Introduction

Special Issue
Gen Urobuchi (Original Story)

Gen Urobuchi:
Born in Tokyo. Affiliated with Nitroplus.

Notable works include the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica (chief story editor, screenplays for all episodes), the anime Blassreiter (chief story editor), and the game “Phantom of Inferno” (scenario). Writer of the original Fate/Zero novel. Participated in production meetings for the anime as the creator.

“When the team of ufotable and Director Ei Aoki so easily dispelled my misgivings at a test screening, I had complete faith that they would be able to surmount any and all obstacles.”

Fate/Zero was never a story made with video adaptation in mind. On the contrary, because of this lack of interest in visual adaptation, there are a great many scenes that rely on techniques that can only be employed in the print medium. The decision to take such a thing and adapt it into an anime, not to mention a two-season show placed within the constraints of terrestrial broadcast, with the stated aim of remaining true to the source material, can only be called foolhardy. To be honest, if I’d only read the proposal, I would have burst out laughing, thinking it was a joke, if it wasn’t for the fact that ufotable (who had so successfully adapted the Garden of sinners) would be doing the adaptation.

In terms of degree of difficulty, I had always thought that the Garden afsinners.‘ Chapter I Was the toughest; a piece that was beyond “hard” and well into “impossible” territory. When the team of ufotable and Director Ei Aoki so easily dispelled my misgivings at a test screening, I had complete faith that they would be able to surmount any and all obstacles. And just as I expected, my expectations were met twenty times over.

Of course, even though I had absolute faith that they had the leg strength to leap over any ordeal, the height of the hurdles was never lowered one bit. It was only when I went to the studio to sit in on a script reading that I learned just how grueling an obstacle course race this had been, given the constraints placed on it to be a faithful adaptation.

The fence between print and visual media tends to look lower than it really is, but the fact is that their structure, concepts and the goals that they set out to accomplish are as different as the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea. While visuals greatly surpass the imagination of the written word, there are some concepts that can only be conveyed by the written word. Visuals should only strive to express, never to recreate.

The process of adapting a novel can be described as two athletes in a shot put event trying to land the shot in the same spot from different starting spots. Now, imagine that everything about them is different: they have different builds, different degrees of strength, and even the weight of the shot puts are different. If the throw by the first athlete is the source material, then the throw by the second athlete, who is trying to land his throw in exactly the same spot as the first shot, is the faithful adaptation. Naturally, if he throws his using exactly the same form as the first athlete, the shot will land in a completely different spot. The more meticulously you go about planning to hit the same spot, the more you will be forced to take a different approach using a
different form.

In this anime adaptation, a great many scenes are revised from the original novel, or were deleted or added. These all fall under the “differing form” in my analogy above, and as a result, the second shot thrown by the anime staff landed in the same spot as the one thrown by the original novel. It isn’t the throw that should be copied, but rather where it lands. This is why it is impossible to produce a proper visual work by simply lifting dialogue or scene descriptions from the novel and dropping them verbatim into the screenplay.

Having taken part in both the novel and visual productions, the main difference I sensed was in how time was manipulated. The pace at which sentences are read ~ even though the author has some slight control over this by means of the rhythm of the writing style and so on — is fundamentally dependent on the speed at “which the reader progresses along the page. The running time of a visual work, on the other hand, doesn’t allow for audience interference. In a text medium, it’s possible for the reader to slow down as they read an emotionally moving passage, or even reread it, or close the book and bask in its afterglow, but in a visual medium, every depiction washes over the audience at an even speed all in one go, and then is done and gone.

When all is said and done, let’s say that reading is the act of directly pouring ideas into the consciousness of the reader, whose all five senses have been sealed, while viewing video could be described as a vicarious experience that is conveyed through only the two senses of sight and hearing. In as much as video graphically appeals to the body more than text does, there is a faint visceral pleasure that is magnified while reading. It makes you start to want to interpret each scene of the story only as information that can be more readily taken in by the body. The ability to have that urge stimulated is the visual medium’s strength, while conversely, being able to skip that urge entirely and appeal directly to thought is the strength of the text medium.

To give a specific example, allow me to explain Berserker’s flashback scenes, which were probably the most heavily revised from the original. In the original novel, it is a scene that jumps to an entirely different time period that is inserted right in the middle of the duel at the end. It is precisely because the depiction of the fight had been placed in the back of the reader’s mind as a concept that it was possible to depict and link this to his past as a separate narrative thread.

With that said, in the visual medium, because the audience takes in the battle in the underground garage by means of sights and sounds, the scene has a sense of place which helps to make it seem as if they themselves are there. If the point of view were to suddenly shift to another time, another story, the tension that suffused that showdown scene would suddenly evaporate. Although humans can develop differing concepts in parallel, they can only focus on and process one viewpoint at a time. If the anime version had ignored this difference and stayed slavishly true to the original novel and revealed Berserker’s past in exactly the same way, the viewers probably would have felt a visceral sense of incongruity and instantly been thrown out of the moment.

The same goes for the flashback scene where Gilgamesh reminisces about Enkidu. In the novel, I took care to write it with deliberately vague, ambiguous imagery to depict Gilgamesh’s flashback so as not to ruin the afterimage of Excalibur’s activation scene that immediately preceded it. However, this sort of allowance isn’t possible in visual media. Every scene is depicted with the same resolution and the same sense of presence as time unfolds at the same pace. So with that in mind, they had no choice but to place both the catharsis of Excalibur and the information dealing with Enkidu on the table and decide between them. Of course, it was obviously the former that was more vital to the overall story.

I suppose the ideal relationship would be for the original novel and visual adaptation to be served as two different styles of cooking, with both different flavors and different ways of eating. If the sense of satisfaction and fullness after being fed either one is the same, it could be considered a perfect case of having your cake and eating it, too. Assuming there ever was a visual adaptation of an original novel that perfectly reproduced its source material, the novel would become useless wastepaper the instant that adaptation was completed.

My goal as the author of the original novel was to create something that would inspire my readers to go replay Fate/stay night after the curtain falls on this story. And that sentiment has carried over to the anime version, and I believe it has borne fruit in the ideal way. They landed their shot put smack-dab on the same spot. The ideas that I placed in the novel have been fired off at a new audience, and have reached more people than ever. The anime version has inherited Zero’s spirit as a faithful visual adaptation.