Why Fate/Zero Works As A Prequel
On the whole, most will make the claim that prequels don't work, fundamentally. They don't work because anyone familiar with the original story already knows the fates of any characters from the original story, and because of that, there's no real tension or suspense. Moreover, they already know how story events will play out, because they already know where things are come the time of the original story. Anakin Skywalker was always going to become Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire was always going to take over the galaxy.
But aside from the counterpoint that prequels give a unique perspective on events that occur before and during the story proper, even re-contextualizing the narrative in sometimes interesting ways, why does a story like Fate/Zero work best as a prequel? It could easily have been told first, setting aside that Fate/Stay Night just happened to be what was conceived first. And it's not like it's Stein's;Gate 0, which draws upon the concepts of time as a flat circle, meaning it can only work as a strange future-timeline prequel. Fate/Zero is an otherwise straightforward story, all things considered. No, it works best as a prequel precisely because anyone familiar with the story of the original Fate/Stay Night already knows what's coming, and that's because its essential structure reflects that of the classical tragedy.
Fate/Zero's Ending, Explained
This isn't just tragedy in the sense that most of the characters in Zero end up saddled with horrible endings to their stories. Take, for example, something like Oedipus, or Romeo and Juliet. In both of those plays, the audience is told, either right from the very beginning, like in Romeo and Juliet, or close to the beginning, as in Oedipus, that things are going to
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