This chapter combines the wrap-ups for Volume One, "The Fifth-Century Arc," and Volume Three, "The Fourth Holy Grail War Arc." I had a high fever when I finished Volume One, so I never wrote its wrap-up. Now I'm catching up on both at once.
I touched on some of the ideas behind the protagonist, Sovell, in the chapter "About 'Albion.'" But first, I want to talk about what has motivated me to keep writing this fanfic for so long...
To put it bluntly, there were things I just couldn't stand reading.
That went for other people's writing as well as my own earlier work, whether it was the content, the setting, or the way things were portrayed.
In short, whenever I read, I had an issue with this or a gripe with that.
In the end, I still wanted to write a story of my own. After all, only a story I wrote myself could possibly leave me completely satisfied, though even that wasn't very likely.
I chose Artoria's era as the protagonist's background partly because I'm an Artoria fanboy, of course. But another reason was that Urobuchi wrote her so out of character in the Fourth Holy Grail War, and the anime spread that portrayal far and wide. On top of that, a bunch of people kept going on about how fucking amazing Fate/Zero's writing was. I honestly couldn't take it anymore.
Artoria wasn't the King of Knights because she was the greatest, most exemplary knight. She was the King of Knights because she was a monarch capable of commanding the finest knights of her age, whose mighty reputation would be celebrated for a thousand years afterward.
I hinted at or outright stated that many times in Volume One, so I won't belabor the point here.
Next, the protagonist.