>>282946414
Across infinite timelines of battle and suffering, even the strongest ideals will wither away. Archer handled his time as a CG better than most examples we've seen like Kerry Alter and Okita Alter. He's almost the voice of Alaya itself now, the self-hating unconscious of humanity that is forced to know all of its sins and what it's done to survive in every timeline, the sacrifices it has made, the people who have died because of its evil, greed, and weakness. It's inevitable that anyone in his shoes would become either a worn-out, sanded-down, empty-minded vessel of bloodshed like Okita Alter and Kerry Alter, both of whom exist only to kill and remember nothing. EMIYA is an unusual case that managed to cling to his identity as swordman, full of personality, but he's essentially tainted the same way as what the Fuyuki Grail mud does to a mfer. His entire existence is wading through grail mud in a symbolic sense, staring into the worst curses of humanity and having to kill, kill, kill so that everyone else doesn't end up getting dragged down into the mud with him and the curses of humanity upon itself.
So no, there was no hope of that. EMIYA gave up on humanity a long time ago. But Archer does his job regardless. It was only seeing Shirou that really caused EMIYA to suffer a crisis of morale, being forced to confront the infuriatingly naive past version of himself that would foolishly throw his life away to try to save humanity, when EMIYA knows it's pointless from the start.