#illya's father

[pippinoftheshire]

I still cannot believe how rich this AU has gotten. Truly, when I wrote that first little ficlet, I never dreamed that it would become this wonderful world.

Thank you again to @justabigoldnerd for leaping into my sandbox with your spade and helping me craft such glorious sandcastles💖

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Bright Lights

Everything's Got a Price

Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat

A Passion Crime With a Danger Sign

Those Who Cling to Death, Live

Religion Leaves a Bitter Taste (Prequel)

(Picrews edited to perfection by @justabigoldnerd)

[radarsteddybear]

I was tagged by @rose-of-pollux. Thank you!

Make a poll with five of your all-time favorite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favorite.

[too-young-to-fall-in-love]

idk yall this song is just so Illya-coded to me

[foreverknightalways]

Flashback: London, England, 1941 during World War II

Nicholas walks over to the closed curtain. He opens the curtain and peaks out. Janette screams out, Where is he? Janette and LaCroix have annoyed looks on their faces. Nicholas answers, He's gone. Then he closes the curtain.

[monstersqueen]

while this conversation is going on i kept thinking of what other masters there are

so illya, who they already know of

the caster/assassin/souichirou trio makes up for two masters and two servants

kirei is not actually lancer's master but bazette is hors-jeu

and the matou, who manage to be three masters for two servants but this route we'll only see shinji

...wait. at school they've got rin, shirou, souichirou, and shinji. that's four our seven masters. if you chose to go by rider's actual master, she's also at school

kirei's not actually a master of this war and assassin's master should be counted as souichirou's servant, so -

in short only illya doesn't go to school

rin : 'no of course there are no masters at school i would know'. rin, they all go to school

[simplymariac]

From Season 1, Episode 113 Father Figure - Flashback: Orphan Daniel during WWII, London, England, 1945. #ForeverKnight #Illya Woloshyn

Just having fun with these screenshots. Sony has all the rights to this screenshot set. 😉

[typellblog]

Illyasviel von Einzbern: The Hole at the Center of Fate/Stay Night

Emiya Shirou is the beating heart of Fate/Stay Night. Every character radiates outwards from Shirou, shapes and is shaped by him. He fights against foils like Archer and Kirei while growing alongside the three main heroines in each route.

There's really only one character who precedes Shirou in influence, who shapes him near-completely but cannot himself be shaped.

Emiya Kiritsugu is already dead, after all.

It's his legacy that drives the novel - but something oft-undiscussed is that Shirou only has half of it. He inherits his father’s justice, and the one that inherits his ruthlessness is Illya. Thus, Illya’s relationship to Shirou is dictated from the start.

She is everything his father left behind, the first gatekeeper of the moonlit world of death and magecraft that Shirou now finds himself in. In this role she transcends routes, appearing at the end of the third day to deliver a near-lethal attack just as the story branches off.

She seems intent to deliver Kiritsugu’s baggage to Shirou, to make him reckon with the past that he himself never experienced; the truth that a hero can only help those he sides with while many others are left alone in the cold.

In this way her very existence is a far more fundamental challenge to Shirou’s ideals than that of any other character - and yet this challenge is met only indirectly. Much of the information regarding her true identity and relationship to Shirou is elided until the end of HF.

She functions similarly to Sakura, a character who totally changes the reader’s perception of the first two routes in retrospect. The reveals about Illya force us to reevaluate how positive her ending in the Fate route really is.

In the narrative of Heaven’s Feel, both Illya and Sakura are considered ‘doomed’ - able to be saved only by Shirou sacrificing his own life to Archer’s arm.

It’s the crux of their characterisation, in the same way that Saber’s pursuit of the Holy Grail leads her into timeless and uncountable doomed battles. In a route based around that character, you would expect fixing it to be the main thrust of the plot.

And so just as the Fate route is focused on Shirou clashing with Saber over her lack of regard for her safety, and Heaven’s Feel is focused on accepting even the ‘impure’ parts of Sakura, there is no route focused on showing Illya that she needn't give up on having a normal life.

Instead all of her scenes in Heaven’s Feel are about accepting that she cannot have one.

This is the hole in the center of FSN that I’m talking about. Its absence is felt keenly throughout the novel, because Illya has another role besides a specter of Shirou's past. She embodies the prize and object of the Holy Grail War itself - the very same wish-granting device.

Many of the characters in this story are not fighting for the Grail specifically, but nonetheless their strong personalities and desires cause them to clash with one another, in a process Kirei sees as comparable to everyday life.

Their wishes, both in the form of the dead’s regrets and victor’s will, enter the neutral, empty Grail in order to produce a miracle. The only one not allowed a will of their own is the vessel of the Grail, who, in absorbing these desires, must completely erase their humanity.

Illya is not intended to have a reason to pursue the Grail, nor any life beyond obtaining it. The war is premised on the sacrifice of the Servants, yes, but nonetheless they enter as contestants. Illya, like Justeaze before her, enters the ritual only as a sacrifice.

And yet an outside element is introduced. Illya being part-human, the product of an actual family rather than just a clone allows for her to have personal motivations. She holds on to her resentment of Kiritsugu, despite knowing that it’s pointless, because it’s all she has left.

A parallel can be made to the Grail itself. Supposedly a pure wish-granting device, it becomes corrupted through the influence of Angra Mainyu, one small, perverse wish colouring the whole thing black.

The desired salvation of the Einzberns, their thousand-year project relies on being able to reproduce the miracle, to understand every component part of their attempts in order to draw ever closer to the Third Magic, but Illya is a random factor, born to a human parent.

She’s also their greatest creation since Justeaze. Miracles, after all, exist because they are not understood.

The corruption of the Grail with the darkest desires of the world is just the inevitable result of any wish - the price of becoming a human instead of existing as a machine. Live long enough and anyone would turn into Zouken, higher goals suborned by a base desire to escape pain.

Like Illya the Grail is a failed project, a tool that can only provide salvation of a limited nature & only fulfill its purpose incompletely, proof positive that true perfection does not exist in the world of Fate/Stay Night.

In Illya’s case the bug in her programming comes fundamentally from a desire for family, for someone to be close to her. Despite her dysfunctional initial approaches she’s perfectly capable of living normally alongside Shirou.

The issue, then, is the Grail War itself.

Her two sides, two different origins, come into conflict here, and her role as the Holy Grail consistently wins. Not because she desires it in any real sense, but because she doesn’t believe that she can do anything else.

Consider how the Fate route ends with Saber and Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting both the negative and positive aspects of the past without dwelling on that which cannot be changed.

Consider how Illya in the Fate route doesn’t say a single thing about her condition, refuses to burden others with that knowledge, accepting the fact of her death and instead choosing to live in the moment.

Consider how the Unlimited Blade Works route is about Shirou trying to live without regrets, accepting that he will not always succeed, that his self-sacrificing nature will hurt him, but nonetheless his pursuit of that goal is worthwhile.

Consider how Illya’s death is used to illustrate this, how she cannot be saved regardless of whether Shirou makes the choice to intervene or not, how his sorrow is used as proof of his brokenness and his ability to move forward regardless is used as proof of his strength.

Consider why the Heaven's Feel route is named after the ritual that materializes the soul, why this is identified with salvation and rebirth by the Einzberns. I would argue that the Third Magic is a metaphor for the process Shirou undergoes throughout the novel.

He evolves from a machine into a human, gaining his own desires and the will to live. And just as Heaven’s Feel, the ritual, requires a sacrifice: Justeaze’s blood forms the foundation, so too does Heaven’s Feel, the route: Illya spends her own life to fully realize Shirou’s.

In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past his belief that his life is worth less than others. He wants to live, wants to let Illya save him, wants to let her sacrifice herself for him. In moving past Kiritsugu’s legacy, he moves past Illya.

I don’t blame him. I just want to emphasize how significant to this novel the existence of suffering is, how important the figure of someone who cannot be saved, how necessary a single person’s sacrifice. And how this falls on Illya in every route.

In the latter parts of the Fate route she quickly disappears from story relevance. Her functions as a Grail offer a convenient excuse to have her sleeping for much of the day, as it does for Kirei’s kidnapping of her, stringing her up as a sacrifice to open the gate.

In UBW we have Gilgamesh brutally ripping out her heart. He values her purely for her core, which holds the Grail, tossing aside the rest of her body.

If her role as the Grail is what drives her doom, though, she is at least partially able to overcome this at the end of Heaven’s Feel.

For a brief moment, Illya escapes the bonds of fate by uniting her deeply personal wish with the impersonal functions of the Grail.

She also dies. She fucking dies, okay? I’m so tired of talking about this as though it’s supposed to be a good thing, as though we’re just supposed to accept it as the best possible option.

It works precisely because we know there is another, because we know for a fucking fact that an Illya route could have existed, that her salvation is possible not just from a meta perspective but directly implied in-universe.

Illya’s power is to grant wishes, but she is incapable of giving voice to her own. She needs someone there by her side to tell her that it’s okay to want to live, and yet- Shirou is so fucking broken that he needs her to do that for him instead.

Illya could have lived, but she doesn’t, and in not doing so she carries half the weight of this story’s tragedy on her back.

In a way this is an excuse for the lack of an Illya route. I really do think its blatant absence adds something to Fate/Stay Night, really sells the tragedy of HF, becomes even more beautiful precisely because of its unattainability.

It’s a comment on how the artistic process, materializing your soul on paper if you will, is an inherently restrictive one, rife with failure and things left on the chopping board.

But it does not, not for a second, mean that we should accept the lack of an Illya route. It doesn’t mean the desire for it is a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that its addition would make Fate/Stay Night worse.

It would, however, become a different game at that point, and here I want to pay respect to the one that has lived alongside me for twenty years.

Thanks for reading, and happy anniversary to my favourite story of all time.

[iloveyoutotype-moonandback]

The way Nasu handles magic and Mage society generally is fascinating to me. Mage families basically being aristocrats whose members almost seem to view everything in the abstract and cause immense suffering through all of their experiments and attempts to gain more power or to extend their lives. Viewing their children as pawns to continue the family lineage or even experiment with. The way we see the consequences of this "mage culture" through the characters of Rin, Sakura, and Illya. Rin attempting to maintain this cold and calculating mindset because that's what's expected of her and her father left behind this weighty legacy that she feels she must uphold. Sakura suffering abuse from Zouken who views her as merely a vessel for the grail and from her extremely jealous brother. The fact that Sakura was only adopted by the Matous because of their father, who was thinking mostly of lineages and family alliances, and either didn't realize or simply didn't care about the hell he was sending his little daughter into. The fact that this act drove a giant wedge in the relationship between Rin and Sakura, one which they were only able to mend at the end of Heaven's Feel. Meanwhile you have Illya being experimented with and turned into a vessel for the grail much like Sakura was. And she, as a homunculus, is basically just set up to have ultra powerful magic circuits to help them win the war but ultimately Illya herself probably wouldn't have lived very long even if she had survived the war since homunculi have short life spans. Not to mention she was basically groomed to hate her own family.

Fate/Zero did some interesting stuff with this concept too. Like we see more of Tokiomi and the shit the Einzburns got up to in the previous war. Kariya especially was always interesting to me, because you have this guy who hated mages and wanted to leave it behind. And he did for a time, but joined the war anyway for the sake of Sakura and Rin; two children who aren't even his own, but he at least has an idea of what awaits Sakura if he doesn't do something. Admittedly there's some weird friendzone shit he has with Tokiomi's wife, but I do think his desire to save this child from Zouken was genuine. And even for people outside these families, Waver Velvet has to deal with classism since he's not part of an established family.

There's just this interesting element of like, class, elitism and patriarchy. Mages are really similar to the old nobility in many ways, except even more exaggerated in their vanity and lack of empathy. It's like Nasu added a twist to the classic fantasy image of a wizard in his tower. The mages are in an ivory tower and don't understand the suffering caused by their little magic experiments, or if they do understand, they simply don't care. Just a complete disconnect.

[scotianostra]

The Scottish actor David McCallum was born on 19th September 1933.

Born as David Keith McCallum, Jr in Maryhill, Glasgow, the second of two sons of Dorothy Dorman, a cellist, and orchestral violinist David McCallum Sr. When he was three, his family moved to London for his father to play as concertmaster in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Early in the Second World War, he was evacuated back to Scotland, where he lived with his mother at Gartocharn by Loch Lomond.

McCallum won a scholarship to University College School, a boys’ independent school in Hampstead, London, where, encouraged by his parents to prepare for a career in music, he played the oboe.In 1946 he began doing boy voices for the BBC radio repertory company. Also involved in local amateur drama, at age 17, he appeared as Oberon in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Play and Pageant Union. He left school at age 18 and was conscripted, joining the 3rd Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, which was seconded to the Royal West African Frontier Force.In March 1954 he was promoted to Lieutenant. After leaving the army he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (also in London), where Joan Collins was a classmate.

David McCallum’s acting career has spanned six decades; however, these days he is best known for his starring role on the police procedural NCIS as medical examiner as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard. I first really remember McCallum for his role in another US show, The Invisible Man which ran for 13 episodes in the 70’s. McCallum by then was a veteran of many TV and Film roles, starting in the 50’s including Our Mutual Friend and The Eustace Diamonds, in the 60’s he was in several ITV Playhouse shows before moving across the Atlantic to take roles in The Outer Limits and his big break as Illya Kuryakin in several incantations of The Man from Uncle.

His most notable films were The Greatest Story Ever Told as Judas Iscariot and of course Ashley-Pitt ‘Dispersal’ in The Great Escape.

As well as the aforementioned Invisible Man in the 70’s he took time to pop back over to our shores to star in two quality series, as Flt. Lt. Simon Carter in Colditz and Alan Breck Stewart in an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Kidnapped.

The 80’s saw him team up with the lovely Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel and several guest roles in the likes of The A Team, Hart to Hart and Murder, She Wrote as well as a one off reprise of Illya in the TV movie The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair.

The 90’s saw David in Cluedo and Trainer on our TV screens over here and American science-fiction series VR-5 in the states..

During the last 20 years or so he has been in the kids TV show, Ben 10: Omniverse as the voice of Professor Paradox and of course Donald Horatio “Ducky” Mallard in a remarkable  436 episodes of the popular NCIS.

David has been married twice. He married his first wife Jill Ireland in 1957. They met on the set of the movie Hell Drivers. Together, they had two sons and a daughter, Paul, Jason and Valentine, with Jason being the only one who was adopted. In 1963, David introduced Jill to his co-star on The Great Escape, Charles Bronson, and she left David and married Charles in 1968. In 1967,

David McCallum passed away aged 90 on September 23rd last year, he is survived by his wife of 56 years, Katherine McCallum, his sons Paul McCallum, Valentine McCallum and Peter McCallum, his daughter Sophie McCallum and his eight grandchildren. NCIS paid tribute to him in an episode called The Stories We Leave Behind when the tagents find comfort in working on one of his unfinished cases. The episode features clips from several old shows.

[justabigoldnerd]

That one Soulmate AU where the first words your soul mate says to you are written on your arm:

Gaby is fucking PISSED when hers appears on her eighteenth birthday. "My woman would never wear anything like that."???? She would never let a man speak to her like that, the Universe is crazy if it thinks she's gonna like this asshole. She spends the next few years fuming and waiting for the day she can tell her "soulmate" to fuck right off.

Solo is just downright confused when his appears. "Obviously I was briefed about you." What does that even MEAN?? What is there to brief?? He's freshly enlisted and just arrived in West Germany two years ago, what the fuck?? Then he starts his art theft career, gets caught and blackmailed by the CIA, and now the words make a little more sense, but now he greets every potential partner or even kidnapper with sharp ears.

Illya wakes up on his eighteenth birthday expecting to see nothing on his arm. What he gets is something he's only ever heard of in stories. There is a sentence on each arm. But when he reads them, he understands. They're not simple greetings or kind words. They're negative. Accusatory, even. They're the kind of things people say to him anyway. "What's he doing here?" on one arm and "I'm sure….you understand humiliation, better than most." on the other. He supposes that if there really are people out there that are meant to be his "soulmates", he can't blame them for any judgment they would undoubtedly have regarding his father.

[wesley-apologist]

Someone preferably napoleon or gaby needs to take illya shopping. He clearly cares and knows a lot about fashion as proven by his arguing with napoleon in the clothing store. He probably gets to dress up occasionally for missions but when was the last time he got to pick out something just for himself just because he liked it. Has he ever gotten a chance to by one of the fancy designer dresses he was picking out for gaby for his mom. He probably remembers her wearing something similar when he was a young child. I wonder how he even learned all this fashion knowledge. Did his mom teach him? Did he read western capitalist fashion magazines? Napoleon wears fancy suit after fancy suit is Illya ever jealous. Does righteous anger over the capitalist extravagance help him hide from his jealousy. Napoleon needs to take him to all his fancy tailors (because Illya would definitely need a custom suit with his size and proportions, nothing off the rack is fitting him that well) would the expensive fabrics remind him of his fathers friends that turned on him? When was the last time he had clothing tailored to him, was it before his father was taken, would it bring back memories? Would Illya protest anything being bought for him, it being too much to have such a kind gift for no other purpose than making him happy?

[pippinoftheshire]

Call this a teaser for the full fic that's on it's way, @ikeepwatchinghelicopters 💖

--

He’s not treated like Illya Kuryakin anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time. He is a weapon and a soldier, nothing more. Not even an alien, in truth. An asset. A pawn on a chessboard. The wound is too old to sting. “What do you want me to do?” Because Oleg never does anything without a plan. Never says anything without meaning behind it. The older man sits up, eyes shrewd. “I want to announce you to the world.” Illya quells the rising nausea; remembers the thin ice they are skating on. Remembers the war they are locked in, have been locked in since 1946. A Cold War. The layer of frost on a lake, deceptive, rotting. What can he do but nod? What can he do but stand, wait for Oleg to dismiss him, and say, “Yes, sir.”

--

He still misses his father, the only one who had tried his best to understand. Who had loved him anyway, more than even his own life. When he closes his eyes, Napoleon can still see his body stretched out on the gravel, littered with dust and debris. Remembers his father telling him to stay, as the building fell around him. To keep his secret. He recalls the day he found the ship, buried in the ice, discovered who he really was. What he really was. He had always known he that he didn’t come from this galaxy, just not which one he did. Krypton. Destroyed by her own failing core, taking her smaller sister planet, Arcania, with her. He remembers the look of sadness in his mother’s eyes when he had touched down in the front garden that night, finally feeling like he belonged in that sleek white suit. Remembers the freedom of the wind ripping through his curls. His laugh getting torn away by the chilled air. And all she had had to say, face bleak, was, I don’t even recognize you. He hasn’t been back to see her for years... Besides, he has Gaby now.

💗

[heytheredeann]

Today on Very Serious Spy Scenarios, imagine Illya and Napoleon at the beginning of their partnership, with Napoleon happily pushing all of Illya's buttons every five seconds to try and see what will get him punched and what not. Illya is endlessly frustrated with him, especially because he CANNOT get a rise out of him, no matter how hard he tries.

And then one day, when they are arguing, again, Illya is getting desperate to Win This and so this conversation ensues:

Illya: "What's your problem, your parents never hugged you as a child?"

Napoleon, completely unfazed: "Actually no, my father barely spoke to me and my mother lowkey disliked me, so."

Illya:

Napoleon:

Illya:

Napoleon: "What?"

Illya: *getting teary-eyed*

Napoleon, now a little scared: "Peril?"

Illya: *bear hug attack*

[foreverknightalways]

Flashback: London, England, 1941 during World War II

LaCroix says, I say we should roast him over a open fire. Janette asks, Hmm, How does that sound, dear boy? The boy answers, Me name's Daniel. What's yours? Princess something?

[illbewritinghere]

Thoughts on Indika

I love media with themes of nuns, I remember watching Sister Death with my wife and enjoying it. I have to say I picked up Indika just by looking at the cover art, I had no prior knowledge about the game. Looking at the trailer I assumed it to a Monty Python-esque escapades of a Nun. It is, but it is so much more than that.

The Story (spoilers)

The story takes place in 19th to early 20th century Russia and is about a girl named Indika. She lived with her father who ran a bike shop. When she was 15 she met a gypsy boy, they became friends and soon they fell in love. The boy asked Indika to run away with her to the city where they can start a new life. Indika reluctantly agreed and the boy convinced her to let him steal money from her father's store. However, the boy gets caught stealing by the father. He drags him out of the store in front of Indika and asks her if she knows the boy. Indika was just a child and seemed to be scared of her burly and mean looking father, out of fright she said she didn't know him and her father shot and killed the boy right infrot of Indika.

This snapped something in her. Watching the love of her life killed in front of her own eyes by her father. She felt tremendous guilt, maybe if she had said she knows the boy her father would not have killed the boy. She did not want to accept her fault and blamed it on the devil. Ever since then, she started to hear the devil in her head, and blamed every bad thing she did on the devil. Her father after realizing this, sent her to a Nunnery to become a nun.

Fast forward maybe ten years later, the game starts with Indika performing the everyday chores of a Nun. She is disliked among her peers even though she is very polite to everyone. Probably because the orthodox people she is around do not like the fact that she has the devil residing inside her head.

One day she was tasked with delivering a letter for which she had to travel to another town. Things take turn for the worse however when Indika was cornered by a person who tried to rape her. Fortunately she was saved by an escaped convict, Illya. She felt indebted and helped Illya escape the authorities.

On her journey, she finds out Illya has a decomposing arm which he refuses to amputate. Illya is a religious man and he believes that in a farway land there is a rumor of something called the Kudets which performs miracles in front of your very own eyes. Indika decided to follow him to find the Kudets because she believes that it could also help her rid the devil from inside her.

Through out her journey, we get to see the human side of Indika, she seems to question her faith while still blindly following it, she shows sexual attraction towards Illya but still abstaining from it. Every time she would think of questioning her faith, we'll hear the devil talking and Indika would shut the voice up by conforming to her beliefs.

Things took an unfortunate turn however when the decomposing arm of Illya got progressively worse and Indika had to cut it off to save him. Once Illya realized that Indika cut his arm off, he was furious and decided to go find the Kudets alone. He believed he was special and the Kudets would allow God to perform a miracle and heal his arm. Because of this he thought Indika was jealous and did not want him to witness the miracle, even though she only tried to save his life.

They eventually reunited and finally managed to find the Kudets. It was a jeweled crown in a cathedral. The priest would not let them near it and in a scuffle he was shot and killed by one of his own guards. Illya ran away with the Kudets and Indika was captured by one of the guards.

She was taken to the gallows where was going to hanged for the murder of a priest. In an effort to save herself she decided to pay the jailer for her release with a sexual favor. When she was getting raped she spoke to the devil in her head who made her realize that god and the devil are only with her own mind, one cannot exist without the other. She managed to trap the jailer by throwing a cupboard on top of him and escape.

In the finale she reunites with Illya who seemed to have been wandering the streets as a lost cause. He sold the Kudets to a pawn shop as it did not perform a miracle. Indika visited the pawn shop and prayed to the Kudets herself in a effort to rid her of the devil but by that time she had already realized that it was all in her head. At the end when she looked at the mirror, she did not see the devil, rather she saw her own reflection.

Thoughts

Indika tells the story a young girl who did not have a direction in life. Just like every child she was not religious but was made to be one. She suffered from schizophrenia but people made her believe it was the devil whispering to her. Throughout her journey there were many events which made her question her faith but she never strayed from her path as she wanted to be a good nun. In the finale, when she stops seeing herself as the devil in her own reflection, the game leaves it for the player to determine if the Kudets actually rid her of the devil, or she realized that it's all a charade and stopped having faith.

[simplymariac]

From Season 1, Episode 113 Father Figure - Flashback: Orphan Daniel during WWII, London, England, 1945. #ForeverKnight #Illya Woloshyn

Just having fun with these screenshots. Sony has all the rights to this screenshot set. 😉