Fate/Zero S2E4: the Eighth Contract (continued even more)

Toto invites Kirei over to speak with him in the predawn hours, shortly before Kirei's due to catch his flight back to...Rome? Somewhere else in Japan? I guess the Church probably has a place set aside for people like him in cases like this somewhere or other. Well, regardless, before he's supposed to go to the airport, Toto wants to talk with him.

They sit down in Toto's office as the pre-dawn light filters in the window, and Toto thanks Kirei for his exemplary loyalty and competence in this Grail War. It's unfortunate that the situation with the Einzburns forces them to part ways here, but Toto hopes that Kirei will consider their parting to be an amicable one, and that they will continue to have good relations if Toto survives the coming days. He also considers it an honor to have had Kirei as a magic student.

Toto may be honest about all this, or he may not be. On one hand, he definitely knows how to be diplomatic and charming even with people he hates. On the other, Toto always at least appears to have earnestly enjoyed Kirei's company. I'm going to call it 85% honesty, 15% embellishment done out of force of habit.

Kirei nods along and says a few polite words back here and there, as he has always most often done. Then, Toto tells him that in the event of his own death in these final battles, he'd like it if Kirei could help Rin continue her training. Makes sense; Toto taught a bunch of Tohsaka magic to him, so he should be able to help teach whatever bits of it Rin hasn't learned yet to her in turn.

He also presents Kirei with a document that, should he choose to sign it, will name him as Rin's legal guardian in such circumstances.

What was his wife's name again? I doubt he remembers either.

...where the hell even was she in the UBW pilot? Rin appeared to be living by herself in that huge mansion. She had a phone conversation with a "dubious priest" who I'm now pretty sure was Kirei, but there was no mention of her mother. Maybe she just stopped existing after Toto died? It would be consistent with her character as depicted in Fate/Zero. In that case, Toto was just making a realistic assessment of Rin's likely situation when he wrote his will.

If the Dubious Priest was Rin's legal guardian, well. I'm sort of curious to see the scene in Fate/Whatever where she finds out that her guardian murdered her father. Given that Rin's experience of her father was positive, and that his death still haunts her a decade later according to UBW, well...I can't exactly blame her for reacting the way that she probably reacts.

Well, back to THIS story.

Kirei vows that he will do all he can to look after Rin, training and protecting her to the best of his ability. He may even be telling the truth about this part; from what little I saw of UBW, Rin was both in good health and pretty good at magic for someone so young. And, to be fair, Kirei doesn't have any bone to pick with her that I can think of except insofar that she's related to Toto and by extension associated with Kirei's father.

Toto also hands Kirei a box containing a parting gift from him. It's a dagger, described by Toto as an "Azoth Dagger." We aren't told what that means, but some quick googling tells me that "azoth" is an alchemical concept related to the alkahest; a hypothetical universal solvent. So, easy inference is that this is a magic dagger that deals extra corrosion damage or something like that. Pretty good choice of gifts for Kirei, since he's a knife-using assassin whose targets often have exotic defences. Of course, it's also a bit of a comedy of errors that Toto would present Kirei with a wizard-killing dagger on the very night that he's decided to murder him.

I'm sure Kirei brought plenty of stabbing utensils of his own to this meeting, in light of that. We know he already has a magic knife collection, or at least a normal knife collection that he can cast spells on. But the irony of using the gift immediately after receiving it might appeal to him.

Toto gets up, and tells him that he should hurry on to the airport now. Kirei gets up after him, and then the show does the weirdest fucking thing.

The scene goes silent, then slowly starts exaggerating the sound effects of sliding furniture and clicking footsteps. Then, veeeery slowly, this eerie, Nightmare On Elm Street-ish discordant bell music starts rising in the background. And the visuals look like this:

My reaction to which was to pause the video, stare blankly at the screen for a minute or two, and then say "...huh?"

...

I mean, sure, this is a betrayal. The fact that Toto just made a big show of trust in Kirei with Rin's training and gave him a nice present does make it a real dick move on Kirei's part, don't get me wrong. But.

1. Fate/Zero has made it clear from the pilot onward that this is a world of Machiavellian schemers who will lie, cheat, and kill each other whenever they think they can profit from and get away with it.

2. The premise of the story, even regardless of the wizard culture that most of these characters came from, is "the Grail Warriors will have to kill each other." The notion of them doing so through underhanded, dishonourable means was already introduced WITHOUT this wtf slasher movie framing in the Team Sabre vs. Team Lancer conflict. Twice, even. Toto himself also spent the whole war trying to cheat and kill his rivals off using dirty tricks.

3. Toto himself had a serious kick-the-dog moment with Daisy just a couple episodes ago. We learned (in that very scene) that his love for Rin, even if it's at least mostly genuine, is dangerously double-edged. We also know that his acts of magnanimity like the one he just showed to Kirei are largely performative, cynical gestures. So, any sort of tragedy or outrage that Kirei's actions here might evoke sort of...fizzles? Kirei doesn't look nearly as much like a horror movie monster when you consider how shallow and cold everything Toto said to him in this goodbye scene really was.

4. Continuing from the above; Kirei is one of the few main characters who HASN'T done anything to make me root against him. The worst thing we've seen him do so far was try to kill Iri and Maiya, but like, this is a war. They're on opposing sides. How harshly can I really judge him for that? I guess there was also the sadistic grin he had when healing Daisy and causing him visible discomfort, but like...he WAS healing him rather than hurting him, right? He was saving one of the most sympathetic characters' lives. Obviously he's being corrupted by Snek, which will inevitably go to dark places, but he hasn't done anything terrible yet. Killing Tokiomi Tohsaka doesn't strike me as a moral "no going back" moment. It's in the same ballpark as what most of these characters have been doing to each other.

What this all comes down to is that I have no idea why THIS act of lethal violence, rather than all the many, many others that the characters have performed over the show so far, is being shot like Michael Meyers murdering a suspiciously mature-looking cheerleader.

It's not even like this murder is a rug-pull for the story or a surprise for the audience. Kirei said he was going to do this a scene ago. Snek was trying to GET him to do it half a damned season ago. So, it's not like this is just playing on the shock, since there is no shock.

Did the creators just really want to do a slasher movie sequence? If so, we literally had a serial killer team in the Grail War. Why the heck would they wait until after Team Caster has exited stage left before trying to shoehorn this in?

I don't know what the show is trying to make me feel in this scene, and I don't know why it wants me to feel it.

...

Kirei puts the +2 acidtouched dagger through Toto's midsection. Toto just barely has time to give Kirei a look of uncomprehending shock and bafflement before losing consciousness and then life. I was expecting Kirei to do some kind of fucked up mutilation or psychological torture to Toto before finishing him off, because that actually WOULD justify the way the scene is being handled and show Kirei to be a twisted psychopath. But no. He just kills him via stabbing. Like anyone killing anyone else in this Grail War.

I want to know what Kirei's daddy issues actually are. It's established that he has them, but I don't know anything else about them other than that they exist. Maybe Kirei's motivations would make more sense to me if I knew what this was all about. Or maybe not, IDK.

As Kirei bends down to recover his new dagger from the body of the man who gave it to him, Snek teleports in. What an appropriately boring, anticlimactic death for a man like Toto, Snek says. Kirei notes that Toto was unusually lax, turning his back to someone like that. He must have been counting on his Servant to step in and protect him if need be. Which was very foolish of him, because counting on Snek to do *anything* is a losing proposition even when he isn't actively plotting against you.

Kirei doesn't answer that question. Instead, he just asks Snek if he's sure he isn't going to have buyer's remorse over this switch in Masters, and Snek replies that as long as Kirei meets a minimum requirement of entertainingness they're cool.

Then, to my immense confusion, they make a pact that includes seeking the Grail together.

-____-

Didn't they just establish that the Grail War is a con at the Servants' expense? Wasn't that part of Snek's motive for finally making his desire to escape Toto explicit?

Snek doesn't seem remotely put out by Kirei saying he wants the Grail, now. In fact, he seems to want it too. And Kirei has more Command Seals than Toto, so this seems like a worse situation for Snek than the one he was in before. Snek even says "Your offering will be my flesh, my new Master" as part of their pact. So, Snek is okay with being sacrificed by a wizard, as long as they aren't too boring? That's pretty damned hard to square with his personality.

I'm really, really, really confused.

Well, regardless of how little sense it makes, they do the thing

And that's the end of the episode.


Part of my issue with this episode is that the rules of the Grail War have finally crossed the line for me from merely confusing to totally impenetrable. I don't know why anyone is doing anything anymore. I don't know if this is because the rules actually are nonsense, or if Zero has just done an abysmally poor job of explaining them. In either case, I'm at the point where I'm no longer able to follow the central conflict of the story. Which...might mean I'll just need to stop reviewing it here, because I don't know if I'm going to be able to say anything worth hearing about it if I'm this lost.

There's also the fact that I'm less inclined to give this story the benefit of the doubt now that I have the image of the author as a garden variety neckbeard bashing out mary sue spitefics on some godforsaken fandom site. I feel kind of guilty saying that. Like I said in my previous post, Gen Urobuchi's writing has genuine merit. It would be easy for me to handwave the enjoyment I've gotten out of this series as him having been given a good toolkit that it took him a while to break, but 1) I've seen other Urobuchi works, and they have a lot of the same good points that F/Z does, and 2) I have no particular reverence for Kinoko Nasu; I've seen one episode of an anime adapting his work that I liked, and a few movies adapting his (earlier, to be fair) work that I disliked. But, at this point, the flaws of Urobuchi's approach to Fate/Zero have proven sufficiently deep-rooted that the story just doesn't have much credibility left for me.

I can't assume that any character's actions will make sense later, or that I'm just missing some important background info from other Fate works, because at least some of the time they really are being written just that badly.

But then, at the same time, there's stuff like the nuances of Toto and Gilgamesh's toxic partnership and the mythic symbolism is rooted itself in, which also peaked in this episode. Iri coming into her own as a strong leader, negotiator, and warrior, just barely in time for self-actualization before she dies to summon the Grail (and, unless this is another case of the adaptation polishing a turd like the Rin episode, Gen is actually writing a strong female character there instead of just gesturing at one. At least, until he ruined it a scene later with the harem-cult-of-Kiritsugu thing. Okay, actually, take back what I said about Iri...). In previous episodes there was a lot more stuff to enjoy, too, and a lot of it doesn't seem like it could be poached from other Fate series. Iri and Arturia's relationship in the early series. Uwu and Gilles grimderp comedy hour. Everything about Alexander and Waver. Etc.

I enjoyed Fate/Zero for a good long while. But now, it kind of feels like the foundations are rotting out from under it.


Also, for real, what was up with Kirei's Friday the Thirteenth moment?