This review contains spoilers
I love Fate/Stay Night for being a very active story. In every route, there is always a fight around pushing the corner pushing the story forward, and they’re very cool to read, yes—but they’re also where the characters are at their best when it comes to expressing their emotions. When characters like Saber and Gilgamesh, Shirou and Archer, and Rin and Sakura clash, there is a lot of pent-up energy, emotion, and history that comes out in full force. It makes for a very powerful story full of cathartic bursts of character drama.
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia brings all that to a halt. Everything and everyone is static.
Seeing the characters of FSN live out happy, daily SoL activities is really fun. I love this cast and I already loved the downtime they got in the original VN, so seeing everyone at peace and developing through silly little skits is fantastic. I wanted to see all these characters happy, and that’s what the VN gives you.
But there’s a sense of wrongness about it all.
Shirou feels it. Certain servants who should be very dead feel it. I feel it as a reader. Even as a story that doesn’t try to tie itself to any “canon” FSN route, you know that not everyone here is supposed to be happy. It’s what they deserve, but the trauma of the Fifth Holy Grail War is not something that’s going away. Nor are the problems that the VN’s new protagonist, Bazett, is facing.
Everyone is living without anything changing. For Shirou and friends, that makes life fun, if strange. For Bazett, there’s no worse fate. She’s someone who’s never been able to change herself, but as long as she doesn’t do anything too new or scary, things won’t get worse for her. But they won’t get better, either. That’s the one, simple point that Hollow Ataraxia drives home from beginning to end. Things need to end, because you won’t grow or change if they stay the same forever. You have to let things go in order to find new ways to learn about yourself.
Expressed through Bazett and her partner Avenger, this is a perfectly succinct message delivered in a very cathartic finale, but it’s just as much a meta-story for fans of the FSN cast. It’s fun to see what these characters would be like if they’re at their happiest. It makes you feel good to see them discuss the memories of the best moments of FSN. But they’re characters whose stories are complete. It’s okay to keep appreciating them and your memories of them, but bit by bit you have to let them just exist as they are. There won’t be an infinite amount of new things to do with them, and that’s okay. That’s life. It’s the same way your relationships with friends don’t always stay the same, or why you start doing new things when life as it is gets stale. It’s something I’ve internalized a lot in the past few years as once-familiar things changed with the pandemic and going away to college, and I think it’s wonderfully represented here. It’s fun to have memories, and it’s fun to keep doing new things, and those things should exist together in harmony.
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia brings all that to a halt. Everything and everyone is static.
Seeing the characters of FSN live out happy, daily SoL activities is really fun. I love this cast and I already loved the downtime they got in the original VN, so seeing everyone at peace and developing through silly little skits is fantastic. I wanted to see all these characters happy, and that’s what the VN gives you.
But there’s a sense of wrongness about it all.
Shirou feels it. Certain servants who should be very dead feel it. I feel it as a reader. Even as a story that doesn’t try to tie itself to any “canon” FSN route, you know that not everyone here is supposed to be happy. It’s what they deserve, but the trauma of the Fifth Holy Grail War is not something that’s going away. Nor are the problems that the VN’s new protagonist, Bazett, is facing.
Everyone is living without anything changing. For Shirou and friends, that makes life fun, if strange. For Bazett, there’s no worse fate. She’s someone who’s never been able to change herself, but as long as she doesn’t do anything too new or scary, things won’t get worse for her. But they won’t get better, either. That’s the one, simple point that Hollow Ataraxia drives home from beginning to end. Things need to end, because you won’t grow or change if they stay the same forever. You have to let things go in order to find new ways to learn about yourself.
Expressed through Bazett and her partner Avenger, this is a perfectly succinct message delivered in a very cathartic finale, but it’s just as much a meta-story for fans of the FSN cast. It’s fun to see what these characters would be like if they’re at their happiest. It makes you feel good to see them discuss the memories of the best moments of FSN. But they’re characters whose stories are complete. It’s okay to keep appreciating them and your memories of them, but bit by bit you have to let them just exist as they are. There won’t be an infinite amount of new things to do with them, and that’s okay. That’s life. It’s the same way your relationships with friends don’t always stay the same, or why you start doing new things when life as it is gets stale. It’s something I’ve internalized a lot in the past few years as once-familiar things changed with the pandemic and going away to college, and I think it’s wonderfully represented here. It’s fun to have memories, and it’s fun to keep doing new things, and those things should exist together in harmony.