[Vicious108]

Originally Posted by Thess

Not really? UBW was never to mean a 'conclusion'. It's only exploration. It has no conclusion. Shirou reaches to nothing at all. The way to live his ideals? He has no idea of how. We don't see him years in the future. Nothing.

It has a conclusion to UBW's story. At the end, "FIN" appears just like it does for HF. I don't care if you personally feel that Shirou continuing to embrace his ideal rather than moving on to romance is an unsatisfactory conclusion, it's still one of the possible endings to his story.

In HF he re-discovers his sense of self.

Where is this stated? If the narrative outright states this (doubtful, given the epilogue is from Rin's POV), I might buy it, but if it's just you preferring romance to ideals again, then I'll stick to my own view on the matter: Shirou simply replaces the ideal to save everyone with his affection for Sakura. He may have moved on from everyone to a person he loves uniquely, but in the end he's still a pure giver who lives entirely for someone other than himself. He's still an empty man filling his lack of self with something external to him.

What Kiritsugu truly wanted was to have his family in a quiet world, not his ideal. By having Shirou pursue empty ideals it's the same as kicking the man in the grave. He wanted him to do that at one point when he was a child, then grow up as people do. The only time Shirou is given choices to make him be Kiritsugu or reject and gone his way? HF. Which routes Shirou accomplishes for sure what Kiritsugu wanted? Fate (at some degree, if you take into account Last Episode) and HF. Not UBW.

Except the way Shirou went about the ideal is fundamentally different from the way Kiritsugu did. Kiritsugu was forced by his circumstances into becoming a corruption of sorts of the ideal. His initial dream was to become a hero who would save everyone, but, when faced with the Shirley incident, he had no choice but to become instead a ruthless anti-hero who kills hundreds to save thousands. That's why he comes to regret the way he lived. Shirou, however, always held true to the initial vision of the ideal. And the whole point of UBW is that he will continue to do so without letting it break him; he's already seen the worst possible end result of the path that lies ahead of him, yet he did not waver in his determination, and he's got Rin by his side, precisely because she takes it upon herself to support him in his endeavor to stay true to the ideal without becoming like Archer (or Kiritsugu).

Sure, you may find that to be naïve and wishful thinking and that Shirou would eventually be forced into killing Rin because of the ideal, but, as you said, the route doesn't actually show what takes place years into the future, so all of that is mere conjecture. What matters is what we actually saw, and that was a Shirou filled with the resolve to become a hero (and not an anti-hero like Archer/Kiritsugu) who won't come to regret his path.

UBW does NOT explore this, guys. It's an incomplete route that shows the middle of the way before the conclusion (HF) and after the beginning (Fate, which had a conclusion thanks to Last Episode later).

…What? One route does not supersede the other just because it takes place afterwards in the game. They're not sequels in chronological order, they're alternate retellings of the story of Emiya Shirou. Now I'm not saying the order is random, there's clearly a thematic logic to it, but I don't believe it automatically makes HF's ending the be-all and end-all of F/SN conclusions (and personally I don't care much for Last Episode since to me it's just retroactively tacked on fanservice).

And UBW's ending is also a conclusion because that's what conclusions are - an end/finish to a certain process - UBW's ending provides an end to the process that was the UBW route. I get that you feel HF's conclusion was the most appropriate one or whatever, but I'm not obliged to feel the same.