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Originally Posted by Cherry_Lover

Evidentally you haven't read HF properly, then, because you failed totally to understand it....

Perhaps you didn't read it properly, since you seem to make it out to be this epic story that may just be the greatest ever told due to your Sakura fanboyism. I, personally, found it to be boring as hell compared to Fate and UBW.

Sorry, but this is total bollocks. He does not "toss away his ideals at the first opportunity". So many people get Shirou's ideal mixed up with Kiritsugu's. What Shirou wants is to save everyone.

Kiritsugu's ideals are Shirou's ideals. Shirou adopted them and took them for his own.

His actions in HF are perfectly consistent with his true wish, even if it means discarding the false 'ideal' that he borrowed from his father.[/rant]

He even said himself that he was tossing his ideals away in order to protect Sakura.

She's the Grail. Archer's soul is inside her, so she can check up on it. In Fate, she may not have cared enough to do so, and she also has several other souls in her. In UBW, she never gets the chance because he doesn't die until after her. But, in HF he's the only soul she has, and because Archer had acted to protect her, she decides to look inside herself and work out who he is (she's actually really protective of his soul, and happy for him to be inside her). Besides, there's nothing in Fate that says that she doesn't know Archer's identity. It just never comes up, and there's no reason for her to screw things up by saying "Oh, BTW Rin, your servant was a future Shirou". For that matter, she never actually tells them in HF either, at least not directly. If it wasn't for Rin and Shirou working it out and asking her, we wouldn't have known that she knew in HF.

Since when has she been able to communicate with any soul she caught? This sounds like baseless assumption to explain something. Besides, we knew almost immediately that she knew who Archer was when she had Kotomine transplant his arm. He said that normally transplanting from a Servant to a Master doesn't work, and Ilya said that it would "definitely work, but only for them [Archer and Shirou]."

Well, Shirou is pretty good. But, yeah, I'll admit that that is a bit odd. But no more so than how Shirou manages to take down Gil in UBW, or (even more) how Archer manages to survive so long and do so much without a master.

To be fair, Shirou was only kicking his ass. He didn't technically take him down. At least Archer surviving can be attributed to his class ability.

What premise?

The idea of there being a "True" version of the class, which just happens to ALWAYS be the same being (part of a hive mind), with the same purpose.