Well, here I am caught up as well - or rather belatedly crossing the finish line - trying to consolidate four years and 150 chapters' worth of thoughts into a farewell suitable for this story. Probably affected by the poignancy of the endgame's events, but also because it's fun to look back at what has changed and what has remained the same throughout
and to give unnecessary sombreness to writing a review for fanfiction on a porn forum.
I think that MPII can be indeed separated in two halves, though not on the basis of limelight distribution or plot progression. In revisiting my first post in this thread, and before that the impression and expectations I had reading the very first handful of chapters, MPII for me is divided into the half where the War is
enacted through the characters, and the half where the characters exist against the
backdrop of the War. A shift in focus, or maybe the sign of solidified purpose about the direction the story would take beyond the rails of the HGW.
For example,
"LEGENDARY HEROES DUKING IT OUT" was definitely my draw to this story, and I think it's fair to say that it'd still hold well into the story, into the General Dialogue arc; but looking at the end, it's not nearly one's final impression, right? Somewhere along the way, the Masters stopped being defined solely within the context and the confines of the War, Servants acquired purposes beyond cool matchups and fight scenes, and they both began to fight for more than a wish, a couple of good duels, and even the War itself. Grandiose battles gave way to desperate struggles, lavish and drawn-out fight scene descriptions to relative terseness, and post-battle boasts to Archer ganks. And of course, those that died were no longer names to be struck off a list.
Going from memory, the turning point for me was definitely Invocations and its cast, and what cemented it was the gradual exploration of Enrico and Nigel's conflict. I'm not sure if calling it a shift to a human focus is fair, considering that ideological clashes and Saber lectures on the subject have been ever-present elements, but there was definitely a point when I thought "I don't think that hankering for Cool Guy X to meet Cool Guy Y and duke it out and then argue about (down)wanking if our favourite lost and then wait for the character sheets to get posted is going to happen anymore"; incidentally, it feels like the actual point where the War truly became an afterthought was Eleanor's death. (That being said, Sigurd had been getting so much of the short end of the stick until his ascension to Saber that him getting the Ramesses treatment was frustrating, though I guess at that point in the story there were neither great heroes nor a place in the story for him to shine.)
I don't know whether it was that shift that made others stop following this story, but I feel that for all the
goodAlexei, Nigel, Eleanor and Moctezuma, the Invocations crew and the
not so goodfor me, General Dialogue's tedious pacing, Napoleon's ultimate role in the story, James and Saber's character flip-flops and emotional roller-coasters, RODERICK FONTAINE GOING OUT LIKE A CHUMP, the story's transformation from the grand scope of two-dozens-plus Servants and the painstaking descriptions of their battles, the landscapes they fight in, and occasionally every single minutia for every one of the 6 armies that are simultaneously clashing, to the subdued, introspective conflicts of the latter parts was graceful. It helped me appreciate characters I had overlooked and feel investment even in the ones I disliked, and there are few characters whose stories I feel weren't told. That's a job well done.
Ultimately, MPII is big, and not just because of its length. First the research, the dedication to the smallest of details, and their organic implementation to the story made it something more than a run-of-the-mill fanfic, and then all of that was pushed to the backdrop when the story became something more than a Holy Grail War fanfic altogether. I'm not sure if it's proper to call it a reinvention, but in a sense it exceeded itself.
tl;dr this is the most fun i've ever had reading a million-word story containing lavish descriptions of roman army logistics, godspeed and i look forward to any anniversary lemons