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This Week in Anime
What the Hell is Going on in F/GO Solomon?

by Steve Jones & Jean-Karlo Lemus,

Newly streaming on Crunchyroll, the gacha game uninitiated could find themselves struggling in the deep end with this movie. Steve and Jean-Karlo try to iron out the wrinkles and explain exactly what went down in Fate/Grand Order Final Singularity - Grand Temple of Time: Solomon.

This movie is streaming on Crunchyroll

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Steve
Well, Jean-Karlo, once again the red thread of Fate has ensnared “This Week In Anime,” and it looks like it won't let us go unless we spend the rest of the column talking about historical figures and how hot they would be if they were reincarnated as magical anime babes.

Thankfully, this isn't my first F/GO rodeo.
Jean-Karlo
Fantastic. 10/10 Nero-face, would umu again. Violent passion for Nero Claudius Caesar aside (ps: call me), I've been on the sidelines for all things Type-MOON for a long time. I originally saw the Lunar Legend Tsukihime anime in Spanish during my formative years and have since pledged my life to the vampiress in a bobbed haircut that doesn't know what money is, but Fate: Whatever was always a well that was too deep for me to dive into. I just appreciated all the silly R63 reimaginings of famed historical figures from afar. I know enough to recognize a ton of these women (and the handful of mandatory 3-star dudes). I know enough to enjoy the concept of Atilla the Hun being an alien weapon that doesn't know what math is and that Nero is an airhead because her mom kept making her drink out of a silver cup. Please don't ask me what a Saint Quartz is; I'm too scared to ask.

Also, because friends don't let friends thirst for anime babes alone, I can be furious on your behalf that Aoi Yūki's true form Shuten Doji isn't in this movie. It's highway robbery.

It's a damn shame, both for me and my boozy oni wife, but a little birdie tells me she'll get her due in the game later this year. So no harm no foul. But on that note, never you fear, because your old pal Steve is here to answer any and all questions you might have about Fate/Grand Order. I've been playing the localized release of the mobile game since about a month after its debut (totaling 1,656 logins as of writing this), so I'm something of a begrudging Fate scientist myself.

Just don't blame me if that is my answer to most of your questions, because it turns out almost 5 years with this game still isn't enough to let me decode the gnarliest of Type-Moon bullshit.
Then, in the name of the Nasu, the Worm, and the holy Earth Unbirthing: this is Fate/Grand Order Final Singularity - Grand Temple of Time: Solomon. Let's just take a look at my notes here...

"Solomon can kill servants. Discuss."
No thank you. But I will provide a little background. This is, ostensibly, the sequel to the 2019-2020 Babylonia anime, picking up right where it left off with Chaldea's last stand against King Solomon. It is also an adaptation of the grand finale for the game's first arc—a culmination of 1.5 years of time-and-space hopping. It is, thusly, absolutely impenetrable for anybody who hasn't played the game.

Seriously, the Babylonia anime, by virtue of its story and length, is at least somewhat standalone. And the same, I assume, holds true for the Camelot films. But Solomon relies on you having context for the entire journey so far, and there's just not enough anime available to give you that.
Being that most of what I know about Fate I've learned from Comiket, I was more or less able to piece together a lot of the story on my own in broad strokes. But it still requires me to nod my head and accept a lot of stuff at face value, given that it expects you to know a lot of characters and the significance of their revelations right from the get-go. It's one thing when the movie throws up a splash-page of a bunch of Heroic Spirits and expects you to get excited about all of them—which is easy enough if you're uguu for umus and Civilization™ like I am. Also, there have been so many Jeanne D'Arcs in gacha games it's easy enough to point out which girl in a game is the Jeanne (they always carry a flag). But then you get this guy up here with a butterfly hat who's a composer and you just scratch your head. I figured it was Beethoven; it's not (apparently, it's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, go figure).
That's Amadeus standing next to Gilles de Rais (pre-Bluebearding, because that's a different Servant with a different class), with Siegfried standing in the background on the right. That knowledge takes up precious brain real estate I can never reallocate.
The long and short of it is this: in 999 BC, King Solomon attained great wisdom at the hands of God Himself. He became the originator of what would become Magecraft (the very thing that allows people to summon Heroic Spirits in the Fate universe). Being the first mage with heavenly-granted wisdom, he amassed great power but ultimately didn't really do anything with it: people suffered under his rule because he couldn't work up the desire to care for anyone given he knew that humanity would eventually meet its end.


When Solomon's body eventually died, his magics persisted in a singularity outside of space and time where he endeavored to simply end humanity to save it from the pain of oblivion. Which led to the events of all the other stuff in Fate/Grand Order, all orchestrated by Solomon's hand in the background. The movie picks up right before the protagonist of the game, Fujimaru, is set to fight Solomon alongside the servant Mash.

Quick detail of note: Mash is an "artificial" Servant; while most Servants are summoned Heroic Spirits of history/folklore, Mash was engineered. As such, she has a limited lifespan, and hers is about to run out on the eve of the final battle with Solomon. Also, she's a "Shielder", so she's a defensive fighter whose shield is apparently the Round Table—as in, the one used by Arthur/Altria/Arturia and his/her knights.

Also, I weep for the protag being Potato-kun and not Gudako, but I'll give the filmmakers this one. Not even Solomon deserves having to face off against Gudako.

Gudako is indeed a canonical eldritch horror in the game, but that's a story for a different time. For now, despite my earlier crowing, the overall plot of Solomon is pretty straightforward and easy to understand: this is the final boss, and our heroes have to punch him hard enough to save the entire planet. Of course, whether you care about that or not relies on you having the aforementioned context, which probably stems from you already having played this section of the game. As such, this movie is basically pure fanservice. It expects you to know this part of the story, and it rewards you with a healthy smattering of familiar faces and lots of flashy action.


Does this make a coherent three-act film? Lol hell no. Did I mind? Yeah, but not as much as I thought I would, honestly.
The Heroic Spirits all showing up is a fun bit, too, considering that they're all willing themselves into existence to help Fujimaru and Mash within a singularity where summoning shouldn't even be possible. Also, there are more than a few moments where different versions of the same Heroic Spirit shows up to help, like this bit where we have Rogue Medusa and Avenger Medusa laying down support fire. You might recognize them from the Fate: Babylonia anime (pps: Avenger Medusa, call me too please). We'll put a pin on that, it'll be important to the story later. For now, I can just call it a really good bit of fanservice that's perfect for a big climactic movie like this one. Out of context, it's just cool seeing these characters you've probably seen people on Twitter thirst over. In context, this is Fate's big "on your left" moment.
Yeah, it's impossible not to draw comparisons to the climax of Endgame (though this part of the game does predate that film by a healthy margin). It's corny as all hell. As cringe as GamemasterAnthony's infamous birthday post. But that recklessness also makes it endearing.

Also, simply by virtue of having Mordred, F/GO is cooler than anything to do with the Avengers.
I'm proud of you, my feral gender-nonconforming AFAB son.
Shuten-saltiness aside, I understand and respect the decision to concentrate the cameos onto the Servants that starred in the main singularities leading up to this confrontation. I think the game had a cast of about 150 characters at this point, so you gotta make cuts somewhere.

Or maybe, in the film's canon, Ritsuka just isn't enough of a whale to have summoned every limited character. For shame.
I feel so bad for the people watching this movie and seeing it dangle that one character they're down-bad for that they've never been able to roll. Like, maybe someone really wanted Francis Drake or Sanzang and they've spent years trying but never managed it. My heart goes out to those who long for Bedivere to come home from the war.
Bedivere is an extra mean example, because he's not limited, and he's only a three-star, but he can only usually be summoned in the story banner, which you never want to pull on because there's always a more sparkly limited-time banner going on. Gacha is a cruel mistress.

But I shouldn't get too deep in the pull efficiency weeds. Not when I completely forgot that Lev showed up, and I was so delighted to see his stupid steampunk ass here again.

So, like... I have no idea who this Black Butler-looking goof is, but apparently he was a named character from the story and it turns out he's actually the Goetic demon Flauros, which is a big deal. For those who don't know: Solomon was said to have made a pact with 72 demons that he could summon. Anyone who's played a Shin Megami Tensei title would recognize a good number of their names: Os, Orobas, Decarabia, so on. Fate's Solomon also has his 72 Goetic demons; they're a swarm of 72 gargantuan demon tentacles made out of corpses that basically are the Temple of Time he resides in. And Lev is Flauros, who's... kinda-sorta the head of it all? Which is why the Heroic Spirits need to show up to rescue Fujimaru and Mash: the entire complex can't be breached unless you kill all 72 demons at the same time. It's a cool concept but not one that stands up all that well to scrutiny, which is the law of the land when it comes to Type-MOON stuff. Just roll with it. Also: hey Amon, how's life between Devilman reboots?

Lev is only important because he's a minor character from the introduction who betrays Chaldea out of the blue. So he's the de facto villain until Solomon reveals himself, and he just shows up here to remind you how far you've come. And to give you the satisfaction of smacking his Redditor ass out of existence. And it's funny—Barbatos actually became something of a meme in the F/GO community because he dropped the best loot.

This is, incidentally, a place where a film adaptation inevitably loses something. In the game, this moment was a raid battle where all players contributed to taking down the demon pillars, one by one, millions of times over. It was a cool display of community camaraderie that helped foster the emotional weight of the finale. You just can't replicate that in a movie.
I imagine seeing the different Singularities is a bit like watching the intro cutscene to A Realm Reborn if you had been around for the end of FFXIV 1.0. You just had to be there. A pity.
Such devastation. (I think that's a FFXIV meme? I'm trying to be cool.)
Anyway, Mash and Fujimaru make it through and they confront Solomon, is what we're getting at.

I like that bits of his hair shape little demon wings around his head. Cute bit of non-subtlety.
Subtlety really isn't this film's forte. To wit, this section more or less devolves into yet another multi-Servant fracas that features plenty of candid frames focusing on Mash's ass. Just another reminder that this is the same crew that helmed Babylonia, for better and for worse.
Wouldn't be Fate if it wasn't weirdly horny.

Fujimaru and Mash manage to keep Solomon on the back-step until he turns into his true form: Beast I.

Now, I don't quite understand this bit so I think Steve might have to clarify. But: Chaldea's purpose was to protect humanity, particularly from entities named Beasts, which are designated as the enemies of the highest order that could end humanity. Many of these can be aspects of existing Heroic Spirits (for example: Beast VI, Draco the Whore of Babylon, is a version of Nero Claudius). Befitting Solomon, the first Mage, he's Beast I. He's a threat to humanity's entire timeline.

To prove how dangerous he is: Beast I just outright erases Summoning from Magecraft once he manifests. The guy created Magecraft, so he gets to dictate how it works. So Fujimaru is playing Calvinball with an entity that can decide you don't even get to try to roll for Shuten Doji in the first place.

Oh yeah. Explaining what Beasts are. No problem. I'll get right on that. [siiiiiiiiiiiiip]
Oh hey, Leonardo Da Vinci. Congrats on transitioning!
Honestly you pretty much got it. They're Fate's version of super big baddies that personify humanity's deadly sins (because there are seven of them), but not the normal sins, because this is Fate after all. Goetia here, Solomon's counterpart, thinks dying sucks, so he wants to Ctrl+Z the planet's history and remake it into one where nobody has to die.

In other words, it's just Instrumentality all over again. Like every other anime villain, it all returns to Instrumentality.
I bet Solomon is just salty Nitocris shacked up with Ozymandias and won't return his calls. (Ppps: Nitocris, let Ozy know I'm bringing the potato salad to the cook-out.)
What I like about Goetia is that, even though he has humanity's incineration pretty much cinched, he still wants another person, i.e. Mash, to tell him he's doing the right thing. Ultimately, he is born of humanity and thus prone to our own need for companionship and validation. It's a neat moment that helps unravel him.
"Please clap", Goetia begs.
Mash says, "Then perish."
Out-of-context, Mash's end protecting a potato from Goetia is melodramatic. But outside looking in: people loved Mash a whole bunch (there's enough doujin to prove it), and anyone who's played through the game only to see the cute named character who's been there since day one sacrifice themselves for you would probably be inconsolable. So I take it as a mark of good writing that even though I don't know much of Mash, I still find this a really impacting scene. Like, you don't just kill off your premium girl like that.

It's a killer moment in the game too, and the adaptation pulls out all the dramatic stops to replicate it. Again, it really only hits if you've spent this whole journey alongside her, but she's plenty amiable throughout Babylonia, so if you've at least watched that, you know how much she and Ritsuka mean to each other. And I very much dig the way the film dramatizes the aftermath, with Ritsuka lugging the heavy shield, the weight of their now-extinguished relationship, in seeming vain to provide one last stand against Goetia.

Of course this goober has to step in and ruin a perfectly good melodramatic gesture.
Now we can fully unpin that bit from earlier: same as how Lev was actually Flauros (and inspired by how Archer and Emiya Shiro were the same person in the original Fate/stay night), the good doctor Romani there reveals himself to be... Solomon.

Remember how I said Beasts were aspects of some Heroic Spirits? Well, it turns out Fate worked out a brilliant way to justify seasonal alts for their characters: basically, summoning a Heroic Spirit means summoning the entirety of who they are... at a specific moment in their history/lore. So Saber Arturia is your typical "King Arthur at any random moment in Arthurian lore", but Lancer Arturia is a version of her where she grew up as King. So too did Solomon and Goetia diverge. Goetia is the Solomon that died in 900 BC, despairing about the end of humanity. Romani/Solomon is a Solomon some other Mage summoned during a Mage War who wished upon the Holy Grail for humanity and, sensing the decline of humanity at large, formed Chaldea to do something about it.

It's goofy and overly-complicated but I am oddly obsessed with this aspect of Fate lore. It's why there are so many Saber-Faces, why Nero can be both a haughty hottie in a red dress and also a Queen of the Beach and also-also the Whore of Babylon. It's a good way of utilizing history and how people view and reflect upon historical figures. After all, Sir Francis Drake was a hero to the English—to the Spanish (and Puerto Ricans, who suffered many of his attacks in the Age of Piracy), "El Draco" was a scourge of the seas.

…Which is why I hope we get a monster-girl Francis Drake alt. C'mon, it's right there.

Yep, that is F/GO's ace in the hole right there. When your blueprint is human history, you have an essentially unlimited trove of characters and perspectives to mine for sweet sweet gacha dopamine. Romani's case, though, is a particularly gargantuan twist, and it's why mentioning his name around a F/GO player will almost invariably cause a pall to fall over their eyes. Me, I just think it's funny that the game's entire first arc stems from him having one bad portent. Buddy, it's 2022 now. I think about this stuff every single day.

Also, big fan of the film deciding that super badass killer-mode Ritsuka should look like he just inhaled an entire bowl in one gulp. If we can't have anime Gudako, then weedlord boy is an acceptable compromise.
Seeing Fujimaru burn through the last reserves of his Dead Space suit to summon other random heroes so he can beat the living daylights out of Evil King Solomon with a shield fashioned out of the Arthurian Round Table was a highlight.

Welcome to anime.

One certainly cannot accuse Fate as a franchise of not committing at every turn to its own spectacular bullshit. And here, I'd agree it largely works just due to the spectacle of it. And like any good action film, the true final battle is a fisticuffs-only bruiser between two exhausted combatants who look like absolute shit.

Ah yes, I too love the ending to Kamen Rider Kuuga.
All the flashy special effects in the world can't surpass the stone-age satisfaction of seeing one dude's fist collide square with another's face.
Goetia's strength eventually fails him, but with the Temple of Time collapsing around him Fujimaru can't make it back to Chaldea. But hope is not so easily snuffed out: it's not a happy ending if the guy doesn't get the girl in the end!

Oh you thought Mash disintegrated? Don't worry, she got better. How? Well, who's to say. Or perhaps I should say, Fou's to say.
Or should I say... Beast IV?! (Dun-dun-DUN!)

But for real, little epilogues like these are my weakness, and I love when the mascot character turns out to be God or whatever. So I like this twist. Besides: like I said, they can't just kill off the Premium Girl, they got cast-off statues to sell!

I was actually worried at first that they weren't going to cover this part at all, but I think layering it here worked surprisingly well. It's the right amount of understated. However, it's still odd that, for me, the most emotionally affecting part of the film is buried in the end credits. But, on the other hand, it wouldn't be Fate if it weren't stuffed with all kinds of questionable decisions.

Most important, though, is that Mash can finally look up in the real world and not have to worry about the camera leering at her lightly armored cakes.

Verily, it was a Fate/Grand Order Final Singularity - Grand Temple of Time: Solomon. But in all seriousness: while I can't call this movie high cinema, given how shackled it is to years of mobile game lore, I can still call this a really effective movie that manages to have some actual weight to it. It certainly worked for me, and I'm only the most casual of Fate appreciators. It helps that CloverWorks made sure this movie was as pretty as it could be.
Yeah I I think it's as solid a finale as Toshifumi Akai and the rest of the folks at Cloverworks could deliver, given the inherent constraints of animating something this fraught with game-only references. And hey, I won't ever turn my nose up at gratuitous shots of Leonardo Da Vinci's thighs.
Watching this movie made me think a lot of For Whom The Alchemist Exists, which Nick and I covered last year. And while they're both films made for gacha games with fairly-impenetrable lore, I still walk away from this Fate film pretty satisfied. Sure, I could only recognize a handful of the heroes and I needed a bit of a Wiki-dive to understand some of the finer bits of lore. But the ultimate takeaway is that it doesn't feel like my time is being wasted. And like I said, the emotional bits feel genuine.
And the best part is that humanity is definitely 100% saved forever this time. Good work on that Grand Order, everyone!
O King of Heroes, did we Fate enough Grand Orders?

…I think he's satisfied with that. Pack in in, chums, we wait for the next banner. With any luck, we'll get Shuten Doji this time!

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