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shiroisotto64 · 4 months

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Gilgamesh Headcanons

He’s not fooling anyone. When he takes a liking to you it’s so obvious. Slowly VERY SLOWLY you go from just a mongrel..to his mongrel? Like huh…?

He’s very possessive of you as well. All treasures belong to him, now that counts you as well. He calls you out on it to. Like why are you getting so close and touchy with emiya, and lord forbid it be cu. Their pests now pay attention to him.

he desires all your attention. If you start to pay to much attention to another servant or he just feels neglected in general he’ll make it known. Gilgamesh will corner you and fuss at you until you explain why you’ve been distant all of a sudden. He’s your king! How dare you not pay attention to him.

Loves showing off and spoiling you. You want it? He’s already got it for you. Despite how he may act he is a decent listener when he wants to be. And since he isn’t the best with words he’s adept to just get you things. Hopefully that gets his feelings across and if not? He’ll flick you.

Just like the old man he is he likes to go on and on about his journeys and the things he used to do in Uruk. Gil could go on for hours and hours about his glory days. And he’s even more shocked if you actually try to listen and ask questions. Not only does this boost his already large ego, but expect him to be a bit more affectionate.

Whenever you’re having bad days and issues he does try to help you. But like I said he’s not the best with words. He’ll say something harsh like “this is stupid!” And “get over it.” Don’t forget “suck it up.” He holds you in high regards so act like it.

But once he sees the negative affect his words had he’ll quiet down and hold you close to him. Hopefully that’ll get his feelings across. And if not he’ll ask someone else for…assistance.

Loves fighting but especially when your there. I told you he likes to show off! And show off he will, this MIGHT be one of the only times he takes a fight seriously…lucky you! Especially if things are starting to get serious.

Gilgamesh would never allow anything happen to you, remember he’s the Gilgamesh. He’ll have something in his gate to be of use to you. Medicine, shields, clothes, etc. he’d happily grab it for you.

Gil likes to talk to you actually. Your opinions on things amuse him. The way you think and tick is so different from him and he wants to understand your mindset better. Playful banter or a serious discussion he doesn’t mind.

And like someone else said, I could see him dragging you along to play games with him like chest, and other mentally stimulating games.

#archer gilgamesh #Gilgamesh #Gilgamesh x reader #fate #fgo #fsn #fate imagines

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typellblog · 9 months

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What the anime got wrong about Gilgamesh

So, we know Saber kinda gets shafted in the anime adaptations. She’s introduced in Zero, in which her role is a bit different from FSN, and then instead of adapting the introductory route, the one where we learn the most about her as a character, we skip straight to UBW.

Well, guess who else gets a similar treatment, where they’re first introduced to anime-only watchers via the prequel, and then we skip the route they’re supposed to be introduced in for one where they play a comparatively lesser role?

Illya, of course! And then the bastards cut her scenes from the HF movies as well.

Okay, but seriously, I want to talk about Gilgamesh. Now you might be thinking, Gilgamesh? What’s wrong with Gilgamesh? People liked Gil in Zero. Well, so did I, but reading the Fate route again, there are some interesting differences. I think examining his introductory scenes in both Zero and Fate makes this clear.

Brief recap for those who don’t remember: In Fate he appears near the end of the route, where he slaughters Caster and establishes himself as the final boss. In Zero he appears near the start of the story, where he slaughters Assassin (well, one of them), and establishes himself as a threat.

These scenes are remarkably similar; I wouldn’t be surprised if Urobuchi’s was an intentional homage (Zero does this a lot, compare the role that Lancer plays as Saber’s initial opponent in both).

The two key components here are that Gil is standing at a position higher than his opponent in order to display his superiority, and that his opponent gets utterly destroyed with no chance of fighting back.

That’s rare in any Fate fight scene, but it serves to establish that if Gil wants you dead, you’re dead. It’s a simple but effective formula, especially paired with his striking character design and Seki Tomokazu’s excellent voice acting.

There are two key differences, though. Firstly, Urobuchi is kind of cheating: Assassin is, by design, expendable. It’s only impressive that Gil dispatches him so quickly until you realise that he’s one of a hundred different Assassins. This was even a trick in-story, the plot concocted by Kirei and Tokiomi to conceal that Assassin is still alive.

Caster, on the other hand, is not expendable. She’s an important character who serves as a midboss in UBW and seems poised to serve the same role in Fate before Gil arrives. She’s in the middle of a tense fight scene with Saber and Shirou and is hinting at the hidden capabilities of her Noble Phantasm and everything! This, to be fair, is something that Nasu can only get away with due to the medium – in a visual novel, you can have the impact of a sudden subversion of expectation in one route while playing it straight in another, ensuring you don’t waste any setup or make readers feel cheated.

The second difference, and I think the more important one, is how we’re supposed to react to the scene as audiences. Zero’s version seems solely oriented around showing off how cool Gil is; Assassin gets about as much characterization as a plank of wood, meaning that the audience, as dispassionate spectators, are much closer to Gil’s point of view than anything.

FSN’s version, on the other hand, has a point-of-view character! And if there’s anything we know about Emiya Shirou by this point, it’s that he’s not a big fan of seeing women getting hurt.

As a result, it’s very easy for us to mentally reframe the scene as a person seeing another person getting brutally murdered. And it is brutal. Caster screams in agony as she desperately tries to escape, in contrast to Assassin who simply accepts his fate. The whole scene is dyed blood-red as she is repeatedly skewered by a barrage of Gil’s Noble Phantasms.

Gil isn’t just portrayed as impressive and powerful in this scene, he’s also cruel and awful. And that’s my first point:

1: Golden Man Bad

Gilgamesh is a surprisingly offputting individual.

From his voice (Shirou describes his laugh as ‘irritating’), to his mannerisms (remember the way he blocks Saber’s blows by just covering his head with his hands?), to his unbelievably weird facial expressions, he’s the epitome of an unlikeable villain.

In Zero, we see Gil at his best: sexy, dominating and intelligent. He’s still not a very nice guy, but his bursts of anger all fall on characters we aren’t particularly sympathetic to. In FSN his casual cruelty is made more apparent and more objectionable. (Need I remind the reader of what he does to Illya in UBW?)

In Zero Gil’s constant boasting asserts his confidence and power; in FSN it just makes him kind of seem like a douchebag.

The core qualities that people like about Gil, and make him a cool character to watch, are still there in Fate, but they’re tempered by a lot of reasons to not like him, which barely show up in Zero.

Basically, in FSN Gil seems to have been conceived as the type of villain you love to hate, while in Zero he leans way into the role of a villain you love to love. The subject of how he's portrayed in FGO, CCC or Strange Fake is beyond the bounds of this post to address, but I do think the popularity of his appearance in Zero had some influence there.

2: Sexism

Strictly speaking it’s a subset of the above point as it’s a big part of what makes him so unlikeable, but I think it’s interesting enough to deserve its own discussion, considering it’s much more noticeable here than in other entries.

Just a quick reminder of some of his greatest hits:

The fact that Gil is objectifying Saber specifically because of her gender is obvious, and interestingly enough Shirou is the one who pushes back against it. There’s a real comparison to be made between the two insofar as they are both trying to win her over in the latter stages of the story.

Gil ascribes to a similar perspective to Saber when it comes to the roles people should play. He just thinks that Saber should abandon her role of king in favour of the role of woman, which in Gil’s view is characterized by a set of obligations that include marrying a man and basically becoming his slave.

On the other hand, Shirou is strongly opposed to denying people’s humanity based on arbitrary categories. That’s why, in the early parts of the route, he . . . repeatedly emphasizes the fact that she’s a girl? It probably sounded better in Nasu’s head.

Regardless, the point is that Shirou sees Saber as a human, while Gil sees her as an object. So, there you have it. Emiya Shirou, ally of social justice.

Now, I don’t think Zero is necessarily a worse portrayal of Gil than Fate. In many ways it’s more interesting, and in fact, I think they’re complimentary. Which nicely leads into my last point (wow, it’s almost like I planned the structure of this post before I wrote it):

3: His defeat

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of an anime-only fan who has started with Zero, just about to watch UBW (yeah, I know, ew).

The main takeaway from Zero seems to be that the bad guys always win. People who pursue their dreams are idiots who will inevitably fail, even if their dreams are really cool (looking at you, Iskandar). A thorough victory for Gil’s ideology of self-centeredness, and a large factor seems to be that he doesn’t care - from his perspective, he already won like three thousand years ago!

So, going into UBW, the characters that we’re attached to, whose stories we really want to see the end of, are Gil and Kirei. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we want them to win – we’d be fine with them losing, just so long as they do something.

And then Gil gets shot in the head and swallowed by a black hole. Shirou wins, but it’s hard to say that Gil loses. After all, Shirou’s whole deal is that he doesn’t need external enemies – the one he must fight is his own image (UBW takes this line very literally). All well and good for the Shirou fans – i.e. the people who began the story at the correct point – but those excited for what they were expecting to be a culmination of Gil’s character arc might understandably be a little disappointed.

To those people I say: read Fate!

In this route, Gilgamesh’s final battle is against Saber, not Shirou. Saber, a person he knows prior to the beginning of the story due to the events of Zero. Saber, the person who serves as his primary motivation and goal during the story. Saber, the person with whom he has significant ideological disagreements about the nature of kingship with!

Just as Ea, embodiment of the cold, hard Truth of the world, proves superior to Iskandar’s dream by destroying Ionian Hetairoi, so too does Avalon, the symbol of everything Artoria fought for, prove able to endure Ea’s destructive power. It’s a perfect conclusion to the questions asked in the Banquet of Kings.

UBW, for the Zero fan, does not reveal anything new about Gil’s character. But Fate does. We get his single best quote!

Not only is Gil implicitly justifying Artoria’s own unobtainable dream as valuable, but he also identifies himself with her, as a fellow pursuer of that which cannot be obtained.

The contradiction at the heart of their conflict is that Gil wanted Artoria precisely because she was the kind of person to refuse him. What attracted him to her was the stubborn idealism of her kingship, not the subservience he expects from a woman. So, there’s no actual way for Gil to end up satisfied, even if he wins.

His plan was to force Artoria to drink Grail mud to physically incarnate her, driving her insane, but even if he could make her submit to him without that, she would still be tainted, still be fundamentally less valuable to him by the mere fact of being his possession.

In realizing this, he accepts his defeat, unlike in other routes. He couldn’t stand the idea of losing to inferior copies of his treasures in Unlimited Blade Works, but Artoria’s Noble Phantasms were never in his treasury to begin with. And after owning everything in existence for thousands of years, the things you don’t have start to look a lot more alluring than anything you already do.

This is the fifth of roughly thirty analytical essays on Fate/Stay Night that I will be reposting here (with some edits) from Reddit.

It was once pointed out to me that this one was where my posts started 'getting good' so to speak. Hopefully this time round the rough start has been softened a bit.

#fate/stay night #type moon #gilgamesh #fsn analysis

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