[Archon_Wing]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

While all that is interesting and things I derived that the anime wanted to tell us, it's not exactly addressing the point I was making. I don't want to get too far into this, but...

The point was that I found it odd that Tokiomi said (paraphrasing) "He just lost his wife so he has nothing to wish for." That statement is odd, even taking the above into account. Given that this is episode 1, and thus we don't know the characters well, one would rightly assume that Koto *does* have something to wish for: his wife back.

If we presume that Toki knows Koto well enough, then his statement should have been more along the lines of "He's not one who has any real wants in this world, so he has nothing to wish for."

If we presume that Toki doesn't know Koto well(and later actions bear out this more than the other), then his statement is odd because he might have considered that most people would want to wish their dead wife back. So it's more a critique of Toki, then it is of Koto.

But while we're on the Koto track, it never mentions Koto's wife again, or shows any real flashback of him, so we never really get a sense for how he developed and became how he is. We get plenty of backstory and development for Kiritsugu, which makes the lack of Koto's development all the more jarring; he's simply there as an antagonist for Kiritsugu to fight, and supposedly his "dark half" but this is all things we are just told, instead of shown why that is. Not very good storytelling.

To me this is fairly obvious why, even though I never read the VN. Kotomine is for all intents and purposes, a sociopath-- one who has no emotions for others.

Spoiler for Fate/Zero:

Through his monologues, one can see that Kotomine's life up to the beginning of Fate/Zero is doing what is "right", aka what was moraly and socially expected of him, not what he wanted. Notice how much joy he felt from throwing away these morals and went down to murdering and other general mayhem.

From this, one can put this into perspective and note that he most likely married also because it was sort of a social expectation thing and not out of love. Note how he has no real attachment to anyone, and could care less about his father dying. In fact, him not wishing for his wife back is a giveaway to something, and makes perfect sense in retrospect.

To finally cement this in, the last episode has what he wishes for, death and destruction without concern for others. Kotomine proves to be a foil for Emiya, who also seems to be emotionless to others, but for completely different reasons.

But having said this, I still enjoyed Fate/Zero and thought it was decently good. However, I'm always perplexed at how people can get jumped on merely for having the subtlest critiques about a series or director. It must be a circle jerk love story discussion fest, and if you have one slightly dissenting moment, you are bad. :P

I don't think Fate series is the worse for that.

Indeed. But oddly enough, it's a major reason I don't consider self-inflicted wounds to be tragic. If a character is rich, and yet live as a homeless person, it's not that tragic if they continually complain that they don't have basic necessities. If their hell is of your own making, then it is their own fault. Even if outside circumstances created it, if they have an easy way to make things right, but don't and simply go emo over it, then it's not tragic so much as sad and pathetic. True Greek Tragedies do have the implication is that the tragic (sad) outcome is an inevitable result of the key character's personal flaws; he or she was 'doomed' to disaster (death) from the outset. But when that crosses into stupidity, it fails the test for me. I suppose this is more of a personal opinion, thing, and as a critic, I do tend to be harsher than most. Most people are easily entertained.

Well, that is a matter of what degree the tragedy is reaching. Your example would be an extreme one and for the most part while possible is hardly plausible. If no effort is to explain why (Perhaps the person is mentally ill, or somehow has some plan to carry out), then yes it would be a bad idea. But in a vacuum, said character would be so detatched from reality that it's not worth considering.

Many anime about war often illustrate this problem. UC Gundam is a story of such-- many preventable conflicts that are made worse by those too stubborn to let go of ideology, and those that are too devoted to the manipulative. Many decent and resourceful people were lost simply due to the worse parts of human nature. The same minds that create such advanced technology are also the same ones that use it to senselessly kill each other out of some foolish conflict. Char Aznable is one example of a tragic character that could have avoided much of the trouble, but trauma and the events that ensued, as well as frustrations with progress let to a rather tragic fate.