Chapter 20: Fate/Stay Night

Unusual title, eh? Does it sound familiar? Well for anime fans, yes.

Exactly 5 weeks ago, around 11:20 pm, I had to shut my computer down because I had to fucking obey stupid house regulations. I wasn't in the mood to sleep of course. I mean, who would be fucking asleep when the moment before you do so, you were being scolded for innocently killing boredom because you were a fucking bum all throughout the day. It has been pissing me off.

Because I was overly pissed at the time I didn't know I was already unconsciously scanning TV channels for a good show that'd hopefully lend me slumber, I tuned in to Animax at around 11:35 pm. I was like,

"Hey I know this fucking shit."

Indeed. It was the last anime I watched before I quit being a fan several years ago. As far as I could remember I was only able to watch the first 3 episodes of the whole series. I was a lucky ass because the moment I tuned in, episode 4 was already playing as if the show was for me.

Fate/Stay Night.

It was based on a video game and the story is pretty awesome although the anime version was minimized to fill in only 24 episodes where as the original length would probably be 100 times longer (hyperbole intended). Here's the gist of the story.

Setting: Japan

The main character named Shirou is an incapable magician who summoned a servant named Saber. Because of this he turned out to be one of the seven masters, who each has a servant, that will fight other masters and servants in the Holy Grail war. Now this war grants the last master and servant standing a wish through the power of the holy grail (note that Shirou was wishing for nothing), but to achieve this means to eliminate every single opponent through the forced cooperation of the master and the servant with the circumstances that 1.) only the servant can touch the grail, 2.) the master can force the servant. Let them sort their balls out with that. Smells like trouble.

Each servant is a reincarnation of a legendary character but in a different form. Saber for example is a woman but is actually King Arthur in the past. King Arthur wanted to win the Holy Grail war to undo a mistake that caused the fall of his kingdom. That is his purpose for fighting in the war. As the story progresses, Shirou pointed out that the effort was stupid since he believes that the past is the past and that what one should be thinking of and preparing for right now is the future. Moreover, he said that changing the past is childish - a mistake is a mistake and undoing something in the past means not getting over it up until now.

There have been numerous twists in the story, of which I'm not going to spoil anymore, that makes Fate/Stay Night a really cool anime considering that I only liked 4 or 5 animes in my whole life. Towards the end, Shirou and Saber were to fight one of the most powerful servants, who was a reincarnation of Gilgamesh (remember your Western history), and a formidable master, who was a survivor of the previous holy grail war that killed Shirou's stepfather.

Towards the end, Saber was able to kill Gilgamesh with her full power. Shirou was able to successfully defeat the last remaining master rendering him the glory of the holy grail war. But then, he ordered Saber to destroy the holy grail to stop the madness and wickedness it has brought to the world. At the end of it all, Saber realized that she loved Shirou who loved her first but she didn't succumb to because she was blinding herself that all she wanted was the grail. It was a cheesy ending, but there's this one scene that I fucking liked in this anime.

When Saber was able to defeat Gilgamesh, the guy told her that all he wanted was Saber and nothing more. Before he dissipated into thin air, he uttered the following words while having his right palm rest on Saber's left cheek.

"Some things are beautiful for the very reason that they are unobtainable."

And oh, during the last minutes of the very last episode there's this scene when Shirou was contemplating upon the past. I think he was standing on a bridge or something while overlooking a sea. It was the same place where he got to hang out with Saber before.

He said something like, "I might forget her smile, her voice, her face... But I won't be able to forget that I loved someone named Saber." I'm not sure with the accuracy of the words though but the essence was the same thing. Cheese. I enjoyed the whole series too that I wanted to download the game. It's just that my hard drive's left with only 200 MB of usable space whilst the whole visual novel was 2 gigabytes in size.

As if I've not had enough of animes and that I'm a fucking bum, I watched another series that was released December 2008. Now this anime's nothing fancy of intense sword fighting, bizarre sorcery, flying people and weird talking animals and mystical creatures and cute little demons and sexy hentai-ish angels - this one's normal, normal as in it can be seen in every day life. It's called,

ToraDora.

(Tiger Dragon, mind you.)

And this one's not fucking cheesy to tell the truth. This one's a simple laughtrip. The whole series can be found at YouTube if ever you're interested and I recommend it to those who don't like anime. Yes, those who don't like anime. And oh, try to unlock why the anime's entitled tiger and dragon. It's pretty interesting.

Interesting because... There's two guys who are good friends - one looks like a serial killer giving him the reputation of a delinquent in school, feared by many students, and the other guy a simple overworking genius and an athlete at the same time, and a heartthrob. They were second year high school students, and on the very first day of their school year, Ryuji 'the delinquent' bumped onto Taiga 'the palmtop tiger' (because of her tiger-like attitude that can beat the shit out of anyone, and palmtop because she's really small).

Now that's two powers clashing in school and Ryuji got his nose broken. Moving on, Taiga got to beat the shit out of Ryuji because she accidentally placed her love letter for Yusaku (Ryuji's good friend) in Ryuji's bag. Ryuji, in consolation, however opened up to Taiga about her feelings for Minori (a fellow baseball team captain of Yusaku) and that's when Taiga revealed that Minori was her goddamn bestfriend, so really, Ryuji screwed his ass twice - making her Taiga's dog for quite some time.

And the best goddamn thing is that they're all classmates.

And there's an addition to their simple group when Ami, a childhood friend of Yusaku and at the same time a really gorgeous model, transferred to their school and to their happy class.

What's good about this shit is that, throughout the story, Minori tried to hide her feelings for Ryuji, while Ami waited for Ryuji to give up on Minori so that she would have her chance. And then, in the end, Taiga realized that she liked Ryuji more than Yusaku (who by the way liked her before but started to like someone else). Now that's what we call intensity.

I'm not going to spoil the details. I'd rather have you see this for yourself.

The verdict: no matter how much time I spend on other things, the tigers and dragons of infatuation cling on me that I stay up all night pondering on the progression of my fate.

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