Anyone else vaguely disappointed in their choice of who to make Caster? I mean, wouldn't Hans Christian Anderson just be a re-hash of Nursery Rhyme?
Rather than yet another "famous writer as Caster", since Apocrypha is already doing that (and Strange/Fake would have done it had that not been canned), I was hoping they'd actually use a famous magic-user like Caster's are supposed to be.
Yep, remember when Casters actually casted magic? In all honesty, Medea was the only Caster in the entire friggin series who has some real experiences with sorceries.(Gilles de Rais was just a sloppy occultist.)
Now they might as well rename the class as Writer and have Stephanie Meyer be the next Servant in the class. Her NP would be the ability to ruin your heroic legends in order to make you sparkly crap.
Seriously, REAL spellcasters aren't rare in folklore, I can name real legendary 10 witches, wizards or prophets right now from the top of my head.
Yep, remember when Casters actually casted magic? In all honesty, Medea was the only Caster in the entire friggin series who has some real experiences with sorceries.(Gilles de Rais was just a sloppy occultist.)
Now they might as well rename the class as Writer and have Stephanie Meyer be the next Servant in the class. Her NP would be the ability to ruin your heroic legends in order to make you sparkly crap.
Seriously, REAL spellcasters aren't rare in folklore, I can name real legendary 10 witches, wizards or prophets right now from the top of my head.
Hey, Extra Caster is an actual magic user as well, so there's something.
To be fair, the reason why the recent Casters haven't been actual magic users is most likely because it's boring. Sure, there are legendary witches and wizards. But they all do basically the same thing: cast magic. By having the Caster class not only encompass magic users, but also include writers, occultists, alchemists, and such, the possibilities are endless in terms of abilities. I mean, really, compare F/SN Caster with Extra Caster. At the core, they both do the same things: throw magic at enemies. The only difference is that F/SN Caster uses Greek/Godly magic and Extra Caster uses Oriental magic.
Zero Caster was a summoner. Nursery Rhyme specialized in Territory Creation, just like Caster of Red/Black, and CCC Caster. All are within the bounds of the Caster class.
Also, in terms of Noble Phantasms, there is pretty much little in terms of actual "magic" NPs. F/SN Caster, while wielding godly magic, had no spell qualified as a NP, just her dagger (and the Fleece but we never see it). Extra Caster's NP was her mirror, a catalyst for her magic. Contrast the other Casters, which had NPs related to their exploits and achievements. It's harder to design good NPs for actual magic wielding figures than summoners, alchemists, writers, etc.
Well Archers don't actually use bows as their main weapon so it wouldn't be strange for the writers to do the same for the Caster class.
All Archers except Gil still used bow or some variant of bow weapon class as their weapon, either primary or secondary.
Farran: stuffs
I disagree, "magic" is a broad term, and I mean really, really broad term. Apart from "I'm throwing fire at your face", there's also many other things you can do, curses, necromancy, terrain alternations, illusions, trap-magics, debuffs, transformations, etc. The only problem I see with this is the fact that in newer Fates, it is the Masters who are doing these jobs, therefore having the Servant doing it too would be rather redundant.
Nevertheless this generation of Writer Casters still doesn't do anything new that the Masters can't. Shakespeare, Andersen and Dumas are all support roles with buffs and debuffs, Avicebron uses automata, and Nursery Rhyme just plain suck in general.
I do welcome the idea of Writers with some alleged experiences with the supernatural though, like Dante Alighieri for example. And I do accept the notion of having alchemists like Paracelsus, priests like Rasputin or more modern occultists Aleister Crowley as Casters, heck maybe even magical musicians like Orpheus or stage magicians like Houdini would make a better Servant than these newer Casters. See? It took me only 3 minutes to come up with these names, so how is it hard at all?
The concept of writers as Caster is only meh at best, I could've lived with having one or two of them. But in any cases it's still a bad idea which definitely does not need to be used FOUR friggin times over and over.