lucentgallivanter asked: Apropos of nothing, if you were slated to be a Master in the next Holy Grail War, what would your Servant of choice be for each of the seven archetypes? (I ask primarily because I'm GMing a game along these lines and I'm curious to see how my current roster of Servant antagonists and/or the unfortunate PCs would stack up.)
This is such a great question, I wanted to save it up as a treat for when my brain was too fried to focus on anything else. Now is the time.
Saber has to be Saber. I think Nasu canon specifies part of Arturia’s contract is that she always has to be Saber whenever Saber is summoned, and anyway, why would you ever want another Saber when you could have the Undefeated King, the sword of promised victory, the matchless Arturia Pendragon. Just lock up, like, all your snacks.
The other very obvious one for me is Lancer: Achilles, son of Peleus. I think he turns up in Fate/Apocrypha, but he can’t possibly be right. He would be my dream opponent for Saber: all the arrogance of Gilgamesh but without the unpleasantness, plus all of the individualist ‘the king must live for himself’ philosophy of Alexander to strike sparks with her duty-bound self-sacrifice jag, plus he’s the greatest warrior ever to walk the Earth. He has Independent Action A (ha ha), Divinity B, and a Noble Phantasm called Dolischion Enchos which basically wipes out everything in a straight line. Their final duel would be like the Saber/Lancer fight in F/Z but on crack. I would blow the entire animation budget on it, and most of Fuyuki City. People for hundreds of miles around would be admitted to hospital suffering from exposure to 200x the recommended background levels of HONOUR.
I want Tomoe Gozen as Rider, to round off the warrior trio. She’s one of my favourite historical badasses, and I think she’d make a great tritagonist.
Three Servants in and I’m already miserable this isn’t a thing! Let’s see. Because this is my blog, I think I should be allowed to write a long, wanky essay on why Homestuck is a form of modern mythology, which levels me up to the point where I can summon Rose Lalonde as my Caster. If you tell me this is cheating I will sulk, and then probably summon Se-Osiris, because Casters are always grimdark and I think it would be really funny to have a Caster who’s a cheerful 12-year-old Egyptian boy and nonetheless fucks shit up really thoroughly.
With Archer I was smug because, having decided Odysseus was too much Trojan Cycle in one place (although… I mean… Berserker in F/Z, maybe I could swing it), I thought of Atalanta, only to discover that she’s in Fate/Apocrypha too. I am hereby declaring that Fate/Apocrypha doesn’t count. It has two separate sets of Servants, that’s just greedy (and frankly if they’re allowed to summon William Shakespeare as Caster, all bets are off).
That leaves Berserker and Assassin. I have a long-standing love of the Fenian cycle, so despite Diarmuid being in F/Z, I’m quite tempted to have Fionn mac Cumhaill as Berserker. He did have a kind of battle-rage, as far as I remember. I’d really like to explore a Berserker who’s not always berserk: I think it would be pretty compelling to have a civilised, honourable guy who doesn’t actually want to go berserk, but has to in order to get his stats high enough to stand a chance, Banner/Hulk style. He’d probably be the first to die, though.
I’m completely stuck on historical/mythical Assassins. But in F/SN they use ‘Sasaki Kojiro’, who’s not really assassinesque at all, except in that he has an instant-kill special move, so hm. Do you think I can rewrite canon, have Kiritsugu make a Shirou-style contract before his death, and then summon Kiritsugu as Assassin? He could hide his identity, leading to a big mid-season heroic BSOD for Saber when she works out who he is. Or Maiya! Or, Hell, they could both be Assassin! Okay, now I’m just shipping and I’ll stop
