Favorite Shirou

[Glazy]

Good choice fellow ojou connoisseur. If you're gonna be the badass to a rich ojou, you know the requirements are pretty much being a superhuman, even as a househusband.

On the other point, Sakura isn't moving away from the world of magecraft even when she has every reason to do so, in fact she found her own mentor.
Do people still think Shirou would honestly just never practice magecraft again? And since its set in stone he won't live past his 30s whatever his path if what I heard recently holds weight, I doubt he's gonna be putting his feet up and whittling in his rocking chair in his 20s.

IICR the whole "Shirou doesn't live old" was a mistranslation. And that Nasu intended message was that he can't imagine what an old man shirou looked like not that shirou doesn't live long.

In HF although magecraft is mention here and there it pales in comparison to the UBW anime (which is most people exposure to F/SN) where Rin and Shirou are literally in the heart of the world of Magecraft. Also during UBW Shirou develop far as mage while in HF it's really unknown what kind of abilities Shirou still have.

[Gohyuinshee]

UBW is an origin for Shirou while HF is an ending for him.

While HF Shirou still practices magecraft he and Sakura are mostly gonna be in Fuyuki peacefully for the rest of their lives. While in UBW both Shirou and Rin are guaranteed to be in more troubles and adventure due to their goals.

[Altima of the Gates]

@Glazy: Didn't he imply Muramasa was kind a what if for old man Shirou, but that may have been a rumor.

What we do know is primarily very little post story given we're shown a lot of side stuff that may or may not come to pass. We know Shirou will follow a similiar lifestyle to EMIYA, but do things differently, but that is about it.

That is pretty much the mystique of it, we don't have a solid picture of where he'll go since the road would be similiar but different. One would expect since he is basically acting like an aimless vagabond that they'd get into trouble, but equally, he could be spending 90% of his time feeding poor kids with 10% finding some random monster in the wastes.
Its romantic to think he'd have some monster of the week tales, but given who he is, you're likely to have a hundred stories of saving kittens, feeding kids, and building things for people(like how he is helping Issei rebuild Ryuudou Temple post HF True), with like an incident once or twice a year. As for Rin, similiar things, for every battle couple adventure, you'd have just them doing normal stuff or her burying her nose in research, precisely what Zelretch tells her to do in HF True and spending months at a time furthering her craft.
The various pieces of things we get over the years imply some other stuff with Luvia too, but nothing precisely saying you'd get some to say, put an entire spinoff's plot to it.

HF is more a transition than an ending, since the epilogue pretty much tells you flat out the two of them are trying to work out where they want to go in their lives. Rin offers Sakura an invitation to the Clock Tower, and while she wisely rejects it (why would she paint a target on herself after all that with Shirou newly recovered?), I think people miss that while they want peace sure, its just logical. Shirou is newly recovered and she has been ignoring her own side effects to take care of Shirou. Taking a Servant while her body is uncontrollably having mana pool inside it at all times in a den of hungry researchers isn't exactly smart, as much as she might trust Rin now.
She has her new teacher, and wants to get Shirou another body. So it seems the two are more moving on to a new stage in life.

[Gohyuinshee]

I say UBW is an origin because the entire purpose of this route is to give Shirou and Rin the affirmation they needed to set out on another entirely new journey to fulfill a goal. There could be a whole lot of nothing in the middle, but it's still a journey to do something.

By the end of HF both Shirou and Sakura are already in a position they will be happy to spend their lives at. Sure things could always be better and they're working to improve it, but Sakura is first and foremost a character who wants to maintain the peace she gets. It's unlikely she would move beyond Fuyuki much.

All of the endings leaves things for your interpretation, but I think it's fair to say HF by its nature offers less potential than the rest, it already works as a happily ever after.

[Altima of the Gates]

UBW was about Shirou understanding what living that life means theoretically, and moving forward with it.
As we can see in the anime, Shirou is uncomfortable with staying in the Clock Tower but ends up reconciling some of that with Rin and they end with him walking through desert metaphorically surpassing EMIYA years later. But just like with Last Episode, its giving you the cliff notes amd not what happened in between. "The ideal was fulfilled, the end" was how it closed the book for the first two routes.

HF had Shirou find another answer, but like any young person, he has to decide on what he does at that point post graduation. Its doubtful they are going to be considering retirement before their 20s.
For both of them, they never considered other options, Sakura didn't expect to really actually live a life past her childhood, and Shirou didn't really consider anything past training to somehow fulfill an ideal he was still piecing together.
So beyond recovery, that is a lot to think about, when you've spent the majority of your life not really considering other options.
They went over this a bit with both of them in Hollow too.

So the entirety of the story is supposed to be, imo, the starting lines for Shirou's life in different situations.

[Rafflesiac]

They probably honeymooned in Greece like they never got the chance to in Prisma.

[warellis]

Good choice fellow ojou connoisseur. If you're gonna be the badass to a rich ojou, you know the requirements are pretty much being a superhuman, even as a househusband.

On the other point, Sakura isn't moving away from the world of magecraft even when she has every reason to do so, in fact she found her own mentor.
Do people still think Shirou would honestly just never practice magecraft again? And since its set in stone he won't live past his 30s whatever his path if what I heard recently holds weight, I doubt he's gonna be putting his feet up and whittling in his rocking chair in his 20s.

I think they feel Shirou & Sakura are going to have their metaphorical white picket fence and 2.5 children, and probably mostly stay in Fuyuki & Japan as a magical family of sorts, where the father is a lawyer and the mother is a flower grower and technician (I don't know the term).

[Altima of the Gates]

An arborist is what she said she wanted to be in Hollow. Because she looked up what she needed to do to restore the tree her step grandmother planted, and wanted to see if she could make a career of that.
The lawyer bit is mainly when I saw them make those jokes with Twitter and remembering he was gonna take the civil service exam(civil service encompassing a lot of things from policy makers to the SDF). But who knows, Nasu isn't really talking too much about that as possibility, since like I said, he probably finds it more romantic for Shirou to be a traveling vagabond.
Sakura seems more like she wants to stay in Fuyuki primarily because she takes responsibility seriously because lets face it. As for staying in Fuyuki, for the two of them, I'd say "home is where the heart is" is very much a thing. So maybe they'd stay, or maybe someone gives them reason to travel. My big point is they are learning to live for themselves now.
Sakura actually has a decent guide from the Church, which to this day I think was both ironic and wholesome.

[yokushi]

Isn't literally said at the end of HF that problems and events are gonna come anyway and it's definitely not going to be just being there chilling in Fuyuki? Like Rin's internal narration about what to do about the future is just that, and she is talking about all of them as a group.

And just going with the third Q&A we know now that some sort of dismantlement happens even in HF, so that's a whole problem to solve.

[warellis]

Isn't literally said at the end of HF that problems and events are gonna come anyway and it's definitely not going to be just being there chilling in Fuyuki? Like Rin's internal narration about what to do about the future is just that, and she is talking about all of them as a group.

And just going with the third Q&A we know now that some sort of dismantlement happens even in HF, so that's a whole problem to solve.

Yes. But people look as it as a tad boring (understandable).

Essentially, normality may be great for characters in-story, but no one reads say a Star Wars novel about a space accountant's standard normal day.

[yokushi]

Yes. But people look as it as a tad boring (understandable).

Essentially, normality may be great for characters in-story, but no one reads say a Star Wars novel about a space accountant's standard normal day.

My point is that it's pretty much said it's not going to be normality from that point on, the characters in the story say so. It's just that specific story ends right there and we don't see what happens after that.

[Best Girl]

Yes. But people look as it as a tad boring (understandable).

Essentially, normality may be great for characters in-story, but no one reads say a Star Wars novel about a space accountant's standard normal day.

It's not because it is about Space Accountant. It's because there is not enough nudity.

[warellis]

It's not because it is about Space Accountant. It's because there is not enough nudity.

Tsukihime & FSN cured us of any nudity interest with Nasu's sex scenes.

[TomPen94]

Did it though?
Do you know how well Fate doujins do?

[ResidentSeagull]

Did it though?
Do you know how well Fate doujins do?

I mean, yeah, because they weren't done by Nasu and Takeuchi.
It's almost like the universe is trying to tell us something...

[TomPen94]

Yes but the interest for nudity is very much there. Nasu's smut didn't cure us of anything.

[Petrikow]

This may come of as facetious but I must unironically argue that Takeuchi's talents as an artist come through very strongly when drawing explicit content.

He's someone whose style's strong point lies in the dynamic of his posing, with the interplay and relative positioning of elements being what gives it strength. In this sense, despite his other weaknesses, Takeuchi is a fairly impressive artist. I bet he'd make an incredible storyboarder for anime.
But to tie in with my first statement, this quality which he excels at is exactly what any good sex scene requires. The

intercourse

interplay

and

joining

relative positioning

of

bodies

elements

.

[madarra]

Insert Karate chop Seiba during sex .jpg

[ItsaRandomUsername]

This may come of as facetious but I must unironically argue that Takeuchi's talents as an artist come through very strongly when drawing explicit content.

He's someone whose style's strong point lies in the dynamic of his posing, with the interplay and relative positioning of elements being what gives it strength. In this sense, despite his other weaknesses, Takeuchi is a fairly impressive artist. I bet he'd make an incredible storyboarder for anime.
But to tie in with my first statement, this quality which he excels at is exactly what any good sex scene requires. The

intercourse

interplay

and

joining

relative positioning

of

bodies

elements

.

You do have a point, as there is something substantially more rewarding about reaching an H-scene in a T-M work compared to reaching one in most others.

[warellis]

You do have a point, as there is something substantially more rewarding about reaching an H-scene in a T-M work compared to reaching one in most others.

But how does the H-scene itself feel to you considering the prose?