Fate/Stay Night Review
Mar. 6th, 2012 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiFate/Stay Night has a great concept that suffers from an overcrowded ensemble--the BSG effect--and a little bit, for my tastes, from being shounen. Here's the breakdown, light on spoilers:
The Good
* Neat concept in bringing together various famous historical/mythical figures to do battle. There's good potential for interesting interactions and cultural commentary.
* Saber: we too rarely see really good female anime characters, but she definitely qualifies. And she's a great asexual role model despite a few romantic overtones.
* Archer and Shirou's relationship: probably the most engaging thing in the series (as a thought experiment).
* Gilgamesh: well characterized as a very ancient king with a fundamentally different sense of social reality than much of subsequent civilization, including modern times. Culturally well juxtaposed with chivalrous knight Saber.
* Low annoyance factor: there are various tropes of high school hijinks and boy-heroism and spunky girls and so on, but it's pretty mild and generally deployed in the service of pretty good characterizations and a serious plot taken reasonably seriously.
The Less Good
* The excellent concept of juxtaposing various historical figures is undercut by having too many characters to develop many well and giving relatively little attention to their traditional backstories. The original characters too suffer from this overcrowding.
* Likewise, the fascinating relationship between Shirou and Archer gets way too little exploration. (The whole series could have been about this--and it would have been a better series.) The movie version explores this more but, alas, in the direction of cheap excuses for battles.
* For a story all about epic mages and heroes fighting, the fight scenes are meh. This is pretty typical for anime but still a shame. (Also typical but a shame is the characters' lack of wardrobe... unless Rin has ten identical snappy red sweaters.)
The Bad
* Shinji: he's a typical nasty, coward, villain boy with no redeeming features and, therefore, no business being in the story. The only silver lining is that he's not in it a lot.
* Similarly having no right to be in the story is the annoying teacher whose only function is to fly in from some other annoying comedy anime and be loud and make snaggle-toothed faces of upset. Seriously, she doesn't even have a plot function that ranks higher than a C or D plot. Why is she there?
All in all, the series is quite good and seems to have spawned a better prequel (Fate Zero), the resumption of which I look forward to later this season. This is a typically "fannish" series in that it opens all sorts of doors for fan fic to walk through. Oddly, I haven't seen a lot of fic that seems to exploit what I'd call the most intriguing doors, but I'm sure there's a lot I haven't seen.
The Good
* Neat concept in bringing together various famous historical/mythical figures to do battle. There's good potential for interesting interactions and cultural commentary.
* Saber: we too rarely see really good female anime characters, but she definitely qualifies. And she's a great asexual role model despite a few romantic overtones.
* Archer and Shirou's relationship: probably the most engaging thing in the series (as a thought experiment).
* Gilgamesh: well characterized as a very ancient king with a fundamentally different sense of social reality than much of subsequent civilization, including modern times. Culturally well juxtaposed with chivalrous knight Saber.
* Low annoyance factor: there are various tropes of high school hijinks and boy-heroism and spunky girls and so on, but it's pretty mild and generally deployed in the service of pretty good characterizations and a serious plot taken reasonably seriously.
The Less Good
* The excellent concept of juxtaposing various historical figures is undercut by having too many characters to develop many well and giving relatively little attention to their traditional backstories. The original characters too suffer from this overcrowding.
* Likewise, the fascinating relationship between Shirou and Archer gets way too little exploration. (The whole series could have been about this--and it would have been a better series.) The movie version explores this more but, alas, in the direction of cheap excuses for battles.
* For a story all about epic mages and heroes fighting, the fight scenes are meh. This is pretty typical for anime but still a shame. (Also typical but a shame is the characters' lack of wardrobe... unless Rin has ten identical snappy red sweaters.)
The Bad
* Shinji: he's a typical nasty, coward, villain boy with no redeeming features and, therefore, no business being in the story. The only silver lining is that he's not in it a lot.
* Similarly having no right to be in the story is the annoying teacher whose only function is to fly in from some other annoying comedy anime and be loud and make snaggle-toothed faces of upset. Seriously, she doesn't even have a plot function that ranks higher than a C or D plot. Why is she there?
All in all, the series is quite good and seems to have spawned a better prequel (Fate Zero), the resumption of which I look forward to later this season. This is a typically "fannish" series in that it opens all sorts of doors for fan fic to walk through. Oddly, I haven't seen a lot of fic that seems to exploit what I'd call the most intriguing doors, but I'm sure there's a lot I haven't seen.
