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typellblog · 3 months

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Illyasviel von Einzbern: The Hole at the Center of Fate/Stay Night

Emiya Shirou is the beating heart of Fate/Stay Night. Every character radiates outwards from Shirou, shapes and is shaped by him. He fights against foils like Archer and Kirei while growing alongside the three main heroines in each route.

There's really only one character who precedes Shirou in influence, who shapes him near-completely but cannot himself be shaped.

Emiya Kiritsugu is already dead, after all.

It's his legacy that drives the novel - but something oft-undiscussed is that Shirou only has half of it. He inherits his father’s justice, and the one that inherits his ruthlessness is Illya. Thus, Illya’s relationship to Shirou is dictated from the start.

She is everything his father left behind, the first gatekeeper of the moonlit world of death and magecraft that Shirou now finds himself in. In this role she transcends routes, appearing at the end of the third day to deliver a near-lethal attack just as the story branches off.

She seems intent to deliver Kiritsugu’s baggage to Shirou, to make him reckon with the past that he himself never experienced; the truth that a hero can only help those he sides with while many others are left alone in the cold.

In this way her very existence is a far more fundamental challenge to Shirou’s ideals than that of any other character - and yet this challenge is met only indirectly. Much of the information regarding her true identity and relationship to Shirou is elided until the end of HF.

She functions similarly to Sakura, a character who totally changes the reader’s perception of the first two routes in retrospect. The reveals about Illya force us to reevaluate how positive her ending in the Fate route really is.

In the narrative of Heaven’s Feel, both Illya and Sakura are considered ‘doomed’ - able to be saved only by Shirou sacrificing his own life to Archer’s arm.

It’s the crux of their characterisation, in the same way that Saber’s pursuit of the Holy Grail leads her into timeless and uncountable doomed battles. In a route based around that character, you would expect fixing it to be the main thrust of the plot.

And so just as the Fate route is focused on Shirou clashing with Saber over her lack of regard for her safety, and Heaven’s Feel is focused on accepting even the ‘impure’ parts of Sakura, there is no route focused on showing Illya that she needn't give up on having a normal life.

Instead all of her scenes in Heaven’s Feel are about accepting that she cannot have one.

This is the hole in the center of FSN that I’m talking about. Its absence is felt keenly throughout the novel, because Illya has another role besides a specter of Shirou's past. She embodies the prize and object of the Holy Grail War itself - the very same wish-granting device.

Many of the characters in this story are not fighting for the Grail specifically, but nonetheless their strong personalities and desires cause them to clash with one another, in a process Kirei sees as comparable to everyday life.

Their wishes, both in the form of the dead’s regrets and victor’s will, enter the neutral, empty Grail in order to produce a miracle. The only one not allowed a will of their own is the vessel of the Grail, who, in absorbing these desires, must completely erase their humanity.

Illya is not intended to have a reason to pursue the Grail, nor any life beyond obtaining it. The war is premised on the sacrifice of the Servants, yes, but nonetheless they enter as contestants. Illya, like Justeaze before her, enters the ritual only as a sacrifice.

And yet an outside element is introduced. Illya being part-human, the product of an actual family rather than just a clone allows for her to have personal motivations. She holds on to her resentment of Kiritsugu, despite knowing that it’s pointless, because it’s all she has left.

A parallel can be made to the Grail itself. Supposedly a pure wish-granting device, it becomes corrupted through the influence of Angra Mainyu, one small, perverse wish colouring the whole thing black.

The desired salvation of the Einzberns, their thousand-year project relies on being able to reproduce the miracle, to understand every component part of their attempts in order to draw ever closer to the Third Magic, but Illya is a random factor, born to a human parent.

She’s also their greatest creation since Justeaze. Miracles, after all, exist because they are not understood.

The corruption of the Grail with the darkest desires of the world is just the inevitable result of any wish - the price of becoming a human instead of existing as a machine. Live long enough and anyone would turn into Zouken, higher goals suborned by a base desire to escape pain.

Like Illya the Grail is a failed project, a tool that can only provide salvation of a limited nature & only fulfill its purpose incompletely, proof positive that true perfection does not exist in the world of Fate/Stay Night.

In Illya’s case the bug in her programming comes fundamentally from a desire for family, for someone to be close to her. Despite her dysfunctional initial approaches she’s perfectly capable of living normally alongside Shirou.

The issue, then, is the Grail War itself.

Her two sides, two different origins, come into conflict here, and her role as the Holy Grail consistently wins. Not because she desires it in any real sense, but because she doesn’t believe that she can do anything else.

Consider how the Fate route ends with Saber and Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting both the negative and positive aspects of the past without dwelling on that which cannot be changed.

Consider how Illya in the Fate route doesn’t say a single thing about her condition, refuses to burden others with that knowledge, accepting the fact of her death and instead choosing to live in the moment.

Consider how the Unlimited Blade Works route is about Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting that he will not always succeed, that his self-sacrificing nature will hurt him, but nonetheless his pursuit of that goal is worthwhile.

Consider how Illya’s death is used to illustrate this, how she cannot be saved regardless of whether Shirou makes the choice to intervene or not, how his sorrow is used as proof of his brokenness and his ability to move forward regardless is used as proof of his strength.

Consider why the Heaven's Feel route is named after the ritual that materializes the soul, why this is identified with salvation and rebirth by the Einzberns. I would argue that the Third Magic is a metaphor for the process Shirou undergoes throughout the novel.

He evolves from a machine into a human, gaining his own desires and the will to live. And just as Heaven’s Feel, the ritual, requires a sacrifice: Justeaze’s blood forms the foundation, so too does Heaven’s Feel, the route: Illya spends her own life to fully realize Shirou’s.

In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past his belief that his life is worth less than others. He wants to live, wants to let Illya save him, wants to let her sacrifice herself for him. In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past Illya.

I don’t blame him. I just want to emphasize how significant to this novel the existence of suffering is, how important the figure of someone who cannot be saved, how necessary a single person’s sacrifice. And how this falls on Illya in every route.

In the latter parts of the Fate route she quickly disappears from story relevance. Her functions as a Grail offer a convenient excuse to have her sleeping for much of the day, as it does for Kirei’s kidnapping of her, stringing her up as a sacrifice to open the gate.

In UBW we have Gilgamesh brutally ripping out her heart. He values her purely for her core, which holds the Grail, tossing aside the rest of her body.

If her role as the Grail is what drives her doom, though, she is at least partially able to overcome this at the end of Heaven’s Feel.

For a brief moment, Illya escapes the bonds of fate by uniting her deeply personal wish with the impersonal functions of the Grail.

She also dies. She fucking dies, okay? I’m so tired of talking about this as though it’s supposed to be a good thing, as though we’re just supposed to accept it as the best possible option.

It works precisely because we know there is another, because we know for a fucking fact that an Illya route could have existed, that her salvation is possible not just from a meta perspective but directly implied in-universe.

Illya’s power is to grant wishes, but she is incapable of giving voice to her own. She needs someone there by her side to tell her that it’s okay to want to live, and yet- Shirou is so fucking broken that he needs her to do that for him instead.

Illya could have lived, but she doesn’t, and in not doing so she carries half the weight of this story’s tragedy on her back.

In a way this is an excuse for the lack of an Illya route. I really do think its blatant absence adds something to Fate/Stay Night, really sells the tragedy of HF, becomes even more beautiful precisely because of its unattainability.

It’s a comment on how the artistic process, materializing your soul on paper if you will, is an inherently restrictive one, rife with failure and things left on the chopping board.

But it does not, not for a second, mean that we should accept the lack of an Illya route. It doesn’t mean the desire for it is a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that its addition would make Fate/Stay Night worse.

It would, however, become a different game at that point, and here I want to pay respect to the one that has lived alongside me for twenty years.

Thanks for reading, and happy anniversary to my favourite story of all time.

#illya #fate/stay night #fsn analysis

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typellblog · 5 months

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So I've been thinking about Illya's gender and it occurs to me that one of the core tensions of her characterisation is that she identifies with the things that entrap her.

Take, for example, Berserker. Despite loving him like a father figure his summoning causes her immense pain. He cannot perform the role of father, cannot gently hold her as she wishes, as a result of his insanity.

Instead he becomes a living reminder of her duty as a Master, his existence sustained entirely by the Grail that is her objective. He cannot live outside of the Holy Grail War and his role as a killing machine, just as she cannot while he still exists.

It is only in the moment of his death that he is able to speak with his own voice.

It is only after his death that Illya is willing to give up on the Grail war, because despite her lack of attachment to the whole thing I think she persists in it because of a sense of duty towards Berserker, who was summoned for that purpose.

It is hard to imagine a happy ending for Illya without Berserker in it, but it is almost impossible to imagine one where he is still there.

Take, for example, Berserker's madness. It's a formless, causeless rage, merely added by the Grail system. Illya is the one that shapes this formless rage into lethal violence. Illya is the one that has a justified grievance, a reason to resent the world that made her.

Shirou, in the Fate route, thinks Illya isn't suited to the violence & considers the possibility that someone else is making her do it.

He is half right - she was literally made to do it, tortured into becoming a better killer, but that doesn't change the fact that every day she wakes up in the morning and chooses violence of her own will. How could she not? She has nothing else.

Take, for example, the winter. Illya loves the snow but hates the cold. She 'gets used to' the frigid conditions in which she was raised without ever really adjusting to them, but nonetheless fully embraces the aesthetic sensibility of the Einzberns - the whiteness of her hair, the foreignness of her outfit, her resemblance to a 'snow fairy' that Shirou points out on multiple occasions are all a delight to her.

Take, for example, her age. She looks younger than she actually is because of human experimentation. Her immaturity is only natural considering her upbringing. But she leans into it. She calls Shirou onii-chan. Which one is the real Illya? Does she want to be seen as the older sister or the younger one? The answer, as always, is both.

Take, for example, the castle. It's a symbol of wealth and yet also, for Illya, a symbol of restriction and isolation. She wasn't allowed outside. She could have as many toys as she wanted as long as she remained compliant. In the Fate route she feels much freer when she abandons the Einzbern residence and comes to live in the Emiya household, and yet in Hollow Ataraxia her primary scenes still take place in the castle.

Of course they do. She's a princess. The fancy clothes, the manners, the gardens and the ballroom, the wine cellar and the dining hall, all these are as much a part of Illya as anything else. Even when she's free to act as she wants there's no reason to expect her to abandon them.

Take, for example, the maids. She says she wants to like them, but struggles to do so. It's not a surprise when it comes to Sella, who reveres her like a saviour while at the same time her job is to make sure she completes the Third Magic. It's not a surprise when it comes to Leysritt, who loves Illya more than she loves herself - because in a sense Illya is herself, she exists only to be fused with Illya and complete the Third Magic.

Which is really the crux of this whole thing, isn't it. Illya's character arc is about being forced into this role of the Holy Grail, and when it comes time to do so in the Heaven's Feel route she does so willingly. Shirou has a wish, and she grants it. But not as some impersonal vessel of a higher power, not to fulfill the Einzberns' ambitions, but to grant her own wish, of being someone who can protect the people she loves.

So, yeah, when I think about Illya's gender, I think about the expectations they had for her. I think about how even if she was born with male genitalia they likely would have done something to make her closer to their ideal reproduction of Justeaze. I think about how her clothes would be picked out for her, I think about how she would be educated in the correct mannerisms.

I think about how some people (including myself) have talked about the idea of Illya being transgender, and I think about what that would even mean in this context.

The idea that she was born in a different body and embraced this one purely of her own free will doesn't sit right with me, but neither does the idea that if given some freedom she would reject her prior gender presentation. Honestly I think the best label for her, if we had to give one, is AFAB transfem.

But that's the core tension for me, when it comes to Illya. I want to alleviate her suffering, but taking that too far just ends up with a different person entirely (e.g. Fate/Kaleid)

That's why it's important to remember that traits like viciousness, childishness, aristocratic mannerisms, doll obsession, miraculous powers and resemblance to the masterwork of an ancient line of alchemists are not just key aspects of Illya as a character, they're also things that she likes about herself.

In one way or another.

#illya #fsn analysis

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