Another post on Fate/Apocrypha

I am firmly enjoying this show, it's not the masterpiece Fate/Zero or the original Stay Night are, but it's a darn fun show.

A couple weeks ago the Dub for the first 12 episodes dropped.  I held off on watching it for a bit, and wound up binging all of it between episodes 20 and 21, it was an interesting experience.

I like all the Dub voice actors, my only issue with how it's "translating" Paladin as Hero in reference to Astolfo.

It further confirms what I already knew, that sometimes I just can't avoid missing things I shouldn't when I have to watch a show Subbed.  I appreciate the story as a whole much more now thanks to what I got easily in the Dub that flew by me watching it Subbed.

So it's a dub I recommend, check it out.

Now below shall be spoilers.




Spoiler Warning.


Only thing I feel compelled to say about what I've watched Subbed recently.  Is how interesting I feel the Achilles vs Chiron story-line turned out to be.  It was cool.

I happened to already have Sagittarius on my mind because of something I was contemplating for one of my other blogs.  I had been wondering if anyone outside of Gospel in The Stars speculation also saw Antares as being the Heel of Ophiuchus and not just the Head/Heart of Scorpio.  So seeing it directly linked to Achilles' Heel here appealed quite a bit to my unique nerdiness.

Speaking of which, as I as watching the original OP repeatedly again with the Dub.  I contemplated the Pieta imagery it had with Semiramis and Shiro.  Most Anime viewers might find that completely random and gratuitous, Semiramis has been anything but a Mary figure.  However I come from a community that often fixates on Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons, the genesis of a lot of bad scholarship that has plagued Protestant Christianity (and New Atheists) ever since.  Much of that is all predicated on saying the Catholic Virgin Mary is actually Semiramis.  Maybe that is entirely just a coincidence, but who knows.

Actually, I feel amazed at myself for not contemplating this more at the time.  Thing is I was buying into all the red hearings leading us to think of this Shiro as another alternate Emiya.  Otherwise as soon as we were made to suspect Shiro was a servant I ought to have immediately considered Nimrod.  Thing is a lot of the modern Hislops think Gilgamesh is the same person as Nimrod, in fact I think Rob Skiba would be quite amused by Fate/Zero.  I tend towards identifying Nimrod with Enmerkar who came before Gilgamesh.  So Nasu's decision to say Gilgamesh was the first Heroic Spirit annoys me a bit as one who knows the Sumerians had an earlier hero.