#Lostbelt 6 Spoilers

[mokadevs]

day 4: doomed by the narrative

[picaroroboto]

red text gang

[tsunesama]

"Well sure! We gave it all we had, didn't we?"

[bittertomato]

This parallel was not something I expected on my Lostbelt 6 bingo card

[onebitart]

your journey and mine

[aciakatura]

My British lostbelt doodles

Spoiler warning for all of LB6 below

[waitingforeresh]

*stumbles in covered in blood* I understand it now.

[backflipstowardstheroot]

[jaclynhyde]

i made this comment and then thought about it for two seconds

[oddeyes588]

So... Lostbelt 6 part 2 is out and it's great! I haven't finished it yet but uh... I gotta address something. And it's this scene.

Good scene, right? Beautiful CG, some insight into the way Castoria thinks... but there's something wrong with this scene.

It's translated wrong.

Now if you're like me and you've been keeping up with fan translations for FGO, you may have realized this already, but this translation fundamentally misses the entire point of the scene.

This is what Castoria is supposed to be saying:

I don't want to see her. I don't want to be shown her. She's too much. I don't want to believe it. I don't want to acknowledge it.

After all.

She has no equal. Takes no refuge. No one who understands her. None who can comfort her.

She receives no reward. No goals. No rest. She cannot afford failure, not even a single mistake.

Ah—from the bottom of my heart, I think: "no."

Just how cruel must it be for everyone to smile and acknowledge a king like that?

Do you see the difference? This is a defining scene concerning Castoria's character. Something that sets her apart from every other iteration of Artoria that we've known so far (barring the Servantverse ones). Castoria sees the way of life that her PHH self chose and is repulsed. She can't stand to think about it. At first it seems like she's just buckling under the weight of those expectations, but in reality, Castoria just can't stand to see her.

She can't stand to see this other version of herself willingly throw away her humanity for the sake of an ideal. To give up her own happiness, to give up any chance of ever being understood, all to become a perfect king who the people will love and praise, but never truly understand.

It is a lonely existence, and like a certain redhead in Fate/Stay Night, she can't accept it. Who could bear to live like that? Who would want to live like that? Castoria wants nothing more than to be happy. She wants to make friends her age, eat sweets with them, go shopping with them and walk down the street while holding their hands. She wants to LIVE, and the thought of giving all of that up for the sake of everybody but yourself...

Noble? Sure. But it's mostly just tragic.

That's what this scene is about. Establishing exactly how Castoria feels about her Proper Human History self. She doesn't admire her, if anything it HURTS to see her, to know what she went through, to know what she did.

So WHY was it translated like this?

I'm the only one of my kind. I have nowhere to run. No one understands me. Romance is out of the question.

There's no reward. No finish line. no rest. I can't make so much as a single mistake.

Ahh... So many things I'll never have.

How cruel would I have to be for everyone to accept a king like me with a smile?

Listen, Castoria thinking of her own struggles in parallel to Saber's is interesting, and it isn't NOT there... but that isn't the point of the scene, and foregrounding it like this is uh...

It sure is a decision, that's for sure.

It's not necessarily bad, but it just doesn't fit due to the obvious reason that this isn't what the scene is supposed to be. This scene isn't Castoria seeing a vision of Saber and going "wow, how am I going to live up to this?" as if Saber's story is aspirational.

No. It's a tragedy, and what Castoria is actually thinking is "that's cruel and fucked up"

Anyways I just felt like putting this out there... and before anybody jumps down my throat about how the fan-translation could've been wrong... I did bring this up with a friend who can read Japanese and went to read the node in Japanese. While you could argue that because Caster and Artoria are acknowledged to be different versions of the same person, that Caster is using "I" to refer to the other, but the last line is just outright wrong. The scene is fundamentally about the cruelty of everyone around Saber placing an impossible burden on her, and how Castoria feels seeing that.

[hoodiedoodles]

i wish Lostbelt 6 and Lostbelt 7 were swapped because it feels like LB7 was penultimate compared to 6.

Lostbelt 7 is very much "big bad guy blows shit up and it's a really hard fight to stop him" which parallels Babylonia's Tiamat in functionality, but it's also kind of a basic premise? Like obvs LB7's story isn't "basic", I hear it's quite complex and very good.

But LB6 is about narratives as a concept. LB6 is a story about stories-- it is a self-fullfilling entity. By existing it embodies it's own ideas.

Given how FGO is fundamentally about "the stories of humanity-- stories of love and hate" manifested both literally through Servants being heroic fables and conceptually through the various Singularities/Lostbelts being "forgotten stories of humanity", concluding with a "story about stories" feels very appropriate.

Who better to be the final boss than Oberon-Vortigern, the Devouring Worm, he who hates you for the stories you've destroyed?

Who better to fight than the Tam Lin of the Round Table, circling all the way back around to the narrative nature of Artoria from the original FSN?

Who better to develop as a character than Mash, someone who's stood with you all this time?

Obvs it wouldn't be that easy. Part of the reason LB6 is so good is because it separates itself almost completely from the rest of the Part 2 plotline. It might be a Lostbelt but all the Lostbelt concepts are absent. Even the Tree of Emptiness has been cut down by the time we get there. If LB6 was the finale they'd have to shoehorn a ton of Alien God fuckshittery in there to tie the story up, which would compromise the overall quality.

But still, Oberon is the final boss in my heart. My man is too well written to not be the last enemy at the gate.

[rustcopper]

have been trying a new mostly lineless art style and conjured whatever this is i made in june

[picaroroboto]

When Mash rejects Beryl after the fight in LB6, it's not because she doesn't love him or that she loves Guda more (though both could be said to be true). She doesn't even deny that what he feels might truly be "love" for him, but she turns it down because she can't understand his love.

This struck me because it's such a CCC-like moment - in CCC, Hakuno has to reject the Alter Egos' love for them because they love in a way that is harmful to themselves and others. It's one of the core thesis of the Fate series, but one I think doesn't see much discussion, this idea that if you don't express your love in a way that can be understood and accepted by others it will not be returned. We see it a lot in Extra and CCC both with the Alter Egos and with Nero's backstory, it's here in FGO with Mash and Beryl, and particularly with all of the Beasts and their inhuman ways of loving humanity.

[tsunesama]

doodle back when lb6.2 was out

[bittertomato]

I love my farming teams

Grey arrows = neutral

Blue arrows = positive, we can be broooooos

Red arrows = gonna fucking murder you in your sleep

Yellow arrow = *cries ugly tears*

Bonus:

[yourdicc]

bugboy appreciation textposts