If unintended misogyny is still misogyny, is unintended feminism still feminism?

[nenena]

Fate/Stay Night: An Introduction. (Yay for history and mythology porn.)

Fate/Stay Night is a franchise (specifically an erotic visual novel game, a safe-for-all-ages PS2 game, an anime series, and a manga) based on a very interesting premise: History got the gender of King Arthur wrong. Oops.

The other premise of Fate/Stay Night is that the Holy Grail exists, it has the power to grant any desire to any person who touches it, and it's in the possession of the Catholic Church. Every so many years the Holy Grail chooses seven magicians ("Masters") who engage in bloody Battle Royale to determine who will be fit to touch the Grail at the end of their war. The last one standing wins. The Church oversees this war as an impartial referee.

The seven Masters each get to summon a Servant of one of seven classes - Saber, Archer, Rider, Lancer, Beserker, Caster, and Assassin. Who fulfills the roles of these Servants? They are eirei, literally "great spirits," the great heroes from throughout history who choose to be reincarnated as Servants in order to vie for a chance to win the Grail. Which is the theory, although as Fate/Stay Night progresses, we discover that not all of the eirei are great heroes and some of them are actually the most vicious monsters in history.


"Behold, my invisible sword!"   "I can't. It's invisible."

Once summoned, a Servant is supposed to obey his or her Master unconditionally, although the Servants do retain free will and it doesn't always work out that way. Regardless, if a Master/Servant pair wins the Holy Grail War they will both be able to obtain the Grail and have their desires fulfill. So Servants enter into this war with as much personal motivation as the Masters themselves.

Thus, in the grand tradition of answering the question who is more badass?, in the F/SN game you get to pair up the great heroes and monsters of history and let them duke it out in battles to the death. And then, because this is a porno game, you get to have sex with them. (The Fate/Stay Night anime and manga, however, are not pornographic, and neither is the for-all-ages PS2 version of the game is due to be released very soon. Although really, what is Fate/Stay Night without Medea/Medusa and Gilgamesh/Cú Chulainn slash? Not as much fun, that's what.)

On a basic level, Fate/Stay Night makes the history/mythology fangirl within me squee with glee. The rules determining which heroes and monsters are summoned as Servants are very interesting - everybody from actual historical figures, to demi-gods, to completely fictional characters are possibilities. The game and anime even include one Servant, Sasaki Kojirou, who freely admits that he was a fictional creation and tells Arthur in the anime, "I have no grave to return to."

Likewise, all of the Servants have special powers ("Noble Phantasms") related to their identities. Arthur has Excalibur, of course. Medea has a knife that can break any enchantment. Heracles cannot die until he is killed twelve times. And Gilgamesh gets to participate in this hilarious mythology pissing-contest with anybody who challenges him, because his Noble Phantasms are older and "more original" than anybody else's. In the anime, when Arthur challenges him with Excalibur, he pulls out Odin's sword in the tree (name?) and makes this big speech which, roughly translated, is something along the lines of: "HA HA EXCALIBUR IS TEH SUCK MY SWORD CAME FIRST YOU LIVE IN BASTARDIZED MYTHOLOGY LOL."

Now, theoretically, the premise of the original Fate/Stay Night erogame, being that all of the great heroes of history show up and fight each other and then have sex with you, could have made Fate/Stay Night the single greatest erogame ever created. Except that, ALAS, this is a bishoujo game (and spun off into a bishoujo anime and manga), so rather than taking this awesome premise and running with it, Fate/Stay Night instead bogs itself down in the spectacularly uninteresting boring-erotic adventures of milquetoast hero and his stereotypical, cardboard-cut-out harem girls.

My other complaint about Fate/Stay Night is that its roster of heroes and monsters is woefully incomplete. For example, the Hindu pantheon is entirely absent. Where the hell are Arjuna and Krishna, the greatest and most promiscuous heroes ever? They would have been a perfect match for the original game. Or the non-porno anime and PS2 versions. Whatever. (*sigh*)

        
Saber/Arthur, both in and out of her armor.

Fate/Stay Night's awesomeness factor is mostly due to Arthur, who is summoned as a Saber-class Servant. She goes by the pseudonym of "Saber" in the context of the series (since Servants have to hide their true identities for strategic purposes), thus in the rest of this entry I will refer to her as Saber. Saber is probably one of the best heroines to come along in bishoujo media, like, ever. And this is pretty astounding, considering that Saber is stuck in the middle of a franchise that is in every other sense dripping with sexism. Saber's storyline, however, is basically a blatant, not-at-all-subtle feminist story. So let's look at Saber and the various ways that she fights misogyny in the context of Fate/Stay Night.

Saber vs. Soft Misogyny... Or is this what we call "chivalry"?

So Saber is summoned by Emiya Shirou, who is pure-hearted and noble and whose goal in life is to become a heroic defender of justice. No, seriously. He wants to be a hero. Only he has this idea that being a hero means protecting girls, even when said girls really don't need his lame-ass protecting.

Right away we have this scenario: Saber and Shirou are attacked by other Masters and their super-powerful Servants. Saber is a super-powerful Servant, a born warrior, and happens to be holding the most powerful sword in the world, which she happens to be damn good at wielding. Shirou, on the other hand, can run around and wave his hands and maybe throw a lead pipe at an attacking Servant, if he happens to have one at hand. So Saber, of course, jumps into the fray and engages the attacking Servant.

And what does dumbass Shirou do? He GETS IN HER WAY and shouts a variation of "OMG DUN FIGHT UR A GIRL I HAVE TO PROTECT JOO!"

And then everything goes to shit, and Saber can't do her job.

A variation of this keeps happening over and over and over again. And Saber doesn't take it sitting down. She's a Servant and supposedly in a position of subservience to Shirou, but being in such a position to someone who seems so intent on thwarting his own (and thus her) chance at winning the Grail is NOT FUN for Saber. At one point she memorably snaps at Shirou, "If you're going to order me not to protect you, then we're not going to last long in this war."

Shirou, in his own head, is being noble and selfless. He cares about Saber and wants to protect her. BUT he also has this weird thing about protecting girls. I think this comes across most clearly in an episode of the anime where Rider throws a metal spike at Rin's face. Shirou's outraged reaction is, "How could someone throw something like that at a girl's face?!" Yeah, it's not bad enough to be throwing metal spikes at a person's face, but at a girl's face, well, gee.

Ultimately, however, after Shirou gets mostly-killed a couple of times, he finally backs down and admits that he shouldn't prevent Saber from fighting. BUT he refuses to back down all the way - he's not going to stop fighting himself. He wants to support Saber as an equal.

Thus, Saber teaches Shirou how to use a sword. Rin teaches Shirou how to use his sorcery. And by the end of the story (most spectacularly demonstrated in episode 24 of the anime), Saber and Shirou truly are equal partners in battle. Most notably, in episode 24 of the anime, both Saber and Shirou have to duel against Gilgamesh and Kotomine, respectively. They vow not to interfere with each other's battle, no matter what. This shows how much they trust each other, and how far Shirou has come from his days of jumping in front of Saber and waving his arms and screaming useless things like "DUN HIT HER SHE'S A GIRL!"

     
I'M GUNNA JUMP IN FRONT OF JOO AND PROTECT JOO BECUZ UR A GIRL... oh shit that didn't go as well as planned.

Personally, I think that Saber and Shirou ending up as equal partners in battle is a more interesting outcome than Shirou simply sitting back and agreeing to let Saber protect him. The latter is what happens far too often in bishoujo media, and really, it's just another male wish fulfillment fantasy - the superpowered girlfriend who will protect the male hero no matter what misadventures he gets into, even to the point of sacrificing her life. The passive-male-superpowered-girlfriend dynamic doesn't show up in Western comics as much as it does in anime and manga, but in my mind it's just as sexist of an idea. The fact that Shirou in Fate/Stay Night refuses to sit by passively while Saber risks herself isn't surprising, considering that his character is supposed to be pure-hearted and selfless in the first place. But it is refreshing. And particularly the anime creators deserve brownie points for being able to portray the evolution of a truly equal relationship between Saber and Shirou.

It's easy to make the male character super-powerful or the female character super-powerful. It's much more difficult to portray them both in a truly equal partnership. Storm and Black Panther, I'm looking at you. You could learn a lesson or two from Saber and Shirou.

Free will, dignity, and making her own decisions.

Shirou's soft misogyny, however, isn't just limited to the way that he doesn't want a girl like Saber to fight. He also eventually falls in love with her... And this is problematic, because once the Holy Grail War ends, Saber will return to her own epoch and die.

UNLESS, that is, Saber and Shirou can win the Grail.

The problem is that Saber and Shirou have two conflicting desires for what to do with the Grail. Shirou finds out that if he makes Saber drink from the Grail, she can gain "a new life" and remain with him in present-day Japan. Saber, however, is bluntly opposed to this idea. SHE wants to use the Grail to travel back in time and change history so that she will never be chosen as the King of Britain. Why? "Because I was not worthy to be chosen," she says. "Because my country fell because of me." Cue tragic flashbacks of Mordred killing her and all of Britain crumbling into ruin. (Interestingly, in this version, Mordred is also a woman. But Mordred adresses Arthur as chichiue, "Father.") Saber dreamed of creating her kingdom as a utopia, but ultimately failed to achieve her dream. Hence, she believes that there is someone else who should have been chosen as the king instead, someone else who could have succeeded in creating the Avalon that she dreamed of.

Shirou tries to convince Saber that her choice is wrong. To change the past would make all of our suffering meaningless - it would make the sufferings of others meaningless. It's a cowardly thing to want to do. Saber doesn't listen - deep down inside, she is convinced that someone more worthy than her should have been chosen as the King of Britain.

Shirou, meanwhile, has an interesting conversation with Kotomine. As a Master, Shirou can use a Command Spell to issue an irresistible command to his Servant. "Use a Command Spell to make Saber drink from the Grail," Kotomine bluntly advises Shirou.

To do such a thing would, of course, completely deny Saber's free will and her dignity as a human being. But Shirou is tempted. HE knows that Saber's own decision is "wrong" and that she would be happy with him living happily ever after in Japan. He loves Saber. He tells Saber that he loves her. He kisses her. But in the end, she pushes him away.

In the end, BOTH Shirou and Saber realize that they are wrong. Saber is able to accept her limitations (and bluntly, failures) as Britain's king, and agrees with Shirou that to change the past would be the wrong thing to do. Shirou, finally, comes to accept that Saber will not choose him. Up until the very last minute, we can see that he is tempted by the idea of making Saber drink from the Grail. But, at the last second, he lets her go instead.

Saber and Shirou destroy the Grail. Saber lasts for a few more minutes, turns to Shirou, and says, "I love you." Then she vanishes. She returns to her own time just long enough to have a last few words with Bedivere, then falls asleep beneath a tree and "finds Avalon" (read: dies). Get out your hankies, because I absolutely bawled during this scene. It was so beautifully done.

Shirou's story is interesting because it's a classic if you love her, let her go moment. He has the opportunity to keep Saber for himself forever, but in the end rejects that choice. He chooses to respect Saber as a person and not treat her as an object. Likewise, Saber's story is interesting because of the way that she doubts that she was "worthy" to be Britain's king. Never explicitly stated but strongly implied in all of Saber's monologues is the notion that perhaps a man should have been chosen instead, and that her weaknesses as the king resulted from the fact that she was a woman. However, even Saber is able to overcome this internalized sexism and realize that she was a strong king. Not a perfect king, but not an imperfect king because she was a woman, rather an imperfect king because she was simply human.

"I am nobody's object!"

By far the strongest pro-feminist aspect of Saber's story is the story of her continuing battle against Gilgamesh (Archer, although he does not go by his pseudonym once Saber figures out his identity). Gilgamesh, the King of Heroes, desires Arthur, the King of Knights, as his "treasure." Not as an equal partner, the way that Shirou desires Saber, but merely as an object.

So here's the backstory: Gilgamesh was a Servant in the previous Holy Grail War, wherein he fought an epic battle with Saber. At the end of the battle, he proposed to her. "I answered him with my sword," Saber explains bluntly while telling this story to Shirou and Rin. Unable to even believe that he had been rejected, Gilgamesh took his chance to drink from the Holy Grail and has survived in Japan ever since then, waiting with his Master... Waiting for Saber to return during the next Holy Grail War.

He raises one hand and points a finger at Saber. "That," he says, "belongs to me, the king! You should know better than to touch the treasures of the king!"


Gilgamesh would like you to know that his enormous shoulderpads are in no way compensating for anything.

Gilgamesh makes his first appearance in the anime when Medea proposes to Saber that she become her Servant. Although he had been silently watching and waiting in the shadows up to the point, Gilgamesh is unable to tolerate Medea's gall. He reveals himself to the other characters, kills Medea (for daring to "lay a finger on his treasure"), says some fucking creepy things to Saber, and then vanishes.

Saber fights Gilgamesh once again and he unfortunately beats her. (This is the part where he's like "HA HA ODIN'S SWORD PWNS EXCALIBUR BEEYOTCH." He also delivers the memorably infuriating line, "I should have gone easier on you, after all, you're just a woman.") While Saber is lying broken and bloody on the ground in front of him, Gilgamesh proposes to her AGAIN. "Become my Servant," blah blah blah. More blatantly creepy and misogynistic speechifying. Saber and Shirou rally back at the last minute to temporarily kick Gilgamesh's ass, and he vanishes.

The next time that Saber and Gilgamesh face off is during the final battle in episodes 23 and 24 of the anime. Gilgamesh starts off his apocalyptic duel against Saber with more of his patented creepy misogynistic speechifying:

"I desire only you. I've been thinking about it all these years. About how to hold you down while you struggle against me. About making you drink this curse [from the Grail]. About seeing your crying face as I step on you. Having you drink enough of this cursed mud to make you pregnant, see you succumb before me as you can't bear it anymore... I want to see that befouled look of yours!"

Whoa.

Gilgamesh, like Shirou, wants to force Saber to drink from the Grail so that she can stay with him forever. Of course because he's totally creepy he manages to make this act sound incredibly sexualized - and indeed, it is, a profound violation of Saber's personhood and dignity, which to Gilgamesh is obviously a turn-on. (*shudder*)

Saber's response to this speech, however, is full of win: "Then I'm sure you won't have any complaints if I do the same to you!"

So they fight. Big apocalyptic battle, and all that. In one scene reminiscent of the end of Utena, Gilgamesh literally hurls a thousands swords at Saber at once. Gilgamesh keeps taunting Saber:

"Why don't you just give up and marry me now? What, not used to being treated so roughly? Get used to it. I just take everything that I want when I feel like it."

Yes, this is a Gilgamesh: a king, the greatest of kings, and the ultimate expression of male power and privelege in the series. He takes whatever he wants and reduces whoever he wants to nothing more than an object, things to own, things to make his belongings.

To which Saber responds, "I will become no-one's belonging!"

When Gilgamesh keeps taunting Saber and she keeps answering with various high-flown Arthurian versions of "Go to hell," he finally figures out that he can never have her. And THEN he decides to kill her. Because, you know, the bitch deserves to die if she's going to reject him. Gilgamesh-logic makes no sense, but whatever.

But this is Fate/Stay Night and Saber is the heroine, so after a rousing and dramatic rallying-back scene she finally rushes Gilgamesh and shishkabobs him like he so totally deserves to be shishkabobbed. Gilgamesh's last words before he dies are: "What an abominable woman you are... Defying me until the end... But I shall allow this. There are things that are beautiful because you cannot possess them."

Deathbed repentance? A last-minute realization that all of his sexism and misogyny was wrong all along? Meh, maybe not. But the point is, in a more blatant way than Shirou, Gilgamesh reduces Saber to an object and tries to "own" her as if she were his "treasure." And the end result of this is that he gets eviscerated by Excalibur in a literal sense, and is defeated by Saber's resolution to uphold her personhood and dignity in a metaphorical sense. The whole Gilgamesh-Saber subplot is a fairly unsubtle feminist revenge fantasy. Gilgamesh, the ancient King of Heroes, is perhaps the ultimate expression of patriarchal power and authority. He wishes to demean and destroy Saber, the ultimate expression of female power in the context of the series. And in the end, Saber kicks his ass.

Accidental feminism, in the context of the same old predictable sexism.

Like I said, the original Fate/Stay Night game is a) bishoujo, b) harem, and c) pornographic. Other incarnations of Fate/Stay Night, including the anime, manga, and PS2 version, fulfill the first two conditions even without the latter. So what we're dealing with here is basically a) male wish fulfillment, b) sexy girls, and c) porn. Not exactly fertile breeding ground for a feminist character like Saber, right?

That's why Saber's storyline is so surprising, especially considering that the other female characters in Fate/Stay Night live up to my low, low expectations of the female characters usually found in a bishoujo anime. Let's break them down quickly:

1. Rin Tohsaka. Shirou's classmate and a powerful magician. She starts out cool and mysterious and powerful, but... Let's just say that she tries to kill Shirou, decides that she likes him, and then moves into his house to "protect" him. Okay.
2. Sakura Matou. The resident yamato nadeshiko of the series. She has no life other than to go over to Shirou's house every morning to cook him breakfast and every evening to cook him dinner. Supposedly she's in the archery club at school, but we never see her doing this until a three-second shot during the ending credits of the final episode of the anime. Her brother is KILLED HORRIBLY halfway through the series and we never see any reaction from her. Because the entire purpose of her existence is to cook for Shirou and to love him in a chaste and silent way, not to, you know, actually be a person with her own thoughts and feelings.
3. Fujimura Taiga. Shirou's legal caretaker (since he's an orphan) and someone whom he thinks of as an older sister, even addressing her as "Fuji-nee-san." Of course because she's an older sister she's outside the realm of possible romantic interests for Shirou, because we all know that THAT particular role is reserved for...
4. Illya, the cute and clingy younger sister. Well, not Shirou's real little sister, but Shirou kind of adopts her as a younger sister. She starts out as a powerful Master and tries to kill Shirou, but then... moves in with him... What? Okay! Also, she pulls an Arwen at the end, falling prey to a mysterious and unexplained illness that can only be cured when the Holy Grail War is ended.
5. Rider (Medusa). Cold-blooded nasty killer woman with a ridiculously sexy getup. But even SHE admits that she is touched by Shirou's pure-hearted nobleness or whatever. Geez.
6. Caster (Medea). Archetypical witch. Dies saving the man that she loves.
7. Ayako. Shirou's classmate and captain of the archery club. She had potential for being a strong and interesting female character, but alas she is for all intents and purposes killed off in the second or third episode of the anime. Although she didn't last very long, most of her appearances in the anime involved her flirting with Shirou. As expected, her death gives Shirou motivation to fight against the first truly evil Master that he encounters.

Well, I think we've got all of the stereotypical bases covered. The yamato nadeshiko, the sexy femme fatale, the witch, the cute and clingy little sister, and the female character who only exists to die and thus motivate the hero... Yep, they're all there.

So where does Saber fit into all of this? She doesn't. Does she "move into" (if you can count "being summoned" as "moving into") Shirou's home? Yes. Does she eventually fall in love with Shirou? Again yes, but this does not stop her from leaving him in the end. She's not a typical bishoujo character and she's not, surprisingly, made of suck.

The point, if there is a point to all of this rambling: Saber rocks.

Fate/Stay Night is bishoujo, it's porn, and it's generally pretty sexist. But in the middle of all of that, the main heroine, Saber, is a purely feminist creation, in both overt (fighting Gilgamesh) and covert (fighting Shirou and herself) ways. Which is why I am officially declaring that I do not feel guilty about enjoying Fate/Stay Night. And it's all about Saber, not about the fact that history/mythology porn is patently awesome.

Fate/Stay Night is a lovely example of what I'm sure is fairly unintended, accidental feminism in the middle of sexist quagmire of stereotypical bishoujo muckety-muck. Which is interesting because... Unintended feminism is weird. Quite often we're reminded that a person doesn't have to be consciously racist to make a racist movie (Peter Jackson), a person doesn't have to be consciously sexist to make a sexist statement (Joe Quesada), but... What about a person who isn't consciously feminist but ends up creating a feminist character and a feminist story? I'm fairly sure that I can't label any of the creators of Fate/Stay Night as feminist based purely on the fact that every single female character in the story sucks *except* for Saber. So is this accidental feminism? Does it even count as feminist at all when compared to all of the other crap in Fate/Stay Night?

Or does it matter? Let's just say that Saber rocks and leave it at that.