Wow, my take on Fate is so different from yours, it’s funny.
I read F/SN several years before Fate/Zero came out, and I was incredibly surprised when I enjoyed Zero, because I haaated F/SN. One of the reasons why, funnily enough, was the characters. I completely understand why it was done this way, but almost none of the characters in F/SN were enjoyable to me. They were all ready to backstab the reader at any moment, and that makes sense, but it doesn’t make me like the characters. The only exceptions to this were Illya and Taiga, because of their little segments throughout the game.
See, that description is (excluding the “pointless”) pretty much exactly what I like about Zero. All of the characters’ opinions are badly thought out for sure, but they are fuelled by a life-long passion that makes them seem dedicated and developed to me. So many of them are good people, just not from the perspective of a modern culture, and that’s suuuper interesting to me.
First of all, monologues suuuuck.
Second of all, despite hating F/SN, I actually quite enjoyed Ufotable’s UBW. It’s still generic and full of nonsense, but it cuts out a lot of the extraneous rubbish and gives us the core conflict born from an interesting premise. It’s a very streamlined experience.
Shirou’s character arc feels a lot better to me in Ufotable’s adaptation. I don’t entirely agree that it was subtle, the show relies on some pretty blatant visual and musical manipulation, and if a viewer is too dumb to recognise that, that’s their problem. And it’s really interesting, because you say that anime viewers will think that Shirou is “some dumbass who doesn’t know what self preservation means”, but he’s been renowned for being such a character ever since the VN came out. Shirou is an idealistic idiot, and a big point of the Visual Novel is to see how that imperfect idealisation of life changes under mass pressure. Heck, whenever people struggle to dodge bad ends, common advice is to throw away common sense and just act how this dumb Shirou dude would act.
