tainbocuailnge:

tainbocuailnge:

hey who wants to hear some deep fate theoryposting. some real out there bull shit.

every single servant stole their face from a normal human. they’re all pseudoservants to an extent.

ive been stewing on this one for a while but recently vlad extra and sanzang said some things that made me feel like i actually had a case so check this out

heroic spirits themselves are nothing but concepts without self. just raw power with a name attached. normally if you summon them you summon a phenomena related to their legend and nothing resembling a person. the heroic spirit and the noble phantasm can be the exact same thing because they’re both just phenomena related to the legend. for many of these heroes, even if they did exist in history, their heroic spirit version is much larger than life. they’re not real people, not individuals. servants of historical figures rarely look like their real world counterpart either, cause you don’t get the actual person you get what they represent. remember back in zero where iskandar was huge despite being short irl cause thats the kind of figure he’s imagined as? remember how vlad is a vampire just cause some bastard wrote a slanderous book about him? yeah

and you only ever summon a single aspect. different parts of the legend produce different servants and these can be completely different in personality, height, voice, face, etc. just entirely different people.

BUT if heroic spirits are just faceless concepts, power to be harnessed, Where Does The Face Come From? raw power has no desires, it’s just energy to be used. why, then, do servants have desires?

remember this girl called laeticia? who was similar enough to jeanne to serve as her face and her dormant personality still influenced jeanne’s personality and desires somewhat? remember how angra mainyu had his entire self removed from history and thus has to take the face of irisviel and shirou to act as an individual in the world and playing at being shirou caused him to develop the desire to play seigi no mikata just this once? yeah



servants are nothing but concepts representing the myth behind their name, so they shouldn’t be able to develop desires beyond the confines of their story. any wish that developed after their death, any personality trait that doesn’t align with their story, is due to to the personality of the face they stole. heroic spirits are just concepts but servants are individuals, because the servant container is a humanlike vessel to contain and direct the mythological phenomena of the heroic spirit, but it’s gotta be modelled after something.

for most servants we don’t really see whomstdve’s face they stole but with servants whose gimmick is already facelessness or shaky identity it tends to be more obvious, like robin being shirou colour kiritsugu and lancelot becoming purple kariya and All These Sakura Clones. in most cases the two blend almost perfectly to the point where you wouldn’t even consider that they stole their face, because obviously they steal a face that’s similar to theirs, but no two people are the same so every servant, every aspect of a servant, is a slightly different face, a slightly different set of traits. if you take a drastically different interpretation of the myth you’re gonna need to find a significantly different face for it too.

‘but lance what about the actual pseudoservants’ yeah yeah im getting there. gods, the divine, they’re different from humans on a fundamental level. something without any humanity can’t perfectly blend in with a human personality so gods when stealing a human face end up keeping a relatively clear divide, but even then they’re influenced. ishtar for example is noted to actually be more responsible and self sufficient than usual due to rin’s influence. its only when some god steals like a literal whole entire human to be their face that it’s obvious enough for someone to step up and classify them as pseudoservant

zhuge liang is an exception because he basically really didn’t want to come so the moment he found el melloi to do his work for him he just left. dumped all his powers on waver and booked it. theoretically any heroic spirit can do this really but most of em want the grail too badly or have like, a shred of responsibility. ”real winners quit” - zhuge liang.