I hate telling people I like the anime more than the VN

Fate as a whole has to be one of my favorite franchises of all time. I love it because of its unique storytelling, and I've always been a bit of history/mythology guy. I watched it starting with Zero to UBW to Heavens feel. The story flowed perfectly for me this way, I tend to be a prequels first kinda guy anyways. Then I went and watched the DEEN Fate route and....it wasnt that bad as people were telling me. And I watched all the spinoff shows and what not.

After awhile I wanted to go and check out the source material. I went and found the original visual novel (before remastered) and went ahead and got started. Now I had never "played" a visual novel before, I honestly didnt even know what the hell one was. The closest thing I could say I got to playing something like it was the Persona series and the Ace Attorney games. But I was willing to try something new.

As willing as I was it still didnt make it an easier to get through. There were some nights I had to force myself to stay awake and get through certain sections. The music believe or not was making my experience worst. Not that music was bad by any means, its just the frustration of having to repeatedly click, while staring at screen for a long time, can make anything in the background sound like mind numbing noise. But I got through almost 3 routes, in about 2 weeks.

The fate route was better than the anime for sure I'll say that much. But I just didn't find myself enjoying the overall product as much as I did its anime counterparts. And Its not like I don't have an attention span, I read books, and always have since I was 4 thanks to my mom. I just don't get why it was so hard for me to enjoy/get through the visual novel, something that as the name suggest gives you visuals as well music to go along with the text. The actual stories themselves were good, I enjoyed the ubw route the most (mostly due to my Rin bias), Gilgamesh is my favorite character so I loved him in the fate arc, and Heavens feel was Kirei at his best to me. But when I compare it to how I felt watching the anime and the voice acting, osts, fluid animation, and scene work, i find myself favoring that more.

And I hate telling people this, because whenever I bring up how I like Fates anime they always say that I'm a "Zero glazer", "a larper", that I didnt understand the VN, or that I'm a fake fan. When I finished watching fate I deep dug into the lore, thats why it played the VNs in the first place. Infact despite my bad experience with it being my first VN, I still enjoyed the story presented to me so much I got into more type moon stuff. I read tsukihime and enjoyed it, I liked the garden of sinners anime and books, and Hollow ataraxia is by far my favorite reading experience. I even keep up with grand order lore despite not playing it.

So It's not like I'm a fake fan, I genuinely love this shit. I just happen to enjoy watching it more than I do reading it. And I dont get why thats something for me to be ridiculed over. I used to think the fan base was chill, but now I dont know.