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When Shirou enters the Greater Grail, it accepts his wish and starts executing
it. However, at that time there were still Servants of both factions alive and
fighting. Why did the Grail comply if the war had not ended yet?

My only guess is that this grail is from the previous, Third war. And since
Shirou is pretty much the only survivor, he deserves his wish granted. But in
that case, why would the Grail start a new war summoning new Servants?


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2018-08-26T05:46:00.900
48546
2018-08-26T07:37:24.533
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question
fate-apocrypha
Why did the Greater Grail fulfill Shirou's wish while the other Servants were still alive?


First thing: A common theme in the Fate franchise is "Rules? Screw your rules.
I'm a mage/servant/noble phantasm/whatever." The true competition is not in
competing in accordance with the rules (no matter how much Ruler tries to say
otherwise), but in breaking the rules better than the others. In this vein,
Shirou forcibly activates the greater grail. It is a system that was designed
to be interacted with by outside forces, and he uses that to his advantage.

Second thing: The condition to granting a wish is not "only one servant
remains," but rather "sufficient energy has been collected through the
expiration of servants, and other servants are not currently getting in your
way to stop you from activating the grail". The (greater) grail basically
works as follows:

  1. Draw magical energy from a ley line.
  2. Use that energy and the promise of a wish to cause Servants to coalesce.
  3. The servants have their own magical energy which is (much) greater than what you used to bring them there.
  4. When a servant dies, they are "filtered" through the greater grail system. The grail claims their magical energy for itself.
  5. Grail now has way more magical energy.

In the first war they only summoned three servants, one for each of the
families involved in its construction, but they couldn't achieve much with
only that much power; especially not their goal of reaching the root. So they
decided that to ensure that the Grail got a large enough supply they would
need around 6 "average" servants to expire, so they adjusted it to summon a
total of 7.

In the Apocrypha grail war, the Clock Tower is able to activate a safety
routine that causes a double-scale war to be initiated. It was designed to
only need to summon 7 average servants, but now there are 14. This then
triggers another safety routine, which summons Ruler. So in fact only 6
servants of average strength needed to be eliminated for the Greater Grail to
have enough power to grant a wish, up to 14 are available (counting Ruler),
and fewer will suffice if there are exceptionally powerful servants (Black
Assassin would be below average, but Red Rider is well above average, etc.).
Combined with a forced activation you don't need to kill everyone, especially
in a double-size war. You just need to have enough control of the situation to
not have your wish-making interfered with.


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2018-08-26T07:37:24.533
48551
2018-08-26T07:37:24.533
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48546
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