typell

Last Episode honestly doesn’t seem like it has much to write about, initially. It’s a moving but short scene, payoff rather than setup, building on what we know without changing or adding too much.

It can’t, of course. As an addition to Fate/Stay Night’s Realta Nua re-release, Last Episode is in the rather awkward position of being an ending to a story that ended well before it was written. But then again, FSN has no shortage of endings – how much could another one hurt?

There’s an interview quote that talks about Takeuchi encouraging Nasu to write Last Episode – Nasu originally didn’t want to, but was eventually convinced to try and come up with something tha

It’s getting close to the end of the year, so I think it’s about time to discuss endings again.

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To complete the Heaven’s Feel route we have True and Normal endings, which offer a twist on the True and Good endings of Unlimited Blade Works.

There, the True end focused more closely on the consequences of the route’s events on the characters and their future path, while the Good end functioned as more of a what-if scenario, a means to grant Saber and Shirou a shard of the happiness denied to them in the Fate route’s single, True, end.

Thus, once again faced

Hi, it’s me again. You might have seen some of my other posts before.

When I started this project, about four months ago (jesus), I began by writing a fun, snappy sort of intro. It felt a bit silly, looking back on it at this point. I’ve spent an absurd amount of time on this and it still feels woefully inadequate to the task of understanding Kotomine Kirei as a character. Nonetheless, I’d appreciate it a lot if you gave it a read.

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I’ll start with his flashbacks in Heaven’s Feel.

While Kirei’s name doesn’t have the same kanji as the Japanese for ‘beautiful’, the fact that the word is pr

She has 100% self charge plus 30% to another party member. If you use two of her plus Oberon that's all three waves of NP without needing any starting charge CEs or mystic codes.

You can put Black Grail on your own Arc and then use a support one with a bond point increasing CE. The only question at this point is the damage but I think it should work for a lot of nodes.

This seems to me like it has the possibility of revolutionizing Buster looping (or at the very least providing an alternative to double Koyanskaya teams for those who don't have her).

I have a confession to make: I like Sakura. Quite a lot, actually. To the point that it impairs my judgement on occasion.

One of those occasions apparently being literally every time I have read this scene before now. This was actually one of the topics that I was most interested in writing about because it’s one of the few times in FSN where a character uttered a line, and I genuinely could not imagine what motivated them to do so.

This is appropriate, though, because Sakura has exactly the same problem. This scene is about Sakura’s misconceptions about Rin being destroyed, the resulting realisation making her snap out of dark mode. Let’s investigate.

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We should begin, I suppose, at the end. More specifically, the END. No adornments, no qualifiers, not even the definite article, just black screen white text all caps END.

This ending isn’t Bad, or Dead, or True or Normal or Good. It’s just . . . an end.

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How do we approach this? The point of the bad ends seems to be teaching a moral or narrative lesson about Shirou as a character. Is the same true here? Arguably, yes. To get this end, you need to ‘fail’ an interaction with Rider, choosing to fight her rather than talk,

Don’t worry, we’ll get to this soon, but I figure it’s appropriate to start this one by taking another look at Archer. This is the last time he plays an important role in the story, after all.

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Question

What is Archer doing in the Fate route? That was the question I was trying to answer with the original Archer’s Back essay, and it is a reasonable one. He’s a cryptic figure, there, his identity teased with no reveal, offering advice without explanation, proving central t

Okay, seriously, what’s the deal with Illya?

One thing I haven’t addressed very much so far is her motivation. That is, what does she want from Shirou? The text itself is strangely muddled on this front, at least when it isn’t entirely ignoring it.

Obviously, Illya likes Shirou, and wants to be closer to him. But, at the same time, she wants to kill him. Right? That seems to be the main sticking point for people who aren’t big Illya fans. She wants to kill you, and she does. Multiple times! Well, in the Bad Ends. But I’m not going to argue that those aren’t canon.

It’s not like Rin, who says she’ll kill you, but

What’s the deal with Illya? Why does she keep randomly appearing in the shopping district? What are her true feelings about Kiritsugu? Does she really want to kill Shirou? And most importantly, why is she so cute? At least some of these questions will be answered today!

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In both routes, Shirou meets Illya at the shopping district (or the park near it), several times in the earlier parts of the story. The first scene in the sequence actually has the same name in both routes: The Daughter of Winter – Illya (I). This initial relationship leads to Illya living at Shirou’s hou

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the function of man is "an active life of the element that has a rational principle". The highest good is therefore to carry out this function well.

He then goes on to say "any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence".

However, this excellence, or virtue, seems to just mean 'the quality of being good at something', seeing as it can refer to anything from someone's moral character to their athletic abilities.

This seems circular, because for any function, 'the appropriate excellence' would obviously be whatever carries it out well, and comes no closer to explaining what that actually entai

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How does this happen? It’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while. Sakura’s arc is probably the most fascinating to me of any character in Fate/Stay Night; there are just so many layers. I’ve written several thousand words about her already and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.

When I tried to start writing this essay, I realized that feeling was correct. Most of what I’ve talked about so far is about how Shirou sees Sakura, how the player’s image of her is reimagined as more information is revealed. Well, you can do that all day without getting to the co

Titans’ Nest has been a pet card of mine pretty much since it was released, but for most of that time it hasn’t seen any competitive play. I thought that with the announcement of Explorer, a format with a deeper card pool than Standard but without the power level of Historic or true Pioneer, it was worth thinking about again.

For those unfamiliar with the card’s history, it was briefly playable in Standard as a meta pick against Sultai Ultimatum. Gerry Thompson wrote an article at the time that explains the

This might seem a bit out of the blue but recently I noticed that there are still some people on this subreddit who don't understand some basic facts about the subject. I'm not here to relitigate the whole thing, just one specific issue.

Have you ever seen this link before?

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/general-type-moon-discussion-thread-2-unlimited-titles-works-please-read-the-threadmarks.795493/page-245?post=63938732#post-63938732

It often comes up in conversations about Shirou's sexism. Specifically, as a rebuttal to people who bring up the following line, in which Shirou talks about Mitsuzuri getting attacked.

Un. 　Because it's rare that that one would run away. 　But .

Note: some discussion of sexual assault in this one, as might be expected

index

The thing about Matou Shinji people don’t appreciate enough is that he’s the most relatable character in Fate/Stay Night.

Think about it. There’s no point in considering the Servants, who are beyond human by definition. However, even the Masters tend to have gone through traumatic experiences and upbringings, and as a result are deeply strange or extraordinary people. I think Rin might be the most normal member of the main cast, which is frankly insane.

Shinji, though? He’s just, like, a guy. Some dude.

One of the funniest thing