12 Days of Aniblogging 2019, Day 10One of the coolest things about Fate/stay night is that it’s divided neatly into three separate, linear routes. First the Fate arc, followed by the Unlimited Blade Works arc, concluded with Heaven’s Feel. Each story builds upon the rest, with Shirou learning from his past mistakes and trying his best to keep the Holy Grail War from ending in disaster. His end goals stay relatively the same, but his philosophy shifts and grows each time. While it isn’t often brought up directly in the dialogue of the shows, Shirou’s relationship to women is an omnipresent theme, and it evolves throughout the show. With its historical Servants, Fate asks us to look back through time and learn from the past. With this perspective, we find that it’s possible to map each of Fate’s routes to a historical wave of feminism. Through this, we can see not only how Shirou’s attitudes towards women change over time, but how the world responds and reshapes itself as a result of each feminist revolution.But I AmThe Fate arc sees Shirou first entering the Holy Grail War, with all of his historical prejudices fully intact. He gets paired up with the iconic servant Saber, a lady knight who has a lot of Gender Stuff going on on the side. But that’s unnecessary for now. She’s obviously strong and capable of handling herself in combat, but Shirou insists that because she’s a girl, she’s feeble and must be Protected By A Man. In fact, Shirou internalizes this down to the gendering of weaponry. See, in JRPGs, physical attacks are often masculine-coded, and magic is more feminine-coded. Shirou literally tells Saber that instead of fighting physically, she should be handling the magic attacks. It’s the Nasuverse equivalent of telling her to stay in the kitchen. At this point in the series, Shirou has misogyny so deeply embedded that he can hardly even begin to change it himself. Through laborious dedication, Saber manages to prove herself as capable of masculine-coded fighting, and Shirou is forced to let her continue fighting and starts changing his ways so he isn’t so forcefully overprotective. This directly parallels first-wave feminism’s goals – not to change the minds of men, but to grant themselves the legal right to have a say in what they do for themselves, such as voting. Unfortunately, bad things happen, the timeline rolls back, and now we’re onto the second arc/wave.The Unlimited Blade Works arc presents a more weathered Shirou. His philosophical development at this point has left him a utilitarian, which means that he believes the ends always justify the means. Shirou has a new girlfriend now, the tsundere Rin. A powerful caster, she believes that women are just as capable as men and should be given the same opportunities. She exemplifies this by having Lancer kill Shirou when he’s not looking. Was that justified? Well, Shirou’s dead now, so he doesn’t really get to comment. With pesky wannabe male philosophers out of the way, Rin is free to enter the Holy Grail War herself and live out her liberated fantasies. This is largely similar to second-wave feminism’s goals! The women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s believed in women’s rights to work instead of be housewives, have sexual autonomy and reproductive rights, and overcome oppression. Ironically, the shortcomings and downfall of second-wave feminism match up with Rin’s failings. In bettering herself, she leaves her Lancer and Archer servants disenfranchised and unable to gain the benefits of her freedom. She’s defeated by a moral backlash – just like how Phyllis Schlafly manages to topple women’s liberation by simply arguing “what if I’m happy enough as a housewife?”, Rin loses to female servants who are happy to be spellcasters and never anything else. The timeline fails and we’re back to the start again.Finally, the Heaven’s Feel arc. This is the final chapter of the story, and boy is it a doozy. Shirou is back again, meets up quickly with Rin and Saber again, having finally fully opened his mind up to women’s rights. He notices that Rin’s Archer and Lancer servants struggle from dual combined oppression. You see, Rin frequently has the two of them join up and fuse to become the Greatbow class. Within this fusion, Greatbow experiences the aforementioned disenfranchisement of both Archer and Lancer. It’s not just their disenfranchisement combined though – that specific combination compounds Greatbow’s oppression, making it far more than just the sum of them alone. What Nasu is grasping at here is very clearly the concept of intersectionality. Coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality refers to how the interactions of oppressed identities exacerbate their discrimination. For example, the oppression of Black women cannot be understood solely by looking at the oppression of Black men and that of women – there’s an additional axis of oppression that occurs from the intersection of blackness and womanhood. Intersectionality can apply to race, trans identity, socioeconomic status, and in Heaven’s Feel’s case, class struggle. Shirou solves the oppression of the Greatbows by throwing himself into the fusion, gaining empathy and solidarity through shared experiences. As a powerful Master-Servant synthesis, Shirbouw easily sweeps the rest of the Holy Grail War. Crowned the winner of the war by Elohim, Shirou is instantly struck dead and sent to the titular Heaven’s Field. Judged to be good and holy, because he respected women and never drank coffee during his lifetime, Elohim gives Shirou the highest glory. The series ends with him entering the celestial kingdom with his 7 sealed wives, destined for an eternity of bliss. The Fate series has always had a somewhat complicated relationship with gender. It’s very easy to tell that the creator Kinoko Nasu is learning alongside Shirou what it means to be a good ally. At the end of the day, though, Fate/stay night serves as an effective metaphor for feminism in the 20th century, and one hopes that the current adaptation of Grand Order Babylonia will further this exploration to the modern era.Disclaimer: I have never consumed any Fate
Dec 23, 2019 • Subscribe
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