Shirō Emiya
Shirō Emiya (衛宮 士郎, Emiya Shirō) (sometimes spelled as Shirou Emiya) is a character from the Japanese visual novel and anime series Fate/stay night by TYPE-MOON.
Shirō is the main character of the story, a serious and honest teenager as well as a hard worker who enjoys helping others. He is in his second year of High School, and his hobbies include fixing a variety of broken things, from VCRs to stoves, as well as cooking and cleaning. He has some slight proficiency with reinforcement sorcery, though his foster father Kiritsugu Emiya did not encourage him to improve it. Initially, he is confused about the Holy Grail War and irrationally attempts to shield others, even his own servant Saber, from danger.
The voice acting for Shirō was done by Noriaki Sugiyama.
Past
A decade ago, toward the end of the 4th Holy Grail War, Fuyuki City was consumed by a massive fire. The flames razed a large portion of the city and took countless lives, including those of Shirō's true parents. Although he managed to survive the blaze, he was on the brink of death and would have willingly succumbed to his injuries had Emiya Kiritsugu not stumbled upon him. Kiritsugu, motivated by his compassion and the guilt caused by being unable to prevent the tragedy, healed the boy and accepted him as an adopted son.
Kiritsugu revealed himself to be a magus, and though initially unwilling, attempted to raise the boy as a successor to his sorcery; however, Shirō was unskilled and incapable of performing even the most rudimentary of sorcery. The only spell he had success in, Reinforcement, was a difficult and unpractical skill, of little use to any proper magi.
Furthermore, and perhaps inadvertently, Kiritsugu passed on his philosophy to Shirō. Kiritsugu was benevolent, and strived to protect the innocent from the world's many perils, even at the cost of his own humanity; however, he had come to realize that whenever he was able to spare one life, another person was fated to die. Although Kiritsugu was tormented by his inability to save everyone, Shirō always admired his efforts at attempting to do so. Kiritsugu also viewed sorcery as inherently destructive, and though he disapproved of Shirō's desire to learn his craft, he advised applying sorcery in secret, where it could only benefit people and not attract confusion or suspicion.
Several years before the 5th Holy Grail War, Kiritsugu died suddenly, leaving Shirō frustrated, depressed, and alone. However Taiga Fujimura, Shirō's longtime neighbor and his English teacher, assumed Kiritsugu's role as guardian, and later on, Sakura Matō started daily visits to help him with housework.
Despite his poor aptitude for sorcery, Shirō makes use of his skills as an aid in repairing various machinery. In awe of his father's aspirations, Shirō hoped that by improving his one and only technique, he could achieve Kiritsugu's dream of being a "Hero of Justice".
Abilities
Although Shirō has significant potential in certain areas, he is unskilled in most traditional forms of sorcery. At the beginning of Fate/stay night, his only ability is Reinforcement, the power to analyze the structural composition of objects, and with an understanding of their chemical and physical makeup, increase said object's effectiveness in its given purpose, such as increasing a blade's sharpness or a shield's durability. However, he lacks mastery for even this simple spell, and his various applications of it are limited.
Shirō's true talents lie in a more advanced form of Reinforcement, known as Tracing. This skill allows him to transmute the form of existing objects through his imagination. With this ability, Shirō is able to transform ordinary objects like wooden branches into metal swords. However, Tracing requires a large amount of Mana and concentration, and replication is limited by the raw materials available for transmutation. Furthermore, all transmuted objects suffer a degradation in quality, making this ability almost useless in combat.
However, in case of Shirō, the tracing is ultimately different. In fact, his Reinforcement ability is not the foundation of his Tracing ability, but the other way around. He can use Reinforcement because he can use Tracing. Unlike other mages who transmutate materials to copy objects, Shiro actually transmutates part of his souls to trace an object. This is why his traced objects can last for a long time, unlike those traced by others which lasts only for a short period of time. This later develops into his ultimate skill, a variant of Archer's Reality Marble, Unlimited Blade Works. Since he first started studying sorcery under Kiritsugu. Shirō's Reality Marble provides him with a world where all the components needed to facilitate tracing exist, allowing the recreation of any object Shirō has ever seen. In contrast to normal tracing, he can create objects from nothing, without having to modify an existing element.
His ability of Tracing is due to Shiro's uniqueness, where he considers others to be more important to him than himself. Unlike a normal human being, who would feel happiness for others only within his or her own happiness, Shiro's happiness comes only from others' happiness even at the cost of his own blessings. Such characteristic of him comes from his trauma in the great fire 10 years ago, when he had almost died. Although he himself was saved by Kiritsuku, Shiro had already lost his self-awareness in the fire. As a consequence, he no longer values his own self and tries to find the meaning of his existence in helping others. Added with his admiration of Kiritsuku's hope to be "a hero of justice", Shiro lives only to be able to help those in needs and not for himself. This total lack of his own self actually renders him free to use his own self to create weapons as a method to protect others. A normal mage would have to transmutate matters using his own mana and maintain it by again spending his mana. But Shiro needs mana only to morph the part of his own being into the objects he desires, making him a very unique Tracer, and allowing him to create his own Reality Marble.
The following chant are the words to Shirō's Reality Marble. They are somewhat different from Archer's chant.
I am the bone of my sword.
Steel is my body, and fire is my blood.
I have created over a thousand blades.
Unaware of loss.
Nor aware of gain.
Withstood pain to create many weapons.
Waiting for one's arrival.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life was "Unlimited Blade Works."
Role
Shirō has no interest in the Holy Grail, and instead despises its use. However, he is determined to win the Holy Grail War with Saber, for he hopes his efforts will ensure that another disaster like the Fuyuki fire will never occur again. Over the course of the story, though Shirō's skill with sorcery develop rapidly, he still holds true to his selfless ideals, as unrealistic as they may at first appear.
Although he remains as the main hero in all of Fate scenarios, the directions he takes are slightly different in each. In Fate, he decides to make peace with his past, and the story ends with him being more idealistic than ever. In UBW, although he still pursues his ideal despite having to face its faults, he finds a small relief in his love with Rin. In Heaven's Feel, Shiro in the end abandons his ideal, exchanging it for the happiness of Sakura. In each scenario, he represents three different types and stages of a man's life: as a boy who dreams of an ideal, as a teen who wants to have both the ideal and the reality, and as an adult who accepts the impossibility of the ideal and compromises with reality.