So what's the point of Shinji existing at all?

The point is to make the audience understand Sakura's broken mind and have more empathy with her.

Also having the realization all of these things happening to her were also behind the scenes of the other routes and she never got saved.

Yeah Fate/Stay Night and UBW were the other main routes of the game.

This is a gross misunderstanding. By the end of the movie you should be aware how weak Shinji really is and also how very powerful Sakura is.
Like I said earlier, Sakura is the one that decides what Shinji can and can't do. Shinji is not in charge and never has been.

If you read the VN Shinji is more fleshed out and reflects more on both Shirou and Sakura. He’s not merely a hate sink.

@TransferUser Yes I get that Sakura was powerful and everything, but I don't get where she was manipulating Shinji into abusing her.
One thing is having raw power and another is having character power, you can be powerful all you want and still get bullied because you can't fight back due to psychological reasons.

@WestOnAndrewAve By other routes you mean the other anime adaptations ?

If you know the VN exists why are you even asking this? No shit Shinji will be better in the source material that has hours upon hours of content

@whatever5464 he mean fate/stay night and unlimited blade works because heaven feel it's the third route and should be watched third after those.

He's a bug that needs to be quashed.
In my humble opinion.

You see the purpose of his creation seemed to be because. Sometimes there needs to be a character needs hated with on redeeming qualities. And he plays that role and so as viewer I'll play my role of hating him.

I suppose I missed that, thanks for telling me.

The story is designed to make you hate Shinji and sympathize with Sakura.

You are supposed to think that Shinji is Riders master and that Sakura is unrelated to the world of magic. (Unless you've already seen Fate/Zero.)
Even then, you are supposed to think of Sakura as the victim, which is true to a degree.

During Heaven's Feel you learn that Sakura is not only the master of Rider, but also a powerful enough magus to be able to defeat Servants on her own. Earlier in the lore Servants are described as uniquely powerful entities that very few humans can survive fighting against.

But this happens towards the end and there's a bunch of other information you are flooded with at that point.


If you think about it, it becomes quite obvious that Shinji never had the ability to abuse Sakura in any way whatsoever. Instead, if you rewatch Heaven's Feel you should notice that Shinji's action never further his own goals, they only further Sakura's goals.


Initially Shinji uses Rider to target Shirou in school. I think it was in the Fate route where Shirou goes to school without Saber and meets Shinji with Rider. Notice how Shinji never tries to kill Shirou. What happened is that at the very beginning of the story Sakura visits Shirou's house and notices his command spells. She likes Shirou and doesn't want him to die in this war. (If it wasn't for Shirou having Excalibur's sheath in his body which makes him immortal as long as Saber is close by he'd have died ten times over.) Sakura doesn't know that Shirou is immortal and thus wants to scare him into quitting. She orders Shinji to use Rider to scare him into quitting. Shinji is not allowed to kill Shirou. He seems incompetent by acting the way he does, but he just tries to do what Sakura asked of him. This fails, since Shirou is a dense idiot protagonist.

In Heaven's Feel Sakura wants to stay at Shirou's house, but Shirou wants Sakura to go home. He currently has beef with Shinji due to the Holy Grail War, but Shinji still was one of his best friends and he trusts him to keep Sakura safe. This isn't what Sakura wants, so she forces Shinji to hit her, to have an excuse to stay at Shirou's house. (In fact, she probably made Rider hit her, since Shinji is too weak to cause damage to Sakura.)


Shinji is very frustrated by life. He lives in a magus family but has no affinity for magic. When he learns that Shirou is also part of a magus family with seemingly no talent he feels relieved to be not alone in this situation. His friend is the same. But then it turns out Shirou can use magic after all. A few years earlier Shinji was trying to win a competition with their school's archery club. Shirou never misses in archery, but quits the club, disappointing Shinji greatly. Shirou is a dense idiot that didn't even notice how he hurt Shinji, though.

Also. Shinji's life is way more fucked up than all of this, since the bugs Zouken used on Sakura turned her into constantly needing sexual relief. She hates the rape bugs, though. So she turns to abuse Shinji instead. Young Shinji is now completely messed up and turns to studying magic, which will never bear fruit.


Along the way you also learn another fact about the magus life. Magic circles are nurtured and passed down. Tohsaka got hers when her father died with the help of Kotomine. But Zouken is technically immortal, so he never passed his magic circle on, dooming his descendants to be unable to build upon the foundation of their own magus family. Shinji not having innate talent for magic wouldn't have mattered too much if he got his family's magic circle to use instead.

I just saw this thread and not sure if anyone else is gonna be reading through it, but as someone who has also read all of Fate Stay/Night and Fate/hollow ataraxia I would highly recommend to take TransferUser's interpretation with a grain of salt unless you've also read them as well. In my opinion it comes across like a wild theory that isn't implied much unless you really try to stretch things as much as possible.