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LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT FATE (Content Warning)
- Thread starter Lyrai
- Start date
Honestly i just sort of always assumed fate was just one of those cell phone games that consists Entirely of ladies in fetish outfits having conversations about nothing where the goal is get new ladies in fetish outfits by spending real money on a digital capsule toy machine.
Fate is not for everyone. And that's fine. I'm not gonna call you a bad person for not liking fate. Everyone has their own thing.
As for Fate/Zero, it was written by Gen Urobuchi the guy behind Madoka and generally known for, uh. That sort of thing.
ufotable is VERY good at fights and has kind of made it their thing to do beautiful animation. But yeah the plot can be hard to get into.
As for Fate/Zero, it was written by Gen Urobuchi the guy behind Madoka and generally known for, uh. That sort of thing.
ufotable is VERY good at fights and has kind of made it their thing to do beautiful animation. But yeah the plot can be hard to get into.
I recently found out that Fate/stay night had a 2008 arcade/PS2/PSP fighting game spin-off in Fate/unlimited codes, which in itself is noteworthy and exciting, but the creative pedigree involved folks like Cavia in one of their later projects before the impending studio closure, as well as Eighting as the primary developer, who of course were no strangers to fast-paced 3D fighting with the Bloody Roar series behind them, and having spent most of the decade working with various licensed anime properties in the genre. The confidence in it being good is there, and as even mere promotional footage may attest to, it is. It's very good, and a gorgeous late-era game for the PS2 in its most-played port. But is its mere existence the only reason I'm bringing it up? Nope. It happened that when viewing the game, a particular character caught my eye. This lady:
Behold Luviagelita Edelfelt. What's even cool about her? Here are a couple of things:
Behold Luviagelita Edelfelt. What's even cool about her? Here are a couple of things:
- she is Finnish as hell. To contextualize the significance here: I'm Finnish! It's about that simple, but of course there's more to say. I usually have no national or cultural pride to speak of, but for whatever reason I get pumped as hell when I see my country and culture represented in media, especially in works created by people not from here. Maybe it's some kind of external validation response, I don't know--but it always happens, and because of Finnish culture's relative insignificance/conflation with other Northern European cultures on a global scale it's all the more appealing in its rarity when it's made explicit. I've interacted with many a terrible media work propelled solely by the knowledge that somewhere in it, a Finn would be present for all of five seconds. I can't in good conscience bring it up as an example of important representation needing to be met in the language these kinds of things are usually discussed, because white Europeans aren't underserved on that front, but as a personal catnip? It's there, and I can't deny it.
What ties Luviagelita to that cultural identity? On first blush, it's her name. "Luviagelita" is kind of a horrific word salad, but as its component and her prime contracted moniker, "Luvia" is a valid if uncommon word in the language, and morphologically and phonetically sound--"gelita" is harder to explicate. "Edelfelt" is what's eyecatching here, for likely being sourced from well-known Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt. That is in its way a point of specific minority representation, as the name and Edelfelt's own context root it in the Swedish-speaking Finn cultural context that is extant to this day and a heritage and identity that applies to many. The historical Edelfelt was nobility and on good terms with royalty, and that too connects to Luviagelita's portrayal, as she lives the better-than-you rich young lady archetype to a tee, and is particularly suited for Fate's broad-strokes historical stylings.
Of course, she's visually coded to be Finnish as well. Most strikingly that comes across in her attire being coloured in the blue and white of the national flag, but the common semiotics of "foreign white person" are in play here as strongly as they are for Americans, generally--almost all Finnish people in Japanese media are blonde, and that stands in her case too. It does not reflect reality, even for as homogeneous a population as Finland is, but it's what the stereotype remains.
- when you see this character design, what do you expect from her, combat-wise, as while she is from a visual novel one of her early big breaks in prominence was this fighting game spin-off? Probably something light on her feet and quick-hitting, maybe lots of fancy twirls to accentuate the dress and princess curls' movement? Nope, it's pro wrestling, and they even go as far as to specify it as Lancashire-style catch wrestling. Luvia loves wrestling so much that her monikers derive from it, as the "Forklift Lady" and "Hunting Dog of the Ring." This matters to me because while I don't often speak of it at least in the context of this forum, I love pro wrestling and have since childhood, and as a woman or queer person feeling that way is a mixed, conflicted field to navigate at the best of times. In Luvia's particular case the concept is so strong to me because here is a prim and proper Lady with a capital L who presents so femme, and is ready and exhilarated to throw down with vicious combat sports at a moment's notice, mixing it in effortlessly and seamlessly with her magically-endowed abilities as the setting demands. It's a really unique and potent mix, and a rare juxtaposition of archetypal elements where their combination is the entire point and crux of the character, and fist-pumping to behold as she unleashes her ridiculous enzuigiri-to-giant swing-to-German suplex combinations. Fighting games need more characters like her.
- speaking of characters like her, maybe you'll think of a couple of very conceptually similar women from other fighting games, because I certainly did; Karin Kanzuki of Street Fighter and Emilie "Lili" De Rochefort of Tekken are of similar creative basis as Luvia: rich, full of themselves, trained in martial arts, blonde and chuckle-prone, the works. This is an archetype that exists in nerd media to some prevalence, and for good or ill, it fuckin' always works, because as the two spiritual peers listed, Luvia has one more commonality to exemplify as they do: she's completely and utterly turbo gay. This, too, is a shared aspect, as narratively these women are always defined by their single-minded, obsessive rivalries with their partners--Karin has Sakura, Lili has Asuka, and Luvia has Rin. None of these works will ever come out and say it because they recognize the value of queerbaiting their audience for maintained interest, and likely have more than a little institutionalized queerphobia forbidding them from moving away from the safeties of plausible deniability, but these gals who are not quite pals sure read like intense and prolonged romantic courtship through their entire fictional existences even to eyes who aren't actively looking for the representation or wish-fulfillment. Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, Luvia and Rin are an inseparable unit, where the most significant interactions at least the former ever has with anyone are with the latter. You can deny intent and context, but the relationship itself cannot be erased.
- she does these ridiculous finger-gun motions when firing her magic curses (described as "Gandr", of Scandinavian origin) at people; the most powerful form of this magic is called a Finn Shot. What can I really add to that?
- you may notice that in some of the art she goes sleeveless. As Luvia usually fights in all her regular attire, the sleeves of her dress are detachable just for that reason. What a good design and character cue!
- ultimately what I think is most notable to me about Luviagelita as a design that's inherently valuable and recognizable to people outside of my personal specifics is that she's just a very good piece of visual design in general, and represents things that make me fond of the larger Type-Moon oeuvre, looking from the outside in. My personal context, now as before, have been the intersections with things like fighting games; Melty Blood was a notable game for me in my youth and I like it even more now because I think it best captures company co-founder Takashi Takeuchi's talent for clean-lined and almost anonymously clothed anime folk, communicated in the French Bread pixel art style of the era. It's an appreciation for a period in the medium that otherwise stylistically does not capture the sensibilities, of that 2000s malaise of sorts, but when the relative simplicity of approach of this dōjin studio and creator happened upon a seeming rarity in basically all media, where their featured women went mostly unsexualized in a rampantly sexualized genre, and even in spite of many of their origins in erotic visual novels. Before I even knew of that particular creative context, characters like Arcueid and Aoko stood out for their nondescript fashion, the sheer audacious mundanity that they represented juxtaposed with their supernatural fighting, and that's the expression that I'm drawn to, which really doesn't exist anymore, even from Takeuchi himself. The larger Fate franchise as it exists now is represented by the gacha hell dimension of Grand Order and the ode to pedophilia that is the kaleid liner Prisma Illya corner, so I have no real interest in familiarizing myself with the larger series--I will probably just continue to enjoy some of its past aesthetics, as they existed a decade and more ago, more as sets of evocative archetypes and suggestions of character than as written entities of their own. It's a relationship I'm pretty satisfied with, all considered.
Fyonn
did their best!
I have just finished reading Fate/Stay Night. Also I thought I wasn't gonna read Heaven's Feel until the retranslation was finished, so I detoured into watching UFOTable's UBW anime, and the Abridged version of that same anime at someone's behest. Oh, I also bought a Saber Nendoroid and got into clay sculpting so I could make a burger accessory for her. All that was before deciding "fuck it" and reading Heaven's Feel.
What a trial.
I'm not a huge fan of Unlimited Blade Works' structurally. Just a large number of scenes where a character states their internal struggle and then achieves no movement in regards to that struggle at all. And in terms of how the action develops... it ain't great. There's not a lot interesting going on in the fights, and the clearly intended cartharsis isn't landing because of the no character development problem. But those problems are largely not present in the anime thanks to much better fight choreography. It's still stupid, but it's stupid pretty now. Also, I think that UBW Abridged is the best version of UBW. No, I'm not joking.
And Heaven's Feel is a lot. It... comes from having it's heart in the right place, I think, but it's a relatively immature group of guys trying to tell a story about some very heavy subject matter. Look up content warnings before ya'll do that route.
It's basically impossible to recall how I felt about the initial Fate route. There's a degree to which it feels like the writers, characters, and subject matured further with each route. I hear the Deen anime is like 60% Fate, 20% UBW, and 20% HF, which is... complete nonsense. I might have to see it just because that seems like such an obviously bad idea.
Anyway I've already done the first week of Fate/Extra, which seems tuned for my tastes specifically. Aside from the r-slur being dropped like candy. Also, how is Extra hornier than Stay Night given that Stay Night is the one that started as porn...?
What a trial.
I'm not a huge fan of Unlimited Blade Works' structurally. Just a large number of scenes where a character states their internal struggle and then achieves no movement in regards to that struggle at all. And in terms of how the action develops... it ain't great. There's not a lot interesting going on in the fights, and the clearly intended cartharsis isn't landing because of the no character development problem. But those problems are largely not present in the anime thanks to much better fight choreography. It's still stupid, but it's stupid pretty now. Also, I think that UBW Abridged is the best version of UBW. No, I'm not joking.
And Heaven's Feel is a lot. It... comes from having it's heart in the right place, I think, but it's a relatively immature group of guys trying to tell a story about some very heavy subject matter. Look up content warnings before ya'll do that route.
It's basically impossible to recall how I felt about the initial Fate route. There's a degree to which it feels like the writers, characters, and subject matured further with each route. I hear the Deen anime is like 60% Fate, 20% UBW, and 20% HF, which is... complete nonsense. I might have to see it just because that seems like such an obviously bad idea.
Anyway I've already done the first week of Fate/Extra, which seems tuned for my tastes specifically. Aside from the r-slur being dropped like candy. Also, how is Extra hornier than Stay Night given that Stay Night is the one that started as porn...?
Yes. And she's a very big sadist. Like enough that the event she's in goes "This is basically crossing the line from people are horny for this into actually scary."Hi! Does FATE have a sexy penguin person?
Just checking!
This is nothing personal for anyone that feels differently, and I have absolutely zero insight into the actual "behind the scenes" of the creation of any FATE media. That said, complete with the confirmation of the sexy sadist penguin above, everything surrounding FATE and axillary materials ... I absolutely cannot give Heaven's Feel the benefit of the doubt on it not delving into mature themes for anything significant but titillation. Like, there is a moral there. It is not simply pornography where the point is the audience getting off. But I do believe those subjects were visited and examined first and foremost because they wanted to explore the extreme end of the opposite of the two other main women in the cast for the benefit of the heterosexual male audience.
Or, to paraphrase Dril, "regarding type-moon. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them".
(BRIEF ASIDE FOR OLD PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET: Am I mistaken, or was "woomy" previously a term describing vulnerable, "please rescue me" anime women? The word appears to have been completely adopted by Splatoon for its nonsense language, but I swear it used to mean something else.)
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Fyonn
did their best!
Cool job replying to my post that avoided mentioning FSN spoilers with a gif that is massive spoilers for Heaven's Feel, gogglebob. That said, I definitely have to play that game, huh?
I'm not sure what the sadistic woman wearing a penguin hoodie over her swimsuit has to do with Heaven's Feel being sometimes tasteless? Compared to Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Grand Order is extremely sanitized. Sure, there's a lot of pandering and swimsuits and shit, but that's gacha. Personally, I think that you can't take anything in Fate/Grand Order as a significant reflection of other Fate stuff, just like you can't play Mega Man X Dive and then decide that means Mega Man Legends must be awful. Being a gacha fundamentally changes the priorities of the writing and character design. Though, it's true that Fate/Stay Night is also a compromised work due to its assumption that it needed to be pornography to sell. Kinoko Nasu has stated in interviews that they regret a lot of the gross stuff in Fate/Stay Night and that Realta Nua, the version that I played with most of that cut out, is close to their ideal version of game. Why the UFO Table Heaven's Feel movie trilogy saw fit to reintroduce the gross shit afterwards, who can say?
I'm sorry you subjected yourself to kaleid liner Prisma Illya and that you very understandably have feelings about that, but there's nothing in Fate as a franchise that's any worse than, say, Gundam or Evangelion as a franchise. I'm not watching Prisma Illya, I'm not reading Char's Deleted Affair in which an adult Char Aznable is in a relationship with a 14 year old Haman Karn, and I'm not buying the horny figurines of Elpeo Ple and Rei [whatever Rei's last name is]. Unfortunately, culture is saturated with this shit, and being into nerdy interests like video games and anime means being adjacent to this stuff frequently.
I bought a Saber Nendoroid, but was upset she didn't come with a hamburger. All Sabers deserve borger. So I took up sculpting clay so I could make her a borger:
I'm not sure what the sadistic woman wearing a penguin hoodie over her swimsuit has to do with Heaven's Feel being sometimes tasteless? Compared to Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Grand Order is extremely sanitized. Sure, there's a lot of pandering and swimsuits and shit, but that's gacha. Personally, I think that you can't take anything in Fate/Grand Order as a significant reflection of other Fate stuff, just like you can't play Mega Man X Dive and then decide that means Mega Man Legends must be awful. Being a gacha fundamentally changes the priorities of the writing and character design. Though, it's true that Fate/Stay Night is also a compromised work due to its assumption that it needed to be pornography to sell. Kinoko Nasu has stated in interviews that they regret a lot of the gross stuff in Fate/Stay Night and that Realta Nua, the version that I played with most of that cut out, is close to their ideal version of game. Why the UFO Table Heaven's Feel movie trilogy saw fit to reintroduce the gross shit afterwards, who can say?
I'm sorry you subjected yourself to kaleid liner Prisma Illya and that you very understandably have feelings about that, but there's nothing in Fate as a franchise that's any worse than, say, Gundam or Evangelion as a franchise. I'm not watching Prisma Illya, I'm not reading Char's Deleted Affair in which an adult Char Aznable is in a relationship with a 14 year old Haman Karn, and I'm not buying the horny figurines of Elpeo Ple and Rei [whatever Rei's last name is]. Unfortunately, culture is saturated with this shit, and being into nerdy interests like video games and anime means being adjacent to this stuff frequently.
I bought a Saber Nendoroid, but was upset she didn't come with a hamburger. All Sabers deserve borger. So I took up sculpting clay so I could make her a borger:
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I kind of figured that would work on the idea that an audience that did not recognize/understand what they were seeing would not see it as a spoiler, but regardless, I stuck it behind a pop now for future generations.
----
Regarding addressing the rest of FATE: I am genuinely asking this as I don't know the answer, and not trying for some kind of gotcha here: is Fate/Apocrypha part of Grand Order? Because that was the distinct "story" with its setting and characters where I judged FATE as something that could have a dedicated (good!) story separate from being a straight up porno, but was still going to dip into the well of Sexy Frankenstein every time the opportunity arose.
EDITED TO ADD: To reiterate my original point, I don't think any of this makes FATE bad, I just think its stories and twists come from a place where initial plot decisions were made to appeal to an audience on a specific sexual level.
Fyonn
did their best!
It's cool. I am just aware another TTer is also working through FSN much slower than I did at the moment, so they could probably clock it immediately.
The Fate wiki suggests that Apocrypha is an alternate universe, just like Extra is an alternate universe. I consider Grand Order it's own weird thing off to the side since it breaks so many rules and is so tonally different, but I think technically it's on the Fate/Stay Night timeline. Technically, they're all directly related since the Throne of Heroes that Servants are summoned from is a multiversal entity, but... Meh.
Agreed on this point. There's no Saber and Shirou cuddling scene in Realta Nua in a universe where that wasn't previously a sex scene. Also, mana transfers. I can't be too mad about the sexual content from FSN because "listen Shirou, you have to fuck your girlfriend because she's out of MP" is the funniest shit on the planet to me. The most RPG-ass version of "... and there was only one bed in the hotel room!" imaginable.
Plus, the precedent that FSN establishes for relationships forming between Masters and Servants is definitely an influence on future Fate works. I don't know if the franchise ever really examines how inherently fraught that is.
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I know next to nothing about the Fate franchise, but dang if that isn't just about the best frivolous excuse for porn I've ever heard.
The thing that gets me is that it is a deeply "mythological" series, with lore and rules that are firmly established and repeated in every new iteration. But the origin of all that lore and fiction and some of the cooler/unique bits are all excuses for porn or thinly-veiled sexual metaphors. We are approaching having decades (plural) of lore that all traces back to "we thought this kink would get you going".
And that is my final opinion on Bram Stoker's Dracula.