Analysing FSN #3: Almost 1000 words on Shirou’s Sexism

Oops, this one ended up a bit longer than I expected, so let’s just get it out of the way now. I kind of binge-read all the way past the point our main characters defeat Berserker, so there’s all sorts of interesting things I want to talk about, but for now lets just finish off the discussion about Saber and Shirou from last time.

Remember how I said that their conflict wasn’t fully resolved? Well, here’s the resolution. Shirou completely and totally admits he was wrong to not let Saber fight. In terms of characterization, it’s notable that this comes as a result of seeing the consequences of Shinji’s actions towards other people.

This is the first signs of a theme that will come up later: the conflict of Shirou’s ideals with reality. In this case, he’s not confronted with anything that shakes him to his core, like we will see in UBW and HF, but he does see how petty his insistence that Saber not fight is, in comparison with the reality of people getting hurt.

However, despite accepting that Saber should be allowed to fight, he doesn’t just want to sit around: Shirou wants to fight alongside Saber. And she’s kind of okay with it, actually. Their relationship is a lot better, now that they’ve finally established the way they’re supposed to relate to one another. There’s also this very amusing line from Saber that point-for-point echoes Shirou’s objections to her going to Ryuudou Temple. Neither of them notices the irony.

I expect I will have to get into the details of how they mirror one another once we get to the point of them arguing about Saber’s wish for the Grail, but for now there isn’t really much more to say about how their relationship is developing so far. I kind of covered all the main points last time (and on a post that was ostensibly about the battle between Saber and Assassin, to boot), which really makes me wish I planned these out better.

So, with that said, lets talk about the whole sexism thing for the next thousand words. Feel free to argue in the comments. For anyone out of the loop, I’m talking about Shirou’s constant references to Saber’s, and sometimes Rin’s, gender. This ranges from ‘you’re not acting feminine enough’ to the straight-out ‘girls shouldn’t do this’. It’s not just a couple of examples, it’s incredibly pronounced, at least in the early parts of the Fate route.

Now, there’s a fair amount of discourse about this, and a lot of people want to offer up defenses of Shirou. Let's take a look at a couple. I’ll call the first the ‘argument from mistranslation’. Basically, it says MirrorMoon’s translation is a little rough, making a lot of Shirou’s supposedly sexist statements sound worse than they are. I go into the details a little more in this comment. To put it simply, I don’t think the conversation can be dismissed that easily. Regardless of how offensive you personally find the way Shirou is written, it doesn’t change the fact that there’s an unusual emphasis on gender, here. As readers we should be interested in what’s going on.

The second argument, which I’m more sympathetic to, goes like this. Shirou’s focus on Saber’s gender is just an excuse. He was looking for a reason to stop her from fighting – he would have said basically anything.

On the one hand, Shirou makes these sorts of comments even before he gets traumatized by Saber’s fight with Berserker, as well as in other routes where he’s less protective of her. On the other hand, these comments noticeably stop right after the stuff I talked about above – when Shirou accepts that it’s okay for Saber to fight in the Grail War.

There might be some more before the end of the Fate route, but the absence is still notable enough that I think we’re supposed to take something from this – so I’m fairly happy saying that most of Shirou’s comments were motivated more by his desire to protect Saber as a person than his intention to patronize her as a woman.

But some questions remain. Like, why her gender? Something that also comes up, just not so much as the gender thing, is that Saber looks quite young. Younger than Shirou, in fact. Why not use that as an excuse?

My read is that it doesn’t seem as convincing because we don’t put the same expectations as we do on people based on their age as we do their gender. ‘Women shouldn’t fight’ is a common trope, so that’s what Shirou appeals to. Ultimately, he takes influence from the society he’s raised in, so while it does say something about him that he first turns to someone’s gender as a reason to control someone, perhaps not so much as we think.

My next question, and perhaps the more important one, is about Nasu’s intentions with this stuff. I mean, we can say whatever we want about Shirou being a product of his upbringing or whatever, but the writer’s the one who gets to decide what Shirou’s upbringing is. Nasu clearly isn’t endorsing Shirou’s attitude here; the narrative makes it clear that he’s being a dumbass for not wanting Saber to fight.

But, at the same time, the moral of the story isn’t ‘sexism is bad’, it’s more like ‘you should trust your partner’. It’s about Saber and Shirou’s conflict – the gendered stuff is just a means to an end. So why this particular means? A ten-year-old interview may have the answers . . .

I really wanted to push it towards that sort of boy-meets-girl story. So as a last resort, I had Shirou continually say things to her like "But you're a girl," and "Girls aren't supposed to fight," in order to remind the users that "she is really a girl." It's like the author's actually the one trying to convince Saber that she's a girl...

Hmmmmm. The fact that Saber is a girl is kind of obvious, right? I think what he’s talking about here is the fact that she doesn’t act like a normal female love interest at the beginning of the story. She’s extremely business-like and has no room for emotion, which aren’t traits typically associated with femininity, so it’s kind of hard to tell we’re supposed to be rooting for her and Shirou’s romance.

But, of course, the core conflict here is that Shirou doesn’t want Saber to act like a machine! So in that sense it ties in. Shirou reminding Saber that she’s a girl is supposed to line up with his attempts to get her to treat herself as a person. It’s clumsy at best and even Nasu seems embarrassed by it in retrospect, but at least we’ve found a reason it serves the plot.

There’s just one more thing bothering me, though: why are we conflating ‘being a girl’ and ‘acting like a girl’? Not only does Shirou, in the story, tell Saber that she has to act in traditionally feminine ways ‘because she’s a girl’, but Nasu seems to confuse the two in the interview as well.

Saber doesn’t stop being a girl just because she’s acting out the traditionally masculine role of king! Do we think Shirou isn’t going to be attracted to her because she doesn’t express her emotions? Like, are we endorsing gender performativity theory here? Is this supposed to be Nasu revealing that Saber is trans, actually?

No, of course not. At the end of the day, it just comes down to people being unable to extract their expectations for how a woman should act from their idea of womanhood itself.

So, yeah. Maybe the 15+ year old visual novel might have a teensy bit of sexism in it. Not as much as we might expect, going into it. Honestly not too bad, all things considered.

Sorry.

Next post, I will be discussing a mysterious, red-cloaked fellow.