Especially After The Events Of Olympus It Is Paramount That Fgo Players Understand That They Are Not

especially after the events of olympus it is paramount that fgo players understand that they are not above the narrative, and the story’s antagonists will never be as cartoonish and one-dimensional as they might think they are. their motivations, their thoughts, and their goals will always be more complex than the most surface level reading, and often you will not know what they are right away. passing judgment upon them is stupid, the decisions they’ve made come from far more gray and far less lenient circumstances. it’s always been that way. you are not immune to making those same choices. that’s the point. from the earliest days of the fate series, way back during the original vn era, one of the most compelling and prevalent ideas within the story was you might have something in common with your worst enemy. you might have also walked down their path had your roles been reversed. you cannot say you could have objectively done better or worse simply because you have the benefit of hindsight and because your experiences were different. shit, ubw smacks you on the head with this by making its main protagonist and main antagonist the same fucking person.

this is especially evident with the crypters. everyone wants to brand them as insecure, jealous, holier-than-thou mass murderers. this is disproven as early as lostbelt 1. kadoc didn’t take part in the bleaching of the earth’s surface. he says explicitly that when he woke up from cryostasis, the world had already been bleached. he wasn’t truly jealous of you, he was taking out the trauma of being denied a purpose and then dying out on someone like him. had guda been in his position, they would’ve reacted the same. he cools off in lostbelt 2, which is why he is kinder and happy to see your gaze has regained some measure of resolve.

ophelia, akuta, and pepe also reinforce this. none of them took part of the bleaching, and they killed no one. the bleaching was all the alien god. the lostbelts were all the work of the alien god. the only thing here that matters is that the alien god chose wodime as their emissary, and the other crypters were expendable. kirschtaria did not accept this. he would not abandon his friends, his comrades, his family. the choice was to cooperate with the alien god or die. could you have seriously, in all honesty, chosen differently? could you, knowing the entire earth was doomed by a product of its history, honestly have decided to keel over and taken your loved ones down with you? could you look me in the eye with zero bullshit and zero hesitation and tell me to my face you wouldn’t have chosen to cooperate if it meant you had an opportunity to turn things around so none of those billions of deaths were for nothing and the world wouldn’t belong to the being behind that destruction?

the lostbelt competition was a foregone conclusion. everyone knew kirschtaria was going to win, because the contest was designed that way. the alien god only intended for kirschtaria to win, and kirschtaria knew this. which is why he used his connection to the crypters as leverage. the other lostbelts were never meant to survive, they were kirschtaria’s way of keeping the crypters out of the alien god’s watch. that’s why kadoc, pepe, and beryl weren’t killed by kirschtaria when their lostbelts went SNAFU. it is an immensely cruel thing to do to all those worlds and all those lives, yet would you have done differently? if the lives of your loved ones were at stake, if you were being surveilled at all times with a gun to your head ready to pull the trigger at the slightest disobedience, would you have been so reckless as to put the people you cared about in harm’s way? because that’s what kirschtaria’s position was. the alien god was ready to crush kirschtaria’s heart if he broke their contract, and tipping off the crypters that he intended to do so would’ve gotten them all killed.

ultimately, that’s what drives the conflict between chaldea and the crypters. the shared need to survive pitting them against each other. there is no guarantee chaldea can restore proper human history, and wodime could not take that chance when he had a plan of his own and the clear methods with which to accomplish it. a new world, a new humanity, free to make new mistakes and reach new heights, free from the grip of the gods, free from the grip of the systemic forces that plagued not just the lostbelts but proper human history itself.

and i need to stress that the story isn’t trying to justify the deaths (if we can even call them that, in all likelihood) of 7 billion people by trying to say “maybe wodime was right!” what the story is saying is that, if there was a staggering loss of life, what alternative would humanity have to even have hope of moving forward? through lostbelts 1 - 4, you may be helping these worlds die peacefully, but you are still letting them die over the chance that you might restore proper human history. your success is an uncertain inkling, yet you have no choice but to move forward and accrue suffering to make sure NONE of those deaths are in vain. you are not judged for it, because the story knows there is no right or wrong answer to this kind of conflict, and the same principle applies to the crypters.

need i remind you that olympus ends with people being crushed by buildings, abandoning all hope, quivering and perishing in absolute terror as the only world they’ve ever known crumbles around them and the only beings that could save them were killed by your hand and by your order because there was no other way out. it is a gruesome death, an unsightly death. and it is brought about by your actions, and it is a terrible burden. and it is the exact same burden carried by kirschtaria, because he was a member of team A tasked with safeguarding humanity, and he failed. he does not claim that proper human history is full of too many mistakes to salvage because he is above them. he claims so because he also made mistakes in his own limited existence and doesn’t want that for whatever humanity can still exist in the world he means to make.

and you know what? kirschtaria even understands what you’re doing. he is the only one who can. he cannot agree but he understands. which is why he never denies you the opportunity to prove yourself. he opposes you, challenges you, dares you. but he never denies you. he says “you think you can bring back proper human history? prove it. prove you have the conviction necessary to bear it and beat me with it.” and then you do. because he wanted you to, because he believed in you from the very start that you could do it if you set your mind to it because kirschtaria wodime for better or worse believes in mankind, and you do too.

so, tl;dr you and the crypters are the same do not be so arrogant as to pretend you are better than the story and you are the perfect blameless unbiased judge of everything ever because you look really stupid doing that