Holmes/EXTRA

Holmes/EXTRA, colloquially also known as Holmesdoc, is a massive Fate/Grand Order theory document that was actively updated from 2020 to 2023. The initial two writers are the document owner (wants to stay anonymous) and Comun (ComunCoutinho on most sites), and I joined as the third main contributor in 2021. The document currently sits at around 46k words, but we regularly removed theories that became either confirmed or irrelevant, and at its peak length around Avalon le Fae's JP release it was a whole 58k words.

The first part of the document points out similarities and connections Holmes has to the EXTRAverse games and it's characters and plotlines. The second part delves into what this might mean for Holmes' role and that of related characters in the story going forward. The third part has theories that are only tangenally related to the intitial premise of the document, but which were developed while researching the earlier parts. Combined, the document covers Holmes, BB, Moriarty, Helena, Qin Shi Huang, Sion and Zepia, Olga Marie, Wu Zetian, the Foreigner class, the hollow earth theory, theosophy, and a whole lot of buddhism.

I personally wrote everything related to Sion and Melty Blood, as well as the stuff about Qin Shi Huang. I also did a lot of the research into the sixth imaginary element (devils) brought up in the Mythological Murder Case section, and did a bunch of general restructuring and rewriting all over the document that is hard to trace back now after its many permutations.

When I first encountered Holmesdoc it already posited the posibility of Sion betraying Chaldea, which I agreed with, but the evidence given for this was like the one part of her Melty Blood lore that didn't actually support that claim. The owner didn't even seem to know about the Dust of Osiris, which I of course had to rectify immediately, and from then I kept leaving so many comments that the owner decided it would be easier to just assimilate me into the staff. I originally wasn't too big on FGO Sion, different as she is from her Melty Blood counterpart, but putting all this research into her has made me very fond of her.

Updates to the document petered out after the back-to-back releases of Avalon le Fae, Tunguska Sanctuary, Traum, Nahui Mictlān, and PAPERMOON left us with hardly any time to revise our theories before the next reveal related to them hit the towers. This coincided with some unfortunate personal circumstances for the document owner, so we decided we might as well just wait and see where the game is taking all this instead of constantly scrambling to update. In that period I also lost interest in actively keep up with FGO myself, so updates had been sporadic since 2022 and effectively died out by 2023. However, the three of us are still in a groupchat and regularly discuss recent FGO developments and evil clown butterflies.