tainbocuailnge:

[opens a half empty tub of mango ice cream at 10:39pm] 

unlimited blade works may be my favourite route but it was an insult to what rin’s character could have been. even though it is supposed to be her route and thus the one where we learn about her the most it absolutely refuses to develop her character properly, presumably because the majority of her character depth comes from her relationship with her family which nasu understandably wanted to avoid going into until heaven’s feel, but sakura is not the only member of rin’s family that massively influences her character and ubw moreso than any other route would have been the prime time to go into how rin’s attempts to uphold tokiomi’s legacy affect her. how it is the cause of her crippling perfectionism and social isolation and the reason she approaches all interpersonal relationships with the need to leave the other in her debt somehow. why she stubbornly takes pride in living like that even though she’s an absolute wreck. because ubw is the route that’s entirely about taking pride in a life full of wrong turns because you believe the reason you chose to live it isn’t wrong. 

ubw is where shirou’s literal future self tells him that trying to uphold kiritsugu’s legacy was a mistake and it missed out on so many opportunities to give rin some proper character depth by making her question the ideals she inherited from her father along with shirou. rin and shirou’s upbringing by and idolisation of their respective fathers is brought up in the route but terribly little is done in terms of actually drawing parallels between the two because fate for some reason insists on never actually acknowledging that rin has a huge pile of emotional issues. ubw is the only route where rin actually finds out that kirei killed her father – again, the man whose legacy she spent the past 10 years attempting to uphold and which is the direct cause for the vast majority of her emotional problems – and we’re given absolutely nothing in terms of what she actually feels about that and how she copes with the knowledge that her guardian for the past 10 years murdered her father beyond that initial outburst. 

properly paralleling the way rin and shirou both stubbornly take pride in following up on their fathers’ legacy in ubw would also make the shift in rin’s character in heaven’s feel have a greater impact because in hf route both rin and shirou decide to discard the ideals of their dead parents for sakura’s sake, not to mention making rin’s character in heaven’s feel far more sympathetic because we’ve been properly shown just how hugely important living up to her father is to her which makes her cold attitude towards sakura more understandable and feel less like simply a dick move on her part 

[slurps down the last bits of now melted ice cream and crushes the container against my forehead] fight me nasu