Analysing FSN #14: Illya Appreciation Post

I figured this would just be a brief look at Illya in UBW to go with the post I did about her in the Fate route, but I got a bit carried away and went over all the Illya scenes in Fate again. Consider this an attempt to explain why I like her so much. You know, without covering anything from Heaven’s Feel. It would be too easy otherwise.

Last time I talked about Illya, one of the things I noted is that while it can seem like she has two separate personalities – a childlike one and an adult one – the distinction isn’t nearly that clear. When she’s supposedly acting as child-Illya, she’ll still say things like this. It’s not that she swaps between innocence and ruthlessness, it’s that they’re juxtaposed - both present at once. Look at her first fight against Shirou and Rin, where she smiles happily while ordering Berserker to kill them.

However, that’s not to say there’s no basis for this impression that Illya flips between multiple personas. Let’s look at facial expressions. You might recognize these two. The furrowed brow and direct look are characteristic of Illya when she’s acting as a Master, and when she suddenly shifts into this mode in the middle of a conversation it’s really striking. Furthermore, there are consistent differences in the way she behaves in this state, to the point where I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking she’s a different person. Let’s examine a few of these differences.

The most notable is probably the harshness of her language. She’s often insulting or demeaning to other characters. It seemed somewhat incongruous to me in the Fate route – she didn’t seem the type to boast about how powerful she was, and I wouldn’t have expected her to verbally abuse Berserker either, given that they have a close relationship.

In UBW it’s made clear that this is a learned behaviour - she does this to take out her anger and frustration on others. A similar behaviour is her choice to keep Berserker insane, which she does to emphasize her own self-sufficiency, and is described as a ‘bluff’. Either way she’s hiding her own pain and insecurity by trying to pass it onto others.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that Berserker is the only person she talked to in the castle – despite all of the invective and vitriol, he’s the only person out of all the Einzberns that she cared about enough to acknowledge in words. The fact that this interlude is from the perspective of Berserker is fantastic, by the way. When he says ‘it was only natural’ for her to hate him, that’s just Berserker’s thoughts. He connects the fact that he was summoned as a Servant to her becoming a Master to her hating him, but that might not be what was going through Illya’s mind at all. It does illustrate how bad he feels for all the pain he put her through, though.

Another behaviour adult-Illya displays is formality: when we first meet her, she curtseys and introduces herself. Skip forward to after Berserker is defeated in the Fate route and once again, we see the curtsey as she formally thanks Shirou for letting her stay. In both cases, this is related to her role as a Master, but I find it significant that in her introduction it’s also related to her family name. Indeed, the invocation of her family name is what gets Rin to react to her self-introduction. This is intimately connected to her role as Master insofar as she’s a Master because she’s an Einzbern – another way of putting it is that she’s interchangeable with any other Einzbern homunculus besides the fact she’s a Master. In this way the Einzbern name becomes totalizing and turns Illya into a tool.

Now, the main quality we associate with adults over children is maturity, and Illya has a few moments where she acts more mature than it seems she should be. This moment where she figures out what’s going on between Shirou and Saber is one – that face is extremely smug and knowing. This is also interesting – she admits she had no idea what she was doing when she wanted to talk to Shirou, but then she shows some forethought about what she wants their relationship to be like. Except, it’s complicated somewhat by the fact that acting more maturely (or what they think is mature) is often a characteristically childlike act.

It’s not that I think she’s a child trying to act like an adult in every scene where she acts more mature, it’s just that there’s no clear dividing line between the two! The whole idea of there being an adult- Illya and a child-Illya that are meaningfully distinct starts to collapse when you look at some scenes. For example, that scene of Illya curtseying to Shirou that I mentioned earlier? Immediately followed by this. Was she acting extremely formally here as a joke – i.e. something a kid might do? Or is this just an abrupt transition between adult-Illya and child-Illya personas? Because the ‘adult’ Illya fades away very quickly in some scenes. Here, as soon as Shirou promises to go with her, she instantly returns to how she was before. Before . . . okay, I guess we need to discuss how these changes are provoked in the first place.

In their first encounter in daytime, Shirou pushes Illya when trying to get her to stop, which results in her making this face. Now, it’s fair to call this her ‘resting face’, similar to this one from Saber, but Illya is usually so expressive that this one comes off as quite cold and unemotional. Which is what it’s used for! It comes up when Shirou asks her to stop being a Master, when Shirou ignores her just before she captures him, and when Shirou is about to decide whether he’ll let her stay with him or not. And in many of these situations, it’s a moment of pause, where she shuts off her emotions before becoming adult-Illya.

Now, with what we’ve discussed so far, it seems obvious to me that adult-Illya emerges here as a defense mechanism. Illya chooses to adopt a persona that’s colder, harsher, and less vulnerable that her usual mode of behaviour – one that she’s learnt as a response to painful situations in the past. In other words, as far as there is a ‘real’ Illya, it’s child-Illya. Adult-Illya is just a mask that she will temporarily put on in some situations.

Okay, with this we’ve synthesized the new Illya content in UBW with the thesis of the last post I made about her. This should be quite enough Illya analysis for – haha, just kidding. Let’s keep going.

The fact that what provokes Illya initially is not anything Shirou said, but rather a physical action, is a motif that comes up a few times. In general, there’s a physicality to interacting with Illya that isn’t there as much with other characters – for example, this sprite seems specifically designed so that it looks like Illya is close up to you and grabbing your hand, trying to drag you around, even. Saber will get close but mostly just by zooming into her regular sprite. Illya will just directly invade your personal space, like with this scene. Now, this one is problematic on several levels, so all I’ll do with it right now is note that the dynamic there is all about Shirou not being able to move because he is tied up and Illya taking advantage of that to get uncomfortably close.

So sometimes, Shirou gets fed up and tries to push her away, as we have seen. He repeats this again much later in the dojo, and Illya briefly shows a frightened face. I think the fact that this results in her throwing a tantrum instead of starting to implicitly threaten Shirou is a sign of progress, maybe.

Another more fun way in which a similar dynamic plays out is when Saber is chasing Illya and trying to get her off Shirou. It’s kind of hard to screenshot so just take a look at Seorin’s letsplay version. It’s near the end of the scene. The sprites used here tell a pretty clear story of Illya playing around, Saber trying to grab her, Illya being frightened, Saber going ‘oh shit did I just hurt this child’, and then Illya smiles like she’s having a great time. Saber wonders if Illya was just faking her earlier fright, and as if to confirm her suspicions, Illya sticks her tongue out. And Saber’s back to impotently chasing her around.

Clearly, Illya is experimenting with boundaries. She’s not used to being physically close to other people, so she doesn’t know what the limits are, and she’s not used to other people using force on her either. If anything, this reminds me of an animal that isn’t used to being around humans yet, and oh look, there’s a quote specifically comparing her to an animal in the context of being close to other people. I mean come on just look at the way she looks at the unknown food Shirou shares with her in this same scene. Her hesitation reminds me of feeding a bird or something.

This is around where it hit me that Illya isn’t human, exactly. Multiple times Shirou refers to her as a ‘winter fairy’, and there’s definitely something otherworldly about her. Look at the very first scene she appears to warn Shirou and then immediately disappear again. It feels almost like a dream, especially as the narrative transitions right into the next scene without referring to it ever again.

The fact that she’s the child of a homunculus isn’t really what I mean by ‘not human’ – homunculi can clearly have a similar experience and range of emotions to humans. Her general strangeness is far more a product of her upbringing, spending most of her time alone and secluded inside a winter castle.

It’s part of the reason why Shirou gives her food in the first place. Look at what they’re talking about directly beforehand. Illya mentions that she was locked up in her room for a long time, so she wants to sneak outside now she’s in Japan. It’s ‘she swings her legs and it seems she’s having fun just doing so’ that really gets me. She must have been really deprived if just moving around outside like this is entertaining for her.

From the beginning of the story, Illya is presented as both wealthy and powerful. However, the symbol of that power, Berserker, caused her physical harm and was forced on her without consent. Similarly, the symbol of that wealth, the Einzbern Castle, is used as a prison to keep Illya inside. It’s why I love this quote from her so much. She seems far more authentically free when she’s living at Shirou’s place without any of those things.

I would end here, but there’s one more scene I absolutely have to talk about, and it’s the second time Shirou talks with Illya in the park. The game offers you a choice between going to the park or going straight home, here, and the narration kinda gives the impression that Shirou is aware of this. He’s deliberately choosing to take a different route because he thinks there’s a chance that Illya will be there. But when he finally sees her, his immediate reaction is ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ He seems so genuinely regretful? angry? disappointed? that she would be waiting there alone for hours.

Maybe it’s just my bias speaking, but with a few tweaks this honestly feels like it could have been a climactic moment in the Illya route in the same way that the bridge scene serves for Saber’s. Illya’s initial admission that she will have to kill Shirou soon casts a pall over the conversation - Shirou’s worried insistence that she shouldn’t stay in the cold waiting for him comes up against Illya’s playful carelessness – finally, Shirou can no longer bear how innocently Illya talks about killing people and tries to persuade her to give up on being a Master, only for her to shut him out and run off. As written, it’s less climactic and more comic, but I still can’t get away from that initial image of Illya wandering around the park with a distant look in her eyes. I dunno, I just like her, I guess.