(no subject)
When it comes down to it, my biggest problem with Return to the Spring (out of many) is that Shirou damages himself so badly that he forgets the most basic things, and then we're supposed to believe that, in a canon where it's said outright that the soul is the vessel of one's memories and experiences, an incomplete form of the sorcery having to do with the materialization of souls preserves him and restores him to 100% mental health??
I just can't buy it. Perfect restoration of his soul by an imperfect application of a sorcery designed to do something related but quite different is bunk. Erasing someone's mental issues that way is basically just handwaving them away (because let's face it, before all that he wasn't actually "getting better"; he just clumsily switched his ideal from "save everyone" to "save Sakura" and while holding close loved ones is good and all, unlike popular fandom opinion, this is really not a fucking improvement OR him becoming appreciably more selfish -- and if anything his switch isn't even that successful, since he's still majorly focused on saving Ilya and even to a lesser degree Rin).
That guy you see in that epilogue may walk and talk and at least on the surface act like Emiya Shirou, but it's not him. It's the scraps of the stubborn, self-destructive, idealistic idiot Emiya Shirou we came to know over the course of three routes shaped into a smoothed-over something vaguely resembling a well-adjusted person flavored like who he used to be. It's telling that the gap between the Grail War's end and the epilogue is biggest in this route out of all of them -- two whole years, which were surely long and arduous as Rin and Sakura basically had to rebuild him from the ground up.
And that's fucking tragic, imo.
I just can't buy it. Perfect restoration of his soul by an imperfect application of a sorcery designed to do something related but quite different is bunk. Erasing someone's mental issues that way is basically just handwaving them away (because let's face it, before all that he wasn't actually "getting better"; he just clumsily switched his ideal from "save everyone" to "save Sakura" and while holding close loved ones is good and all, unlike popular fandom opinion, this is really not a fucking improvement OR him becoming appreciably more selfish -- and if anything his switch isn't even that successful, since he's still majorly focused on saving Ilya and even to a lesser degree Rin).
That guy you see in that epilogue may walk and talk and at least on the surface act like Emiya Shirou, but it's not him. It's the scraps of the stubborn, self-destructive, idealistic idiot Emiya Shirou we came to know over the course of three routes shaped into a smoothed-over something vaguely resembling a well-adjusted person flavored like who he used to be. It's telling that the gap between the Grail War's end and the epilogue is biggest in this route out of all of them -- two whole years, which were surely long and arduous as Rin and Sakura basically had to rebuild him from the ground up.
And that's fucking tragic, imo.