This week sees the release of a new Steam edition of Type-Moon and Kinoko Nasu's dark fantasy visual novel and dating sim Fate Stay/Night. I randomly watched one of Stay/Night's many anime spin-offs, Fate Zero, during the pandemic lockdowns. It triggered a short-lived obsession with the Fate series - I even dipped a toe in the long-lived mobile gacha game Fate/Grand Order.
As such, I think I'm the nearest thing RPS has to a Fate "expert". Join me for a brief and sporadically informed tour of a universe that has Shaped The Culture like few others. Stay/Night is the tale of Shirou Emiya, a schoolboy with the obligatory buried hero complex who gets himself embroiled in a war between mages for the Holy Grail.
The mages do battle by summoning legendary heroes to duel on their behalf. Shirou somehow manages to pair off with one of the elites - Saber, aka Artoria Pendragon, a blonde-bobbed, gender-flipped King Arthur. Saber is absolutely ubiquitous within the Fate universe and beyond.
Even if you haven't watched, played or read anything Fate-related, you will likely have come across a homage to the character, aka "saberface", in some other anime or manga. You will also likely have encountered a reference to Shirou's schoolfriend Rin Tohsaka, often referred to as the original twin-tail tsundere (a tsundere is a character, generally a girl, who shows affection towards the main character by being abrasive and standoffish). If Saber is the heart of the series, Fate doesn't want for alte.