Anime / Fate/Grand Carnival

"It's great to do nothing but play and play (Right?)"

Mysterious Neco V: A once-in-a-decade carnival wherein all hell breaks loose... Rejoice, for the coming of the miraculous carnival. Will it bring chaos? Or madness?
Mysterious Neco Y: The party is beginning anew, I see.
Mysterious Neco V: Indeed it is.
Mysterious Neco Y: Who'd have thought it? I think it's going to be a wild one...

Fate/Grand Order is a story with incredibly dense Worldbuilding that encompasses ideas from the entire rest of the decades long Nasuverse franchise. It tells tales of epic heroes, mythic tragedies, and gods and monsters battling it out with all of human history in the balance. Any given arc can be filled with desperation, sacrifice and death.

...But let's once again ignore all of that and focus on the characters involved having fun instead!^note Don't worry, this time we're not going to go as extreme as the other kind of fun... Maybe.

Fate/Grand Carnival is the 2021 Sequel to 2011's Original Video Animation comedy short series Carnival Phantasm, featuring the characters that now make up the roster of Type-Moon's massively successful Fate/Grand Order mobile phone game rather than just those from Tsukihime and Fate/stay night specifically. Which unsurprisingly leads to even more ridiculous situations.

A special episode aired as part of the Fate Project New Year's Eve TV Special on December 31, 2020. At the end of the short, two full OVA seasons were announced which would be released on June 2, 2021 and October 13th, 2021. On July 3rd 2022, the two seasons were added to Crunchyroll with an English dub.

Fate/Grand Carnival contains examples:

• Actor Allusion:
  • Orion becomes the prominent Butt-Monkey not only because it's his original role, but because he shares a VA with the most prominent Butt-Monkey of Carnival Phantasm.
  • The Mysterious Necos are all dressed up as Fate/Grand Order Servants their voice actors also play: V is dressed up as King Hassan and also still sporting his Nrvnqsr Chaos gray hair under his robes, all three voiced by Joji Nakata. W is dressed up as Frankenstein, both voiced by Ai Nonaka. X is dressed up as Mysterious Heroine X, both voiced by Ayako Kawasumi. And Y is dressed up as Carmilla, both voiced by Atsuko Tanaka.
  • Something doubling as a Casting Gag: Merlin (Takahiro Sakurai) runs a Hostess Club wherein Jeanne Alter (Maaya Sakamoto) chose to part-time. They are also well-remembered for their roles as Cloud and Aerith in Final Fantasy VII (as well as its remake), and one of the game's funniest episodes is in fact in such a club.
• Admiring the Poster: The opening features a scene where Gawain, Lancelot, and Tristan celebrate in front of a poster of Swimsuit Altria, much to her horror.
• Advertised Extra: Edmond Dantes was prominently featured in promotional materials before the OVA aired. However, he only made a few cameos and only appeared in a short interlude in which he didn't even have a speaking role.
• Alternate Self: Frequently seen due to the game having them, having four different Cú Chulainn appear before being executed. Interestingly, Nero's summer version is treated as the original in a swimsuit rather than a separate Servant, which is different from the game where that's true for every other summer version, but not Nero as her summer variant is actually Nero Bride^note who is explicitly a separate servant from the original Nero in the Caster class.
• All for Nothing: Blackbeard spearheads a strike to force Ritsuka to sortie her servants more evenly, allowing the overworked high-tier servants to rest while giving the low-tier ones some actual work to do. It works and a Servant Labor Equity Act is passed... but nothing changes because a large number of low-tier servants ultimately decide that farming is a pain in the ass, forcing Ritsuka to once more rely on her high-tier ones.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Ritsuka really only seems to care at all about Red Hare.
• Always on Duty: While Ritsuka neglects the lower-ranked servants that they are always on standby, servants useful in farming like Arash and Merlin have the opposite problem when they complain about all the farming they have to do. Waver, in particular, is placed in many teams and despondently reveals he is so overworked being taken out into battles that he's shown to be hospitalized later on.
• The Artifact: Neco Spirits are just as prominent here as they were in Carnival Phantasm, despite the lack of other elements from Tsukihime. To lessen their resemblance to Arcueid,^note who wouldn't show up in-game (as Archetype:Earth) until after the anime's release their designs more obviously parody other Fate characters.
• Ascended Meme: A long-time joke from FGO fans is that they overwork the top-tier servants in farming. The 2nd trailer shows Ritsuka doing just that with Blackbeard leading a union strike against her.
• Bad Boss: Ritsuka might not be as bad as Riyo Gudako, but she's still not a Master you'd want to work under. When presented with a choice to keep either her full paycheck or all her Servants she chooses her paycheck without a second thought, doesn't bother helping Mash when Orion sexually assaults her, puts all her high-rarity Servants in a competition of literal life or death while flat out killing everyone worth 3* or less (except for her personal favorite, Red Hare), kills Cú Chulainn Alter (despite being a 5*) to make sure the Cú Chulainn species goes extinct, and has the gall to act saddened by her Servants dying in a competition she chose to put them through. Likewise, from even the 2nd trailer, she turns out to be the kind of Master that overworks her existing Servants and neglects the lower rarity ones to the point that Blackbeard led a union strike against her.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: Some scenes in the opening don't play verbatim compared to their respective skits.
  • In the opening, Jeanne Alter gets fed up with Gilgamesh and burns him. In the hostess club episode, while Gil annoys her, Tamamo-no-Mae interrupts before Jeanne Alter does anything, and it is instead Gilles de Rais who gets roasted after criticizing Jeanne Alter too much.
  • The opening has a brief scene of Ereshkigal streaming before it abruptly cuts off to Dumuzid looking at a banned streaming account. In the Servatube episode, Osakabehime gets banned after she goes way overboard with her fanservice when trying to beat Eresh in a popularity contest instead.
• Berserk Button: Belittling Red Hare or even implying that feeding him doesn't take priority over everything else sends Ritsuka into a terrifying rage.
• Big Eater: Altria, as per usual. To wit, she spends the entirety of the Olympia Games events on the sidelines eating (presumably all provided by EMIYA considering what one of the boxes is labelled) and only enters the final round at the insistence of the Knights of the Round Table, but not before devouring a rice ball nearly as big as her head with one final bite. She also claims that the reason she hasn't retired to Avalon yet is because there's no good food there.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: When introduced to Altria Lily and learning how much of a good person she is, Jeanne Alter thinks it's nothing more than an act but it's averted when the two actually have a conversation.
• Black Comedy: Besides all the death and bedlam, they make a joke about the would-be 2020 Olympics.
• Brain Bleach: Poor Mash will certainly need some after seeing Saber!Lancelot wearing her Stripperific Dangerous Beast Craft Essence costume.
• Brick Joke:
  • During his fencing match against D'eon, Gawain says that the sun's power will grant him magnificent muscles. Later, after Chaldea ends up falling down its slope foundation, Gawain, having survived the ordeal, emerges out of the snow half-naked, with magnificent muscles, thanks to being exposed to the sun.
  • During episode 2, a quick cut shows Sherlock Holmes investigating a chalk outline of the once-again killed Cú Chulainn. The Stinger reveals what happened to him. Jaguarman got upset about the carnival ending, so she used her Jaguar Kick skill on him, turning him into A Twinkle in the Sky.
• But Thou Must!: When discussing how the latest carnival is going to go, Mysterious Neco V's options are chaos... and madness. Made even sillier in Japanese, where the two options have the exact same pronunciation ("kyou"), so written characters have to be put on screen to make any kind of distinction between the two.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Lancer as usual... and more. The change of phrase to "Cú Chulainn died!" is not just for convenience: every version of Cú Chulainn reprises his "Lancer died! You bastards!" routine, even his otherwise totally serious Alter self.
  • Orion gets this treatment courtesy of Artemis whenever he tries to hit on any girl but her. Notice that he shares the same seiyuu with all but one Cú Chulainn, so his inclusion for the role is most likely not coincidental.
• Canon Foreigner: The different "Mysterious Necos" in the first episode are basically the different Neco-Arcs from Carnival Phantasm dressed up as the Servants their voice actors play as. Cue episode 2, and suddenly there is a "Mysterious Neco Z" (Merlin) thrown into the mix, even though Takahiro Sakurai doesn't have a Neco-Arc he voiced before.
• Casting Gag:
  • Mysterious Neco V is Crispin Freeman in the dub, continuing the gag of him dubbing the Fate roles of Joji Nakata after Kirei Kotomine and First Hassan (and outside the Nausverse, Alucard).
  • As Orion and Cu Chulainn are both Nobutoshi Canna in Japanese, the dub casts Cu's English voice Tony Oliver as Orion. This particular sort of casting decision, matching Japanese and English actors, happened often in the Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia dub as well.
    • In that same vein, Erica Lindbeck has her third shared Fate role with Miyuki Sawashiro as Artemis, after Mordred and Nightingale. Grant George also voices Red Hare, as both he and Red Hare's Japanese actor Hikaru Midorikawa were Diarmuid in Fate/Zero.
    • Having shared the role of Medea with Atsuko Tanaka, Megan Hollingshead also voices Carmilla and Mysterious Cat Y here.
• Character Exaggeration: Mash in canon tends to apply textbook knowledge and common sense to her situations, but her general inexperience with regular life means she may miss the mark from time to time. Here, she's an Only Sane Woman among the craziness everyone else displays.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Ereshkigal is part this, part Love Martyr in regards to her relationship with Ritsuka. She's upset that Ritsuka won't sortie her so they can spend time together and tries to catch her attention first by becoming a Servatuber and then by using a grail dropped by Dumuzid to create a singularity. However, once Ritsuka reveals that she had already reached max bond with Ereshkigal (implying that Ritsuka herself no longer cares about her^note though the fact that she's Grailed to level 100 and has a full +2000 to both her stats, all of which requires some decent investment, at least implies that she's a favorite of Ritsuka's), Ereshkigal is elated.
• Cold Equation: The premise for the Olympia Games. With so many contracted Servants straining Chaldea's ability to accommodate them all, Ritsuka is presented with two choices: take a cut in her paycheck to support them all, or decommission some of them. Ritsuka immediately chooses the latter. Amusingly, aside from Nero's self-inflicted death from losing the swimming event (which she recovered from) and all the Servants 3* and lower who were axed before the competition even began (sans Red Hare & Nobukatsu but including Cú Chulainn Alter), it's indicated that most if not all of the participants made it to the final cavalry battle given the sheer number still left to form teams (including several who had fought in and already lost previous events such as Gawain).
• Continuity Nod:
  • During the swimming event, Nero refers to herself as the personification of the beauty of Venus, prompting Ishtar to comment on the audacity of saying that in the presence of the ACTUAL Goddess of Venus. The two of them had this same conversation during the Setsubun event in Fate/Grand Order.
  • In episode 2's Laughing Bartender Moriarty segment, Charles Babbage uses his transformation into a steam train for the "Dead Heat Summer Race" event as an example of his being treated as an object and not a person.
  • Later in the same episode, Ereshkigal calls out Osakabehime for her inconsistent Animal Motifs, referencing her in-game profile.
  • The shot of Jeanne Alter and several others near the end of the hostess club segment is a reference to the FGO Craft Essence Maiden Leading Chaldea, even including Gilles and Hans in the same places (though Gilles is in his other class).
• Cool Horse: Invoked. Red Hare is so cool that Ritsuka grailed him to Level 100 and did not let him participate to preserve his coolness.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: During the fencing match, Gawain is effortlessly taken out by Chevalier D'eon, thanks to the match taking place indoors and therefore making Gawain's Numeral of the Saint skill useless.
• Cuteness Proximity: Altria Lily instills this in anyone she interacts with. Gilgamesh squees when he sees her, dropping his royal demeanor to call her "Lily-chan!" Jeanne Alter tries to brush this off as a façade of hers, but quickly finds herself entranced by Lily's purity and cuteness as well.
• Dark Horse Victory:
  • Before the Olympia Games track event, Achilles and Atalante challenge each other to win before Kingprotea simply steps over the entire track at the start.
  • The swimming event opens up with the contestants chatting amongst each other to set up rivalries, only for it to turn out that none of them realized they were supposed to start until after Nitocris already reached the end of the pool.
• Death Is Cheap: Nero, Gawain, Orion, and multiple other characters who get sacrificed or otherwise killed in the Olympia Games just show back up in later Olympia Games events with no explanation. Well, no good ones anyway.
  Nero: I am the director of the games! You think I would be eliminated in such a pitiful fashion?
• Downer Ending:
  • Played for laughs with the first episode, where the Olympia Games end up causing Chaldea to slide down the mountain it is built on (represented by a silly Art Shift), and restoring the building makes the resource shortage even worse.
  • And again in the second episode, enacting the Servant Labor Equity Act ultimately solves nothing. Blackbeard and his friends still have nothing to do while Waver and the other usual farming team members are still overworked.
• Elite Four: Helena, Medb, Tamamo, and Altria Lily are referred to as the Four Heavenly Kings of Club M, with Lily being regarded as the strongest as her sheer purity, sweetness, and cuteness instantly "purifies" her customers, who happily shell out huge amounts of cash to spend time with her.
• Evil Laugh: Dantes pretty much spends his entire appearance laughing his signature laugh while trapped on an island and multiplying himself to build a wooden castle. Gilgamesh unexpectedly joins in the cacophony of laughter and Dantes ends up blasting Gil with his Noble Phantasm... before going right back to laughing with all of his clones.
• Faceless Masses: The audience for the Olympics is made up of various copy-pasted Neco clones of the Hashashin.
• Failed a Spot Check: Atalante, Achilles, and presumably the rest of the sprinters somehow fail to notice that the ginormous Kingprotea is among the competitors.
• Fan Disservice: Good news, the Dangerous Beast outfit is animated! Bad news, Saber Lancelot is the one wearing it, and he's really bad at recreating the pose from the original Craft Essence.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Ritsuka kills Cú Chulainn Alter because there are "too many Cú Chulainns" around. Keep in mind that he's literally the only Cú Chulainn left when she says that.
• Fourth-Wall Mail Slot: Parodied in the Tiger Dojo segment at the end of the first episode. Sitonai/Illya brings in a massive pile of unanswered fanmail, owing to the anime being released ten years after Carnival Phantasm. It never gets read, because as soon as this fact is brought up, Jaguar Man/Taiga flips out and sets the pile on fire, much to Illya's horror.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Several:
  • At one point, Ritsuka can be seen eating what appears to be a large amount of Mana Prisms and one Rare Prism, presumably from when the Cú Chulainn squad was killed off.
  • During the Sparring Match between Gawain and D'eon, Meunière from the Chaldea staff (who is shown to have a thing for D'eon in the Agartha singularity) can be seen in the background for a brief moment as he cheers D'eon on.
  • When the cavalry battle starts, dozens of Servants assemble in themed teams, complete with a few gags (among other things, both Saber Alter and Kintoki brought their bikes, Heracles is carrying both Shirou the bear and Sitonai on his shoulders, Chacha is riding on a bunch of Mini-Nobus while Nobunaga is riding on top of Okita much like during the swimming event but also has Nobukatsu holding onto her back). Most of these appear for maybe three frames in a quick pan.
• The Gambling Addict: Columbus keeps finding new ways to make sheer determination into a character flaw.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • When Nero suddenly returns for the cavalry battle after dying earlier, she calls out "Thrice I Welcome the Setting Sun!" which is the name of her in-game skill that revives her when she is defeated.
  • Medb uses her skill "My Dear Mead" to woo Columbus at the hostess club, which in the game can stun a male enemy with the Charm status. Oddly, while Tamamo does the same thing to Gilgamesh with her "Malediction, Boundless Sunshine" skill, that's not what it does in the game at all; it drains the enemy's NP charge instead.
• Gratuitous English: Just like in the game, Dumuzid engages in this. Especially when Ereshkigal causes a grail to pop out of the wool on his rear.
  Dumuzid: Holy shit.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath:
  • While not as bad as her Learning with Manga! FGO incarnation, Ritsuka "recycles" numerous servants for utterly silly reasons, tells Mash ridiculous Blatant Lies despite it being obvious Mash doesn't believe her at all, and generally doesn't seem to care about anything but her pay not getting cut and hanging out with her Cool Horse Servant, Red Hare. She's also shown overworking the most efficient farming teams to the point where Waver is sent to the hospital and while Ereshkigal is overjoyed at having reached maximum bond level, Ritsuka only uses it as an excuse to no longer deploy her.
  • Da Vinci suggests the Servant culling in the first place basically cause she's annoyed with them bothering her about silly things like rooms so they're not sleeping in the halls and mana to not suffer a Critical Existence Failure, and then just leaves halfway through the selection process for who's going to go, leaving a badly made cardboard cutout with nothing but "Gone Home" written on it. When a Servant labor strike happens in the second episode, she's already set up the cardboard cutout and bailed before Mash can ask her for help.
• Historical In-Joke: When Nitocris wins the swimming race (by being the only competitor who actually started at the right time), she says "I went forth", which is an allusion to the original title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Book of Going Forth by Day.
• Hostess Club: The second episode has Jeanne Alter working at one run by Merlin and the Neco Spirits, with the payment being Quantum Piece. The Elite Four hostesses are Helena Blavatsky, Queen Medb, Tamano-no-Mae, and Altria Lily.
• Hypocritical Humor: Ritsuka's reason of killing Cú Chulainn Alter is because there are too many Cú Chulainns. Anyone familiar with Altria should quickly notice what's wrong with that statement.
• Image Song: Well, as close as one could get in a series like this, but the new version of Super☆Affection is stated explicitly to be sung in-character by Mash, Nitocris, Liz, Shuten, Ibaraki, Medb, Atalante, Mysterious Heroine X, Ishtar, Nero, and Sitonai.
• Internal Homage:
  • The opening scene of the series with the various Neco Spirits recreates multiple elements from the opening of the first episode of Carnival Phantasm: Mysterious Neco X (Neco-Arc dressed up as Mysterious Heroine X) once again spins up from under the counter at the Anenerbe cafe while mixing a drink, gets angry and hangs up on a caller trying to order food, then gets told by a second caller that the carnival is about to start. At which point Chaos / V once again explains while smoking it's a ridiculous party that comes once every decade, and once again does the But Thou Must! joke about whether it'll be chaos or madness... which in Japanese are homophones both pronounced "kyou". Meaning the written characters 狂 and 凶 have to once again be put up on screen to make any kind of distinction between the two. Meanwhile, Bubbles / W once again just keeps nodding in response to what everyone says.
  • Of course, the opening and ending themes recreate the ones from Carnival Phantasm but with Grand Order's characters instead of the old cast.
  • In episode 1, the sequence where Jeanne Alter is serving as a hostess at a club to try and get QP from Gilgamesh is reminiscent of the Carnival Phantasm skit where Saber had to serve him as a waitress. And like how Gilgamesh fell head over heels for Saber Alter back then, he turns into a gushing, starry-eyed mess when Altria Lily appears here. Finally, just as how workplace stress eventually causes Saber to snap and turn Alter, Jeanne Alter eventually gets fed up and demolishes the clubhouse in a fit of rage.
  • Tiger Dojo returns, this time as Jaguar Dojo, with Taiga and Illya Pseudo-Servant forms Jaguar Man and Sitonai instead.
  • Following Carnival Phantasm's Magical Girl show Phantasmoon is Oni-cure, this time parodying Pretty Cure similar to how the former parodies Sailor Moon. Shuten-Douji takes Arcueid's place as the lead magical girl with Ibaraki-Douji as her exasperated partner.
  • Ereshkigal plays a game of "Real Pop Up Pirate" by stabbing a barrel containing Blackbeard from every direction with her noble phantasm — much like Gilgamesh did to Cú Chulainn back in the very first episode of Carnival Phantasm.
• Killed Offscreen: Aside from the Cú Chulainns, whose deaths are part of a Running Gag, every servant who are three stars and below in the arena except for two (Nobukatsu and Red Hare) are never seen again, presumably burned into mana prisms like the Cú Chulainns --until the next episode, anyway.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The first episode doesn't bother to hide Archer of Shinjuku's identity as James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' archnemesis.
  • The opening also reveals Lostbelt Artemis' Aletheia form, nuking the area with her Noble Phantasm to punish Orion for his philandering.
  • The first episode's second half indirectly spoils that the servant Mash fuses with during the Fuyuki Singularity is Galahad, Lancelot's son from Arthurian Mythology.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Just like its predecessor, the titular carnival is stated to take place once every ten years in-universe. The New Year's Special aired on December 31st 2020, just a few months shy of a decade after Carnival Phantasm's 2011 run.
• Made of Iron: Gawain survives being run through by d'Eon during the fencing match and apparently fought all the way to the end of the Olympia Games, and he then one-ups himself by surviving being at ground zero of Altria and Nero's Noble Phantasms going off and being launched out of Chaldea.
• Magical Girl: Shuten-Douji and Ibaraki-Douji appear at the end of both episodes for a spoof commercial of an Oni-cure episode just like what Arcueid did in Carnival Phantasm.
• Male Gaze:
  • During the track event, there's a noticeable camera focus on Bradamante's ass, a reference to the similar camera angle in her Noble Phantasm's animation.
  • When Altria and Nero are grappling, Altria insults Nero's younger age by calling her a child, causing Nero to retort that she's very much a well-grown adult, while the camera centers on her sizeable chest.
  • Osakabehime uses this to her advantage as a Servatuber. Unfortunately she goes overboard with it during her popularity contest against Ereshkigal getting herself banned.
• Me's a Crowd: A bizarre sequence in the second episode has Edmond Dantes stranded alone on an uninhabited island. He quickly makes use of his Noble Phantasm to create duplicates to build a shelter for himself. By the end of the sequence, a veritable army of Dantes fills up the screen, having created a palatial resort hotel.
• Mockumentary: The Servant Labor Equity Act skit is presented as a ten-minute documentary show, following Blackbeard and a few servants in their everyday life and presenting the difference between the lifestyle of the lower rarity servants and the high-rarity (with some exceptions) ones in Chaldea.
• Mood-Swinger: Despite appearing as his sane Saber self, Gilles de Rais repeatedly switches back and forth between his cool and collected persona and his crazy-eyed madman Caster self at the drop of the hat.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • The swimming event in episode 1 is basically an excuse for the female Servants to wear their summer swimsuits, with a small subversion on Nitocris: While she has an attractive swimsuit, she spends all of her screentime covered with her Medjed sheet (part of her swimsuit costume), thus she's the least fanservice provider of the swimming Servants in the short aside from Meltryllis, who is wearing her penguin hoodie over her swimsuit.
  • Osakabehime in episode 2, providing ample cleavage during her Serva-tuber streams. When she's losing a popularity contest against Ereshkigal, she resorts to changing into her swimsuit variant, proclaiming that she'll stream that way exclusively if the viewers vote for her. She wins only to get banned and her channel locked immediately afterwards.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Aside from Nero riding the variants of Elizabeth because she just had no friends, it is also a touch-in with Nero's other more nefarious interpretation: Mother Harlot, who was known to ride multi-headed dragon (in this case, the dragon heads are represented by the three Elizabeths)
  • Artemis turned Orion into a pincushion of arrows for his habits of 'peeping girls in the water'. While this is pretty in-character for Orion in here, this actually doubles with an incident Artemis is familiar with from her original myth, which involved the hunter Actaeon, stags, and hunting dogs. ^note Actaeon was the one who peeped into the bathing Artemis and as a punishment, she turned him into a stag, which ended up having him being devoured by his own hunting dogs.
  • Mash's costume from the Dangerous Beast craft essence appears in episode 2... worn by Saber Lancelot.
  • The original Carnival Phantasm had Gilgamesh comically falling for a domineering Saber Alter and throwing lots of cash and gemstones her way. Come episode 2 of this show, Gilgamesh is seen comically falling for Saber Alter's polar opposite, Altria Lily, and throwing lots of QP her way.
• Never My Fault: Ritsuka blames Chaldea for making her Servants go through the Olympia Games, conveniently forgetting that she was the one who made the suggestion in the first place.
• Only Friend: Variant. Because Nero's stats says she has no friends, the only people she can get on her team for the cavalry battle are her idol rival Elizabeth and her mecha counterparts.
• Only Sane Woman: Mash is the one person with proper common sense and worries over the events unfolding before her. As a result in contrast to the soft-spoken earnest young woman that F/GO players may be familiar with she spends most of her time questioning terrible ideas, panicking, and screaming.
• The Pollyanna: Altria Lily, to the point that she is not the least bit upset after Jeanne Alter burns down the clubhouse.
• Pose of Supplication: Jeanne Alter falls into this once she experiences firsthand how utterly dominated she is by Artoria Lily's purity.
• Pretender Diss:
  • Ishtar scoffs at Nero calling herself the personification of the beauty of Venus when Ishtar is standing right there, as Ishtar is the Babylonian version of the Roman's Venus.
  • Altria and Gawain insult Nero's status as a Saberface, referring to her as a Palette Swap, and Elizabeth agrees judging by how she nods her head along.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Osakabehime and Ereshkigal start a popularity contest as You- sorry, Servatubers. They are pretty evenly matched for most of it, until Okkie brings out her trump card: she pulls out her swimsuit and starts camwhoring. She wins the contest, and promptly gets her channel banned.
• Rage Breaking Point: Jeanne Alter. In the opening, she grows increasingly irate at Gilgamesh until she just roasts his ass. In the hostess club episode, after spending a crappy night serving annoying customers and being upstaged by the other hostesses, she is patronized by a judgmental-but-flippant Gilles, causing her to snap, sic her NP on him, and raze the club to the ground.
• The Rival: Plenty all over the place.
  • Atalante and Achilles, in an almost flirty way during the track event. Alas, they don't get a chance to settle the score when Kingprotea takes it.
  • Karna and Arjuna, as per usual. One of the scenes shows them in a heated ping-pong match, and during the free-for-all near the end they both go at each other specifically.
  • Interestingly, Ozymandias and Odysseus seem to have one based around their Kaiju and Humongous Mecha Noble Phantasms respectively, with the two clashing with each other at least twice.
  • Even when they're on the same team in the cavalry battle, Tesla and Edison can't help but try and knock the other on out.
  • Altria and Nero can't stand each other. They even glare at and pick fights with each other throughout the opening!
  • Osakabehime and Ereshkigal become this as Servatubers.
• Rule of Funny: While ostensibly taking place before Part 2 of the game, several Servants who shouldn't be in Chaldea at this time are there for the sake of comedy.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: After outright dying from shock during the swimming competition when she lost, Nero suddenly appears near the end of the Olympia. When Gawain calls her out on this, Nero boasts that rising back like a phoenix is one of her abilities, and that as the director of the Olympia she wouldn't let herself be eliminated in such a pitiful fashion.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: da Vinci gets out of dodge and leaves behind a cardboard cutout by the time Altria and Nero are about to wreck Chaldea with their Noble Phantasms. She pulls it again in episode 2 to avoid having to deal with the servant strike.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The reason the whole Olympia Games got started was because Ritsuka wanted to "decommission" Servants to lighten the strain on Chaldea resources. By the end of it, the battles more or less wreck Chaldea (up to and including destroying its foundation on the mountainside), putting them at an even worse material deficit.
• Shout-Out:
  • While talking about how famous he is, Blackbeard claims the main character from that one really popular shonen manga is based on him.
  • The Moriarty sagment is called The Laughing Bartender.
• Show Within a Show: After starting as a joke in the game, Oni Cure is now a proper show. And it's a massive Long Runner, too, with over 700 episodes!
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Artoria and Nero, the two of them won't stop glaring at each other in every frame of the opening whenever they are close to each other.
• Social Darwinist: Ritsuka decides which Servants she'll keep by putting them in a deadly version of the Olympic games, and keeping the winners. Also, only the higher rarity Servants (read:the more powerful ones) can even participate. Everyone else lower-ranked (and Cú Chulainn Alter) gets the axe immediately. Except Red Hare, who she's already Grailed to Level 100 and keeps off to the side, and Nobukatsu, who somehow averted getting burned and is shown latched onto Nobunaga's back during the Cavalry Battle.
• Sore Loser: Nero took losing to Nitocris in the swimming event so badly she outright vanished into golden dust, only to revive during the finale thanks to her Thrice Setting Sun skill (which Gawain claims is cheating because she skipped the intervening events).
• Stalker with a Crush: In the opening, Edmond Dantes can be seen watching Ritsuka via Ominous Multiple Screens, laughing maniacally all the while.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: Ritsuka is a Cloud Cuckoolander while Mash is the Only Sane Man to counter the former's zaniness. Overall, female Ritsuka acts like a toned down Riyo Gudako.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Despite the fact that the Servants successfully unionize against Ritsuka for more chances at working, it turns out that since farming is a tedious chore (especially for Servants with inefficient skillsets) this just led to a lot of them weaseling out of work and everything going back to the way it was.
• Tempting Fate: Cú Chulainn Alter thinks he's escaped the Butt-Monkey curse after the other Cú Chulainns get killed off and starts bragging that he's different. Then Ritsuka kills him because one Cú Chulainn still alive is one too many.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Artemis' usual response to Orion's philandering is one lethal shot to the neck... followed by a hundred or so arrows. Every time. In the opening, she even turns into her Lostbelt form to flat out vaporize Orion from orbit.
• They Killed Kenny Again:
  • In episode 1, not just Lancer, but every version of Cú Chulainn is eliminated in one fell swoop. Ritsuka and Mash even say the requisite lines. Episode 2 seem to go without killing the poor man off, but the Oni Cure section shows a chalk line that is clearly of Cú Chulainn, and the Tiger Dojo ends with Jaguar Man punting poor Cú Chulainn into the distance, with her and Sitonai saying the requisite line.
  • Orion is made a Human Pincushion twice thanks to Artemis when perving out on other cute girls. And the hostess club episode gives him one more time.
• Troll: A deliberately Invoked Trope on Ereshkigal's part as in order to get more views on ServantTube, she presses the Berserk Button of a lot of the Servants in Chaldea such as making the Amazoness CEO deliver stuff for Achilles, filing Salieri's room with Amadeus merch, forcing Edison to use AC electricity (while making Tesla use DC electricity), and fakes being wounded in front of Nightingale. She also challenged a "real-life pop-up pirate" in the form of Blackbeard all while using her Noble Phantasm on him.
• Visual Pun:
  • Why is Red Hare Ritsuka's favorite low-rarity Servant? Because Ritsuka has red hair.
  • Dumuzid poops out a holy grail after Ereshkigal shakes him in frustration, making it a literal holy shit.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Gawain's Numeral of the Saint is completely useless even in the right time if he's in a place without the sun... like the indoor piste. D'Eon easily runs through him after pointing it out.
• Weird Trade Union: In the second season Blackbeard leads a union for Servants.
• Whole Costume Reference: This time around the Neco-Arcs, now going under the names Mysterious Neco V, W, X and Y, show up dressed as King Hassan, Frankenstein, Mysterious Heroine X, and Carmilla respectively.
• Yandere: Artemis is this to Orion. Both times when she catches him attempting to hit on (and grope) Mash, she turns him into a pincushion — the second time, it even looks like Curruid Coinchenn!

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