So the interesting thing about Fate/Extella, from a narrative standpoint, is that it is (for our purposes) a romance-oriented visual novel where the action begins after the romance has already been firmly established.  What’s more, you have amnesia regarding the period when the relationship was actually coming together, and no one seems particularly interested in discussing those events.  But it’s not a story about romances having complications, or anything like that – it’s the usual arc, only the part we see is just the very end, extended to the length of a game’s worth of cutscenes. 

So you have this bizarre spectacle of a cute anime girl talking endlessly about how intensely she adores you, about how you make her feel all warm and tingly, about how most of what she really wants out of life is just the chance to spend cozy quiet time with you, and there is no context or story grounding any of it.  It’s just sort of there, right from the starting gun.  And it’s presented as being a pretty stable dynamic; the game gestures explicitly at the idea that you can dwell in that sort of saccharine schmoopiness forever. 

It feels like an emotional crack hit, a superstimulus, some kind of literary equivalent of the all-marshmallow-box-of-Lucky-Charms idea.  I wonder whether this is what the audience is really craving; I wonder whether the authors understand what kind of forces they’re playing with here. 

(Romance novels and similar media are often themselves accused of being emotional superstimuli; the usual argument is that they take “the juiciest part” of a relationship, the tension and catharsis of the courting dance, and make it feel as though that’s the whole thing, and thereby screw with people’s instinctive expectations.  Maybe there’s something to that, I don’t know.  But the F/E version feels…a lot more potent, and somehow a lot more dangerous, from my perspective.) 

The other interesting narrative thing about F/E is the way it presents power dynamics in its relationships.

As standard for a piece of Fate franchise media, the player avatar character is a “Master” (mage), and the girl is a “Servant” (legendary/historical hero summoned to fight in a mystical Grail War).  That terminology is, uh, already pretty loaded.  And the text does not play this down.  Your Servant will talk about how glad she is to serve you, to submit to you, in ways that are more text than subtext.

But it’s just talk.  And this is also pretty explicit. 

Your Servant, you see, is a queen.  She has an agenda (controlling and expanding her domain, mostly, but also some other stuff).  She makes choices and decisions for the sake of furthering that agenda.  You do not sign off on those choices; you do not even weigh in on them; you basically agree to support whatever she does, no questions asked, and you say this in so many words. 

In battle, she fights, and you are literally reduced to an inanimate piece of jewelry that she wears for the sake of comfort and moral support (and also nebulous metaphysical power).

Plus there’s the standard visual-novel interactivity format, wherein she does about 90% of the talking, and your input amounts to getting to choose between a couple of near-identical dialogue responses every now and again. 

You don’t act like the dominant party in the relationship.  You have no real control over anything, diagetically or in terms of shaping the story.  The girl makes every single decision and prompts every single course of action. 

It…it honestly feels like a fantasy of a gender-reversed version of medieval courtly love, wherein attractive members of the Other Sex will swoon over you and swear fealty to you and engage in grand glories enterprises that are ostensibly in your name, while you just sit there and look pretty.

I don’t know whether this accurately represents what the otaku/weeb audience here really wants.  But to the extent that it does, well, it’s a pretty big change from the standard models of sexist desire.  The fantasy doesn’t involve controlling anyone, certainly it doesn’t involve belittling anyone, it’s just about having your ego stroked and making someone else happy. 

(Sadly, there is no male otaku/weeb-accessible version of “feminine charm” that could possibly make this engine run, at least not as things currently stand.) 

NOTE: This analysis covers both the Flame Poem arc (in which the heroine is, uh, girl!Nero) and the Orchid Words arc (in which the heroine is Tamamo no Mae).  I have no idea whether it applies to the Dawn arc, which I haven’t yet played; it seems like girl!Attila the Hun might be pretty different from the other two, personality-wise.  I also have no idea how things change if you choose a female player avatar.