Second Sword, on 23 August 2014 - 01:22 PM, said:
Re: Fate. They were participating in a deathmach, true, but the consequences of that would or at least could influence all of humanity, especially in Emiya's case. So they are essentially a group of uber-powerful people that gather in order to 'discuss' the fate of the world (comparison to the illuminati totally intended)... who gives them the right? Why, they take it themselves...
If Emiya cannot or will not understand what is the most important for one other individual (let's assume for the sake of the argument that Lancer is human) then what gives him the idea that he knows what's best for 6 billion other people? His arrogance, I assume.
Emiya could be accused of arrogance but I'm not entirely sure that's fair, considering his backstory. Naivete is perhaps a better word for his primary flaw. He didn't know any better. And technically, his wish was going to be something along the lines of "a world where people don't have to die horribly" - it's just that the Grail kinda...well...you know. XD
That being said, I completely agree that the Grail Wars as a whole are a monument to arrogance, and that it requires a certain amount of arrogance to even think to try and participate, for any reason.
I take your point regarding his disregard for Lancer's opinion but bear in mind that Lancer just wanting to have a proper chivalrous duel with Saber is categorically antithetical to everyone's understanding of how the Heroic Spirits are chosen - by definition, Lancer needed the Grail, wanted the Grail, and it should have been his top priority. Clearly, everyone was wrong. But to lay that purely at Emiya's feet is disingenuous, I feel, as he really had no reason to think otherwise - any evidence to the contrary in Lancer's actions could easily be dismissed as a ruse, after all, given that otherwise it would contradict his fundamental reason for existing in that tournament! >.<
And that's where Emiya is a tragic character, basically. He has his fatal flaw, and that's basically what the Grail shows him. He sees everything through a faulty moral compass. His belief in the simple weighing of more lives vs less lives and his desire to find a better way to resolve that than the death of the few is what drives him to kill ever more people. He's scarily pragmatic (as you might expect, again, given his backstory) and therefore the question of sacrificing every other competitor's wishes has to be put aside (iirc, there was a point where he, or was it Irisviel, contemplates the fact that to win the Grail War he has to wipe out six other wishes - so he's clearly aware of what he's doing) but basically he honestly considers himself to be doing it for the greater good. Arrogant, to be sure, but it's an arrogance born of naivete, and his rather horrifying life experiences. *shrug*
...to be fair, the only person whose wish we know in the Grail War that anyone could really probably get behind was Kariya Matous' one. Everyone else's either fell into the "horrifically self-obsessed" or "arrogantly world-shattering consequences" fields. And, well...yeah.
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Silencer, on 23 August 2014 - 12:39 PM, said:
those people might be in more immediate danger not of your making, but nonetheless you have the capability to prevent their deaths
Yes. Not of your making is the key issue here IMHO. You did not put those 5 there, but you will be the one 100% responsible for that man's death. The fine point I'm trying to make here is that it is not only about saving/killing. It's about sacrificing an unaware, innocent human because you judged him an acceptable loss. So what if he is? Still doesn't give you the right to decide his fate for him. (i.e. pulling an 'Emiya'
)
Hmmm. I see your point. But. And it's a fairly large 'but'; what is the math 100% responsible for taking the other man's life? If the other five were not placed in a situation where you had to make that call in the first place, what bearing on this man's life would you have had? None. So while you are 100% responsible for the final decision on which people get to die (and I believe that holds either way - again, I think inaction is a choice here that is almost equivalent to swapping the tracks), you are 0% responsible for the setup leading to that decision. Whoever set up five people to die on the tracks is just as responsible for the one person's death as they would have been for the five - and they in the end bear the primary responsibility for all deaths that occur, either way. All you did was reduce the number of lives lost. By not acting, you also bear responsibility for deciding the 'fate' of the five, imo. In either case, it's not as much responsibility as if you were choosing whether to personally shoot either set of people for your own reasons, because you would (presumably) rather not have any lives lost in this situation, and would not have set it up, with or without service man on secondary tracks.
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