Hi guys, sorry I haven’t had the time to do much editing lately, but here’s one that’s been on my mind after I re-watched Fate/Zero this week: one of the main antagonists of Fate/Zero and a major antagonist of all routes of Fate/Stay Night – Kirei Kotomine
What’s The Work[]
The Fate franchise is a long-running visual novel/light novel/manga/anime/mobile game/video game series with an assortment of stories generally focused around Holy Grail Wars, battles between mages and their “servants” (summoned heroes from the myths and legends of the world’s history) in order to obtain the omnipotent wish granting device known as the Holy Grail. Kirei mainly features in Fate/Zero (following the Fourth Holy Grail War) and Fate/Stay Night (the Fifth Holy Grail War)
Who is he/What did he do?[]
Kirei is a priest and former inquisitor of the Holy Church who joins the fourth Holy Grail War under orders from its overseer, his father Risei Kotomine, forming a secret alliance with the Tohsaka family to prevent the Holy Grail from falling into the wrong hands.
Prior to the war, he spent his whole life unable to feel any emotion at all, not even feeling love for his wife or daughter, or grieving his wife after her suicide. He threw himself at different fields of theology and magecraft, but gave up each time after being unable to find any passion at all.
Over the course of the war, he comes to understand, through his conversations with Gilgamesh that the one thing that can give him satisfaction is the despair of others. After Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald murders his father, Kirei is not sad but angry that he didn’t get to kill his father himself, despite the fact that Risei had been a loving and doting father towards Kirei throughout the whole series. Under Gilgamesh’s guidance, he cruelly murders his ally Kotomine, then frames Kariya Matou in front of Kotomine’s wife (whom Kariya was in love with), causing a situation that would force the mentally unstable Kariya to murder the woman he loved.
At the same time, he had Lancelot kidnap the ailing Irisviel von Einzbern (the wife of the series’s protagonist Kiritsugu Emiya and a homunculus created to hold the Holy Grail). Knowing that Irisviel’s transformation into the grail was inevitable, Kirei elects to fully cross the moral event horizon by strangling her to death, so as ensure that she did not change without suffering. Kirei would later battle with Emiya in the final stage of the Grail War, which would end with Emiya shooting Kirei in the heart, killing him.
However, when Emiya rejected the grail and the horrific amounts of death Angra Mainyu revealed would be given if his wish were to be granted, and had Emiya destroy the grail, the curses that poured out from the grail revived him. These curses revived him, and according to Kirei in the 2006 F/SN anime, his wish was enacted throughout the city, bringing wholesale destruction and death through a great fire that destroyed an entire city district. By this wish, the fourth Holy Grail War ends, with Kirei considering the entire thing a farce, but realising in this moment that for his wish to have brought forth such horrors, he must truly be rotten to his core. We also learn in the 2006 anime that, by manipulating the curses that flooded from the grail, he intentionally ensured that Emiya would slowly die painfully across the next few years.
Ten years later, Kirei has kept Gilgamesh alive by murdering orphans and feeding him with their life force. He is assigned to be the overseer of the Fifth Holy Grail War, but secretly fatally injures Bazett (the assigned minister to be the Master of Lancer) in order to become the secret Master of Lancer, while officially being impartial. In the Fate route, he attempts to use Illyasviel von Einzbern as the grail’s vessel, and use her to wreak destruction upon the world for his own amusement. In the Unlimited Blade Works route, he has Shinji Matou kidnap Rin Tohsaka, and after sadistically revealing to Rin that he was the one who murdered her father, he asks Lancer to cut Rin’s heart out so that he can turn her into the grail, and also orders Lancer to commit suicide. Lancer is able to refuse the command seals only so far as to kill Kotomine by stabbing him with his spear.
I don’t know much about the character’s actions in the Heaven’s Feel route as I haven’t played the original visual novel or watched the anime movies yet.
Mitigating Factors[]
I can’t think of any (though there might be some in the Heaven’s Feel route). He’s a heartless monster who kills for the satisfaction and entertainment of it.
Heinousness Standard[]
Okay, so, there’s no getting around this, the world of Fate/Zero is pretty darn bleak, and even in the franchise’s more fun and lighthearted iterations there are tons of horrifyingly dark characters. From Zouken Matou’s sadistic infestation of the bodies of his own family with flesh-eating (but power-amplifying) worms and abuse to his whole family, to Darnic Prestone Yggdmillenia’s demented betrayal of everything Lancer of Black stood for and his mass murder of mages, to Gilgamesh’s cold-blooded murder of Illya in Unlimited Blade Works and his plan to destroy the world simply out of disgust that the ordinary people were living like kings in the modern era… and that’s ignoring the crap ton of awful stuff in Fate/Grand Order. But I still believe that the sheer scale of Kirei’s crimes rival those that I’ve mentioned, if for nothing else than the selfishness of his motivation and his complete lack of empathy or remose across the series. At least Matou and Darnic had their families magecraft lineage in mind as some kind-of excuse. Kirei’s motives for attempted mass murder in the Fate route are simply “because it’s fun”.
Final Verdict[]
I leave this in your hands, but from what I’ve seen in the three anime series, and in his background via the Type-Moon wiki, I firmly believe that he should be listed as PE.