Though from an SI's perspective the Sakura route also involves Sakura becoming both a mass murderer and an eldritch abomination.
A couple of people on FFnet pointed out Sakura stuff too, like Yukio is ignoring her or just because his narration phrases things a certain way he doesn't care about her, and even that particular line about the Sakura route got some comments, too.
The thing that perhaps wasn't conveyed properly and maybe should have been clearer: no matter how flippantly he says it, the Sakura route is considered a failure state because it means
everything is on fire. The Sakura route means everything has spiraled out of his control, his dearest youngest sister is now a mass murdering monster, Shirou is probably two steps away from self-destructing every second of every day, and the most dangerous form of King Arthur is playing guard dog for the manifestation of a creature that is just barely shy of a Beast of Disaster.
The Sakura route isn't, "Oh, hey, this tortured wallflower is finally finding some happiness," it's, "Oh god, we're all gonna die!"
I completely agree Sakura's fate is fucking awful. That alone is one of the primary reasons the Heaven's Feel route is my favorite of the three.
See, Sakura's route jumped the shark for me. There's a point where a character's fate is just so awful that you stop feeling sorry for them and start losing immersion in the story. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve love or whatever. I'm saying that Nasu and (later on, in Zero) Urobuchi tried a little
too hard to push that, "See? Isn't this terrible? Isn't this awful? Don't you want to rescue her? Isn't she worthy of sympathy?"
Put it another way, it's pointless cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Zouken torturing her isn't the actions of some depraved individual who has an understandable reason, no matter how despicable, it comes off to me as "Zouken needs to do this so that Sakura can be a broken girl in need of love." Compared to, say, Marida Cruz (Elpeo Ple 12) in Gundam Unicorn, whose backstory is just as horrible, but who was abused and mistreated out of greed and sadism, not just because her backstory said she needed to be.
Maybe I'm misremembering a little. I read HF all of once, so I don't remember it clearly. But even still, for most of his appearances, Zouken struck me as the guy doing evil shit for no real reason other than "I need to pass the time, I guess." And that makes neither him nor his victims compelling.
