Change Fate/Zero to The Adventures of Rider and Waver

I’ve now watched twice as many epis­odes of Fate Slash Zero than I was cap­able of last­ing through in Fate Slash Stay Night (in other words, I just fin­ished epis­ode 4). There’s a couple of more gen­eral reas­ons why Fate Slash Zero stomps over its pre­vi­ous com­pet­i­tion. The dir­ect­ing is nowhere near as woe­ful. The anim­a­tion is con­sid­er­ably bet­ter. What humour it attempts actu­ally works. But the main reason I like Fate Slash Zero is because of Rider and Waver.

The story of Rider and Waver, when taken in solitude, is like a sub­ver­sion of the  Magical Girl­friend genre. Here we have this hope­less loser Waver, laughed out of class by his teacher and class­mates. No fam­ily of his own, try­ing to some­how prove to those around him that he too can be great. He dis­cov­ers a magical game in which people sum­mon power­ful her­oes who will be at their every beck and call. They fight with other her­oes to get this magical maguffin that will grant him any­thing he wishes. It’s real wish ful­fill­ment in here. But what hero does he get? Not the beau­ti­ful and proud war­rior Saber, as would be the typ­ical magical girl­friend type. Neither does he get the mas­ter­fully power­ful war­rior who will bow to his every whim, mak­ing him feel amaz­ingly cool. What he gets instead is a gruff manchild who makes him feel like an even big­ger loser than he already is.

There’s more to the combo than humour that makes it work. Rider is like the hard-headed father try­ing to beef up his wimpy son. Throaty guf­faws from his gut as he thumps his pupil on the back so hard that he falls over, lec­tur­ing him on the vir­tues of good food, drink and sex. But in a sense, this is exactly the hero Waver required. Waver never had a father fig­ure in his life. The old couple in the first epis­ode were simply hyp­not­ised by him to believe Waver was their grand­child. If the Holy Grail gave Waver any of the other her­oes, he would have simply indulged him­self in a power fantasy. Rider’s refusal to listen is the exact firm hand of par­ent­ing Waver needed.

I would hon­estly like the anime to be just these two, partly because they’re so great, but also because I’m really not too fussed about the rest of the anime. Take epis­ode 4 and the duel between Saber and Lan­cer. The epis­ode con­sisted of the two of them dis­cuss­ing the weapons they were using, fol­lowed by a brief (admit­tedly well anim­ated and well coreo­graphed) fight sequence. Then they back off, hav­ing internal mono­logues about the attacks they just threw at each other. Per­haps maybe a brief exchange as to what their true iden­tit­ies are. A few more words of praise or goad­ing. Shuff­ling into stances to pre­pare their next attack and then finally another brief flurry of attacks. Fate Slash Zero has essen­tially become Dragon­ball Z. It’s not the worst for­mula in the world but, as was the case in Dragon­ball Z, the extent to which they draw out the inbetween seg­ments makes them rather dull.

This is an indic­ator of a lar­ger prob­lem in Fate Slash Zero. In the duel between Saber and Lan­cer, they’re both very straight faced. Lan­cer is a teensy bit more flam­boy­ant while Saber is slightly more proud, but the dif­fer­ence is so small it means their exchanges are very sim­ilar. The two of them are just try­ing to out-cool each other. As is the case with every other char­ac­ter in the series. I still struggle to tell the dif­fer­ence between the two identical brown haired, deep voiced dullards. The other her­oes aren’t much bet­ter, with Assas­sin and Archer also being intent on look­ing as cool as pos­sible. It makes the inter­ac­tions dull because they have nobody to play off. Every­one is so straight-faced that their con­ver­sa­tions are stilted.

This is why the Rider and Waver seg­ments are a god­send. It’s the only part of the anime where humour is injec­ted, mak­ing the whole affair a lot less tedi­ous to sit through. Not only that, but they do this while mak­ing their char­ac­ter stor­ies already far more inter­est­ing than any­one elses thus far. As I haven’t seen Fate Slash Stay Night, I don’t know who wins this ver­sion of the Holy Grail war, but it’s safe to assume that Waver doesn’t win. His wish is for people to simply respect him, some­thing that is entirely within his own power. Rider points out as much, say­ing that he should wish for some­thing out­side of his own con­trol, like mak­ing him­self taller. In a way, the Holy Grail has already given him the thing for his wish to come true. He doesn’t need to win the war because he will become a per­son worthy of respect under Rider’s tutel­age. I don’t want to see a story about the Holy Grail war. I want to see the story of how Wavers magical girl­friend made him grow to become a bet­ter person.