Comedy, Catharsis, and Cooking the Canon in Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family

• Author: Alex Henderson

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero

A spinoff is a metatextual exercise, existing not only in conversation with the series it belongs to, but in conversation with that series’ audience. A good spinoff adds to, or remixes, pre-existing characters, story, and worldbuilding to make something new and refreshing while playing off the audience’s knowledge of (and the affection they already hold for) those original elements. By this metric, Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family—a cooking-focused, slice-of-life spinoff of Fate/Stay Night—is an excellent example of the genre. The series is cute and fun, and is the epitome of a comfort watch for a fan who wants to indulge in seeing their favourite characters Have a Nice Time For a Change™. However, this warm and fuzzy feeling is carefully crafted: the series’ creators have a canny sense of what to emphasise and what to leave unspoken that leads to some wonderfully delicate, understated storytelling that uses, twists, and plays with audience knowledge for maximum emotional impact, sometimes to unexpectedly heartbreaking and bittersweet results. Emiya Menu takes pre-existing ingredients and prepares them in a new way, relying on the familiarity of those flavours and elements to make the resulting, transformative meal extra satisfying. 

Fate is no stranger to spinoffs. The Fate/Stay Night visual novel (released in 2004, receiving an official English-language release just in time for its 20th anniversary) tells a tale of mages and legendary heroes fighting for the wish-granting device known as the Holy Grail that has inspired a seemingly-endless whirl of related media. Some are direct continuations of the original story, like the tragic and dad-focused prequel Fate/Zero, or the mind-bendy pseudo-sequel Fate/Hollow Ataraxia [1]. Some, like Fate/Apocrypha, veer off into alternate universes and semi-canon “what if?” scenarios. Others play in different genres: The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II is a magical mystery procedural, and Fate/Extra and Fate/Extella launch the franchise into a dizzying hybrid of fantasy and sci-fi. And, of course, there’s the mobile gacha game Fate/Grand Order, which, nearly ten years into its run, has gotten to such gloriously convoluted and meta storytelling heights that I couldn’t even begin to summarise it. 

Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family takes the focus on cooking in the original visual novel and expands on it, transporting the Stay Night characters into the slice-of-life foodie genre. The manga by artist TaA is, at time of writing, going strong at ten volumes (six of which are available in English) and was adapted into an anime series in 2018, which featured thirteen short episodes that aired once a month across the year. Each installment focuses on the creation and consumption of a different delicious meal, seasonally-themed to match the episode’s release date, while often being emotionally significant to the characters in some way. Stay Night protagonist Emiya Shirou does most of the cooking, as he does in the original source material, though he occasionally passes the spoon to his co-stars.

Emiya Menu operates on a “I know that you know that I know” system of strategically-placed gaps and silences. Sometimes, this is just economical storytelling: the series assumes that the audience already knows who all these characters are and what kind of relationships they usually have, so it doesn’t devote any time to (re)introducing them. For example, it assumes that you remember Lancer killing Shirou at the beginning of Fate/Stay Night (don’t worry, despite the out-of-context meme that Shirou is unfortunately so famous for, he didn’t die, or at least he didn’t stay dead). It doesn’t need to provide you with a flashback that explains this, it just dives straight in and lets you enjoy the odd and funny juxtaposition of Shirou running into Lancer in the shopping district. Seeing these familiar characters in a new context where they can have goofy, sweet-natured interactions that wouldn’t have been possible in the mainline canon of the series is the big appeal of Emiya Menu (aside from, of course, all the beautifully drawn food) and that familiarity informs the storytelling choices.

In addition to informing the construction of the series’ many jokes and cute scenes, this familiarity and these “gaps and silences” are also used for some rather emotional moments that provide in-the-know fans with a unique form of catharsis. A key emotional throughline between Zero and Stay Night is the Emiya family itself, and the tragedy of miscommunications, unresolved heartbreak, and cruel irony that underpins their backstory. It’s no surprise that Emiya Menu draws on this, using its format and relatively peaceful setting to expand upon elements of these fraught relationship dynamics, exploring them in the peaceful context of the cooking show and leaving the audience to fill in the unspoken gaps to get the full emotional impact.

An effective example of this is Episode 3, which focuses on Illyasviel von Einzbern (Illya to her family and friends, and some of her enemies) celebrating Girl’s Day, fitted into a kimono and surprised with a traditional feast. Illya is introduced in Stay Night as an antagonist, not only as a competitor in the Grail War, but also as someone with a uniquely complicated relationship to Shirou. Unbeknownst to him, Shirou’s adoptive father and mentor figure, Kiritsugu, is also Illya’s biological father, though the tragic circumstances of the end of the previous War separated him from his daughter [2]. Illya arrives in town for the events of Stay Night convinced that her father betrayed her family and left her to suffer, ready to enact revenge on both Kiritsugu and the child he seems to have replaced her with, Shirou—only to discover that Kiritsugu died years before she could get there. 

Illya’s role in the narrative, and the relationship dynamic that develops between Shirou and Illya, varies depending on the route, though she meets a tragic ending in the majority of the visual novel’s branching storylines. Seeing her alive and well, hanging out with Shirou and company without anyone trying to kill each other, offers viewers a sweet and peaceful vision of what could have been if all these characters had been able to live, and these relationships had been able to continue their positive growth without canon’s tragic tendencies cutting them off early. With that in mind, though, the greater emotional significance of this event will be lost on the viewer if they’re not aware of the complicated and miserable dynamic that Kiritsugu’s two children share. 

The unspoken subtext of Illya learning more about Japanese culture is that she’s learning more about her estranged father’s culture, welcomed into all this by Shirou’s family friend Taiga, who knew Kiritsugu and saw a side of him that Illya never got to. It’s an olive branch and a promise that Illya is part of this new family, rather than them having replaced her. By proxy, this is an opportunity for her to start to understand and accept Kiritsugu, even if Illya can never reconcile with him personally. She’s quiet throughout the episode and her feelings about the whole thing are clearly complicated, and the viewer familiar with her complicated relationship with Kiritsugu will understand exactly why. 

There are other parts of the episode that also rely on the audience’s knowledge of the broader story: Saber offers Illya her hand and promises to escort her as a knight escorting a lady, calling back to the moment in Zero where Saber makes the same offer to Ilya’s mother, Irisviel [3]. It’s a cute moment even out of context, but viewers who recognise this parallel will feel an additional, strategically-placed twinge in their chest. It would be easy enough to give Saber a line of dialogue making this connection more explicit (“Your mother would be so happy for you” or something along those wistful lines) but Emiya Menu’s creators instead leave the emotionality of this scene simmering away in the subtext. They don’t belabour the point as they know that a dedicated audience will pick up on it, and the emotional impact will come from drawing these connections. If the viewer knows what has come before, or what happens to Illya in the alternate routes of the canonical story, they get the full effect of this peaceful juxtaposition without the comparison itself needing to be emphasised in the series. 

Perhaps an even more bittersweet example is Episode 6, which features Kiritsugu himself—a character absent from the slice-of-life shenanigans of Emiya Menu, though, as I noted above, never far away in terms of his lingering emotional impact on his children. The episode’s flashback is an adorable glimpse into Shirou’s journey to becoming the skilled and beloved home cook we now know him to be, diligently cooking hamburg steak from a recipe he saw on TV. As always, it’s adorable, but it’s also a very sombre and quietly tragic departure from the lighthearted silliness of the rest of the show… Though, once again, the bittersweet elements remain understated and unsaid, with trust placed in the audience to read between the lines and supply the missing pieces. 

For one thing, this does count as one of the series’ odd and funny juxtapositions: if you’ve previously seen Kiritsugu being a competent assassin in Zero, it’s a fun contrast to see him sitting down to a wholesome meal and doing goofy dad stuff, rendered especially cute and fluffy in TaA’s art style (and through the rose-coloured lens of Shirou’s childhood admiration for him). But, of course, there’s a deeper layer. First, this episode never emphasises the point that Kiritsugu is dead—his death is such a pivotal moment for Shirou that it’s presumed knowledge. As with Illya’s episode, the characters’ grief goes unspoken and the viewer feels it for them, the narrative drawing attention to Kiritsugu’s absence with a kind of negative space. 

Likewise, the melancholy of the episode largely exists between the lines. Shirou doesn’t know any of Kiritsugu’s backstory when he’s serving hamburgers for lunch. But the audience does, and it casts the so-called sleepy old man in a new light that’s only possible due to layers of canon awareness. We know that he’s “always traveling” because he’s going overseas to try and get Illya back. We know that his health is slowly failing from the curse the Grail placed on him at the end of the previous War, which is implied to be why the household is relying on little Shirou to do the adult’s job of cooking.

The savvy audience, too, will notice the significance of him mentioning that he ate hamburgers in Germany, drawing a clear line back to Illya and his now-lost life with his family there. The disparity between the characters’ knowledge and the audience’s is used to drive home the tragedy that sits, heart-rending but understated, in the backdrop of this episode. Knowing everything Kiritsugu has been through lets the audience read into subtle things and peer under the surface of his behaviour. Knowing that Shirou’s wish for him to “stay forever” won’t, and can’t, come true, gives the scene of domestic bliss a deeply sad undertone that’s only recognisable with all of this context. 

But, because this is a feel-good show, that understated sadness leads to an understated happiness. The episode cuts back to the present—to the peaceful, Grail-War-less setting of Emiya Menu—where Shirou is once again cooking hamburg steak. Kiritsugu is no longer in the house and evidently did not “stay forever” like his son asked him to. This isn’t commented on; the audience fills in the gaps with their knowledge of the story. Instead, Illya arrives for dinner and notices the burgers, looking at them in a way that implies she, too, is making the connection between her lost father and his favourite food [4]. Kiritsugu might not have lived to see it, but his kids have found each other, and (in this Everything’s Fine version of events where they both end up alive) maybe they can talk it out, reconcile the two very different Kiritsugus they remember, and heal together from the hole he left in both of their lives. These conversations never happen onscreen, but the audience is invited to presume that they might have, and left to enjoy the implicit peacefulness that follows. 

The end of the episode shows Shirou carrying dinner out to a house full of friends and loved ones, wordlessly driving home the point that he (and Illya) have a new family now and are starting to be okay. It’s swapped heroism for hamburgers, but this cute little moment taps into the basic core of Shirou’s growth in Stay Night’s canon, from tragedy to hope. It’s deeply bittersweet, and the series invites the audience to sit with all of this without over-explaining any of the details. It knows that you know, and the emotional high of the episode comes from how the narrative carefully deploys that. 

Of course, some of the things that Emiya Menu leaves unspoken, and its “everything’s fine” tone, does run the risk of sweeping some of Fate’s darker content under the rug. As this essay points out, for example, Episode 5 portrays Sakura cooking dinner for Shinji in a way that uncomfortably understates, or outright erases, the abusive power dynamic in their relationship. Reframing their situation through this cute lens lets Shinji off the hook for the violence he’s inflicted, but it arguably also brushes off the trauma that’s irrevocably shaped Sakura’s life and is essential to her character arc [5].

Arguably, the audience is simply not meant to overthink such things, much in the way we aren’t invited to question the logistics of this world state where everyone’s living normal lives sans Grail War. There is a greater critical conversation to be had about what gets set aside in order to construct Emiya Menu’s chill vibe, or what aspects of canon get turned into punchlines—just because something is a goofy little spinoff, doesn’t mean it’s not a piece of art worthy of scrutiny. I’d just as equally say this about other side projects like Carnival Phantasm or You've Lost Ritsuka Fujimaru, which are different in tone and format but rely on a similar metric of assumed knowledge, familiarity, and fandom.

Still, while the shift in genre and format may lead to some issues, I want to give Emiya Menu credit where it’s due for the clever way it plays on fan expectations and knowledge to create emotionally impactful and cathartic moments while remaining wonderfully subtle and understated in its character writing. I could just as easily talk about the catharsis of seeing Rin and Sakura cooking together (Fate is full of tragic split families; as this article shows, I just have an Einzbern-Emiya bias), or the joy of the Christmas episode where these variously orphaned, abandoned, and traumatised young people (and their friends, who are equally traumatised mythological characters) form a new family tradition. It would be easy to shrug this series off as “just” being fluffy fan service—I think it deserves accolades for being fluffy fan service deployed with expert precision and skill. 

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• Emiya Menu borrows some concepts from Hollow Ataraxia, such as the trip to the waterpark or the Heroic Spirits getting part-time jobs to support themselves now that they exist in the modern world outside the context of a Holy Grail War. Incorporating these ideas may serve as yet another little treat for big-time Fate fans, though it may cause anguish for Hollow Ataraxia fans specifically as that spinoff is yet to receive any kind of anime adaptation.

• To cut a long story short while hopefully maintaining nuance: Kiritsugu sought the Grail to try and save the world, only to fall in love with Irisviel, the homunculus designed to be the vessel for this magical device—and designed to be destroyed in the process of summoning it. Irisviel, undeterred by the tragedy of all this, suggests that they start a family together, and Ilya is born (the audience is treated to a slideshow version of their romance in the second ending credits of Zero, and it’s elaborated on in this drama CD). Irisviel has faith and believes that the man she loves will use the magic that inevitably kills her to create a better world for their daughter to live in. However, unbeknownst to everyone, there’s something terribly wrong with the Grail. When he discovers this, Kiritsugu ultimately chooses to destroy it rather than let its destructive magic run its course, even if it means losing any chance he has at happiness with his family (represented, brutally, by him having to kill visions of both Illya and Irisveil that the Grail summons for him). As Kiritsugu’s narration bluntly, sadly informs us in Zero’s final episode, the Einzbern family prevent him from returning and rescuing Illya, and he never sees her again.

• Irisviel doesn’t appear in the TV show, but she does cameo in a chapter of the manga, in a flashback where she bakes brownies with Illya. Illya, continuing the trend of family reconciliation through recipes, makes those same brownies with Shirou.

• Kiritsugu’s love for the good old-fashioned beef burger is a Fate mainstay: he requests them from Shirou in this drama CD, prompting his son to tease him about having a childish palette; and Zero shows him stoically shovelling down a burger while multitasking and making assassination plans. Interestingly, this is one of the only scenes of characters eating in Zero, in a stark contrast to the many, paced-out, emotionally-relevant sit-down mealtime scenes in Stay Night. Possibly the only scene of someone actually enjoying food is when Kiritsugu’s right-hand-man Maiya goes to a dessert buffet, and that’s in this drama CD rather than the series itself. Anyway, it’s likely the lack of dinnertime scenes in Zero is a practicality for the sake of pacing, tone, and a difference in medium from visual novel to light novel; however, it would be interesting to examine what this different approach to food and its role in characterisation says about the two different texts by the two different writers… but that’s an article for another day.

• This isn’t necessarily unique to Emiya Menu; Type-Moon’s self-parody skit series Carnival Phantasm also has a bit where Sakura is portrayed as the over-the-top tragic, innocent heroine in a soap opera, essentially playing her abusive family situation as a joke. Yes, it also takes the mick out of Shinji and portrays him as a lazy, obnoxious internet troll on the receiving end of slapstick violence, but it obviously wouldn’t be fair to say that this is equivalent.