On August the 17th 2020, I watched an animation movie called “Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel –III. spring song”. It is a fantasy story about harsh competition to obtain the ‘fake’ holy grail, which grants any desire of someone who finally survived the battle. Competitors callsummon “servants” who are emerged souls of heroes/heroines of any age. It is the last part of the “Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel” trilogy, and the third route animated from an (adult) game “Fate/stay night”. An introduction for the trilogy is previously described: https://shunadachi.hatenablog.com/entry/2017/10/20/205204.
The story is full of seemingly childish desires for sin, indulgence, fornication, dislike, injustice, disrespect and stubbornness. The origin of the great holy grail is a social ostracism; i.e. all the evils were attributed to one mediocre guy and only to exile him was misbelieved to be sufficient to be the place in peace. Such a foolish superstition resulted in a foolish outcome as expected. A desire to be a place peace, sacred would be distorted to form outcomes of sin, indulgence, fornication, dislike, injustice, when the people stubbornly disrespect others. Respect should be encouraged whoever is in a particular society, despite losing ideal in some cases.
In contrast to this animation movie, a poem “The Faerie Queene”, written by Edmund Spenser, describes virtues of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy, together with insubstantiality. These virtues are required for achieving a great goal such as England and Ireland Queen Elizabeth I (the model of The Faerie Queene) had achieved. In these days, there are of course full of friendships. However, besides holiness, temperance would convert to indulgence, as in all the chit-chat in SNS. Chastity and courtesy are often forgotten. Stubbornness keeps the people away from all the virtues. These would lead to injustice with no self-awareness. “Fate/stay night: HF” depicts the aspects from viewpoints of common people in contemporary age, while “The Faerie Queene” depicts them from broader viewpoints of early modern age. If you understand the themes of “Fate/stay night: HF” well, you could find more in “The Faerie Queene”. Coming back to “Fate/stay night: HF” again, you may find modernizations of the theme.
There is also a funny scene of a hand-to-hand battle between Shiro and Kirei, though they are both magicians.
“The Faerie Queene” text: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/fqintro.html.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene.
