Fate/Apocrypha keeps up in the proud tradition of using past heroes as servants. With that in mind we know most of them from Spartacus, Shakespeare an Achilles but what about the rest.
What about Karana and why he is a perfect answer to Dracula. Mordred and her rage for Arthur as she quest for his thrown. The assassin with her romantic moments. Well thanks to Anime News Network Gabriella Ekens we have an idea. As she has put in the work and to see what inspired Type Moon most powerful warriors in this series.
I am going to post sword and Karan below as for the rest you need to read the article for. Check it out to see what is up with the red side of this grail war.
Saber Mordred
[Okay, so if Fate/Apocrypha is your first exposure to the Fate franchise and you aren’t familiar with Mordred’s (lady) daddy, go ahead and read the Saber entry in my previous Fate/stay night editorial. King Arthur is kind of a big deal in this franchise, and the show presumes you know that – Mordred’s first flashback reveals Saber’s true identity. Now that we’ve got that sorted, just who is Mordred?
Mordred is King Arthur’s illegitimate son with his half-sister, the sorceress Morgan Le Fey. The circumstances behind this incestuous union are complicated, especially since King Arthur is a lady in the Fate universe. We’ll get into how that particular reproductive act worked in a minute, but first, let’s find out how Mordred came off in his (her?) original legend.
Like the rest of the Arthurian saga, there are around four or five different accounts of Mordred’s story dated to various points over the past 2000 years. The figure we know today is probably a composite of several older characters, but his name first appeared (as “Medraut”) in the 10th century. While the details of his story vary across different accounts, I’ve managed to pare his history down to three primary events that influenced the red n’ rowdy murder gremlin we meet in Fate: first, the Battle of Camlann, second, his usurpation of the throne, and third, his illegitimacy.
Mordred’s earliest recorded appearance states that he died at Camlann alongside Arthur. The fact that he specifically murdered Arthur (or vice versa, depending on the story) wasn’t added until later. (Eventually, this ambiguity regarding who-killed-who seems to have evened out into the mutual killing we see depicted in Fate.) Mordred’s status as an usurper appeared around the 12th century. While Mordred’s name acts as a synonym for “unscrupulous traitor” today, there were some positive accounts of his reign around this time. Finally, the incest/illegitimacy thing seems to have been added around the 15th century, linked to the character of Mordred’s mother, Morgause. Morgause is Arthur’s half-sister, the wife of King Lot, and the mother of the Round Table knights Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth. (It’s worth noting that this relationship between Mordred and these “Orkney siblings” doesn’t seem to exist in the Nasuverse.) While previous stories assumed that Mordred was the son of King Lot, Thomas Malory‘s Le Morted’Arthur attributes his conception to a brief fling between the two siblings. To be fair, they didn’t know about their relationship at the time because Arthur’s parentage had been kept secret. Over time, this version of the story became the one that stuck, probably because of the ironic echo it adds to Arthur’s demise as a man both made and unmade by illegitimacy. Morgause’s character is now frequently conflated with that of her witchy half-sister, Morgan le Fey, so Type-Moon went with the version where Mordred was intentionally conceived by that sorceress as a bid for power.
This brings us to Merlin. Perhaps the most famous wizard of all time, he’s known as a master of magic, Arthur’s staunch ally, and Britain’s great kingmaker. He was also a total pervert. This factors into Type-Moon‘s portrayal of the character, where he magically gave Saber male genitalia so that Le Fey could harvest the resulting sperm and grow a baby. Yes, the incest somehow manages to be the least bizarre part of that sentence. Altria was presumably unconscious for this process, seeing as she’s quite surprised to learn of Mordred’s existence. The specifics of this situation were cut from the anime, so you’re just left to assume that Le Fey stole her sister’s DNA to grow a clone of her in some more clinical sort of way. But even if the anime skirts over this detail, I assure you that the “magical pseudo-phallus” is absolutely 100% canon. I guess it does help explain why Altria gave Mordred the cold shoulder so hard
So Le Fey raises clone baby Mordred to believe that she’s the true heir to Britain’s throne. While Mordred’s existence was kept secret, Le Fay managed to sneak her into the Round Table under the condition that she always wear her helmet. (Seems sketchy to me, but maybe knightly recruitment standards were lower in the latter days of Camelot.) Over the course of all this, Mordred developed a pretty serious complex over Altria. She idealized her as the perfect knight and – upon learning that Altria was her father – became desperate for her validation. Soon, her self-worth would start to vacillate between pride over her relationship with the king and intense shame over the details of her birth. So when Altria ultimately rejected Mordred, it basically broke her spirit. Mordred’s love turned into hatred, and she vowed to destroy her father from that day forward. So while Altria was out one day, Mordred rallied all the forces of discontent within the kingdom and seized power. She rifled through her dad’s shit, stole one of his backup swords (Clarent, which she wields in-show), and began setting fire to things (maybe by accident?). Altria came back, saw this mess, and decided to lay down the law. Unfortunately, her own reign was pretty solidly screwed at that point, so the two didn’t have much left to do other than stab each other and leave the crown to someone else.
And that’s Mordred’s story, a tragedy that runs parallel to Altria’s, where both were forced into an antagonistic relationship with the other through their fated circumstances, as well as the suppression of their true desires in service of roles that they were born to play. This is a notable example where Fate’s version of a character is infinitely more nuanced than their inspiration, whose reasons for usurping the throne in Arthur’s absence basically boil down to him being a mustache-twirling villain.With this in mind, it’s honestly heartwarming to see Mordred find a decent father figure in her master, Kairi Sisigou. Unlike anyone else in her life, he immediately accepts her for who she is without reservations. In another more nuanced twist on Mordred’s legend, the avarice and fury of Fate’s version can also be explained by her stunted age. As a homunculus, her growth was accelerated so that she could catch up with daddy as soon as possible. She is quite literally a kid in many ways. Mordred’s relationship to Apocrypha’s overarching theme of “fakes” is also obvious – she’s a fake King Arthur desperate to live up to her predecessor’s legacy. Still, Britain’s most infamous traitor comes off pretty well in this series, all things considered, just a boisterous kid forced into villainy by circumstances outside her control. In life, she died too soon to realize how badly she’d been manipulated, but at least the Grail allowed her to find someone who understands her in the end.]
Lancer Karna
[Just like last week’s Romanian blood-sucker, this Lancer has a long complicated backstory that will take me a while to tell. Karna is one of Hindu mythology’s most famous heroes, on par with a figure like Herakles in our Western imagination. Like Herakles, Karna is a demigod (the son of a mortal woman and the sun god Surya) who endured a lot of bullshit in his life. But unlike Herakles, he managed to be overwhelmingly righteous (and pretty) while doing it.
However, in spite of his heroic reputation, Karna was not the central character of the work he appears in. That would be his younger brother Arjuna, with whom he had a turbulent relationship to say the least. Their story, the Mahābhārata, is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Perhaps the longest poem ever written, it’s as important as the works of Homer to world literature while also being around four times as long. Obviously that makes it difficult to summarize, but it’s basically about two families, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, who are fighting over the throne of a kingdom. Arjuna is one of the Pandavas, while Karna is on the Kaurava side. The two become bitter rivals, with their ultimate confrontation serving as the story’s climax.
So once upon a time there was a lady named Kunti who’d been given the power to summon and have a baby with any god she wanted. A sage gave her this power when she was pretty young, but she didn’t believe him at first, so she decided to test it out. She recited the mantras, and lo and behold, the god Surya showed up to give her a baby – Karna. This was actually a problem, since Kunti was unmarried, and she’d be in hot water if anyone were to find out that she’d gotten pregnant. (Or had a baby handed to her by the sun.) So she decided to get rid of the baby by sending it down the river Moses-style. The baby was eventually found and adopted by an impoverished charioteer, while Kunti went on to marry a king named Pandu. Pandu was cursed to die if he ever had sex, which made it difficult for him to produce heirs. He got around this by letting Kunti make babies with gods while passing them off as his own kids, and Arjuna was the product of one such union between her and the thunder-god Indra. Say what you want about this situation, it’s still better than what Merlin came up with.
But back to Karna. Nobody liked him as a kid since he was born a freak, with golden armor and earrings embedded into his skin (proof of his divine lineage). Despite being a poor nobody, he really wanted to study warfare and approached a number of gurus about this. When they wouldn’t teach him because he was part of the wrong caste, he masqueraded as a member of the proper caste in order to attend lessons. Pretty soon, he became the absolute best at fighting, since he was supernaturally gifted at it. When his teacher found out that he’d been lying about his status, however, he cursed Karna to lose his martial prowess whenever he most needed it. This would come back to bite him in the ass hard, along with another curse that prophesized he would die helpless some day.
Sometime after all this, Karna crashed a tournament that was meant to show off his half-brothers, the Pandava princes. When they wouldn’t let him fight because he was low caste, Karna got pissed off enough to spark an eternal rivalry between them. That event is also where the Kuarava prince, Duryodhana, realized that Karna’s mad skills would be useful in the event of an inheritance war between him and the Pandavas. Duryodhana adopted Karna into his family, letting him participate in the tournament and earning the Pandavas a formidable enemy
Afterwards, a bunch of stuff happened to intensify the conflict between Karna and the Pandavas, especially with the youngest of their number, Arjuna. Arjuna was almost as good at fighting as Karna, so that “your skills will abandon you when you really need them” curse kept acting up whenever they clashed. Still, Karna was an absolute monster on the battlefield, doing all sorts of crazy shit like conquering the world for his Kuarava friends. Eventually, folks on Arjuna’s side of things started to worry about his chances and looked into ways to take down Karna by cheating. In one instance, Arjuna’s dad Indra disguised himself as a beggar in order to beg for Karna’s magic armor as alms. Since Karna had previously promised to fulfill anything requested of him, this plan might have actually worked. However, Karna surprises Indra by seeing through his disguise and giving his armor away anyway. This act of charity is so stupefying that the heavens literally explode to shower him with flowers, while Indra just stands there red-faced with shame. Indra ends up giving Karna his spear, Vasavi Shakti – his signature weapon as a Lancer in the Fate universe. (He can also qualify as an Archer by using his divine bow, or as a Rider by using his dad’s crazy sun chariot.)That’s the most relevant story to his powers in-show. In the end, Karna’s mom Kunti reveals her identity in an attempt to emotionally blackmail him into sparing her other sons. Karna accedes to some of her demands by making the fight between him and Arjuna more equal. And so, with the loss of his invincibility armor, the limitations on his arsenal imposed by Kunti, and the prophesied curse coming to fruition, Arjuna is able to triumph over Karna. Even then, Arjuna mostly wins through a series of dick moves, so the poem’s hero ends up looking bad compared to his rival in his own epic. That’s gotta sting
Believe it or not, that’s the shortest synopsis I can give of this mythological melodrama. Karna is a fascinating character and Type-Moon has a neat take on him. He falls into the archetype of “characters who try to be inhumanly good and are driven to bad ends because that isn’t actually possible to sustain”, alongside the likes of Siegfried and Fate/stay night‘s Archer. Of this bunch, Karna seems to be the most content with his fate due to his ridiculously nice personality. He doesn’t seem to harbor any resentment unlike his peers in this category, because Karna’s tragic fall is portrayed as the culmination of transcendent and sublime beauty. On the other hand, this divinity makes him easily the most inhuman of Apocrypha’s Servants, hardly ever expressing any emotion and showing up everywhere looking like a blinged-out stick-bug. He hasn’t featured in Apocrypha’s story much beyond fighting a lot in the first half, so it’s unknown how his reputation as “the hero of charity” will factor into the story. Judging by his encounter with Siegfried, he seems to be a stickler for rules and expresses concern about the status of his original master, who he’s never met.
Karna ties into the “fake” theme in being an antihero (or perhaps anti-villain?) relative to the epic’s proper hero, Arjuna. Karna is a weird underdog who manages to constantly show up a prince who was given every advantage in life that he never had. He’s a weirdly subversive hero who reveals the artificiality of concepts like “illegitimacy” and “social status” in the face of true virtue. (Okay, he’s still a demi-god and prince by birth, so it’s not too subversive.) In Fate, he’s become a svelte anime boy who dresses like Gackt, while Arjuna is made to look like Lelouch Lamperouge. You can probably guess who fans seem to prefer.]
Again please read the whole article. If you area Fate/ Stay Night fan and loved this series the history lesson will interest as much as Type Moon take on them.
As always thank you for reading.
