It's made of meteoric iron, so obviously it's a knight arm.
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What, you thought まさに斬撃皇帝である wasn't DeEpEsT lOrE?
It's made of meteoric iron, so obviously it's a knight arm.
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What, you thought まさに斬撃皇帝である wasn't DeEpEsT lOrE?
I dont think sanda has said anything on it? but man that incident just made me think nasu is either awkard or a bit of a dick
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Yeah but servants are clones, how do there rights or ideas not matter? regardless of what nasu thinks the facts say they both get modern info and are clones, it a stupid argument and it sounds like something that should come out of a magi's mouth.
Especially when we get 'servants ruling the mooncell is totally not that bad look at how quirky they are XD'
I was just responding to the general sentiment. I'm not sure how it applies to Servants. Honestly "Servants are ghosts from the past and shouldn't interfere with the present" always struck me as a weird and unjustified part of Nasuverse philosophy. If it's wrong to give dead people a say it's surely because they can't act or have desires. Servants clearly can, so treating them as "dead people" (even if they technically are) doesn't make much sense.
That and the constant "life is only worth living because it's fleeting!" refrain is what annoys me the most about Nasu philosophy (though the last one is hardly Nasu-specific, being a very common trope in stories about immortal life). In general I find a lot of Nasu's philosophical musings to be quite cool and thought-provoking, but whenever he gets into stuff like that I just have to sigh and remind myself that it's okay for an author's worldview to differ from the readers.
And yeah, I think that part is worst in Apocrypha, though that was written by Higashide rather than Nasu it's clearly trying to emulate his worldview. Jeanne outright admits that Amakusa's goal would be best for humanity but still fights him just because dead people shouldn't decide the future for the living or somesuch. Presumably by that logic, his plan would be perfectly okay if a living human came up with it instead of a Heroic Spirit...?
Jeanne's argument was in essence that if we're just taken to the end, we won't be the kinds of people who could stick out the journey, you appreciate something when you're earned it, not when it's given to you, and so on.
There's also the fact that nobody there had any clue what Amakusa's wish would actually do to the entire human race, a huge gamble with a non-reversible result.
FGO Supports
Immortality isn't the problem, Extra has humanity figuring that out by projecitng their souls into computers.
The problem is that just like in Extra, some dead guy that can only repeat his old grudges shouldn't be the one to decide humanity's path. For all heroic spirits seem just like living humans, they are still just ghosts fated to repeat themselves.
I think people usually misunderstand opposing Goetia's and Amakusa's goals as some anti-immortality theme when that's not really the case presented. Even more when the setting itself (and Apocrypha and FGO point) saying that is something that humans are going to do at one point anyway on their own.
Even in the Final Singularity, Solomon outright says in the HGW flashback that humans using Third Magic would be an acceptable outcome if that's what they want. And Guda's reasoning to oppose Goetia's ultimately is just because the desire to live, Mashu's realization is her own opinion. The main problem with Amakusa is that his desire is not sincere and what he actually wants is to eliminate desire because he hates humans as individuals. The main problem with Goetia is that he basically incinerated everything without even understanding the actual pros and cons of being alive.
Last edited by yokushi; May 10th, 2020 at 07:05 PM.
Is it true that Heroic Spirits are fated to repeat the arc of their lives/legends though? Boudica managed to get over her grudge against the Roman Empire, which ought to be as defining of her legend as anything after all.
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Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely oppose Goetia in real life. But that's because I'm not a total utilitarian and I don't think destroying literally everything humans value is okay as long as something theoretically better comes along. It's not really an issue of "immortality versus mortality" for me, but I recall some parts in GO where the heroes come pretty close to outright saying "life is worth living because it's fleeting" which I can't really agree with.
Amakusa's plan is a thornier issue because it's not really clear just what it would accomplish, especially in the anime where they don't even explain what he's trying to do until right at the end. Was it ever stated that his plan would "eliminate human desire" though? Amakusa outright states that human emotions would be preserved after being incarnated through the Third, and it's not really implied anywhere (at least in the anime) it'd directly tamper with people's psychology. Unless you're making the broader point that people wouldn't want anything without the pressure of knowing they're going to die someday, but that's a more generic anti-immortality argument that I don't agree with.
Last edited by RoydGolden; May 10th, 2020 at 07:05 PM.
The repetition isn't always obvious, like Apocrypha had hydra blood as a macguffin but what really killed Chiron was one of his students, Mordred didn't end up killing their father figure this time but they both ended by dying in the same fight.
Boudica may put aside her grudge against rome for the moment but that doesn't mean she might not one day get really angry that someone she cares for is hurt and end up getting killed trying to wreck vengeance.
I don't know about repeat, but there have been several examples in FGO about how some events or concepts are so fundamentally engraved into a servant's saint graph that they can never overcome it. I guess the big one is that Serenity can never find love, so even if she was to do so while summoned, that information would never be passed on to her main record in the throne, and as a result be part of her major saint graph.
Also, for what it's worth. I don't particularly think it's right to call HS "clones" in an attempt to humanize them. Just because a HS comes from a person who was once alive, and is now extant through a Servant doesn't mean they're a clone of the person that once was. Time and time again they hammer in the fact that servants are fundamentally "pages from a book". For instance, your college years given (spiritual) form does not constitute a clone of you, nor does it constitute something which should rightly dictate your path through life at the moment. You likely valued very different things back then compared to what you do now, because you didn't have some things in your life, or you couldn't even imagine ever caring about those things, and that's pretty much what the idea behind "the dead should not lead the living" is about, because they've had their time, the things they valued have been lost to history, and as such it does not correspond with what we, the living, value now. If they were the same, then they wouldn't have been lost in the first place. And fundamentally I'd say it's more about this than any question of immortality.
Actually, I guess a better analogy is just to look at real life, and replace HS with the older generation, and the living with the younger generations.
While HS/the old might be those who have built history up to this point and who lend their power to the currently living in the form of tradition, their values, morals, and knowledge about things are outdated or just not compatible with the world moving forward. On top of that, they shouldn't be the ones to decide the future, because they aren't the one who will live with those decisions.
"The dead should not lead the living" is used very literally in Fate (with the dead being "alive" and all), but the basic idea is that society should look towards the future and not be bound by the actions and philosophies that came before. In some ways it's part of the more general "superstition is bad, science good" transhumanist themes going on in some of Nasu's work.
Whenever the topic comes up, it's usually done so in combination with pointing out the differences in cultural values - Gilgamesh' tyranny and might-makes-right Darwinism, Iskander's love of war and conquest, etc. In the moment it's literally about not letting King Gilgamesh dictate the fate of the world, yes, but it's also an extended metaphor for how the ideas and values of King Gilgamesh don't have a place in our modern society.
It's probably not a coincidence that in FGO most of the story chapters have a living human as your main companion - the exceptions in Part 1 being Orleans (Jeanne is newly executed) and E Plurubus Unum (kind of weird character-wise, not gonna lie). It's someone who represents the time and place rather than just a random Servant.
More generally, humanity's salvation has to come from a human place. A psychopath or an autist is going to be missing something important in the large picture, and cause more harm than good.
Spoiler:
Here, she retorts that these kinds of things are what would cause humanity's destruction / the Sixth instead, which is a non sequitur, but also an interesting factoid. Generally each of these definitely not same guy villains will have it pointed out to them that maybe they're missing something important, and they'll say 'no, you're the one getting humanity wrong, I am right, my autism says so' and then everybody fights with huge laser beams. At least Sion admits individuality is a thing, I guess, and tries to work with the fallout, rather than trying to make everybody into a robot too, except that she has to turn currently existing humanity into the fallout of the Sixth because just sleeping until after humanity's demise comes naturally wouldn't be dramatic enough.
You could probably go with a more basic comparsion, like how humanity is still a child, and giving a child something for free will not teach it anything. But no, it has to be as unintelligible as possible.
Type-Moon, especially Nasu, is just huge on the idea there's no progress with conflict and competition.
Goetia and Amakusa are bad because making humans physically unable to harm each other would drive the competition stakes to zero and halt progress.
Shi Huang got their ass kicked by Jing Ke because they stopped evolving after they run out of competitors.
Kirschtaria was good because he was just giving humanity cooler tools without compromising competition.
Even Twice, the exaggerated strawman version of Nasu's hot take, is treated by the narrative with much more respect than he ever deserved