rpanons | Hear the voice of thanatos

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The more I play her, the more I realize how easy it is to completely fail at doing her justice. I've got an LP of the game bookmarked and I plan to do a review soon, but any advice anon has would be great.

1. Ilya looks like a child and acts like a child, and I guess you could make an argument that her physical stunting affected the development of her mind, but she does have some edge / cunning to her. Naivety isn't her thing. For most of the Grail War, she's the one running the show, strategy-wise; her family is nowhere to be seen. She takes enjoyment in childish things because she's been shut up in the von Einzbern castle all her life, and also childish things are probably most familiar to her, given the conditions under which she was raised. She's also (if I remember right) among the earliest possible bad ends for Shirou, and absolutely ruthless about the way she goes after Rin and Shirou in battle. When the mood strikes, Ilya can be deadly; it's up to you how much of her brutality is down to lack of feeling, since she's always been set up to die at a specific point herself, and how much is just a child's unawareness of the weight of death.

2. Remember that when Shirou offers Ilya a "command seal" to force him to do anything, after all, she spends it on getting him to take her shopping. This has a dual effect: it puts out the possibility that she could ever be tempted to use it against him on a strategic level, and it reveals, to an extent, just how disconnected Ilya is from the world. She's drawn to normality largely because she's so very aware that her time is limited and that she will never be normal -- but I imagine being raised as an Einzbern homunculus engenders at least a little detachment from worldly things, too. She knows she's not supposed to have normal human things, and to an extent seems to have resigned herself to not wanting them to start with. So if she gets them in a game, and treats ridiculously simple daily rituals / objects with a little wonder -- well, that's to be expected!

3. She does have issues with Kiritsugu which get varying degrees of resolution, depending on your route, and which are subsequently pushed onto Shirou. What isn't likely to happen is an unconditional return to childish love. She was told for years that her beloved father had abandoned her. That kind of betrayal doesn't die off overnight. Certainly she can be made to understand that this wasn't the case, but Ilya strikes me as just childish enough to hold something of a grudge, however unconscious.

4. ... personal opinion, but I don't buy the reading that her feelings for Shirou are particularly romantic, or that she'd 'compete' with the respective routes' heroines for Shirou's affections, no matter how the Tiger Dojos joke about her undeveloped route. She's a pretty lonely kid, and she fixates on Shirou for good reason, but we know that she's never developed secondary sexual characteristics and the closest she came to affection after Kiritsugu was Berserker and her homunculus maids. Romance doesn't seem like something to occur to her -- at least not, in any real sense.

Hear the voice of thanatos

Ilyasviel von Einzbern | Fate/Stay Night

Re: Ilyasviel von Einzbern | Fate/Stay Night