At that moment, the monitor showed the scene of someone sprawled on the "airplane," shouting at the top of his lungs.
"What is that idiot knight doing? Didn't I tell him to wear his helmet while filming?"
"Master." Through the radio, Medusa imitated Lancelot's voice. "He seems to be saying, 'How could I let the king pilot this for me? I'm such an incompetent knight—I can't possibly make up for this!'"
"...In that case, let him fly around a little longer. We'll stop when he remembers to put on his helmet."
Shinji issued the order without mercy.
Ratings and Prohibited Words
Half an hour later, Iskandar finally brought the chariot back down to the ground.
"Hmm, if this thing were real, it'd be pretty cool. I kind of want one."
Iskandar stared intently at the fighter jet model. "We didn't have anything this handy in my era. This is much more useful than a spear formation."
"No way. Absolutely no way."
Waver, who'd been forced to go up with him, leaned against the chariot's side and waved his hands frantically.
"No ordinary person could afford to operate a modern fighter jet. Just maintaining it would bankrupt you."
Smack.
Iskandar flicked Waver hard on the forehead.
"What was that for?!"
Waver covered the red mark on his forehead with both hands and complained tearfully.
Iskandar patted Waver's shoulder with a series of loud smacks, then let out a hearty laugh. "Hahahaha! Boy, what nonsense are you talking? I'm a king! Once I return to Macedonia, I'll have an empire of my own!"
"Let's talk after you've made it out of Fuyuki City," Waver said sourly. "What kind of king can't even enter his own country?"
Iskandar's lips moved a couple of times. He glanced at Shinji. "If I connect the Ley Lines bit by bit, can't I just follow them to Europe?"
"..."
Waver looked utterly disgusted.JPG
"Right, that's what I'll do!" Iskandar smacked his palm. "I'll help Master develop his business and get him to connect the Ley Lines of the entire world! Then the whole world will become the territory of me, Iskandar, King of Conquerors!"
"..."
Waver looked at him like he was a hopeless idiot.JPG
"Hahahaha! I really am a genius!" Iskandar drew his sword, his heart surging with excitement. "It's decided! I've chosen the goal of this expedition! Conquer the whole world! Fight all the way from the Far East back to Macedonia!"
"You're so fired up. Global warming must definitely be your doing."
Waver had clearly given up.JPG
Meanwhile, Lancelot was climbing down from the fighter jet model, sobbing.
"I really am useless! My mistake made the king pilot for so long! I'm an incompetent knight!"
The sorrow on Lancelot's face was enough to make him cosplay his colleague's tragic expression. Shinji even wondered if, were he to hand Lancelot a tissue, he'd bite down on it and start crying.
So this is the strongest of the Knights of the Round Table? Why does he seem like some kind of obsessive fan?
Listening to Lancelot mutter nonstop, Shinji wanted to kick him in the ass.
"It's all right, Sir Lancelot."
Artoria climbed down from the plane, completely unconcerned. On the contrary, her cheeks were flushed with excitement, like a child who'd just gotten off a roller coaster.
"Though I couldn't control it freely in the air, piloting this little one was a truly novel experience." Artoria ran her hand over the model's casing.
Lancelot shook his hair out. "Your Majesty, please stop! This is all my fault! I must die to atone!"
"Cut the crap! Keep this up, and I'll send you and Diarmuid out to seduce middle-aged and elderly housewives all over Japan."
Shinji swore that if he'd known this dead camel would be like this, he would've summoned the Saber of Red.
"Enough, Master." Artoria waved her hands, trying to reason with him. "I'm sure Sir Lancelot didn't do it on purpose. You should be more forgiving."
Shinji shook his head helplessly. His thoughts had already gone further.
If even the relatively normal Lancelot was like this, Shinji could imagine, right down to the nape of his neck, what kind of oddballs the other Knights of the Round Table would be.
"Artoria, I've realized you have it pretty rough, taking care of so many problem children by yourself... What are you doing?"
Shinji turned and noticed Artoria undoing the fighter jet model's supports.
Artoria smiled. "Master, I'm going to take this little one for a spin."
"This thing can't go on the road! Do you want the traffic police to impound it?" Shinji's mouth twitched violently.
Although Japan was relatively lenient about modified vehicles, no country with a functioning legal system would allow a motorcycle converted into a fighter jet to be driven on public roads.
Not to mention, it was loaded with live ammunition—magecraft-type ammunition, anyway!
Was Lady King of Knights planning to start an Anglo-Japanese war?
"Artoria, if you really want a motorcycle, I think the one you rode in the movie was pretty good..."
"Hey, Master. What do you think of Lamure II?"
"Don't name it!"
Shinji brought his hand down on Artoria's head.
In the end, Artoria never got to realize her dream of taking Lamure II out for a spin.
As for what they would do with the fighter jet model, Shinji planned to remove the unnecessary parts after filming and auction it off as a movie prop.
Though the model had cost a pretty penny, there were plenty of bored rich people in the world. Shinji estimated the final sale price could far exceed the cost of making it.
Of course, that was all thanks to the nimble-fingered senior, Touko. It wouldn't have been easy for anyone else to make such a realistic prop so quickly and so well.
Shinji had now completely handed over prop production to Touko. He only needed to make requests and wait for her to deliver.
Professional work should be left to professionals.
And people like Touko were what you called professionals.
To get professional help from professionals, Shinji didn't mind working with certain "bad guys."
For example, to get the European and American rating standards, Shinji had to ask the Jidai Group to send a consultant to assist with filming FZ.
Although Shinji had already removed the parts of the script involving "children," the European and American rating systems were far from being as simple as applying a blanket rule.
For example, there were strict standards for the amount of blood shown onscreen: how much red was acceptable for PG-13, and how much made it R-rated. The standards were exacting.
Sometimes Shinji thought the amount of blood was fine, but the Jidai Group consultant would insist it wasn't, because the injuries were in critical areas and couldn't involve bleeding.
This hadn't been a problem with FSN, because Shinji had avoided blood and gore to make it easier to pass review. The characters usually just had a few bruises added with makeup.
Even in the scene where Shirou was critically wounded and near death, Shinji used lighting and cinematography to suggest what had happened, leaving the audience room to imagine the rest.
But that wouldn't work for FZ. To show the brutality of war, blood was necessary onscreen, so figuring out how to pass review became a troublesome part of the filmmaking process.
The European and American review standards really were a pain in the ass.
The publicity made them sound great: "If the law doesn't prohibit it, it isn't a crime." You could film whatever you wanted, and nobody would stop you.
But when it came time to release your work, you had to submit it for review by the industry association.
You could skip the review, but not a single movie theater would agree to screen an unlicensed film.
As for the film association's review standards, they were every bit as flexible as Sir Humphrey's moral principles.
To make internal decisions easier, the PMAA (Motion Picture Association of America) published review standards in deliberately vague terms. Apart from the taboo subjects everyone knew about through common understanding, only insiders knew the rest.
It was no exaggeration to say that if a complete novice made a film without knowing the rules, it could inexplicably end up rated R-18.
Not because it was particularly explicit or violent, but because the filmmaker had accidentally violated some detail of the review standards.
Of course, if the novice was an idle Brit like that one and his film was Paint Drying, that was another matter.
Compared with Shinji, a novice, the Jidai Group consultant was clearly far more experienced at dealing with the review process.
Besides checking the visuals, the consultant also helped redesign the characters' dialogue, avoiding many words that might trigger a rating review.
In addition to words that might be considered discriminatory, the consultant paid special attention to the profanity in the characters' scripts.
When people thought of English-language movie profanity, the first thing that came to mind was often a certain word beginning with "F."
But English had plenty of swear words, and different ones corresponded to different ratings. Even the same word could receive completely different ratings depending on the context or usage.
For example, "dick" wasn't prohibited when used as a name, but became a prohibited word when used to refer to an organ. Yet the word wasn't prohibited when used metaphorically to mean "jerk."
So although the sentence "Dick's dick is dick" contained the word "dick" three times, only the second instance crossed the line.
More importantly, because of social trends and the interests of film companies, review standards varied completely from one period to another.
Before the 1980s, the word "dick" was used to refer to an organ only as a bit of private slang among a small number of women, similar to how people online now used "Liu Bei" to mean adult books.
After Watergate Nixon took office, everyone found the old schemer so detestable that major European media outlets began using "dick" everywhere. After all, Dick was a nickname for Nixon's given name, Richard.
After the Watergate scandal broke, even Americans started using the word constantly, eventually landing "dick" on the media's list of prohibited words.
And after that, nobody named their child Dick anymore. These days, all the Dick-named people in Europe and America were at least forty-year-old white men.
That might've been an extreme example, but the complicated, constantly changing review standards really did give Shinji a headache.
Just having the dialogue reviewed made him feel that hiring a Jidai Group consultant had been worth it.
Still, no matter how clever the dialogue was, it was only words. Replacing a few terms would be enough to pass review.
But the scenes of Ryunosuke Uryu and the Marshal killing people were harder to handle. Even if there wasn't a single drop of red onscreen, those scenes were absolutely not suitable for children under a PG-13 rating.
However, there were things that couldn't be shown directly onscreen but could still get the audience's imagination going in other ways.
Just like how Shinji handled the scene in FSN where Shirou was nearly cut in half by Uncle Hai: through the objects in Ryunosuke's hideout, the list he'd made himself, and one or two murders that stayed within the review limits, they could still portray how cruel he was.
In this sort of scene, even if there were limits to what could be shown onscreen, the things left "unsaid" offscreen could still send a chill through the audience.
As for whether moviegoers would have nightmares, Second Master figured they probably wouldn't.
After being immersed in "art," the movie fans in this world had already seen it all and been through the wars.
If Shinji weren't thinking about the rating, and really filmed it as R-rated, the gore-loving audience would only find it appetizing.
After finishing the aerial combat scenes, Shinji once again led the crew back to the soundstage.
He'd stopped filming on the soundstage earlier so the set-design team could rebuild the scenery. Now that the set was ready, he naturally came back.
The soundstage had been decorated to look like a rooftop. This was where Matou Kariya and Tokiomi Tohsaka would fight.
Kariya: Tokiomi, This Thing's Better Than a Wand
Rooftops had always been mysterious places in works of fiction.
Although most rooftops in the real world were locked, and ordinary people couldn't get in, story protagonists always seemed to find one way or another to access them.
That was because, in stories, rooftops were like isolated islands in the middle of a bustling city. The streets below were full of traffic and people, yet the rooftop itself was quiet.
For creators, it was a setting with a striking contrast, a natural hiding place where the protagonists could sneak off and do something together.
That was why we saw Heroic Spirits fighting on rooftops, Mages fighting on rooftops, and Makoto-bro fighting on rooftops.
Ahem. The last one didn't count.
The rooftop set had already been built on the soundstage, and the crew was making the final preparations before filming.
Shinji wasn't about to take the crew to a real rooftop high above the city. The wind was too strong, and the footage would look terrible.
Kariya, already in makeup, stepped out of the makeup trailer. Even without the worms inside his body, his dry hair and deathly pale face looked much like his appearance in FZ—just as "kindly" as ever, guaranteed to scare any child into tears.
"I think you have some kind of misunderstanding about the meaning of 'kindly,' Shinji," Kariya teased his nephew. "Or does someone without even a high school diploma not know how to speak Japanese?"
Shinji answered in an exaggerated drawl. "That's called sarcasm, my dear uncle. You're the one whose Japanese must've been taught by a gym teacher."
Shinji's words gave Kariya goosebumps. He rubbed his arms. "If you keep talking in that stilted translation voice, I'll toss the old man's treasured collection into your bed!"
But by then, Shinji had already gone off to discuss camera angles with the cinematographer. Kariya had been talking to himself.
"Tch."
Kariya smacked his lips, a mischievous grin tugging at his face. "Just you wait, Shinji. You'll see what I do to you when we're filming later."
Before you continue