Least favourite servant?

[SeiKeo]

Secret Santa flakes whens

[Rafflesiac]

Fuck you, Chris. Step up and gib Jeanne/Sieg/Astolfo, Raylen.

The rest of you lot are chopped liver.

[Deathhappens]

I would respond to that but I'm having an existential crisis, hold on...


Aand done. "At least cats appreciate us".

[Ratman]

Top post I've read in a long time Dullahan.

[Dullahan]

time to shovel the driveway again i guess

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.

"existences that blur the line between what is real and what is fiction and simultaneously exist as both" - this is meaningless pap. despite appearances to the contrary TM isn't strip-mining a subcreated alt-history of their own construction for limited SSRs. what characterises the creative process behind a heroic spirit for TM is its being essentially parasitic on the historical record as it exists in the real world. saying that nasu gets to 'decide certain things are true' in his world doesn't change that in the slightest. in a certain sense that's where some of the libidinal interest comes from - people love finding out who X (art by pako) is, how their 'legend' folds into this and that skill or NP, how their lines reference it. they like GETTING THE REFERENCES. seeing how this point in the database connects to other points in the database. that is a source of enjoyment. how database mindset works.

sure nasu has the RIGHT (as if authors need 'rights' to do things) to pick and choose arbitrarily what he likes from the database. what he is unable to do, what the other TM writers are unable to do, what the target audience is unable to do, is stop thinking in terms of the database.

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.

yeah adorno for sure thought fiction was useless escapism that's why he wrote entire books on literature, praised beckett and proust, composed music, and assisted Thomas Mann in writing Doctor Faustus

both adorno and the dadaists can be understood as critical of prevailing tendencies in art out of a sense of responsibility to the historical catastrophes of their day - ie they, in different ways, held that the forms of cultural production of 'advanced' societies in europe shared in culpability for the industrialised mass slaughter of WW1 and 2. but the idea that they espoused some kind of vulgar-bolshevik position that everyone should give up on art and work toward building communism is appallingly wrong-headed.

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.

boy i'd hate to be the wikipedia page for dadaism right about now

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.

warmed-over liberal platitudes. pure ideology. sniff. you romanticise the "capacity to imagine stories" and in so doing wilfully ignore the real condition we are faced with, in which almost all content subsumed under the heading of 'fiction' is today the output of an industrial process of administered, rationalised mass-production. the words you use to argue otherwise came off an assembly-line.

[Yggdrasil]

I actually play FGO for completionism, to set all the available numbers of all the units to the higher possible values, and because I'm obsessed by compulsive farming. It's like getting all the endings, the CGs and the Bad Ends in a VN. I like to fill the empty spaces on the screen.
Story and HS backgrounds are just a delicious plus.

Let my brain release its sweet sweet endorphins, please.

[Spinach]

Re: op

Jeanne. Not Alter like the rest of the lowlives in the thread.

Jeanne.

[Snow]

Sadly I have to agree. The advent of Jeanne marked the death of Fate.

[Dullahan]

Sadly I have to agree. The advent of Jeanne marked the death of Fate.

As Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx, "life does not go without death, and that death is not beyond, outside of life, unless one inscribes the beyond in the inside, in the essence of the living." The coimplication of life and death spells out an autoimmunity at the heart of life as such. Even if all external threats are evaded, life still bears the cause of its own destruction within itself. The vulnerability of life is thus without limit, since the source of attack is also located within what is to be defended.

fate marked the death of fate

[Yggdrasil]

Well, duh.

[Urameshi Yūsuke]

I'm afraid to ask, but why is Jeanne so cursed?

As tax my least favorite has to be Gilgamesh, hes soooooooo boring, "Blah blah blah mongrel blah blah blah saber blah blah blah EA blah blah blah modern humans suck blah blah blah"

[Magikewl]

Jeanne just sucks

[SpoonyViking]

yeah adorno for sure thought fiction was useless escapism that's why he wrote entire books on literature, praised beckett and proust, composed music, and assisted Thomas Mann in writing Doctor Faustus

both adorno and the dadaists can be understood as critical of prevailing tendencies in art out of a sense of responsibility to the historical catastrophes of their day - ie they, in different ways, held that the forms of cultural production of 'advanced' societies in europe shared in culpability for the industrialised mass slaughter of WW1 and 2. but the idea that they espoused some kind of vulgar-bolshevik position that everyone should give up on art and work toward building communism is appallingly wrong-headed.

Fair enough. Let me amend myself to say Adorno considered all uncritical fiction as useless escapism.

[Iceblade44]

I'm afraid to ask, but why is Jeanne so cursed?

As tax my least favorite has to be Gilgamesh, hes soooooooo boring, "Blah blah blah mongrel blah blah blah saber blah blah blah EA blah blah blah modern humans suck blah blah blah"

Jeanne isn t cursed just people don't like her. But that can be said for everything.

[Dullahan]

i mean, even then, to say that he thought of it as 'useless escapism' is pretty obtuse - the value-judgement inherent in decrying things as escapist exemplifies a certain bourgeois emphasis on the reality principle, the capital-F Facts of dickens' Mr. Gradgrind, "quit daydreaming, come back to reality" etc. when it came to elements of low (or high) culture that could be amply subsumed under the heading of 'uncritical' adorno certainly wouldn't dismiss it as escapist tout court; he would take into account the works' place in the totality of cultural production, their use as a means to pacify, stultify and control people - to render them into a compliant 'mass'. at heart he preserves something of the original marxist critique of religion as the opiate of the masses: you cannot properly criticise the opiate without essentially criticising the world-historical condition of immiseration that compels the masses to cling on to those illusions. the denunciation of escapism, logically developed, is the denunciation of the world that needs it.

[Spinach]

I wonder what might be cursed about turning a tough soldier into a brainless, incompetent idiot infatuated with a self-insert's twink cock.

[Dullahan]

I wonder what might be cursed about turning a tough soldier into a brainless, incompetent idiot infatuated with a self-insert's twink cock.

yeah fate route's not my favourite either

[Snow]

Not even a quality twink...

[SpoonyViking]

when it came to elements of low (or high) culture that could be amply subsumed under the heading of 'uncritical' adorno certainly wouldn't dismiss it as escapist tout court; [...]

Sorry, I leave that level of pedantry when writing for publication. :-)

ETA: Wait, let me be a bit more charitable: I understand if you think it's important to note why Adorno is so critical of entertainment in general, but it's just not a level of effort I'm willing to spend on something which was originally an offhand remark.

[Urameshi Yūsuke]

yeah fate route's not my favourite either

Yeah. Didn't really get the "romance" between the two. Amongst other things.