Impression
They’re here! Answers at last! I admit, I feel like I’m still slightly confused over several points, but with what’s been revealed this week, my own inferences and what I know of the Fate series as a whole (or at least, what I think I know), most of the puzzle pieces should be present. The thing that surprised me the most this episode was the casual revelation that Kiritsugu and Irisviel had pretty much instigated everything – and up until this point, I was blissfully unaware they were even involved in this at all! Naturally, I should have known – in this spin-off, the Tohsaka family exists, Clock Tower exists, a Grail vessel exists and of course, Zelretch exists. So it shouldn’t be all too shocking that the original Einzbern family exists, as does a Holy Grail War – at least, until Kerry and Iri did away with it. That’s the big change here – if they’re involved with the Holy Grail, presumably they had something to do with the Class Cards as well, although it’s beyond me why they’d be corrupted. Iri’s actually seeming quite suspicious to me in that regard – I know she was already hiding a lot, but I was a bit unsettled by how she maintained a perfectly composed look all throughout the episode. That was it – there was no sympathy or apology from Iri to Kuro at all; she made no attempt to deny or explain why she did what she did. I don’t know, it struck me as being a bit odd that she was so dispassionate. She’s supposed to be their mother, after all.
So from what I’ve gathered, Kuro is in fact Ilya – it’s just that she happens to be the Ilya from before Kerry and Iri decided to let her live as a normal girl. That’s the difference between this and what happened in Fate/stay – in that, with Kerry and Iri gone, Acht made Ilya into the perfect Holy Grail, ready for an Einzbern victory in the 5th Heaven’s Feel. Instead of Kuro getting to live as a normal girl though, her very existence was sealed away alongside the memories held by “Ilya”. And I presume she was forced to watch as Ilya effortlessly got the normal life she so wanted. Kuro isn’t Archer, despite some physical resemblances – it’s more like she installed him much like Miyu did Saber. And of course she can think, because unlike the corrupted Heroic Spirits, she’s supposed to be human in the first place. Although it was interesting to find out that it was Kuro who’s performed all the instances of Archer-style combat we’ve seen so far in the show! At this point, I’d actually feel pretty bad calling her the “other Ilya” or the “fake Ilya”, because if anything, she was the real Ilya to begin with – and as she’s said before, the Ilya we know is the actual fake. In the end though, as our friend Kaiki Deishuu once said, the fake can sometimes be more real than the real itself – and if Ilya is what Kuro’s always wanted to be, who’s to say she’s not “real”?
Ironically enough, now that we know what Kuro was, a new question has popped up as to what she currently is. I’d genuinely believed she’d disappear after exhausting her mana reserves, and I have a feeling she’s no longer the sort of entity she was any more. It almost looks like the Holy Grail granted its own wish… but that can’t possibly be it, right? 😀 At any rate, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that mana surge attracted certain individuals who will make their way over to cause trouble – in fact, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. You know, like Bazett.
It’s not that Iris didn’t care about Kuro, I don’t think, it’s that she felt there was nothing she could say to her. There was no way she could apologize for what she had done. Even though it had never been meant to happen that way, Kuro’s life, her identity, her very NAME was taken away and given to another girl so that that girl could live an ordinary life. I am sure Iris didn’t know, but what comfort is that after ten years, now that everything is done, and Kuro can’t even call herself by the name she was born with? What could Iris say to make it better?
“It almost looks like the Holy Grail granted its own wish… but that can’t possibly be it, right?”
Well… is there a particular reason why it couldn’t? :p
The Grail, as always, is imperfect. It doesn’t create true miracles, it instead makes use of the tools on hand to make a semblence of the wish coming true (which is the way it has always ended up working, if you remember the Fate franchise). It stabilized Kuro’s to prevent the immediate collapse, but she is still a mana-based creature. As long as she continues to receive a supply of it from someone, she will continue to live (thus granting the wish). Fortunately, she happens to have a “sister” on hand who seems to not want to let her die…
That sort of thing reeks of a self-awareness and autonomy I didn’t think this Grail would have. I thought it was just a clump of energy, and that Kuro was the container – I guess I see the Grail and Kuro as two separate entities. As for the wish itself, I hope there’s no Angra Mainyu in this spin-off. Basically, I hope it turns out to be a happy wish.
Illya/Kuro IS the lesser Grail. She is its awareness, and her subconscious is likely what directs it. However, even in FSN the Grail had enough awareness to give suggestions and show possibilities of granted wishes (“hey, you want world peace? I think you should do it by KILLING EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, BWHAHAHAHAHA!”)
And no, so far as we’ve been able to tell, the Einzbern family completely severed connections with the other mage families a long time in the past. As a result they never had the whole working together to create the Holy Grail thing going on, and the successive wars that resulted in the original mess. The Einzberns instead tried to do it alone, and Iris and Kiritsugu screwed everything up by choosing to save their daughter rather than go along with everything.
The author has made some comments elsewhere discussing details of when and where history diverged in Prisma Illya compared to FSN, but I only heard about them secondhand, and I can’t remember the specifics.