[Cherry_Lover]

Originally Posted by GDB

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.

Well, I very much doubt Nasu wrote HF to be boring and full of plot-holes, so if I don't find it to be and you do then it's more likely that I've read it properly than that you have.

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

OK, I should have been more specific. Even though Shirou claims to follow Kiritsugu's ideals, that's not what he really wants. If he did, then Archer would be happy with his lot in life, since he gets to save the many by killing the few all the time. What Shirou wants is to make people happy, and to save people, not to kill people. UBW Shirou realises this at the end of the route, but he accepts that he may have to kill people sometimes (I do wonder, though, how UBW Shirou would react if it were Rin who he had to kill...) but Archer only realised it after his death. HF Shirou, on the other hand, realised it when he was forced to make the choice between killing Sakura now, even though she hadn't done anything and wasn't certain to do so and potentially letting other innocent people die later if things went wrong.

Shirou doesn't start out like Kiritsugu. He does borrow his ideal, yes, but he borrows the idealistic version of it, which is to save everyone, and he follows that whole-heartedly, because it fits well with who he is as a person. But, of course, the war makes him realise that he has to compromise, and his emphasis has to vary a bit. In Fate, it mostly stays intact, in UBW he accepts that it is sometimes necessary to kill one to save many (although, notably, he never has to put it into practice) but in HF he realises that his true wish is not to see people cry, and to prevent the people in front of him getting hurt, and he follows that. It's the same realisation Archer came to, only he came to it too late.

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

Yeah, and Sakura said that she was dirty and cowardly because she got raped by Shinji for years. A total lack of self-esteem does tend to make you rather self-depreciating. Just because he says it, it doesn't make it true. And in any case, like I said, he doesn't stick to his ideals in the other two routes (especially Fate). He tries the best he can to save everyone, and mostly succeeds. He doesn't go against them in Fate or UBW simply because he never has to.

Since when has she been able to communicate with any soul she caught? This sounds like baseless assumption to explain something.

Well, the souls are inside her, and we know full well that they can interact with her, because the souls inside Sakura are what form the shadow (coupled with her connection to Angra Mainyu). It's not a case of communicating with him, either, it's a case of her simply looking at what's inside her. I'm pretty sure this is a canon explanation, too, although I don't know if it comes from the game itself or from elsewhere.

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, it's heavily hinted at there, yes. But, she never outright admits it, and certainly not to Shirou and Rin. She could easily have found out in Fate without telling anyone, because she doesn't need to.

At least Archer surviving can be attributed to his class ability.

Yeah, but his ability to pull prana out of his ass in order to repeatedly sword-spam isn't.

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.

That's how the Assassin class works. An Assassin can't normally be a Hero, because Assassins are, by their very definition, anonymous. The only exception to that is Hassan-al-Sabbah, because he founded a famous order of Assassins (in fact, the word Assassin comes from that group). If anything is absurd, it's the idea that False Assassin could fit in that class, because he's clearly not one.

And the name "True Assassin" is simply a way of distinguishing between the Hassan Assassin and the Fake Assassin summoned by Caster (who is a Fake Assassin since he quite clearly doesn't belong in the class, since he's not known for, you know, assassinating people).

Oh, and Assassin isn't the same person every time. There are actually (IIRC) 19 possible different Assassins, corresponding to the 19 different Hassan-al-Sabbah's who led the Hassassin. They all have the same name, because every leader of the Hassassin took the name "Hassan-al-Sabbah" by tradition, but they're not a 'hive mind', they're not all the same being (hence the different NPs) and nor do they all have the same purpose (Zouken got that Hassan specifically because he wanted to be immortal).