Does it deserve the spoiler tag?

It has her real name written right on the image, so I'd say yes.

I must say though, I never saw that one coming.

Well according to the story, Saber Extra wasn't actually evil. She was just a crappy ruler who was more concerned with having fun and goofing around than ruling. This made her very unpopular with everyone so they demonized her publicly and the rest is history as we remember it.

It kind of fits... I guess. In the game she is pretty vain, but develops into a tsundere over the player.

@Fragbet85
Isn't that how it goes normally anyway?
I remember reading a book on the Greatest (or worse, depending on your views) tyrants of all time.
On the entry for Nero, it wrote that he once blocked off the Coloseum and filled it with water so he could watch renacted navy battles.
I have no idea about the truth of the statement, but it definitly fits with "crappy ruler who was more concerned with having fun and goofing around than ruling."

sounds like the opposite of normal Saber, who in life focused too much on ruling for her own good.

Sideswipe said:
@Fragbet85
Isn't that how it goes normally anyway?
I remember reading a book on the Greatest (or worse, depending on your views) tyrants of all time.
On the entry for Nero, it wrote that he once blocked off the Coloseum and filled it with water so he could watch renacted navy battles.
I have no idea about the truth of the statement, but it definitly fits with "crappy ruler who was more concerned with having fun and goofing around than ruling."

According to the game at least, Saber actually cared for the people, she just sucked at ruling. To make an analogy it's basically like having a decent president who would rather watch television and play video games than signing tax bills. So her unpopularity is understandable.

Compare to the historical Nero who is often portrayed as someone who killed people for his own amusment. One story is when he got actors on theatre to KILL each other for authenticity. Though there has been some debate over Nero's acts, as some sources seem to indicate that he was popular with the common people. I'm guessing this is what Type-moon used the portray Saber Extra.

You might want to consult someone better versed in Roman history though.

Now that we have two separate Sabers, one red, one blue, both royalty, and both with similar looks, the way is wide open for a Royal Heart Breaker video featuring the two.

Saber, or rather Atruia being a girl, but pretending to be a boy was a nice spin on the legend. This one is just a messed up sex change for no reason.

Let's not forget that according to Fate/Zero, Jeanne d'Arc also looks like Arturia. So now we have three nearly identical looking historically important blonde swords women.

A little (real life) Nero history:

Nero's perhaps most shocking acts to the Romans themselves were that he considered himself such a great poet that he actually went out on stage and performed himself, either as an actor or a musician. In those days, actors were typically slaves, and were essentially prostitutes, and viewed by society as such. They were the lowest dregs of society, even if going to a play was a high-class thing to do, and here was the Emporer performing with a bunch of dirty slaves!

Flooding the Colluseum to re-enact naval battles is actually nothing terribly exciting. The Colloseum was actually built for that stunt, and plenty of other Emperors besides Nero had similar stunts. The whole idea was to show off "Look at how great Roman Engineering is! We can build a man-made lake and have actual naval battles in it, then drain it, and have man-to-man fighting in it the next day!"

What would have been more shocking was that Nero was a big fan of the Chariot races (as were pretty much all Romans), and decided that HE would enter, as well. Chariot racers, like actors, were slaves. His personal chariot, however, had something like 16 horses pulling it, rather than just 2, but nobody could complain, since he was the Emperor. When the race started, he was totally unable to control 16 horses, and flipped the chariot, destroying it, and so the judge called the whole race off and declared Nero the winner, anyway. Probably highly amusing for the crowd, but it wasn't the sort of thing that instills confidence in the direction the Empire is heading.

Nero would also have been Emperor during the period after the reign of Caligula, where prostitution and images and talk about sex had become MUCH more open and public than previously before. Much of the wealth of the Empire at that time would come from taxes upon private, government sanctioned prostitution, if not public houses of prostitution.

What really would have pissed off the Romans, however, besides Nero's utter distaste for going out and fighting wars (Almost all the other emperors, after ascending to the throne, would declare a war against someone for spurious reasons (Cassus Belli) to get a quick victory that makes them a "War Hero". Romans loved War Heroes, so every emperor had to become one to make themselves popular) was that Nero was similar to the nobility of Europe later on: He had been raised as a noble, not as a military man, like other Roman emperors were, so he didn't give a shit about the rules or opinions of the ruling class, and felt he could do what he wanted, and nobody could stop him. He spent money like a drunken sailor, and put the Empire in debt, even though he was raising taxes, as well. Worse, he tended to spend on perosnal pleasures like an unthinkably huge palace (I mean, the size of a small city huge) being built in the place where a great fire had burned down a quarter of Rome. (Which is where his enemies coined the term "Nero fiddled while Rome burned" to make the building of that opulant mansion atop the ruins of many other people's homes sound even more egregious.)

Nero is also probably best known in Christian audiences, however, for being the guy who fed Christians to the Lions, or set them on fire, or otherwise publicly executed them. He saw them as an unpopular cult, whose practices seemed strange and repulsive to the Romans (Communion was seen as "cannibalism" since it involved eating "the body of Christ"), so he figured he could boost his popularity by blaming all Rome's problems on a racial/religious minority (the Old Faithful of politics) and giving some free public executions to sate the crowd's bloodlust. Unfortunately, it backfired, because the Christians were given a chance to repent and simply say that they would embrace a different God, and they would be spared execution, and they would consistantly choose their religion over their life. The idea of a faith that was more important than their life was such a strange idea to the Romans that it wound up creating more curiosity for the religion than it actually turned people against them.

Basically, no, it's hard to see Nero as a "good person", although probably not the worst dictator in history, Nero definitely fit every negative stereotype of "useless stuck-up self-serving nobles" you can think of.

I know I'm not the only one that thought D'Arc in regards to Saber. Oddly enough, the idea that she was King Author had occured to me first.

I fail to see how gender-flipping one of the most infamous emperor's of Rome is any sillier than gender-flipping the one of the most famous legendary knights. But this is the Nasuverse so anything goes.

Saber Extra portrayal in the game is okay though. She is a direct contrast to the original Saber. Being somewhat vain noisy and somewhat of a Blood knight. Much like the original Saber though, she eventually starts to get better when she develops feelings for the MC and becomes all moe tsundere.

BakaHoushi said:
Let's not forget that according to Fate/Zero, Jeanne d'Arc also looks like Arturia. So now we have three nearly identical looking historically important blonde swords women.

I doubt we can take Caster's word for that. He was kind of... insane. GIRL WITH SWORD? OMG JEANNE!!111

Caster was indeed insane, but come on, thinking just because Saber had a sword is the reason why he thought she was Jeanne is just ignorant. They most definitely resemble each other. Caster was crazy, not blind.

And a couple months after the new Saber's identity is revealed, the National Geographic channel does a special on how Nero was a pretty decent ruler that got railroaded by history. The question is, does Nasu have access to information that we don't, or is someone at Nat Geo a Fate fan?

Arael said:
And a couple months after the new Saber's identity is revealed, the National Geographic channel does a special on how Nero was a pretty decent ruler that got railroaded by history. The question is, does Nasu have access to information that we don't, or is someone at Nat Geo a Fate fan?

Fascinating, given that's exactly how she's portrayed in-game. A decent ruler whose extragavances and eccentricities made her unpopular and thus demonized by history (that and the whole "butchering Christians" thing; I doubt that did her any good when Christianity became one of the most dominant religions on the planet; kind of wonder if the game ever addressed that)!