shioran toushin said:
then tell me Mike, where is stated that Shirou didn't respect Rin's choice and was
quite clearly intent on killing Sakura and, had Rin not done so, he would have done it himself.
Where does it say that he
wasn't?
I guess it's a matter for interpretation, ultimately. However, the fact that he offered to kill her in Rin's place certainly
suggests that he was willing to and, further, it does not fit with Shirou's character
at all to be so passive about it. If he's genuinely decided that Sakura needs to die to fulfill his ideals, then he will ensure she does indeed die,
regardless of Rin's intentions. If he hasn't, then he will protect her with everything he has.
Honestly, I'd say that your argument actually makes him seem
worse. At least my belief has him reluctantly sacrificing an innocent to potentially protect more. Your version has him not even bothering to make a decision on the matter, and deferring it to Rin, whose decision (at least nominally) has absolutely
nothing to do with "protecting people".
as for the Kill one to save many also works within his ideal to be a superhero/ally of justice, save people, directly from the VN:
""
I know what's right.
The thing that keeps me alive.
I can't turn my back on the thing that has kept me alive.
I can't let my conviction waver.
For the sake of everyone who could not be saved, I can't let any more people share in their fate.
The man who turned away from the Einzberns for something he believed was right.
I've chosen the same path.
Ilya has been betrayed twice now.
Not choosing Sakura also means not choosing Ilya.
he choose his ideal over his own humanity.
and from Fate/Zero on Kiritsugu
The Ghoul Bees raided towards the passengers one by one, and as every single passenger had become a Ghoul, were the situation deemed too risky and Kiritsugu shot the plane down before it could land, sacrificing Natalia in the process. In their last conversation via radio, he admitted that she was like a mother to him. It was then that he became disillusioned with his ideal of becoming a 'hero of justice', as it was impossible to save one person without losing another. However, he continued to fight for this dream, to ensure that everything he had given up would not be in vain.
can you see the parallel situation?
Erm, Kiritsugu is not Shirou. He may well have turned into someone who took the "kill one to save many" approach, but that was
not his original ideal, and nor is it Shirou's. It may have been the path that Kiritsugu ended up following, but it's not the one he wanted
Shirou to follow and nor is it the ideal that Shirou ended up believing in.
The whole point of an "ideal" is that it is exactly that. An ideal situation that could never get any better. Killing one to save many can
never be an "ideal", because no-one would choose to take such an action if they felt there was a better choice. It's simply an
extremely cynical corruption of said ideal, and one which invariably causes the person adhering to it to break
horribly, and also causes immeasurable suffering to anyone who knows them.
hell i'll give you the EMIYA version of them following their ideal (and feeling betrayed by it, but they were still true to it)
In order to save a hundred people dying in front of him in a calamity, for the sake of saving the lives that his eyes could see and for the sake of saving even more lives as a Heroic Spirit after his death, he made a contract with the world and became a hero. Although he desperately fought to end a war, he was branded as the mastermind behind that war and executed. His belief that he would continue to save many people as a Heroic Spirit didnÆt come to pass, but rather he was made to clean up after human actions and forced to kill many more people to save humanity as a whole instead. After being shown human self-destruction and forced to oppose his own ideals countless times, he began to deny himself and his ideal.
How does that in
any way disagree with what I said?
Archer became a CG to
save a hundred people. If he was genuinely only interested in killing one to save many, then he'd have abandoned them and gone off to save a larger number elsewhere. Further, if you look at it objectively Archer
did save people as a CG, but the way that he did so goes completely against his true ideal, hence why he became disillusioned by the situation.
and for fuck sake Mike HF was obscenely selfish in chooosing Sakura, that made him fucking human, even if he knew that that choice was extremely risky (for Sakura's health and Zoken manipulation at first and latter because AM) and when push came to shove instead of anihilating Sakura, who was completely dominated by AM,á as it was the most eficient solution aviable and with less overall repercussions, he still choose to use the very High risk- High Reward method of using Rule Breaker, notá even knowing if would work right, not to mention his death duel with Kirei and his distraction/ambush ove Alt!Saber
Sorry, but refusing to murder an innocent person is
not "obscenely selfish", it's just plain
right. Sakura deserves a
chance to live, and HF Shirou is the only one who gave her that.
all in all HF Shirou is the most Selfish representation of his characters in all the Visual Novel, why? because he Risked everyone's Life on the remote chance that Rule Breaker worked on an Angra Manyu Fueled Sakura to prevent All Evils of The World from being born. instead of terminating her and AM using the Jeweled Sword.
but is fine if you can't accept that, just don't go force feeding us your PoV everytime we disagree on something and you feel that we are in the wrong and must be enlightened.
Note: i am not saying that Shiro was wrong in doing what he did (except in the bad endings when he ies, and no, MoS is not one of those endings) or that i would behave ifferently if i was in his place, i am just saying that HF Shirou was the most Selfish of the 4 routes:
Fate
UBW
MoS
HF
I never claimed that HF Shirou wasn't the "most selfish of the 4 routes", but that's not the same as calling him selfish, because Shirou is generally an
extremely unselfish person.
Even in HF, he still risks a
hell of a lot to protect people, and it's not
only Sakura. If he was genuinely being selfish, he'd have let the world burn, rather than spending every night hunting down the shadow and trying to prevent it killing despite having
no idea what is causing it and no way to actually
stop it.