If you go back and look at the prologue of Fate/stay night up to fate_04, there is a scene that is extremely suspicious upon closer inspection. Shirou Emiya is stabbed through the heart by Lancer, saved by Rin Tohsaka using a gem, and then inexplicably summons Saber in his own shed—after this chain of events, Rin brings him to the Fuyuki Church. There, Kirei Kotomine, acting as the Supervisor, “explains the rules” to this completely clueless newcomer: what the Holy Grail War is, what Command Spells mean, and—“once you possess Command Spells, you cannot simply resign.”
On the surface, this appears to be a neutral priest fulfilling his institutional duties. But if you zoom out and piece together the prehistory of the Fourth War and every node of the Fifth War’s opening, you will find: this “rule explanation” itself was the most critical opening move of the Fifth Holy Grail War, and the person executing it was precisely the least neutral presence on the entire battlefield.
The Church’s “Neutrality”: From Risei to Kirei, a Promise Never Fulfilled#
To understand Kirei Kotomine’s maneuvers in the Fifth War, we must first go back to the Fourth—to his father, Risei Kotomine.
The prologue of Fate/Zero, “Three Years Ago,” explicitly establishes one thing: Risei Kotomine, the Supervisor of the Fourth Holy Grail War, had already formed a secret alliance with Tokiomi Tohsaka before the war began. He arranged for his son, Kirei Kotomine, to participate in the war under the dual identity of “Church Executor and Tohsaka disciple,” secretly assisting Tokiomi in obtaining the Grail. The reasoning behind this arrangement even sounded rather warm-hearted—Risei hoped to use the Holy Grail War to help his chronically empty son find meaning in life, and it was also out of the longstanding friendship between the Kotomine and Tohsaka families, as well as his agreement with Tokiomi’s pursuit of the Root.
But regardless of the reasons, the fact remains: the Supervisor of the Fourth War had already chosen a side before the war even started.
What’s more, Risei didn’t just show private favoritism. He openly used his Supervisor authority during the war—after the Caster incident, he issued a manhunt order on the grounds of “serious violation, endangering the ritual,” announcing that whoever completed the subjugation would receive additional Command Spells. This move was perfectly justified by the rules, but it also served to consolidate the advantage of the Tohsaka-Church alliance. By Volume 3, Act 11, while Risei was receiving a “meritorious Master” according to protocol, he was shot dead on the spot by Kayneth, who exploited the Command Spell reward mechanism. From then on, the Church was no longer just a neutral arbiter—it became a battlefield for personal vendettas and factional realignments.
The endpoint of this thread: after Risei’s death, Kirei discovered his father’s body, and then in Act 12 completed his reversal—killing Tokiomi Tohsaka, seizing the contract with Archer (Gilgamesh), and narrowing the war down to a final confrontation between himself and Kiritsugu Emiya. After the Fourth War ended, Kirei survived, and in the disaster of the black mud, he obtained a new body. Then, he took the seat his father once held—Supervisor of the Fifth Holy Grail War.
The sheer irony of this setup is hard to find a match for in the entire Fate series.
The Fifth War’s Opening: Three “Non-Neutral Actions” by the Supervisor#
Now back to the opening of the Fifth War. The most comprehensively covered module in the database is the segment from the prologue to fate_04—Rin Tohsaka summoning Archer, Shirou Emiya getting dragged in, Saber’s materialization, and the rule explanation at the church. And within this chain, Kirei Kotomine’s hand appears at at least three critical junctures.
The first action: urging Rin Tohsaka to summon.
The prologue clearly records: Rin “received a prompt from Kirei Kotomine that she must complete her Servant summoning that very day.” This was not a neutral reminder. The Supervisor actively urging a specific Master to complete their summoning at a specific time is, in essence, setting the starting line of the war. And because Rin’s clock at home was an hour fast, she performed the ritual at the wrong moment, resulting in her failing to summon Saber and instead calling forth a red-clad Archer with muddled memories—the chain of consequences from this “accident” runs through the entire Unlimited Blade Works route. But without Kirei’s urging, the timing of Rin’s summoning might have been different in the first place.
The second action: the “rule explanation” to Shirou Emiya.
In the latter part of fate_03, Rin brings Shirou to the church. Kirei’s explanation is formally impeccable: the Holy Grail War is a ritual repeatedly held in Fuyuki, currently in its fifth iteration, and once a Master possesses Command Spells, they cannot simply resign. But what is the substantive effect of these words? It transforms a passive witness into a participant institutionally locked into the war. Before entering the church, Shirou was just an ordinary student who survived Lancer’s attempt to silence him; after leaving the church, he is a formal Master of the Fifth Holy Grail War. Kirei gave him no real “opt-out” option—because with Command Spells in hand, what “resignation” means is something he knows better than anyone.
The third action: concealing his true identity.
In the church scene of fate_04, Kirei presents himself purely as the Supervisor. But the truth revealed later in the Fate route (fate_13–fate_15) is that he is not only the Supervisor but also Gilgamesh’s Master. Gilgamesh survived the end of the Fourth War by incarnating through the black mud, and continued to act in the Archer class during the Fifth War. And in the finale of the Fate route, Kirei stands before Shirou as the “Guardian of the Holy Grail” and the final antagonist—he guards the corrupted Holy Grail in the church’s underground chapel, awaiting its birth.
A Supervisor who is simultaneously a participant. A rule-explainer who is simultaneously the ultimate breaker of rules. That is Kirei Kotomine’s position in the Fifth War.
The Core of the Paradox: Not Exploiting Loopholes, but the Rule Itself Never Existed#
Many analyses like to describe Kirei’s maneuvers as “exploiting loopholes in the rules.” But the evidence points to a more radical conclusion: the rule of “Church neutrality” in the Holy Grail War was a pretense from the very beginning. It was written in the rulebook, but no one ever took it seriously—including the people who wrote the rules.
In the Fourth War, Risei, as Supervisor, secretly allied with the Tohsaka family and used the manhunt order and Command Spell reward mechanism to influence the war. In the Fifth War, Kirei inherited this position, but his motives were more dangerous than his father’s—Risei at least had a fatherly reason of “finding meaning in life for his son,” whereas Kirei had already completed his reversal during the Fourth War from “an Executor driven by others’ goals” to “a destroyer driven by his own emptiness.” What he discovered in the Fourth War was not the meaning of life, but that the suffering and destruction of others themselves could bring him pleasure. Gilgamesh’s temptation in Volume 3, Act 9, and his persistent observation of Kiritsugu Emiya’s practice of “sacrificing the few to save the many” ultimately pushed him to a place where he no longer needed “answers”—he only needed to see more people struggle, break down, and destroy each other in the Holy Grail War.
For Kirei, the Fifth War was not a contest he needed to “win.” The finale of the Fate route, fate_15, shows that his true goal was to bring about the birth of the corrupted Holy Grail—to let “All the World’s Evils” gush forth from the church’s underground chapel and consume everything once again, just like the great Fuyuki fire ten years ago. And to achieve that, he first needed to ensure the war started smoothly, that enough Servants were summoned, and that the vessel of the Holy Grail was filled.
So he urged Rin to summon. So he used the “rule explanation” to lock Shirou into the battlefield. So he sat in the church as the Supervisor, watching one newcomer after another walk in, and then walk out as pawns.
The Supervisor’s mask of neutrality was precisely his most effective weapon. Because no one would suspect the rule explanation of a “neutral priest.” Not Rin, and certainly not Shirou.
From “One Who Was Pushed into the Battlefield” to “One Who Pushes Others into the Battlefield”#
There is a detail worth highlighting separately. Three years before the Fourth War began, Kirei Kotomine himself was the one “pushed into the battlefield”—Tokiomi Tohsaka and Risei Kotomine together enrolled him into the war system, while he himself was in a hollow state of “not knowing what he wanted.” His internal monologue in the prologue clearly shows: although outwardly self-disciplined and devout, he had long lacked a sense of purpose or value, and could only maintain a formal faith through ascetic practices; the recent death of his wife and the appearance of Command Spells on his hand did not immediately translate into a clear wish.
Ten years later, Kirei Kotomine, sitting in the church and “explaining the rules” to Shirou Emiya, is doing to another young man exactly what Tokiomi and Risei did to him back then: using the language of institutions and rules to lock someone who doesn’t yet truly understand what the war means into the battlefield.
The difference is that back then, Kirei was passive. Now, he is active. He knows what Command Spells mean, knows what “cannot simply resign” means, and knows that the Holy Grail has been corrupted—but he won’t tell Shirou any of this. He will simply recite the rules in the most neutral tone, and then watch this adopted son of Kiritsugu step by step into the battlefield he has designed.
This is what makes Kirei Kotomine as a character so spine-chilling: he doesn’t target Shirou out of hatred for Kiritsugu. He derives satisfaction from the very act of “manipulating the fates of others.” And the position of Supervisor gives him a perfect, unquestioned stage.
Conclusion#
Looking back at the opening of the Fifth Holy Grail War: Rin enters the battlefield first, Shirou gets dragged in, and the two threads collide at the point where Lancer’s silencing attempt fails. But driving all of this is a more hidden engine—the three actions Kirei Kotomine executed in his capacity as Supervisor: urging Rin to summon, using the rule explanation to lock Shirou into the battlefield, and concealing the fact that he himself is also a Master. These three things are the true “opening” of the Fifth War.
The rule of Church neutrality was never “broken.” It was inherited—from Risei to Kirei, from the Fourth to the Fifth, each “enforcement” simultaneously hollowed it out. When Kirei stands before the black mud in the church’s underground chapel in fate_15, a smile on his face, the paradox reaches its endpoint: the Supervisor was never there to maintain the order of the war. What the Supervisor wanted was the war itself.