Spoiler alert: Spoilers for volumes
five through ten of the manga beyond this point! Please do not share any
spoilers past this point in the series, please!
In my last Fate/Stay
Night post, I cut it short to keep things simple and vowed to post about the
wonderful relationships in this series later. So here I am, later, talking
about the relationships in the Fate/Stay Night manga! I hope I do not bore you.
Personal relationships in manga, whether romantic or friendship or otherwise,
always intrigue me – and F/SN has been doing a really good job of keeping them
developed and three-dimensional.
Especially Saber and
Shirou. Oh, I adore them so much. But I’ll get to them in a second.
First things first, I
don’t think concentrating an entire blog post on relationships is silly! After all, much of what Fate/Stay Night
does is based on relationships – mainly, the one between a Master and their
Servant. Their link is what keeps the Holy Grail War going. You cannot have a
Master without a Servant and vice versa.
(And as recent events
showed, sometimes you can have multiple Servants under one Master. But that is
cheating, y’all! Real Holy Grail holders don’t cheat. They just mercilessly
slaughter their friends in the name of victory! Ahem.)
I feel like the core
relationship of this series is the one between Saber and Shirou. It has really
evolved from a simple Master/Servant one to one where they can start to rely on
each other for support and better themselves in the process. Just look at
Shirou. He’s putting it on himself to become stronger so he can protect Saber
and make her burden lighter. Masters don’t do that! But Shirou isn’t a typical
Master, and Saber is no typical Servant.
In turn, Saber makes
it her job to protect Shirou and make sure he achieves his goal of becoming a
hero who saves people while at the same time understanding that his way of
doing things involves saving people he considers friends. People like Shinji,
who has shown his true colors as a controlling, manipulating Master – and yet
Shirou still sees the good in him, the person he’s been friends with for years.
For someone who is
fully entrenched in the culture of a War which teaches those involved to value
power over friends, it has taken a lot on Saber’s part to accept these parts of
Shirou’s accepting personality. Shirou wants to save everyone. Saber wants to
save Shirou from his own nature. Eventually, these two interests will clash
majorly, but for now they’ve found a balance within their Master/Servant
relationship.
Also, I love that
Saber has become a teacher for Shirou in several ways, mainly in the ways of
combat and the history of the War. This brings me to Shirou’s relationship with
fellow Master Rin Tosaka, who despite declaring her intentions on winning this
War has given Shirou a lot of help in his Magecraft and understanding of how
the Holy Grail War wins. But then again, Tosaka has said time and time again
that she’d rather win against someone prepared – and she also has too much
pride to beat an opponent who is so heavily mismatched against her years of
skill and preparation.
Shirou did not have
the benefit of coming from a family who has been involved in the conflict for
generations; no one really raised him to be a soldier in this War like the
Tosaka clan did with Rin. Really, the best resource for making sure him and
Saber aren’t knocked out early in the game is, ironically enough, the girl most
determined to take the Grail for herself.
As for Rin herself,
it’s obvious that her strongest relationship is with her own Servant, Archer.
As the series progresses, we see Rin learn more about her Servant and the
person he once was in the distant past. Like Saber, Archer has had one hell of
a time remembering who he is, but it has not fully come back yet. This has not
negatively affected their relationship, although it has kept them from
connecting as Saber has with Shirou.
Which is not to say their relationship is
strained or distant; it is obvious from their moments in combat that Rin and
Archer has spent much of their time together becoming tuned in with each
others’ thoughts and action patterns.
Plus, I would say
that Rin and Archer’s relationship, compared to Saber and Shirou, is much more mature. Whether it’s the lack of an age
gap (physically speaking) or the fact that they’ve spent more time together,
the two of them have a much more honest dialogue and are able to talk to each
other like adults. They have the occasional tiff but it does not completely
break apart who they are.
And they are – let’s
be honest, folks – really cute together. Archer wins for making Rin blush on
occasion. Blushing Rin Tosaka is one of the cutest things in the universe, next
to Saber wearing girly clothes and Shirou in an apron. Sorry, still shallow!
Aside from the two
main relationships, the one I think really deserves mention so far is the one
between Shinji Matou and his adopted sister Sakura (no, not the one between
Caster and her Master, I’ll save that for when I read volume eleven). I think
they have the potential to become closer and more sibling-like, so long as it
doesn’t erase the fact that Shinji did a lot of jerk-like stuff to Sakura. He
was very controlling and manipulative! Yes, it sucks that he’s not the heir,
but it doesn’t give him the right to take it out on Sakura. Who knows – maybe Sakura
will eschew her destiny to build a stronger bond with Shinji, who has felt like
an outcast in his own family for so long? That would definitely be interesting.
Really, I could hit
on a lot more relationships – that’s
how good Type-Moon is at crafting connections on various levels between
characters – but I’ve reached 1k words so for those who stuck around, thank you
for reading! I hope my Fate/Stay posts have brought some kind of fresh
perspective to the series, and I hope to make some more posts about Saber and
company in the future.
Please feel free to comment about your favorite F/SN
relationships in the comment section! I’d love to hear y’all thoughts on this
wonderful series.
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