Following any slow period of work, you can expect a busy one - not too much work if it were spread out, but it usually isn't. Planning a vacation in the middle of next month too, so the next week or two is really going to be nose to the grindstone.

Finished the second path of Fate/Stay Night. Definitely fun - there's a lot more plot divergence in this game than in most visual-novel types, so it's not really the same story twice in a row. This arc is Rin-heavy, which is good, as I definitely prefer Rin as a character to Saber... spoilers below.
It's not that there's something wrong with Saber... no, actually, that's not true. Saber does have a problem, a fairly large one, and it limits the amount of slack I can cut her as a character. Specifically, Saber's problem is in her own head - she's got an inferiority complex that's utterly unmerited. I mean, come on, when you're King Arthur, you don't get to say "I just wasn't good enough"... and when you do, shouldn't someone else step in and say "you are King Arthur, precisely who's going to do any better?"

And in Saber's path, she never really gets past that. She doesn't ever really decide "oh, maybe undoing history and giving someone else a crack at it isn't a good idea", but just hangs on obstinately until it becomes impossible anyway. Not until she's back in her own time does she realize that hey, maybe life with Shirou and the gang a thousand years from now is better than dying pointlessly as the kingdom falls into ruin, only to end up inventing cricket! You just wish that Shirou had dug out a history book or something and smacked Saber over the head with it.

Ironically, Saber does better in Rin's path, mostly because Saber and Shirou have exactly the same problem - overwhelming regret related to a life lived for the sake of others. Of course, in Shirou's case, it's not that he wants to change how he lives, it's that Archer is hell-bent on killing him before he can live it and become Archer. ;p Shirou works out his issues (martially), and seeing him do it, Saber works out her own issues... so Saber at the end of Rin's path, either ending, is happier than Saber at the end of her own path. Sad, sad, sad...

Playing through this definitely convinced me why people talk about Rin as being the true tsundere, and not an Akamatsu heroine. She has the attitude down pat, but doesn't resort to "I'm not happy with him so I will hit him and you should laugh". (That's not saying that Rin isn't violent, but when she goes after Shirou, she's actually trying to kill him...) One of the elements that gets lost in the more-violent incarnations of the tsundere is that the tsun- elements don't stem from just being prickly - they're a reaction to the dere- elements. The tsundere feels a cute little feeling, recognizes it, and gets embarrassed and angry and takes it out on the guy. She's not angry at the guy, per se, so much as mortified that she's attracted to him. Makes for some fun stuff, anyway.

It helps that the Rin endings are, essentially, "good end"; even the one not labeled "good" is pretty good, especially contrasted with the wistful Saber ending (or the unrelenting horror of Sakura's path...)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:08 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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