That’s the Fate route, mind you, not Fate/stay night proper. I only just started Unlimited Blade Works, so I have quite a ways to go before I can say I’m done. Still, this is probably the last set of annotated screenshots I’ll post before I start digging through the reactions of my esteemed colleagues in earnest.
(It may be worth mentioning that grad school and eventually work will probably prompt me to write more here and less over yonder. These posts are so much easier.)
Reading the structure is a wasted…hey, what the hell, Shirou?
To be fair, if we’re going the magic = art route, I don’t think he’s wrong, per se. Structural criticism may deal with absolute terms on the surface level, but all we can say for certain of those terms (provided we study them sociologically) is that they effect x% of y population one way, z% of y population another, and so on — where the artistic energy is most easily transmitted, as it were. But then, I like that about structural criticism; if you go far enough with it, it ultimately has to move beyond textual minutiae into the realm of readers. Also, Shirou ends up getting quite a lot of use out of his talent for structure. But at any rate I’m not opposed to taking this as a warning against dwelling on the surface of things exclusively.
I had forgotten that a Hindu/Buddhist reincarnation mechanic was in play here. Humans and animals I understand — but machines? That’s an interesting twist. This cycle of death and rebirth seems to rely on public opinion, or devotion, or “worship,” so what happens when a kind and generous human being known to very few dies? Should we simply measure kindness and generosity in terms of the number of people who benefit from it?
Who else wants to see a Mother Teresa servant? She’d make a hell of a Berserker.
Ooh! See, this is why I like Kotomine (besides the mullet). He’s a real bastard, but he says what needs to be said. Really, this is true; the desire to protect something does imply a desire to protect something from something else, which must obviously be an active threat, or else what’s the point? Some people get on to Shirou for being misogynistic in this route, but I think that particular quirk of his is sufficiently dismantled by the end.
It’s a matter of point of view, isn’t it? I’m sure the Cyclopes didn’t think Odysseus was a hero. This explains handily why many of the servants designated “good” seem so ruthless — we’re on the receiving end.
This becomes a theme late in “Fate,” and it strikes a personal chord with me. Bad experiences with the kind of people who spend half their time wishing things had happened differently for them have led me to believe that they’re cowards, in a way (not that I, you know, do that myself or anything). Granted, Saber’s in a position to make an eternal sacrifice here, so she’s a bit of a special case.
This following a date. I love how F/sn has handled romance so far. It’s so awkward, so…mundane that it’s easy to forget those involved are superhuman. Even the first sex scene in this route is a little awkward. The second…well. Awkward to watch, maybe.
Turning the dissemination and evolution of stories into a literal source of power…this is some serious Pontifus-pandering right here. I especially like the Caliburn vs. Gram/Balmung bit. Still, the way it works seems a little contradictory, given what we’ve learned already about the relative power of servants, namely that it’s derived from how well-known they are when they’re summoned. If Excalibur is more well-known than Ea at the time of this particular Holy Grail War — and it no doubt is, as Ea doesn’t even have a “true” name — why does Ea overwhelm it so reliably? Perhaps the rule applies to servants but not noble phantasms individually, which function as extensions of the servants, and if Gilgamesh draws power from those who revere heroes derived from his epic…well, that explains a lot.
More Pontiservice. I like the theme of balance, and of all things belonging to systems which in turn belong to larger systems and so on. It makes sense (to me) if we’re talking about magic, or magic symbolizing art and the consumption thereof.
And it is the case that many heroes die in pursuit of their final objective. Gilgamesh even jokes about it one point, referencing his own failed quest for immortality. This is one of the many little answers F/sn throws at the question of what a hero is, exactly. Joseph Campbell would’ve been all over this shit.
Dear Cuchlann: PLAY THIS GAME.
Kotomineeeeee~ m(_ _)m
So many questions to deal with here! Is art’s having been created what renders it entertaining? Probably, given how it’s used. Kotomine circumvents the issue of art necessarily being a distilled depiction of reality by toying with people directly, but Kotomine’s just a tad crazy, and art’s distilled nature isn’t an unequivocally bad thing; it may let us see ourselves more clearly within it than we can in reality. Perhaps Kotomine’s rejection of art played a role in rendering him as emotionless as he is here; if nothing else, it contributes to my sense of his inhumanity.
Here’s another answer to that ubiquitous question: heroes are exemplars of humanity, encompassing all the good and bad traits thereof. Heroes of myth often do things that aren’t especially admirable — Gilgamesh here would know, he having been a womanizing lout of a leader before he and Enkidu became an ambiguously gay duo. Interesting, as we (and by we I mean me, and by me I mean His Majesty Northrop Frye) often think of mythic heroes as exceeding humans in means and surroundings, and romantic heroes as humans of supernatural or at least exceptional means and surroundings, and yet these very heroes manage to be everypeople, in a way. Perhaps being an everyman itself constitutes exceptional means; after all, which one regular human can speak for all regular humans?
More posts to come on “Fate,” as soon as I hit the aniblogocalypse for thoughts thereupon.
Enkidu actually, uh, makes an appearances in Fate/hollow atraxia but everything else I can say about it is [spoiler].
Mother Teresa would make a great Caster. A HEALING ONE! Nevermind how… oh wait, I can’t tell you about that just yet, since you haven’t done UBW. BAH!
Remind me to link you to this Fuyuki thing once you’re done with it all. I’m afraid I’d be doing you a disservice linking you to it now since, well, it’s chock-full of spoilers, but all in good time. There’s a lot there that explains things in a canon way based on what Nasu has said about power levels and their ilk, which you might find interesting.
M. Teresa has FAINAL BOSS written all over her. RESPECT, fool.
So, basically, I just need to finish. Before I forget about it. Again.
I am looking forward to seeing how the three routes interact. And I have a lot of incentive right now, UBW being the Rin route.
I had just finished reading Welcome to the NHK, where a hikkikomori is presented as a hero despite himself. He has a harrowing struggle against himself, and his prize is the survival of another person, and the continuation of his reclusive, disgusting existence.
How would you, and by you I mean His Majesty Northrop Frye think of this hero? Or is His Majesty limited to dealing with myth, and not everymen. I however, cannot think of Satou the hikkikomori as an everyman. He’s too extremely degenerate to be considered one.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE IN THIS THREAD ASKING QUESTIONS NOT RELATED TO F/SN?! GO FINISH IT, YOU… YOU… DOUBLE FOOL! PONTIFUS WILL OVERTAKE YOU AT THIS RATE, AND HE IS THE BETTER MAN FOR IT.
I’m going to say that Satou would come across as ironic to most people, and perhaps low mimetic to people in his situation, if we’re basing it on the population of the reader and not the general populace. I think there’s a good case to be made for low mimetic/ironic comedy insofar as his situation does marginally improve by the end (he has a job, at least, representing one step toward inclusion into society), and the obstacles he overcomes are mostly everyday things. I wouldn’t call him an everyman either; I’m not sure if Frye really got into that, but then I’ve been using the Anatomy of Criticism in a horribly fragmented way, so I’m probably not the one to ask.
Pontifus: Take a look at White Wolf’s Exalted. Then read F/SN again.
Suddenly, everything takes a weird, White Wolf-inspired twist of lulz.
This is good advice.
You should read Exalted pretty much regardless, actually.
As long as it doesn’t have any of those damn vampires and werewolves…
You have my respect for managing to finish it. I still can’t get past the first encounter with Berserker, lest I go all THIS SHIROU THIS SHIROU THIS SHIROU etc. At least it’s marginally more bearable than the anime, but eh…
Now, as for the structure/core dichotomy, which is one I am mightily fascinated with… I’ve lately become more and more convinced that all of human endeavour and thinking cannot do anything but explain structure, in terms of structure. The “core” of things is inexplicable except perhaps in certain circumstances of meta-structural investigation. Because what do we do when we describe things? We describe its relation to other things, or the relations of its parts to other parts/things. Physics knows exactly how things move; nothing more. It does not know if matter exists, is an useful fiction, is neutral or eliminatively material. There are no tools for finding out.
To make it stark: If you take a formal system and try to explain a single element in your domain of discourse, you end up with self-reference, which formal systems can’t really handle well, since it is mostly useless in them. (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is on part of self-reference; after Russell discovered Russell’s paradox in Fregean logic the main problem for many logicians was exactly how to define away self-reference, since it did not work; they ended up having to admit a powerful enough system of logic had to incorporate it).
essentially: Art is all about structure. Everything is.
The heart of things may well be a mere fiction.
I cannot even concieve of how how the core would be thought of. I suppose consciousness may simple be the core of matter constituting our brains, and find it an elegant explanation of matters, but I think it needs stronger arguments, so nevermind that bull.
…This comment really is about FSN, I swear ;_; Point is: the core of things which are structured is, I think, unreachable and not concievable. Which makes magic in Nasuverse even funnier for me than magic in fiction tends to be, because it’s more magical. And more full of hawt girls. Who must have sex with you or you/they/the world dies.
Yes, yesss, this!
Well, it depends on how we’re defining “core,” really. I’m with you regarding things in the world, in a general sense. Being all existential about it (and everything), I’m inclined to say that if we can’t conceive of a thing’s essence, it doesn’t have essence for all practical purposes. But in the absence of a finite core, we have a void that can be filled with personal meaning — and, as regards art, it seems that’s a thing that must happen for an experience of a thing to be artistic. Before that it’s just an inert text. I’m taking Shirou’s lines here as a warning against trying to deal strictly in terms of inert text, even if our understanding of personal meanings is limited by our not being other people. He does seem to talk about the “core of things” as an absolute, but maybe even Nasuverse magi see things differently when they look at this core.
“Core = Definition of an element of a structure without any references to its relations within that (or any) structure, in other words that which is related to in itself“, perhaps?
It’s an unholy fusion of Kant and Russell. Both of them would cry over it.
I have a hard time even conceiving of such a thing (Kant hurts my head). If one defines an element of a structure without reference to its relations within that structure, wouldn’t that just be an inadequate definition insofar as it overlooks the very fact that the element belongs to a structure? I was thinking of “core” more as the ultimate ideal a structure tries to represent, something I don’t think exists, or at least for all intents and purposes. Plato’s probably a little passé, though.
Yeah, that’s why I hold it as essentially unknowable. There’s really no way to describe it except by “A is A”.
That other way of thinking as cores would be rather interesting too… There are many realists regarding meaning/etc left, so while Plato is passé, the basic idea of there being Meanings which the structures try to look like is quite prevalent.
I’d say that’s also hogwash, though for different reasons than the Kant-core. Antrealism is the shit :v
I think both ideas relate to Nasuverse rather well though; take Kara no Kyoukai, when Spoiler tells Spoiler2 that Spoiler2′s Origin is Worthlessness, it is something quite about relations to other elements, the vast concept which drives his/her life and being (yoi’re worthless to things), but also about what Spoiler2 essentially is in him/herself.
Antrealism?
I do believe ants exist, I suppose.
But it should really be antirealism.
Interesting reflection.
We similar to this information given and that has provided me a few sort of inspiration to have success for some good reason, so thanks.