On the whole, most will make the claim that prequels don’t work, fundamentally. They don’t work because anyone familiar with the original story already knows the fates of any characters from the original story, and because of that, there’s no real tension or suspense. Moreover, they already know how story events will play out, because they already know where things are come the time of the original story.Anakin Skywalker was always going to become Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire was always going to take over the galaxy.
But aside from the counterpoint that prequels give a unique perspective on events that occur before and during the story proper, even re-contextualizing the narrative in sometimes interesting ways, why does a story likeFate/Zerowork best as a prequel? It could easily have been told first, setting aside thatFate/Stay Nightjust happened to be what was conceived first.And it’s not like it’sStein’s;Gate 0, which draws upon the concepts of time as a flat circle, meaning it can only work as a strange future-timeline prequel.Fate/Zerois an otherwise straightforward story, all things considered. No, it works best as a prequel precisely because anyone familiar with the story of the originalFate/Stay Nightalready knows what’s coming, and that’s because its essential structure reflects that of the classical tragedy.
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The Inevitable
This isn’t just tragedy in the sense that most of the characters inZeroend up saddled with horrible endings to their stories. Take, for example,something likeOedipus, orRomeo and Juliet. In both of those plays, the audience is told, either right from the very beginning, like inRomeo and Juliet, or close to the beginning, as inOedipus, that things are going to go sour for their main characters. Oedipus fulfilled the prophecy his parents were trying to avoid only because they were trying to keep it from being fulfilled, and because of that, everything is going to fall to ruin. The star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, are going to die.
WhileFate/Zerodoesn’t broadcast anyone’s fates up front, in a sense, just the fact that it’s a prequel, the original work ofFate/Stay Nightalready checks off that box before the story even begins. Not everyone’s fate is guaranteed, especially for characters original toFate/Zero, but just by the fact that they’recharacters that don’t show up inFate/Stay Night, and given this involves something called the Holy Grail War, it’s easy to make a few likely guesses as to why that person is never mentioned in any of theStay Nightroutes.
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But it takes more than just the fates of the characters being broadcasted, or even just insinuated, fundamentally pointing to fates that cannot be avoided no matter what any one character does to try and avoid them. There also has to be, more specifically, that sense of the characters holding onto hope when the audience knows that that hope is futile, much as they want to be able to hope as much as the characters do.
That Kariya wants to save Sakura from her dark fate being adopted into the Matou family is a noble one, and his optimism and heroic determination to see it through is all the harder to watch when, while his fate isn’t entirely clear until much closer to the end, the audience still knows it can never be because they already know thatSakura doesn’t get rescuedfrom what she has to go through inStay Night. That Kiritsugu Emiya wants to use the Grail to bring about world peace is also a noble goal, if far more high-minded. But given that there’s another Holy Grail War following this one, the audience already knows he’s going to fail, they just don’t know the details yet. Still, watching those details unfold, there’s a sense of dread as he walks closer and closer to his inevitable failure, and worse still, the inevitable loss of his relationship with his precious daughter, Illya. Anyone familiar withStay Nightalready knows that Kirei Kotomine will be the last one standing, and that it will result in the fiery destruction of a whole section of Fuyuki City, there’s no avoiding it otherwise.
False Hope
Theanimeeven takes advantage of the fact that it’s a ticking clockto the inevitableby having an actual ticking clock appear with the title card at the end of every episode, counting down to the moment when Kiritsugu rescues Shirou from that same disastrous fire that the audience already knew with dread was coming. Though that doesn’t become clear until the final episode, when the clock with the title card shows up midway through, rather than at the end, at the precise moment that Shirou is rescued and Kiritsugu finds some modicum of redemption for everything he’s been through–it is in that moment that the clock ticks down to zero.
This, along with the emotional beauty of the writing and the animation, allows for a watching experience that actually holds immense rewatch value. The best tragedies are the ones that not only take advantage of the unfortunateness of the inevitable, but also the ones that people will keep coming back to, even though they definitely already know what’s going to happen.Like that scene inTitanic, where the ship is approaching the iceberg, even though all reason and history itself points to the ship hitting that iceberg, there’s always this moment of hope, a fool’s hope, a desperate wish, just to see the ship maybe miss the iceberg, just this once, and let the characters have a happy ending. The strength of the character writing inFate/Zerolends itself to wishing, upon every rewatch, that things could maybe turn out for the better, even though Fate has already been decided.
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