No, seriously, are we done here? Have we, at last, reached the limit of how fucking ridiculous light novel names can get? Was it not enough to inquire after the morality of picking up girls in a dungeon? Were the rascals not satisfied by dreaming of bunny girl senpais? Didn’t we all suffer enough on the death march to the parallel world rhapsody? Must we now be tormented by this ungodly amalgamation of letters and symbols arranged loosely into some perverted fascimile of a descriptive title? What’s next? Are we going to start throwing in parentheses now? Percent signs? @ symbols, dare I ask? How deep does this rabbit hole go? When does this nightmare end? When do we wake up? WHEN DO WE WAKE UP?!?!?!?!
*sigh*
Anyway, let’s talk about the latest Fate spinoff, henceforth referred to as Detective Waver because fuck me if I’m indulging this bullshit any more.
Gripes about the title aside, if there was any way to get me genuinely excited about a Fate side project, following the life and times of Waver Velvet would be it. The snot-nosed brat’s journey to maturation and humility was one of the best parts of the original Fate/Zero, telling a fantastic coming-of-age tale in the skin of the most enjoyable buddy comedy this side of Death Note. His story had tragedy, humor, heart, genuine pathos, all the building blocks that make this bloated franchise work so damn well at its best. And best of all, he was a character who still had so much to explore. Who wouldn’t want to follow this blubbering dork into adulthood and see him try to put everything he learned from Iskander into practice? Who wouldn’t want to peel back his psyche even further and explore how the boy he was influenced the man he became, and how deep those connections might run? Who wouldn’t want to see Waver Velvet move on, find closure, grow and evolve while still being the same lovable punching bag he always was? Honestly, I can’t think of many better places for a Fate spinoff to go than this.
So it’s a real shame that it ultimately doesn’t work. And the problem, sadly, is simple: it’s a property in the Fate franchise, with all the frustrating, bloated baggage that brings with it.
Structurally, at least, there’s a lot of promise to Detective Waver, which sees our favorite son inducted into the El-Melloi family as a way of repaying his debts to his mentor Kayneth, who you may remember as the least interesting part of Fate/Zero. Now a member of high mage society, Waver must balance his personal pursuits with the politics and backstabbing of the countless ruthless factions vying for power and influence. By day, he’s taken on Kayneth’s role as academy professor, but his real profession, as the name suggests, is acting as the Sherlock Holmes of the Fate world. The first half of the series is episodic in nature, each episode focusing on a new magical mystery that Waver is called out to solve. Meanwhile, a larger plot builds up in the background, eventually taking over the second half of the series for a massive, six-episode whodunnit. Accompanying him in his sleuthing are a handful of Fate crossover characters that you thankfully don’t need to be familiar with to enjoy their presence here (Luvia the wrestler is an absolute peach), a couple students from Waver’s class who enjoy tagging along his missions, some political wheelers and dealers, and Gray, a mysterious hooded girl who considers Waver her master and is easily the best part of the series. Seriously, she strikes such a great balance between adorable, goofy, badass and haunting, and every time she was on screen was a delight.
In fact, there’s a lot I liked over the course of this show’s first half. I liked the overall aesthetic and animation, which does a damn fine job replicating the hazy grandeur of Ufotable’s Fate properties (Troyca in general is a damn fine animation studio). I liked the camaderie between the characters and how willing this show was to lean into the goofier sides of the franchise. I really liked Waver himself, who, while still recognizably being the Waver of Fate/Zero, has matured and taken on some incredibly interesting dimensions. There’s a running undercurrent of PTSD metaphor, how Waver’s obsessed with finding some way to speak with Iskander again and reconnect to the greater Grail War mythos, despite it clearly having a negative impact on his mental well-being. It’s a damn well-realized portrait of someone grappling with the past, trying to figure out where their place should be in the world now that they’ve decided they want to be part of it. For the most part, it was what I always wanted from a Fate spinoff. It was enjoyable, it was lighthearted without being devoid of weight, and it legitimately fleshed out the parts of the mythos I had emotional investment in.
And then it got to the second half, and the whole thing fell apart.
See, as much as I was enjoying myself in the first part of the show, there was one aspect that wasn’t clicking as well as everything else: the detective stuff itself. Which for a detective show is kind of a problem. See, because this is a Fate spinoff, all the detective stuff that should be the draw in any good mystery show- the clues, the misdirections, trying to piece the evidence together for yourself alongside the characters- is tied up in the mechanics of the Fate world and its magic systems. And I’m sorry, but let’s be frank here: Fate’s magic is bad. It’s a convoluted mess of pretentious-sounding phrases and ideas with no set rules outside of “whatever the fuck we want it to be”, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for this franchise consistently trying to build so goddamn much of its structure out of it. It’s impenetrably dense, unfairly obtuse, and you need a PhD in bullshit lorekeeping to even begin to understand it. And every single mystery in Detective Waver, from the murder weapons to the motive to the sleuthing mechanics to the reveal itself, is built out of that bullshit. Thus, there’s no way to get invested in solving the mysteries, because there’s no way for you to actually solve them, because the answer to any question is always just whatever magical bullshit sounds cool to do.
Still, this wasn’t too annoying in the first half of the show. Because the adventures were all so episodic, it allowed the stories to flesh out the characters and have fun beats in between all the magic stuff, focusing more on the actions the cast took en route to the mystery than the mystery itself. They were character pieces that just happened to have dumb, nonsensical mysteries rolling around in them, and it made it easy enough to just enjoy the emotions driving the plot while appreciating the cool magical bullshit for what it was. But once you get into that six-episode mystery plot, everything collapses under the weight of too much bullshit. The obtuse mechanics and unreliable lore completely take over, shoving the characters to the sidelines as the plot piles on complication after complication, each question making less sense than the one before and each answer raising a million more questions in its wake. It gets bogged down in complication, and the easy charm of the first half is lost in favor of exhaustion and boredom. Even as Detective Waver tries to keep the character beats flowing, they’re squeezed out by the sheer amount of disconnected stuff this plot throws at you. So in the end, once again, the greatest weakness of a Fate spinoff is that it’s too bogged down by Fate Stuff(tm) to relax into being it’s own thing.
Look, I’m a huge fan of the core Fate timeline. What Ufotable did in bring Zero and Stay Night to life wasn’t just epic, it was the kind of awe-inspiring urban fantasy that truly captures the grandeur and majesty this genre is capable of. But these classics weren’t built on mechanics and lore. They were built on characters and themes, emotions and hope, triumph and despair, stories of people with dreams and desires fighting to realize them in a world that sought to stamp them out. It was epic not because of the convoluted rules holding everything in place, it was epic because of the stories it told within those rules, the people that brought those rules to life. Detective Waver could’ve been the spinoff this franchise deserved, a story that truly did justice to the heart and humanity of Fate at its best. Instead, it gave into all of Fate’s worst instincts yet again, leaving crushing disappointment in its wake.
