered mana sources all over the city for it to keep up with.

She follows...something? I'm not really sure how she navigates to any one target with her compass going crazy, but she does somehow. Anyway, she somehow is led to a man walking a child a little younger than her down the late night street.

That strikes her as suspicious, given recent events. Also, that little boy looks awfully hypnotized for a kid walking with his dad. And the glowy bracelet around his wrist could just be a glowstick, but it could also be the mana source she's (I think? Is the compass doing anything for her at this point?) homed in on.

She consults her compass, and now it IS pointing in a single direction. Okay, I guess when she gets close enough to a mana source that one becomes a dominant pull. She follows the compass, and it leads to her catching up with Uwu again. The hypnotized kid has been joined by another, and Uwu is guiding them along while referring to them as "kid" without seeming to know their names.

Rin hides in an alley, realizing that she's found the culprit. Then, she stops and asks herself what the hell she thinks she's even hiding from.

It's time to feed a motherfucker to his own eyeballs.

...

If ten year old Rin just waltzes in and banishes Gilles while everyone else is politicking over him, I will laugh extremely hard.

I don't expect her to be any match for Gilles himself, of course. But Uwu is a nascent wizard with no practical magical knowledge, functionally a muggle as far as confrontations go. And, if I'm understanding the rules of the Grail War correctly, Gilles will return to the afterlife if his Master dies.

...

She tries to approach, but gets a bounded field effect like Iri felt when people breached the castle grounds earlier, stunning her. Guess Gilles gave Uwu some low level anti-mage shields; this might be harder than I thought. This drives her to hide herself until Uwu has moved on passed. She tracks him back to what looks like an abandoned restaurant or something, where she finds her friend Kotone sprawled out on the floor, hypnotized in much the same manner as the two boys she just saw.

As Rin is trying to figure out how to snap her out of it, Uwu enters the room and catches her. He asks if she's lost. She insists that she isn't. Then he slumps the two hypnotized boys he just brought in down onto one of the tables, and Rin realizes that there are several other unconscious kids in here besides them and Kotone.

Uwu remarks on how convenient this is, having an extra sacrifice just show up all on her own at the ritual site. She tries to get away from him, but he catches up; fortunately, she DID get a moment to check her compass, which specifically pointed to the glowy bracelet around his wrist.

She figures that he may be using this bracelet to control the children. And, sure enough, an instant later he grabs her and the bracelet glows brighter as he starts ordering her to stop fighting, and her eyes widen and her mouth falls slack.

However, it seems that her innate magic makes her at least somewhat resistant to the bracelet's effects, and she's able to shake it off after a moment's mental struggle. She remembers what Goatee told her after she shattered that crystal; that getting too emotional while using magic can cause her mana to overcharge whatever she's trying to channel it into, usually with destructive effects. She doesn't know any proper disintegrate spells, but deliberate overcharging works as one, albeit inefficiently.

Upbeat techno music plays as she lays her free hand on the bracelet, and focuses her power into it with a wild surge of defiant anger.

She succeeds at failing very, very well, shattering the bracelet in a violent burst. Uwu, who had been staring at what she was doing in confusion, gets a face full of shrapnel that leaves him blinded and in pain. Meanwhile, the children are all awoken, and Rin leads them out of the building and onto a well-lighted street while Uwu is still out of commission.

Uwu, still blinking blood out of his eyes, hopes that Gilles isn't going to do anything too awful to him for fucking this up.

Rin calls the police, and a couple of cruisers show up to bring the children to safety. Rin stays out of sight in an alley entrance, not wanting to get caught and have her parents find out.

Then her compass goes crazy again and points sharply upward, in a kind of reaction that Goatee warned her about. From a rooftop overhead, one of Gilles' starfish demons leaps down, chasing her deeper into the alley. Welp, this is it Rin. This will be a tough fight, but he has huge eyeballs, so if she can get them to eat him he'll probably go down fast. A swarm of...locusts?...shoots passed her, and forms themselves into...hmm. That silhouette doesn't look like Gilles.

Did he send Uwu to recover her? And give him a swarm-form ability? That figure is shaped more like Uwu.

Cut to Rin's useless stupid pathetic mother driving to Fuyuki to try and recover Rin, who has now been missing long enough to be noticed. She quickly finds her, presumably using some sort of family bond magic. She's laid out on a park picnic table, unconscious but seemingly unhurt. Huh?

He's not getting any healthier, by the looks of him.

Hmm. Maybe that swarm ability he used was something crest worm related? Like, his new powers just have an insect/vermin motif because of their source?

He tells her his story. He doesn't cast any blame on her for letting her husband give Sakura to the Matous, or for her rebuke of him when he tried to reason with her about it. But he does take some obvious grim satisfaction in telling her that this physical deterioration will be happening to Sakura too eventually, thanks to Darth Matou's abuses. He assures her that she needn't worry, though; he'll kill her husband and win the war for Darth, and then Sakura will be free, and they can all play happily together in this park like they used to.

Honestly? Daisy's being a lot less cruel with his choice of words than I would be in his place.

Granted, it strikes me as all too possible that whatever Darth Matou uses the grail to wish for, it miiiight not result in a world that has a future in it for either of his nieces.

Also, Berserker's one combat appearance thus far was pretty unimpressive, so the chances of things even getting to that point are quite low.

Daisy leaves, despite dumb weak pathetic Mrs. Tohsaka's protests. One of the Assassins is watching this all unfold from hiding, and relays the news to Hassan. Hassan asks Kirei if they should make a move against the Tohsakas here. Okay then, Kirei has already made up his mind to betray Goatee, and Hassan knows it's a matter of when rather than if. Kirei tells him not to bother with Rin and her mother, though; instead, he should have his agents trail Daisy and hopefully find an opportunity to take out the Berserker's master. Sensible. We already know that Goatee values other things over his family, so hostages wouldn't be too effective against him.

The episode ends with Rin sleepily musing that, though she wasn't able to inflict any permanent damage on the enemy or meaningfully impact the Grail War, she didn't come back to Fuyuki to do either of those things. She came back to save her friend. And she did. Operational objectives achieved. Mission accomplished.

She just needs to keep practicing. Keep getting stronger. Become more like her father. She doesn't realize how little like him she really is becoming, and how good of a thing that is. End.


Well, it's a filler episode, but it's a very good filler episode. Urobuchi (EDIT THIS WASN'T UROBUCHI'S WORK, IT WAS COMPLETELY CHANGED IN THE ADAPTATION, HE'S STILL A DUMB SEXIST HACK) did a good job writing Rin, and she continues to be my second favorite Type Moon character after the deliveryman. Giving her an active role in this Grail War - however tangential - is almost certainly a retcon, and very much fanservice (you'd thiiiink she would have reminisced about this incident before entering the next Grail War in UBW, no?), but taken on its own it was a good little story. Nice thematic takeaway too. Rin's growing power comes from her ability to both be like her father, and to be completely unlike him.

Also, it reminded me that Daisy and his Berserker exist. I'd actually forgotten.