14 August 2017: I'd be more inclined to watch Fate/Apocrypha if it weren't so much work
You can't tell from a still, but Mordred has, like, mecha armor.
Experts predict that at the current rate of growth, all anime will be Fate/stay night by 2062. There is, shall we say, at lot of Fate anime. Besides the first television series in 2006, there is the Unlimited Blade Works movie from 2010, the Fate/Zero anime from 2011-12, the Unlimited Blade Works series from 2014-15, the Fate/Grand Order: First Order movie from 2016, and Fate/Extra coming in 2018. This doesn't even count Carnival Phantasm or anything else I might have overlooked. One does not explicitly need to watch all the other Fate/stay night properties in order to watch Fate/Apocrypha, but I think it's sort of expected a fan will make at least a token effort before attempting a 25-episode Netflix binge once it becomes available.
This would be so inconvenient. No wonder she's so irate.
I'm actually sort of all right with the idea of Fate/stay night in that I'm actually committed to completing the original video game, never mind that it's taken me 10 years already and I still haven't finished the final route. With the first of three Heaven's Feel movies quickly approaching, I at least have a self-imposed deadline for completion now. That said, I find the video game (visual novel, whatever) rather aggravating mostly because most of the characters are numbskulls. This should come as no surprise; they're famously idiotic. It's still a lot to put up with for players who actually attempt to read it all, though.
See? Fun.
It's not really fair to heap all this baggage on Fate/Apocrypha which at least theoretically deserves to be weighed on its own merits. However, I did watch the first two episodes, and Fate/Apocrypha wasted no time embracing its own body of impenetrable lore, so I dropped it posthaste. That said, I am sort of intrigued by the various screenshots what pop up on the Twitter from time to time. Mordred seems to be a lot more fun than her, uh, dad. (Look, it's complicated, okay.) It's enough that I'd be interested in giving Fate/Apocrypha another chance if a good part of the show turned into a buddy comedy featuring Mordred and Old Man Scarface bombing around Romania causing trouble. You know, instead of being about impenetrable lore.
