Character · Fate/stay night
Lancer
First on the field, quickest on his feet, and the subject of a franchise-wide running joke about mortality.
In Otakana the clue reads: Servant class that fights with a spear
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Fate/stay night
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Lancer is the spear class, summoned for agility and reach. The servant who takes it in Fate/stay night is a blue-clad Irish warrior with a red spear, cheerful about violence, and cursed with luck bad enough that fans keep a tally. He opens the story by attacking a high schooler in a school corridor, which is how the protagonist gets dragged into the war at all.
The spear is the danger. Its noble phantasm reverses cause and effect, so the strike lands in the heart first and the thrust follows, and dodging becomes a matter of luck rather than skill. Against that, the class stat sheet is almost beside the point. He is fast, he is honest about wanting a good fight, and he is repeatedly handed orders that stop him having one.
Nasu gives every class a rough archetype and then breaks it in one route or another. Lancer's version of that is loyalty to a master who has not earned it. Across Fate/stay night, Fate/Zero and the mobile game, different legends fill the slot, and the joke about the class dying first survives every one of them.
Spelling LANCER
LANCER begins with a letter Japanese never had. It is written ランサー, Ransaa, because the language has no L and borrows the R row for both sounds, and the English restores the L. Six letters, and the trap is the same one that turns Rufi into LUFFY, only smaller. Compare RIDER, where the R is real.