Content Warnings

This article covers some heavy topics including:

• Suicide
• Mental Health
• Fascism
• US Politics
• Religious Trauma

There is never any shame in prioritizing your mental health. If this is as far as you read, that’s totally ok. If you’d rather come back another time on a better day for you.

Spoiler Warning

Hey, I’m gonna be talking about the ending of “Fate/ Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works” extensively in this article. So like if you wanna go and watch that before I go and spoil everything, that’s super hecking valid.

Hot Takes Inbound

Also, there are a handful of hot takes in here. And to get ahead of any possible assumptions you may have, I am not going to argue that Fate is a “good” series. I simply don’t believe there is an objective way to prove any media is “good” in any universal sense. Rather I will be focusing on one component of the narrative and how I emotionally related to it.

What is Fate? And why does it stay the night?

Fate is, originally, a visual novel. It was later adapted into many different anime series and films. Each would focus on a specific route of the game. The anime in question that I want to talk about is the adaptation of the “Fate/stay night” game’s “Unlimited Blade Works” route. If you want to experience the narrative in the original form, there is a remaster of the game that came out in 2024 that seems to run on basically anything and looks very pretty.

Anyway I’ve actually never played the Visual Novels, the anime adaptations are mainly my understanding of the story. And that’s important to note because if there are any discrepancies that I am not aware of, that would be why I “get X wrong”.

Also crucially I am talking about the 2014 iteration of the show instead of the 2006 “Fate/stay night”.

High Level Summary

The Fate series is a modern-fantasy hidden society story that takes place in the fictional Japanese city, Fuyuki. Which is generally inspired by Kobe city, the capital of Hyogo Prefecture. Within this world there are families of “mages” which pass down their magical arts generation by generation in the form of knowledge. Crucially, this means that there is nothing inherent to a person that prevents or allows them to interact with magic, but it does appear that one’s capacity for mana acts more like a muscle to be trained.

The main conflict of the story follows a “Holy Grail War.” In this story, rather than being “a cup of a carpenter”, the holy grail is a semi-sentient entity of raw magical power.

Some of the main plot of the anime follows the protagonist, Shirou Emiya (I am following western naming style, Given Name followed by Family Name. If you watch the anime in Japanese you probably know him more as “Emiya” than “Shirou” and that’s a fun language thing that is very interesting but I won’t get into it here because that is not the focus of this blog post). He is a boy that nearly died as a bystander in the previous Holy Grail War. Clearly the mages in Fate went to the MCU school of how to fight in a city.

Shirou was adopted by a very chill mage who wants to keep Shirou outside of the cycle of the Holy Grail war. Because of this he begins the story generally unaware of various aspects of magic, the Grail, the War, other mage families, and is basically just a clueless dudebro who just knows a few basic magics and uses them to just be an all around decent guy.

Surprise, as the heir to his magic family (The Grail is based as fuck for recognizing adoption as legitimate family structure BTW) he is now thrust into a magic battle royale against other people who have been training their entire lives for the day they are in this. Lucky for him a girl at school, Rin Tosaka (Tohsaka in some romanizations), is a fellow mage thrust into the war and holds herself to a high standard of honor.

Now a battle royale between different intellectual ancestries of magic would be cool enough as is, but in addition to that, the Holy Grail summons “Herioic Champions” as spirits to protect and fight for their mages. They are generally heroes from all of time that and then bound by contract to serve their “master” and referred to as “servant”.

For me, personally, I don’t feel comfortable using those terms here, and will be referring to the characters who do the summoning as “mages” and the summoned spirits as “champions”. No kink shaming for those that are into Master/Servant dynamics in their own lives, for me it’s mainly the context of the show that makes it feel a bit uncomfortable for me.

The champions are all pigeon-holed into different “classes” but very different classes than you would expect. The champions have several rules around them. The mages are given three “Command Seal“s which the mage can expend to force a champion to obey the command. Which leads into the next wrinkle in the situation. The champions are fully people with their own free will. They volunteered to join the Grail War in the hope that they will be the last one standing with their mage and will receive the wish that winning the grail promises. Each champion also has something called a “Noble Phantasm” which is basically an ultimate ability that is based on who they were in life. Each champion has an imperative to hide their true identity, so they often are called by their class rather than their names, for example Archer, Saber, Rider, Assassin.

The champions have a contiguous memory and sense of time, so they can remember, learn, and grow over each grail war that they are summoned for. The Episode 0, which I highly recommend watching, follows Rin performing the summoning ritual to guarantee that she gets a powerful champion. Apparently Saber is the premium champion. Arguably that is true in the case of Rin, who specializes in ranged magical attacks. But generally it seems like everyone thinks Saber is the best of the best despite having no clue what her identity is.

The show itself has to have a lot of exposition which can bog down the pacing. Watching with my girlfriend I got to hear about how painful it can be for someone who doesn’t already have a special interest in the series. But hopefully that is painfully clear in just how much I had to write just to get you ready to understand even the narrative that affected me.

The Unlimited Blade Works Route

The main focus of the Unlimited Blade Works route follows Shirou repeatedly allying with Rin, and the scuffles that they both get into. Rin’s champion is Archer (my girlfriend called him Virgil because he looks like the character from Devil May Cry). Archer generally hates Shirou. And Shirou’s accidental summon of Saber makes Rin very jealous. Together they have to face off against some truly despicable people. Shirou is working through the ideals he wears like a mantle. He wants to be a “hero of justice” and believes that if he fights really hard he should be able to save everyone. He wants to avoid fighting when possible but if someone is being deeply immoral then his sense of justice wins over her desire to avoid fighting. Time and time again Archer contests against Shirou’s ideals and argues that he needs to be “more realistic” about his sense of justice. Towards the later end of the series, Archer straight up tries to kill Shirou several times, forcing Rin to expend a Command Seal to prevent him from killing Shirou before their alliance can come to fruition.

Eventually it comes to a point where Archer betrays Rin and pledges himself to another champion as their champion in order to “side with the winning team”. In a different way, Saber is forced to sever her ties with Shirou and is captured by another champion who tries to coerce her to pledge as well.

Shirou’s story eventually comes to a minor climax when he must face down Archer, who reveals himself to be the heroic champion of justice “Shirou Emiya”. (For clarity I’ll keep referring to him as Archer). Archer is Shirou from the future when he made good on his ideals and became such a true champion of justice that the holy grail took him in as a champion. Before being taken for the grail war, he was made into a “Guardian” who is dispatched by some cosmic entity that the show doesn’t really get into in order to save humanity during times of great peril. Archer is sent time and time again into horrific war situations and forced to kills hundreds of thousands in order to save humanity time and time again. Specifically during the sequence he describes this we are shown stills of different factions throughout history, such as people in what I think is ancient Egypt, modern Middle Eastern combatants, African child soldiers, different factions in medieval Europe, all bloody and broken by Archer’s supernatural powers. He grows more and more jaded at having his powers and his ideals used to cause such suffering of people deemed to be the cause of strife. (Uh oh I think this anime is getting a little political /s). Archer explains all of this to Shirou in an attempt to convince him to kill himself and save them both from that fate.

My damage

I was raised Catholic. I was raised so damn Catholic that I was sent to a private Catholic school that was generally sub-par at being a school but very good at being Catholic. There I was always taught the “correct” faith which just so happened to be conservative Catholicism. My parents themselves are and were more progressive, basically “hippies” compared to the adults at the school. They encouraged me to base my faith on the simple premise “God is love” and “love one another as I have loved you.” The school/church I spent 9 years of my adolescence at, didn’t seem to agree. Generally I was told time after time that, as a mortal, I am inherently predisposed towards sin. And especially any deviance from being “normal” is giving in to that predisposition towards sinful living. (Another thing that I was apparently sinful for according to the adults at that school was not being racist enough. But if that’s a sin then maybe I’d really rather avoid heaven.)

I also developed the signifiers of Tourette’s Syndrome around the age of 5, the typical age for many neurological conditions to start making themselves known. Now thankfully this very modern and reasonable school decided to help me in the most reasonable way possible, they decided that I must be possessed by a demon and needed to be saved. My parents were more grounded but a doctor had suggested that I had a brain stem tumor so they weren’t doing so hot either.

This lovely little whirlwind of bullshit culminated when I started to go through puberty. Now if you know me outside of this article you may already know this, but I am transgender. So this first puberty was pretty traumatizing for me. I was feeling all kinds of different feelings that I couldn’t understand and I worried more and more that I was becoming some kind of sexual deviant. Of course along with the absolute flood of testosterone into my brain the sexual urges started as well. I wanted to experience things as a woman, all throughout my younger years, I was just hanging out with the girls at school because I related to them better. And it was only when we started “growing up” that the girls told me that I shouldn’t hang out with them anymore because of the social repercussions. Which was devastating. Of course around that same time, most of my peers were being told my their parents not to consort with me because my family had the “audacity” to adopt a child who wasn’t white. I generally wasn’t doing so hot and was getting more and more suicidal.

My overall decision at this time in my life, at the ripe old age of 11, was that my entire life was forfeit. I fully believed that when I died, I would be sent to hell for my deviancy. Every time I tried to absolve myself of my sins through the Church prescribed method, I would struggle to express to the priest all of my deviancy, often for fear of punishment. And ultimately I determined that I would never be able to clear my soul of sin before death.

My determination then was that the only good I could do in life was to sacrifice myself in any way possible to care for others and get their souls to heaven. I saw myself as a doomed soul who could only desperately offer themselves to others in servitude in the hopes that by some glimmering grace the god above would lend an ounce of mercy on my scarred soul. During this time I struggled severely with suicidal ideation. I frequently had to push down that urge to end myself. The only things that stopped me was knowing that the Church says that people who commit suicide go straight to hell no questions asked, and knowing that I would only be more of a burden on my family by causing them to clean up the mess of my death and fund the funeral and tend to whatever was left of my body and any other financial costs added in related to my death.

Side note: It is currently my firm belief that religion does have a great capacity to be an uplifting and encouraging force in people’s lives, and for those that this is the case I highly encourage them to continue to pursue their faith in the ways that it serves them. But when religion is used as a cudgel to dissuade deviation from the norm, when religion is used to torment those that seek to find relief in it, that religion itself becomes morally bankrupt. It is for that reason that I no longer associate with the Catholic Church personally. My own trauma from the experience prevents me from seeing any god in a positive light. But I know that for those that have a positive experience with their faith, it can be a significant help in their life and I want them to be able to continue to pursue that religion as far as they like, provided they are not themselves using their religion as a cudgel on others like we see so often in the USA from “Christians” (who as far as I can tell have never read a single passage of Jesus’s teachings).

Why the story is so damn compelling

Over and over again Rin admonishes Shirou for putting others before himself. He is a character that strives against all odds to care for others, regardless of what suffering that brings himself. Which makes his character all the more sad as his future self describes how his very ideals of servitude and caring for others eventually betrays him as he is forced to kill and kill and kill only to save humanity from destroying itself. The two ends of Shirou demand that final confrontation.

Throughout the story we get different beats of foreshadowing like how Shirou finds Archer’s fighting style more natural to himself, how Shirou develops the ability to “project” (instantly create physical objects from raw mana) and his first projections are the same dual short-swords that Archer wields. The blades themselves are curved but one is a stark white while the other is a black with a grey hexagon outline patterning. They appear vaguely ancient and futuristic all at once and their dichotomy serves to further represent that internal conflict that Shirou/Archer undergo.

The question consistently is made of, how many people is Shirou or Archer willing to let die so that the greater number of people may live. Towards the end of the show Archer allies himself with a champion who is on track to kill all of the people living in Fuyuki city in order to better fuel her own mana and take the Holy Grail for herself. Shirou insists that any concession of lives is morally bankrupt.

When the two clash their physical assaults are broken up by moments of banter, like all good fighting media. They spar verbally on their ideals as well as physically with their projections. Eventually Archer uses his ultimate ability (which the show insists is not a “noble phantasm”), a “reality marble”. The Reality Marble places all that surround Archer, including himself, into a physical manifestation of his mentality. It is the same scene that is shown in subtle ways time and time again throughout the show prior, frequently in the opening of the second half of the season. It is a desolate wasteland with an “unlimited” number of swords all plunged into the sandy earth. They are all different swords from different eras and heroes. Archer describes them as copies of every original sword he has ever seen, and since the Grail had him popping into different moments in time for an unspecified duration, he has seen quite a few different swords. Archer’s power to project swords comes from his physche where he stores every sword he has ever seen.

Here Shirou demonstrates his sheer tenacity and holds to his ideals even stronger. He demonstrates that he will never become the person that Archer is because he is fully committed to fighting as hard as he can to ensure that everyone in the world gets the chance to smile. And he admits that he will never succeed absolutely, but that in and of itself is the very nature of an ideal. Few ideals are possible to create within reality, but striving for them is the noblest thing one can do, and it is what Shirou commits himself to with Archer and Saber as his witnesses. It is with this pledge and one final assault that he finally beats Archer who is so fully taken aback by Shirou that he accepts Shirou will never become the person he did.

How in the hell did this save my life?

Who am I? Certainly not a “hero of justice” nor a mage, nor a badass sword fighter. But I am, or at least I choose to identify myself as, an artist. I have been having a “crisis of faith” as it were. I was struggling to create and struggling to find a reason to carry on through all the horrors and pain that have been happening recently. Again, I live in the USA in the year of all kinds of bullshit, 2026. My country that I have lived in for my whole life is careening towards fascism with a smile on its face, the highest courts of the country are doing everything they can to purge any remnant of civil rights, mobs of dumb white fascists in ski masks and military cosplay are being given carte blanche to harass, arrest, deport, detain, abuse, torture, and murder anyone they deem to be “probably foreign” (Even going so far as to determine someone must be here illegally because they speak with a ‘foreign sounding accent’). My country that I live in is by and large, supremely fucked. And the overall global hegemony seems to be placing the USA in power, with many countries choosing to walk on eggshells around Trump or to bend over backwards trying to appease him. The man who himself is a crybaby, a bully, a pedophile, a fascist, a war monger, narcissist, and is gleefully dismantling anything that he thinks will get him more popularity while destroying the very fabric of society. And all he is even doing is exploiting the fundamental problems our country already had. In the face of all of this, the fear of being persecuted for being trans, the fear that I will never find a future in this country, the knowledge that if this continues to go on unfettered it may reach a time where I am no longer able to move voluntarily but will be forced to flee or submit. All of this fear and anguish, grief over the loss of a home that I never moved away from, it broke me. How could I create art when all I felt was pain. How could I bring joy to others when I felt none in my heart.

I was struggling to move on, I had to take a day off work to try and recover mentally. My girlfriends (polyamorous BTW) were urging me to rest and take a break. Luckily the weekend came before I completely broke down. That weekend I went and visited my local girlfriend and we watched anime, had good food, cuddled, and generally had a really good time. It was very restorative. And the reminder of how good art, no matter when it was made, can give such joy to someone who couldn’t possibly ever track down the creative(s) behind it helped to put things into perspective.

Shirou’s inner conflict, externalized through Archer as a foil, gave me greater determination to strive for the very reason that I got into making games. And it told me that it’s OK if I don’t match that ideal beat for beat, so long as I strive for the ideal then the work is noble enough as it is. And by existing as a piece of art originally made back in 2004, adapted by other creatives several times culminating in a 2014 iteration that captured my heart when I was in college enough that I thought to make my girlfriend watch it with me, Fate found a way to burrow into my heart and tell me that everything was going to be okay like the story itself was a “guardian” chosen by the grail to transcend time and space and gift joy into the hearts of people.

And that’s just it, by nature art is not ephemeral. Art stays existing for as long as we preserve it. Art can transcend time, space, language, and it can touch the hearts of people that the creator(s) could never have anticipated.

Why I make games

I have spent a significant portion of my life struggling against my depression. It has been hard and there are many different “weapons” in my arsenal to help me fight. Prescriptions make it easier, being recognized as my gender in society makes it easier, having people who love and support me makes it easier, and having something to live for definitely makes it easier. When any one of these starts to falter, I risk slipping backwards in my mental state. But the thing that always seems to bolster me in this fight is art. Stories through games, books, movies, TV (which is where I am lumping in anime for the dorks that like to think that Japanese television shows are somehow some higher form of art than any other television media), have all touched my heart one way or another.

Horror games in particular bolstered me when I was at my lowest. When I had none of the things that help me fight, horror media got me through. And so now that I find myself relatively stable and able to give back to communities that got me through the lowest points of my life, I ask what I can give. And the answer is resoundingly, “comfort.” I am one of many who believes that art, including horror, should serve to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I create horror to strike terror into those that have no concept of living in fear while at the same time showing those who feel it every last day that they are not alone. That they will never be alone. And the comfort of knowing that art can transcend time and space gives me hope of someday creating something that will touch the heart of someone struggling. That the things I create can bolster someone else who is struggling through their lowest point. That maybe just maybe, I can change someone else’s life for the better.

And like Shirou taught me, I can’t promise that I will always succeed. But I can promise that I will always fight like hell to get there.