Ayaka was an early prototype for Shirou Emiya, designed as the protagonist of an unfinished Fate/stay night draft. Unlike the orphaned Shirou, she comes from a prominent mage family and knows exactly what the Holy Grail War is—she just wants no part of it after losing both her father and sister in the previous conflict.
Where Shirou naturally drifts into summoning Saber, Ayaka deliberately calls on a male version of the Servant to protect herself when Lancer moves in for the kill. She's the type to view her Servant as something of an ideal protector, though not to the degree her older sister Manaka became obsessed with her own. Ayaka's always struggled with self-doubt, especially shadowed by Manaka's natural talent for magecraft—her own skills are painfully ordinary by comparison, which only fed her inferiority complex.
The War doesn't go smoothly. Archer, an archetype version of Gilgamesh, takes interest in her and proposes, immediately marking Saber as his rival. Worse, Saber gets stolen by Sancraid Phahn, the Master of Berserker. When Lancer loses his own Master to a curse, he forms a contract with Ayaka to help recover Saber. But then Ayaka gets poisoned, and Archer uses the antidote as leverage in a brutal confrontation with her Servant.
Since the original story was abandoned and completely rewritten into the Fate/stay night we know, Ayaka's actual ending remains a mystery—including what would've happened when she inevitably crossed paths with her resurrected sister Manaka, the first Master of the War and controller of the Beast itself.
She makes a minor appearance in Fate/school life as just another student at Shirou's school.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
