I finally finished enough to be ahead for only the second time in this project. Waver OVA rewatch, ahoy!

Synopsis

F/SN: UBW 19 – 22: A whole bunch of characters take far too long to die and some even come back from the dead briefly, whether in flashback or in…uh, spirit. (I mean, this is a battle royale, after all…)

Impressions

• Wouldn’t it not make sense for future!Shirou to kill present!Shirou? I mean, you know the time travel paradox…if you kill the present guy, the future guy doesn’t exist.
• “Sorry about that, punk.” – LOL. Lancer’s great.
• Hey, wasn’t Kirei dea-oh right. In fiction, when there is no corpse, you can’t have assumed the character died. They probably skedaddled off somewhere, heavily bleeding and/or on the edge of death…and I’m assuming that was how Kirei got out of his scuffle too. Update: Or alternatively, someone moved the corpse.
• All this talk about ideals makes me wanna play Odd Future (from BnHA) for some reason, LOL. (Well, the first line of that song is “I keep my ideals”, no?)
• “…it is you who is disobeying orders.”
• A eunuch, huh? Rin, you do know that a eunuch has his *erhem erhem* cut off…right?
• Okay, people. Why must women be the source of the Holy Grail? This is only the 2nd time I’ve gotten to this point and you’ve got enough men to fuel the Grail instead. Why not use them??? Update: Suffice to say I get my wish later on.
• “You’ve been removed from the bounds of time.” Subbers, I know you’re under pressure to produce subs, but please proofread…? Pretty please?
• I predicted, a few seconds before it appeared on my screen, that Shirou wasn’t the type to do things he regretted. Yyyyyyyyyyup. That’s Shirou, alright.
• Okayyyyyy. That was not an episode title that needed to be subbed.
• Oh, gosh. Can you please just knee Shinji where it hurts, Rin…? I know you’re being choked, but you could still do something like that.
• …(lol)…What the heck, Shinji’s such a self-preserving prick!
• So how many times did Lancer actually die and how many times was he faking it out?
• “Dying because of some order that comes with being a hero.”
• So who’s Gilgamesh’s Master now…?
• Hmm…I thought by saving Rin and Saber, Shirou was already a hero. Maybe it’s just a perception thing.
• H-Hey, Shirou…you keep saying redundant things…
• Why is Saber just standing there, anyway…? (Well, Shirou did say it was his fight, but…she can do something…)
• Okay, whose idea was it to cut after “However…”?! That’s terrible pacing.
• This series peaked quite a few episodes ago. Now it’s just stretching for time.
• Um, hey. Random question. Didn’t King Arthur draw Excalibur from the sword in the stone? Is that a stone or a tree stump? It’s hard to tell since the zoom quality is funny, but…if it’s a tree stump, someone got a crucial detail wrong. Update: Nup, it’s a stone. Forget I told you.
• Having sacrificed myself for over a year for other people’s sake, I can’t say I agree that giving yourself up for others is a beautiful thing. This is speaking as someone who volunteers at a not-for-profit (the charity store). In fact, having thought long and hard about the fact I’ve completely gone down the wrong path from having taken this one opportunity I was given (note I did get rejected from a similar place before I got the position I did), I’ve thought, occasionally, that sort of thing is disgusting.
• Did the Great B*stard even age 10 years while waiting for this new war…?
• “…left off 10 years ago.”
• Uh-oh. I don’t like Shinji – you can clearly tell that from the way I’ve been reacting to him – but there’s no way you’d use him as a Grail vessel…right?
• My gosh…it’s like the scene in Akira…(haven’t watched that movie, but I did see a clip of the scene in question.) The sort of scene that makes your stomach churn…
• If I understand the pink box correctly, it says kayumino-ru which is…*checks that up* itch cream(?) (That’s just an educated guess, so please don’t take my word for it.) Another of the boxes says either iburon or ipuron, but it seems to be some kind of medicine (although I can’t figure out what it does).
• “…flashy gold jerk…” – Yup, that’s why he’s the Great B*stard. The most narcisstic of all b*stards.
• Lemme guess, Rin…if I know my visual novels right, then the way to establish the mana link is either kissing or sexual intercourse, right? Update: Oh well, transplantation of a Magic Crest will work too. With the way Rin was reacting, I thought it was gonna be really intimate, but…nup. It’s just them taking off their shirts for one another…*whistles and pretends to walk away…not that I can whistle, anyway…*
• The reason I don’t like tsunderes is that whenever they want to be romantic, you can’t tell whether they’re giving mixed signals or not. Then again, you could argue I count as one, so…uh…*sweatdrop*
• Shirou, why are you so concerned for the pillow?!

Issues

Having gotten carried away again and finished UBW at this point in time, I can kinda figure out where the weird patches are. That said, hindsight only truly sets in after some distance is created and I don’t have that time right now (‘cos I gotta put out this post, after all), so let’s see if I can get this stuff straight.

• By interacting with his past self, did Archer do something to the timeline (like erase himself from existence)? You know how time travel media works – if you mess with the past, you mess with the present and same for the future.
• Some of the pacing is a bit off. Maybe that’s a result of skipping things like OPs and EDs, but that “However…” *cut to OP* was pretty disorienting for sure. Likewise, it’s not covered in this post’s impressions, but in the epilogue, there’s a few scenes that seem a little too long.
• If Kirei’s the Master of Lancer, then Shinji had Gilgamesh, right? However, Shinji was said to not be a particularly powerful Master because his Magic Circuits were basically dead, so how was Gilgamesh sustaining himself? The Grail “mud”?
• That issue I bring up in the synopsis – how many times do Lancer, Kirei and Assassin die? Assassin has an explanation for his, but Kirei and Lancer, not so much. I especially don’t get why Lancer had that weird vein pattern on him as he died – was that some kind of poisoning…?

Sidebar: That “if the corpse disappeared” thing I mention about Kirei…remind me to address it in one of those “basics of the mystery genre” things I was promising to do. It’s probably not one of the actual rules, but it’s a genre trope nonetheless.