When discussions about fate/stay night come up I tend to hear a lot about how stupid or boring the protagonist is, followed by a flurry of people attempting to explain why he’s not so bad, trust me, I know, I was one of them. But regardless of how good or bad Emiya Shirou is as a character, I found the ideas behind him very interesting. I always got the feeling that Shirou is the product of the world he lives in first, and a character second; I’ll try to explain what I mean

Now keep in mind, the fate series is complicated as shit and I have only played the first visual novel, fate/stay night, so I might get something wrong. I find this stuff really interesting so I’m going to talk about it anyway, but if you have reason to believe that I got something wrong feel free to inform me.

In regards to Shirou’s powers, it’s easy to see them as kinda bullshit, why does is this regular person so goddam powerful? How is he facing of against some of the strongest people to ever exist? Well that’s an easy question to answer, as in this way I feel that Shirou is supposed to embody the potential of the everyman. In the nasuverse the concept of origins shows up every now and again, and I Shirous origin appears to something along the line of “swords” (weirdly specific right, I’ll come back to that), and this is what gives him the tendency towards the powers he has, but in the nasuverse, everyone is supposed to have an origin, and theoretically everyone should be able to be as powerful as Shirou becomes. What puts Shirou apart from others is his disregard for himself, and desire to achieve things outside of his capabilities. The way he practices his magic every night in the visual novel is extremely painful and puts him at the edge of death every time he does it. Not to mention his powers of projection take a slight toll on him every time he uses it, slowly destroying his body, this is why he looks so different as archer. Shirou will to go to any length for the strength he feels he needs, he quotes Kiritsugu often, stating that magic is the act of killing oneself, and Shirou’s willingness to hurt himself is what allows him to use magic the way he does.

Shirou seems to try to help people to an annoying degree, but I don’t think this is the just the result of him being a goody-two shoes protagonist, the visual novel goes repeatedly tries to drive home the point that the extent to which Shirou tries to help others to the danger of himself is crazy. It’s also important to take into consideration that he clearly has survivor’s guilt. The event that created him also really traumatized him. Shirou repeatedly questions why he was the one who survived over everyone else that was there, ultimately justifying it by trying to save as many people as he can to compensate for those he couldn’t save previously. This also explains his disregard for himself, it isn’t necessarily that he’s foolishly brave, but rather his only way of justifying his existence is through his ability to save others, so his own life is unimportant to the equation, if he dies while saving others, so be it. At the same time, what can keep him going when he should be near death is idea that he cannot die until he succeeds in saving those around him.

When I first heard that Shirou’s origin was supposed to be swords I thought it was pretty stupid. In Kara no Kyoukai, origins were portrayed as abstract concepts that people were born of, concepts like nothingness or consumption, but for some reason Shirous origin was supposed to swords, so is there someone out there with an origin of dishes? or someone with an origin of chairs? Looking back on it however, I found an obvious answer for why he had such a specific origin in the fact that Avalon was in in him. I always found it weird that Shirou never brings up his past, before the disaster of the previous grail war. I mean he probably had a family that died, but he never brings it up. The visual Novel can spend pages of text on what fucking lunch their having but not one word on this. But I feel this was entirely intentional. When Shirou describes his experience prior to being saved, he says that it’s as if the life had been drained out of him. The way I see it, Shirou’s essentially dead at his point, the person who was in his body up till this point is gone and all that is left is a living husk, a container without anything inside. So when Kiritsugu comes along and attempts to heal him with Avalon, he’s giving life to a blank slate, a blank slate that is molded by Avalon. The sheath desires the sword to be complete and thus Avalon creates a sword for itself, Shirou. The concept of the sword was the basis for his creation, his origin.

So Shirou is defined by the event of the end of the previous Holy Grail war. He was created there, and the impact it left on him created the ideals he strives for.