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  • Fate Prototype Silver Fragments

  • Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
 #165538  by Don
 Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:29 pm
After what I assume was a complete failure to attempt to sell Joan of Arc as their next leading character, Typemoon seems to decided that if you're going to make a franchise about legendary heroes maybe you should stick with King Arthur as a guy and have the original character being female, because there obviously aren't any super famous legendary female character at least not on the same tier as King Arthur and randomly changing legendary hero's gender might not have been the greatest idea. So now we have the prequel to Fate Prototype which has yet to be made in Fate Prototype Silver Fragments featuring King Arthur (left), Manaka Sajyou, and some poor shumck on the right (probably Ayaka, Manaka's sister, not like anyone cares):

Image

Now if you know anything about the Fate universe any girl who looks like Manaka is generally unfathomably evil, but she sets the standard for evil even by Typemoon standards. Although Fate game has moved out of the 18+ range, if this was still back in their 18+ days she'd totally fit the role of an the aggressor. It seems like Fate Stay Night when Gilgamesh ripped out Ilya's heart that may have been how they originally planned to killed off Manaka though while it was overkill on Ilya, in her case it's more like 'maybe this will keep her down for a few years before she resurrected herself'.

She also sets the standard for the most overpowered main character out there. If you think Kenshin or Train Heartnet is powerful, Manaka was born with All-Knowing and All-Powerful because she's One With the Source. While not obvious in this particular illustration, most of her shots involve her pulling her dress down so you can see the crest of the Seraphim engraved on her chest, which is also one of the most bizarre fan service as it's always drawn in a way to somehow not reveal anything except the crest (not that she's got much of a body anyway) and while the crest of the Seraphim seems to be something given to the strongest mage or something, it has no meaning to someone who is born all-powerful and it's literally shown off because it'd be a waste to not show off such a cool body marking. Her magic power reads as ??? as in 'incomprehensibly high' and she also summoned King Arthur for the Holy Grail War and she decided that rather than risking her Prince Charming in battle it'd be easier if she just go out and killed everyone instead even though originally the point of summoning powerful heroes is that they do the battle for you, not the other way around. After brutually killing everyone that got in the way, it finally dawned on King Arthur that he's on the wrong side of good so he backstabbed Manaka just before she can win and threw her down the abyss in the prequel. In the Fate Prototype that still has yet to be made, it's supposed to be what happens 8 years later and after all the randomly epic battle it'd turn out that this was just preparation to fight the ultimate evil that King Arthur threw down in the abyss 8 years ago, and I guess it was never finished because it's not even clear how they can possibly defeat her again. I think the explanation is that Manako is madly in love with King Arthur so it never occurred to her that she needs to check if King Arthur would stab her in the back and threw her down the abyss, but this probably won't work a second time.

Meanwhile, there's also another Fate short novel in the works where Manaka traveled to an alternate universe to participate in yet another Holy Grail War, probably just for the lolz. She's gotten a ton of attention in drawing from official Typemoon sources that would probably put her close to the level of the 3 original Typemoon trinity (Arc, Saber, and Rin). I don't like her as much because she's gratitously violent/murderous/overpowered to the point where it's not even remotely fair and she even has plot armor on top of a list of abilities that'd easily qualify her as the final boss. In Fate there is no one who is too cute to not to die horribly, but it seems awfully hard to get rid of Manaka and it's still an unresolved question in the work she is supposed to appear in.