Least favourite servant?

[Magikewl]

We should all read his FGO fanfic again

That was fun

[PioneerOfTheStarsEX]

Link please

[Deathhappens]

I'm not familiar with the history of you people on this forum but,
I don't get why people seems to have something against Dullahan, his posts actually really interesting and, more importanly, made a lot of sense.
If this is about his criticsm on FGO above, I don't think it's so harmful. I mean, I think FGO community as a whole is actually self-aware of it? (isn't that the whole point of these "gatcha jokes" and Riyo's manga?).

What makes you think that people have something against him?

[PioneerOfTheStarsEX]

What makes you think that people have something against him?

Some people, at least. I don't know, it just seems that way to me. I could be very wrong though.

Also, I'm quite interested in the fic, is it posted on this site, or some other site?

[Leftovers]

I'm not familiar with the history of you people on this forum but,
I don't get why people seems to have something against Dullahan, his posts actually really interesting and, more importanly, made a lot of sense.
If this is about his criticsm on FGO above, I don't think it's so harmful. I mean, I think FGO community as a whole is actually self-aware of it? (isn't that the whole point of these "gatcha jokes" and Riyo's manga?).

That's exactly why people treat criticism as a meme.

edit: to wit:

"h-he must secretly like it, guys," murmured the stamp collector, mind reeling from the momentary thought - that someone could possibly, genuinely, not like FGO. yeah, that was it, wasn't it? it must be irony. we're all on the same page here, aren't we? just like we are when we say that we're trash, or go on twitter to tell everyone how angry we are at the gacha. the idea that there was anything beyond irony was more than incomprehensible to him. it was actively painful to contemplate. "t-t-tsundere! you're a tsundere!" he screamed as he hurriedly closed the tab

Also, here.

[PioneerOfTheStarsEX]

That's exactly why people treat criticism as a meme.

Also, here.

Ah....... Mind blown

Also, thanks for the link

[Deathhappens]

Lyra and Will totally fucked.

And His Dark Materials is still among the best in terms of literary value in fantasy series, in my biased opinion. But no, when I say YA novels I have something a bit more trashy in mind. Everything by Richelle Mead, for example.

[Deathhappens]

That's exactly why people treat criticism as a meme.

edit: to wit:

Also, here.

Death kit. It contained the following items: (1) A patch of excised skin the size of a CD case, preserved in a sterilised plastic sleeve, (2) samples of hair labelled by site of origin, (3) six detachable noses, (4) high-resolution photographs of a human iris, (5) three sets of breasts, paired at distinct size thresholds, (6) a 500ml bottle of commercial lubricant, (7) square manufacturer's samples of high-quality kimono fabric, (8) a set of sprites commissioned from a niche illustrator, (9) captioned photographs of everyday situations, (10) charts showing the growth of unit statistics in proportion to selected variables, (11) an itemised list of upgrade materials, (12) a dossier of lines to be spoken aloud when specific flags were raised, including possible variations and instructions on cadence and intonation, (13) a cross-section of thickness not exceeding 1mm taken from the blade of a Japanese sword, (14) the text of several pornographic short stories with all proper nouns removed and replaced with quoted empty space, (15) an invoice for dialect coaching in a formal register, unpaid, (16) a chart displaying variations in body temperature, axillary, buccal, and rectal, over a twenty-four hour period, (17) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm, (18) a flowchart for her route, and (19) a slip of paper, hastily typewritten, bearing the words lemon, tags: swimsuit, ice cream, sweat.

This was the secret santa fanfic assignment, wasn't it.
Sesquipedalian loquaciousness aside, this is an entertaining read.

[SpoonyViking]

nasu could very well have chosen to establish heroic spirits as the 'actual persons' in front of whom all the subsequent legendarium is built up. in fact he to a degree did go in this direction with characters like false assassin.

Or King Arthur being a woman.

Also, what's "ITT"?

[pinetree]

In this topic

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

the reason we have all this bullshit going on is because nasu wrote fate with the idea that he could have "heroic spirits" ie persons sublimated to a higher mode of existence by human veneration particularised by "myth" in a relatively unproblematic way

this idea was patently retarded, a highschool level of comprehension, which makes sense when you remember how old nasu was when he wrote the prototype for fate but is no longer remotely cute or forgivable in a man in his 40s

the problem is this assumption that the past is univocal and that heroes of the past are venerated in a directly univocal way in response - as if there's THE myth, THE story, singular, for any given figure, which persists irrespective of subsequent historical conditions

time has passed since FSN and writers have grown up and become able to see that, hey, the above is trivially untrue, what we call a 'myth' is actually a whole body of texts originating at different times and historical circumstances, all in communication with one another and with other texts etc

and they have no fucking idea what to do with this realisation because (1) they're stupid (2) the profit motive overpowers any will to understand the issues of historicity more deeply (3) they're all writing in the shadow of fate and fate's systems and way of approaching the past and are unable to think outside that straitjacket

and because they have no idea what to do we have shit like Innocent Monster - a servant skill where, in-universe, later textual interpretations enforce certain characteristics over the 'real' 'original' character. they're trying to come to terms with the fact that records of heroes are created and disseminated in and through history and doing it in a very cack-handed way in this case - they palm it off on the ostensibly egregious cases like vlad tepes, whereas if they had a clue they'd realise that almost every single servant by rights should have this skill or something like it. their problem is they still think in terms of the past being univocal. where they look at the past and see multiple voices their instinct is to flatten the multitude into an even melange in which every element is as meaningful as any other, from which they themselves can pick and choose arbitrarily to make their stories. they're database thinkers at heart. they reduce everything to atomic components. individual datapoints of positive fact.

so we have things like syncretism. where the historical transmission of a religion from one place to another resulted in the identification of native figures of worship with the new foreign ones. there's been a huge amount of this in japan since the introduction of buddhism in the 6th century AD. mainly in the identification of shinto kami as emanations of buddhas etc. ask mizukume for the details i'm sure he knows more of them than i do. the point is that the arrival of a new religion - a new system of metaphysics, ontology, ways of understanding history, etc - collides with pre-existing religions & folklore in a massive variety of ways which are in every case conditioned by local circumstances, politics, culture, etc.

so at some point shingon buddhist monks identify dainichi nyorai, which is to say mahavairocana tathagata [the dharma-body of the historical buddha in vajrayana] with the shinto kami amaterasu. (lest we forget that shingon was not a 'mass' religion like the various strains of japanese mahayana. shingon was esoteric buddhism for the elite, very close to the kyoto nobility & imperial house. the latter of whom were, notionally, descended from amaterasu. thinking emoji) meanwhile elsewhere and at other times whole sheathes of formerly isolated pieces of folklore about foxes are picked up and linked together; the folklore of tamamo-no-mae from the heian period is fused with that of its archetypal antecedents from china in da ji and bao si and the one in india whose name i forget. all this stuff that's been mentioned already. the connection between kitsune and amaterasu. the identification of kitsune with the dakini of hindu/buddhist folklore imported from china. a huge amount of syncretic transformations and identifications happen at various times and places for various reasons with various logics underpinning them, and these are disseminated and authorised through texts which enter into communion with prior and subsequent texts and so on.

the problem is that TM writers and to a large degree TM fans don't understand what it means that these syncretisms occured in and through history. because the TM writers are stupid and don't know how to actually think about history they look at the textual corpus which has emerged from centuries of the impact of syncretism on myths and folkore and they see - what? isolated datapoints flattened into an ahistorical melange from which they can pick and choose what sounds coolest.

so sometimes they decide siegfried from the nibelungenlied and sigurd from the volsunga saga should be seperate characters, despite the common origin in the folklore of northern europe they have. other times they decide tamamo = the entire pantheon of east asian religion. because they can't see any reason not to do either.

because TM writers are smart, but not smart enough to realise how fucking stupid they are.

Also, about your whole assertion that Nasu is an overgrown child for trying to fit legends and myths into the mold of Heroic Spirits, I honestly cannot agree with that. If that is the case, then nearly all fiction writers who incorporate mythological figures into their works are the same, and it's thus pointless to write fiction about these things, which isn't true. As Royd said earlier, even if there is no platonic essence or "real" version of the legends of heroes in real life, Nasu and other fiction writers have full rights to make these legends real in their works, and by doing so, certain legends and interpretations must be privileged by the writer by default, since "real" people aren't collections of legends that change with time and social mores. In fact, I'd say Nasu does more than most to acknowledge the ever-changing, multifarious nature of legends, since while his Heroic Spirits were typically real people who existed at some point in time, they are also reflections of all the legends told of them, and they are changed by peoples' perceptions of them. Thus, they are the bridge between truth and fiction, being existences that blur the line between what is real and what is fiction and simultaneously exist as both. This acknowledges changing legends far more than any other fantasy author I've ever read.

Or King Arthur being a woman.

Also, what's "ITT"?

Thank God I'm not the only one curious.

[Deathhappens]

In this topic

Or "in this thread", but same difference.

[SpoonyViking]

In this topic

Thanks!

If that is the case, then nearly all fiction writers who incorporate mythological figures into their works are the same, and it's thus pointless to write fiction about these things, which isn't true.

To be fair, there are whole schools of thought (like Dadaism or Adorno's, for instance) which consider fiction to be useless escapism, or worse.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Ah, that's very true. But Dadaism had its own form of escapism in that it eschewed order completely and dove headfirst into chaos and randomness, or at least the founders tried.

[RoydGolden]

All I can say is that the capacity to imagine stories is one of the precious few things that make human existence worthwhile.

I'd consider any philosophy that rejects the worth of fiction as no different than advocating for the extinction of humanity as a whole.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

All I can say is that the capacity to imagine stories is one of the precious few things that make human existence worthwhile.

I'd consider any philosophy that rejects the worth of fiction as no different than advocating for the extinction of humanity as a whole.

Personally, I'd go the Unlimited Blade Works approach to those philosophies. Sure, fiction is escapist at the core, to some it may be useless, but the act of making fantastical stories isn't wrong, since it makes peoples' existence worthwhile.

[Bloble]

smh people itt

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Blame Dullahan for starting this particular thing.

[Deathhappens]

This was the secret santa fanfic assignment, wasn't it.Sesquipedalian loquaciousness aside, this is an entertaining read.

And finished. I would add "enlightening" to that, but really it only raises more questions, chief amongst them "why?"

[Bloble]

Oh no I'd never do that. Dull is the only thing saving this thread.