I am not sure how many persons who play FGO or consider themselves Fate/ fans are in that position. Fan culture has always seemed strange to me, because (at least from what I have seen) conventional fan culture can be singularly incurious about the complexities and deeper implications of the entertainments which give rise to a dedicated fandom. Thus I suspect that Arturia Pendragon and other iconic heroes in Fate/ material have attracted chiefly a very specific sort of fandom—people attracted (sexually, I daresay) to a particular character with a particular appearance appearing in the entertainment to which they have developed a particular attraction. They don't see Arthur, vast and complicated and taking a thousand different forms over the centuries; they see "Saber", a comely blonde young anime woman who comes in a wide variety of toyetic and salable forms. You can get a poster or a figurine of Arturia with bigger boobs, or Arturia dressed as Santa Claus, or Arturia in a darkly alluring red-and-black "alter" form.

Type-Moon presumably wants to keep the Fate/ franchise going forever, so as long as Arturia Pendragon is their standard-bearer and the linchpin of the franchise they'll keep messing with her and inventing fresh variants arising from some tedious multiversal explanation or other. Fate/ lore has gotten extremely ponderous over the years as they keep devising new complications, very much like the eternally compounding complications in the Marvel comic empire.

I write this because I want to be plain and obvious about my emotional prepossessions: I am endeavoring to be analytical about something that is, in all honesty, an article of my personal faith. Arturia Pendragon and the other heroes of Fate/ are not merely "fictives" for me, they aren't merely anime characters…they are real, rooted in real-life history and mythology, genuine aspects or facets of the totality of their stories as much as any particular Arthurian romance is part of the Matter of Britain. It is my belief that popular entertainment has become a primary locus of belief for humanity in general: Fate/ is able to reap massive profits for Type-Moon because millions of people believe in the heroes who fight in Fate/ media and especially in Fate/Grand Order. Without that genuine connection to the power of human myth, Type-Moon would not have a large audience.

In a similar spirit do the fans of Umamusume Pretty Derby freely discuss their favorite horsegirls as if they had a continuity with the real-life racehorses upon which the Umamusume are based. The gacha game overlaps with reality; it is not distinctly unreal. People are fans of the game's characters because they mirror the real-life antics and struggles of real-life horsies.

Fate/stay night is the emotional anchor for a vast entertainment empire, built by Type-Moon around FSN and its numerous spinoff works, most especially a highly addictive and profitable gacha game called Fate/Grand Order. FGO takes the "Heroic Servant" concept and goes wild with it, creating hundreds of playable game characters from the gods and heroes, from mythology and popular fiction, appropriated from all over the world. FGO has a strong tendency to turn every hero into a pale willowy young woman lightly clad (cf. Umamusume Pretty Derby) and many of these characters seem to be designed to appeal to pervs. And I suppose that's how one can interpret the entire Fate/ enterprise: it started with Nasu's lechery towards a gender-swapped King Arthur and continued in that vein, exploiting the lusts of a chiefly straight male audience in order to lure them into buying figurines and dumping thousands of dollars into a gambling game.

The friend who got me interested in Fate/ sometimes expressed regret that they'd done so, and they no longer play FGO. But I am glad that Kaylin did so because, in screening Fate/Zero for me, they rekindled a flame which had once burned in me during childhood. That flame was almost smothered in adolescence and in adulthood I practically forgot that I had ever believed, but Fate/Zero astonished me because…well, I got to see her in action, and I ceased forever to disbelieve in the King of Knights.