Musings of a Fate Fan: Is Shirou Sexist?

It's one of the most divisive issues when it comes to Fate/Stay Night: you either love Shirou or you hate him. Anybody whose known me for an extended period would know that Shirou is one of my favorite protagonists out there, and flat-out favorite characters. I see him as a sort of role model, as embarrassing as it might sound to look up to a fictional character.

One of the most common reasons I see for people hating Shirou, though, is the way he acts in the "Fate" route towards Saber. Now, obviously the things he tells her sound very sexist (like "girls shouldn't fight"), but I've sat down and thought over all three routes of the visual novel, trying to deconstruct why he acts in that manner in one route and not the others, and realized that they aren't as controversial as they may sound... At least, the way I analyze the story, themes, and characters. If you want to hear my perspective of it, then read on.

Anyway, before we get into the major issue here, let's take a second to establish that Shirou does not think of women as "inferior" in any ways. Pretty much everything he takes pride in, he admits that a woman he knows (usually Rin) is better than him at. He even admits that when it comes to cooking, the thing he enjoys above everything else, Sakura is close to surpassing him (and Rin is at least on his level when it comes to cooking). But that's a digression that isn't even relevant to what people cite they call Shirou misogynistic, is it?

Seriously, the ONLY thing he prides himself in.

Let's start by establishing something pretty clearly: while the occasional comment might slip through in some different routes, the lion's share of "girls shouldn't fight" and etc. is in the "Fate" route. That's when it hits me: everything Shirou says about "girls" is when he's talking to Saber. He doesn't say anything about the way Rin, Taiga, Ilya, Sakura, Rider, or Ayako act (for the most part). Why would this be? Is it because he's "content" with the way they are? But that would be against a "sexist" belief, I would imagine, since they are for the most part not feminine (especially Taiga and Ayako). Even if Shirou had a really weird outlook on what he thinks the ideal woman is, all the women that surround him are so vastly different, it doesn't make sense that he would only take issue with one of them. The key here is that Shirou's statements to Saber aren't about her being a girl and are about her being a person.

What's the point of the Fate route? Philosophically speaking, I mean. It's to present the question examined in the other two routes: "What do you save, ideals or people?" The central conflict is not in trying to prove Archer wrong, or to save Sakura, it's to save Saber. Shirou has no qualms with having Rin fight Caster in Unlimited Blade Works, or on relying on Rider's help in Heaven's Feel, or (again in Heaven's Feel) letting Rin walk into a scenario of almost certain death by herself. He does this because he doesn't feel the need to remind them that their lives are important. But hey, most of those were after his character development in the other routes, so let's go back to one of the constants across multiple routes, wheeling it way back to the first Berserker encounter, which is a perfect example of how Shirou saying "girls shouldn't fight" actually is not a matter of Saber's gender. In Unlimited Blade Works, he doesn't intervene until Archer shoots Caladbolg at the melee because Saber was actually doing perfectly fine by herself. But if he doesn't think girls should fight, then why would he let Saber do this when he immediately jumps in to help in Fate? And before you try and say "well, Archer was there, too," he fires one shot at the start and then goes to get a vantage point for Caladbolg, his intervention mainly just served to give Saber a chance to not get taken out by a surprise attack. His desire to protect Saber, even if it doesn't make sense, is part of having her remember that she has her own emotions and isn't just "a knight."

In the famous "Berserker chops Shirou in half" scene in the Fate route, Shirou would have jumped in to protect Saber even were she male, knowing full well that it's a foolish move, because he puts more value on others than himself. His desire to fight in place of (and later, in tandem with) Saber is born not of an ideal of chivalry as much as it is his heroism combined with a lack of self-preservation instinct. He would rather die than have to watch someone get hurt when he could do something to prevent it. Think about it: he doesn't directly intervene in pretty much any other fight of the novel. He doesn't jump in to try and fight Lancer because Saber was holding her own, same goes for the majority of Saber's fight against Kuzuki, he's willing to sit in the back row taking pot shots at Berserker in the woods while Saber tanks, he's willing to let Saber fight Gilgamesh one-on-one even if that's clearly a bad move, he has faith that Rin's plan can defeat Caster, and he doesn't say a single word about Rider beating the crap out of True Assassin.

There are probably more examples of this, but these are just a few where you need to take step back and say, "Do Shirou's actions differ from his words?" Resounding answer: yes. When he says "Girls shouldn't fight," I think what he actually wants to say is, "I don't want people to get hurt." It could even possibly be that he just uses the chivalrous, archaic wording because it's something Saber would be closer to.

Point is that it isn't about gender, it's about Shirou's desire to protect others as well as his lack of a sense of self. Shirou can't enter the minds or bodies of other people, obviously, so his perception when seeing someone huddled over their sword, half-covered in their own blood, is that they are in agony. Shirou's used to pain. Even after taking Rider's nail through his hand, he asks Rin if she's all right without even registering his skewered palm. And there's this other quote...

Point is that if you think really about Shirou's character, it becomes apparent that his insistence Saber not fight has nothing to do with her being a girl. It's just that he looks at Saber and doesn't like what he sees - because a recurring theme across all three routes is that, "People don't often like those they are too similar to," more apparent in Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel since it's flat-out stated. Except with Saber, it isn't that Shirou dislikes her so much as he is discontent with her ideal. Shirou does not want to have to live with the "Mind of Steel" ideal that Archer, Kiritsugu, and Saber all embodied, and each route manifests this desire in a different way. In Unlimited Blade Works, he wants to still live by the ideal, but doesn't want to give up the things he loves for it (I'll probably post more about this later, since I have a long long WIP of that). In Heaven's Feel, he flat-out rejects the ideal and says that his ideal is to protect those close to him. In Fate, though, his confrontation with his ideal is far more subdued. He sees Saber, who ended up saving a nation by burying her emotions and being unable to understand those she protected. The main goal Shirou is working towards is to remind her of that and I'm starting to sound like a broken record.

So I guess I turned a one-sentence statement of "Shirou isn't being sexist so much as trying to remind Saber she's a human being" into a multiple paragraph essay.

...Of course, this entire retrospective about Shirou's constant reminding that Saber is a girl seems to be a bit overshadowed when, in an interview a while back, Nasu flat-out admitted his motivation when writing it was to try and remind the reader that Saber is a girl.

"...it's difficult to call the relationship between Shirou and Saber a relationship between a man and a woman. Saber has fought for a long time as the ruler of Britain, but then turned into a girl all of a sudden and fell in love with Shirou. It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. But 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... I feel like I could have written it a lot better now, but that was the best I could do at the time."

 But, hey, if I can try and turn an author's saving throw into an analysis of the character, then I figure why not? Anyway, do I have a point here, or am I just talking out of my ass, blowing hot air in defense of a character I enjoy? If you want to leave a comment, feel free to.