Anime girl King Arthur and the history of genderbending in the Fate series

Spoilers for much of the Fate series, particularly the first route of Fate/stay night

If you’ve heard of the Fate series at all, you’ve probably heard that its poster girl is a cute anime girl version of King Arthur, who is but one of many esoteric reinterpretations of history, myths, and legends. Indeed, across its twenty year lifespan, Fate has earned a reputation for turning historical figures into strange things such as girls, robots, and lion-themed furries. Historical accuracy in the traditional sense is of little concern to the franchise, which follows, in the simplest terms, wizards who summon figures from the past to fight over a magical wish-granting object called The Holy Grail. Given the franchise’s roots in eroge with Fate/stay night (2004) (T-rated version now available in English, worldwide on Steam and Nintendo Switch!) and its current status as a gacha game juggernaut with Fate/Grand Order (2015-present), you might presume this is a ploy to make these historically male individuals more marketable to a certain target demographic. However, these changes in gender are not just an aesthetic choice but frequently serve to develop the character in question—and often have more basis in folklore and history than one might expect.

The premise used to justify this genderbending is that these historical and mythological figures are magically summoned to the present as something called a Heroic Spirit, the appearance and abilities of which can be influenced by their reputation and personal preferences. For example, Alexander the Great appears as a huge burly man in Fate/Zero (2006 – 2007) because that is the image of a larger-than-life conqueror, even though historical sources suggest he was of average height. These characters are best understood as anthropomorphications of this figure’s legacy, rather than a portrayal of the figure themselves. That concept gives plenty room for creative interpretation by itself, though by now, the series has hundreds of Heroic Spirits across its many sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and semi-canon alternate universes, and it has done a lot of iterating on its own concepts. Accordingly, the reasonings for any given genderbend have grown increasingly convoluted, metatextual, and self-referential.

Fate/stay night: Gender, Ideals, and Personhood

Fate’s first genderbent character was King Arthur herself, the main heroine of its first instalment, Fate/stay night. She is summoned under the pseudonym Saber, and her true identity is a carefully kept secret for most of her route, both for strategic advantage and out of her personal hangups.

In the world of Fate, King Arthur is indeed known to history as a man. The Britain of Saber’s time was in need of a king to lead it, and she was quite literally born for the job, with the sole problem being that only a man could claim the throne. At first the court kept up the pretense of her being a man, but eventually her gender became an open secret. The people ignored the truth and continued to treat her as “the king,” because as long as she adequately fulfilled her role as “the ideal king that will save Britain,” it didn’t matter who, or what, the person filling that role actually was.

King Arthur’s rule, of course, ended in tragedy, and Saber’s wish for the Holy Grail is to find someone more capable than her to be that ideal king and save Britain in her stead. This commitment to her duty even beyond death leads her to clash with the protagonist and her love interest, Shirou Emiya. Shirou, much like Saber, has spent most of his life trying to live up to an inherited ideal of “being someone who saves others,” in his case out of debilitating survivor’s guilt, and at great cost to his sense of self and general wellbeing. Shirou has difficulty letting Saber put herself in danger to protect his life when he considers his life something he should be risking to protect others instead. However, because he struggles to acknowledge the trauma at the root of these self-sacrificial tendencies to himself, let alone articulate it to others, he latches on to basic gender roles as a modern social shorthand and the only significant difference between them that he can point out: Saber is a girl, and as a man, he can’t allow girls to fight! 

If we take Shirou’s knee-jerk reaction at face value, we might see Fate’s decision to change King Arthur’s gender as a contrived excuse to turn this legendary figure into a damsel and subject of heterosexual romance. However, neither the characters around Shirou nor the story itself entertain the notion that Shirou’s attitude is correct. Within Saber’s route, not only do none of the female characters around Shirou tolerate his attitude on the matter, the final antagonist is history’s most entitled chauvinist, Gilgamesh, who does indeed see Saber solely as a future sexual conquest, a mere woman that he has the right to exploit as a man. Gilgamesh’s attitude towards women and treatment of Saber are played as indisputably villainous, and he is defeated only once Shirou grows past his own savior complex and associated justifications. 

Shirou originally survived the disaster that left him with so much survivor’s guilt thanks to the protective powers of a magic artefact that originally belonged to Saber, and throughout Saber’s route it has allowed him to recklessly throw himself into otherwise lethal danger to satisfy his savior complex. His clumsy attempts throughout the route to convince Saber to live a “normal,” happy life fall flat because he refuses to allow himself the same. Returning this artefact gives Saber the powerup she needs to win against Gilgamesh, and is the culmination of their relationship: Shirou lets go of the way Saber can be used as outlet for his own maladaptive idealism, and instead gives her his trust and support as an equal, an ally, and indeed someone who is able and willing to fight for him.

A major theme of Fate/stay night is the price of surrendering your identity to your ideals, and Saber’s gender is the symbol of her personhood, of the way every aspect of her identity was subsumed by her role. What Shirou wants is for Saber to start treating herself as a person (a girl) instead of an ideal (a king), and the fact that he can only cling to baseless gender roles as justification for why the same doesn’t go for himself is what forces him to examine his hypocrisy and begin his own trauma recovery alongside her. King Arthur being a girl is not just a contrivance to allow the male protagonist to have sex with her; if Saber were not a woman despite her historical counterpart being a man, nothing about these characters’ relationship and development would work the way it does.

The “Saberface” is Born: Spinoffs, Intertext, and Parody

Fate frequently revisits this theme of identity and ideals, and with Saber’s position as the postergirl and main heroine thus established, several later characters were genderbent in direct response to how she first expressed this theme. Fate often revisits the Arthurian canon, including with Mordred in Fate/Apocrypha (2012-2014). Mordred’s character is defined by being his father’s son, and if that father is a woman, then naturally Mordred is a girl who looks much like her. However, Fate‘s Mordred hates being seen as a woman because it is absolutely crucial to his sense of identity that he is “King Arthur’s son,” and that friction between his role and his lived reality echoes that of his father (Mordred’s pronouns are inconsistent across official localizations; I personally believe he/him is most appropriate despite the character appearing, superficially, as the “girl version”).

Fate/EXTRA (2010)’s Nero Claudius also looks very similar to the first Saber, though here it’s as an intentional bait and switch that reveals a character with a vastly different personality; a hedonistic tyrant rather than a chivalrous knight, but one whose commitment to her role likewise denied her the privilege to form connections as a human being.

The in-joke about how the lead artist keeps designing the same Saber was then continued with the character design of Okita Souji for the gag manga KOHA-ACE (2013-present)—a character later explored with more gravity and the complex relationship with personhood that her design implies in this context in the manga Fate/type Redline (2019-present). But while these genderbent designs are primarily self-referrential, they are not devoid of historical basis. Nero reportedly enjoyed playing female theater roles, while Okita as a gag character likely references the ‘80s comedy Bakumatsu Junjouden‘s character of the same name.

There are many similar cases in the series: Ibaraki Douji disguised himself as a woman to steal his arm back, Xuanzang Sanzang is often portrayed by female actresses in Japanese adaptations of Journey to the West, Uesugi Kenshin has a whole wikipedia page dedicated to the theory that he was actually a woman, and Heroic Spirit Leonardo da Vinci looks like the Mona Lisa and happily explains that she’s a genius, and therefore made herself into the ideal beautiful woman she always wanted to be. Fate’s depictions of historical figures are rarely traditional, but they are not wholly irreverent to their sources.

Female Heroic Spirits Metatextually Messing with Myth and History

Fate also has a notable interest in women in history, and most of Fate’s female Heroic Spirits are in fact based on real life female figures rather than genderbends. Starting in Fate/stay night already, Greek figures Medusa and Medea are among the cast of Heroic Spirits, with both of their character arcs paying close attention to the ways women are vilified for wanting agency, the way abuse victims are denied personhood, and the overlap between these two phenomena. They are sympathetic characters even as they take antagonistic roles, without softening any of the violence and cruelty they commit in either their source material or in the game itself in order to garner that sympathy. Later female Heroic Spirits include mythological figures like Tamamo-no-Mae, Atalanta, Kriemhild, and Queen Medb; rulers like Elizabeth Bathory, Nitocris, Cleopatra, and Wu Zetian; Christian figures such as Jeanne d’Arc, Saint Martha, Salome, and Pope Johanna; authors like Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu; more modern women like Florence Nightingale, Helena Blavatsky, Rani Lakshmibai, and Mata Hari, and so on.

In addition to drawing on various details that could justify reinterpreting male figures as women, there are also many cases where the male figure’s name and the series’ reputation for genderbending are used to draw attention to a lesser known female figure instead. The Heroic Spirit that introduces herself as Katsushika Hokusai is actually his daughter Ōi, an accomplished ukiyo-e artist in her own right. Kyokutei Bakin uses the appearance of his daughter-in-law Tokimura Michi, who transcribed his novels for him after he became bedridden in his late years and thus forms an inseparable part of his legacy. Sen no Rikyu appears as the young Komahime in order to demand justice for her brutal murder. The girl who uses the name Van Gogh is actually the oceanid Clytie, drawing on the shared sunflower motif as a connection (remember, these are anthropomorphized legacies), and her design draws elements from the few surviving records of Vincent van Gogh’s sister Wilhelmina. The Wikipedia pages on these women are often only a fraction of the length of the respective men’s pages, if they have one at all, but Fate uses its established framework of genderbending to draw attention to them instead. 

Fate is strongly self-aware of its own reputation for arbitrary genderbends, and it regularly makes use of this in developing its characters, including the ones that indeed don’t have much historical basis for the change. Hephaestion, Miyamoto Musashi, and Jacques de Molay are examples of figures who are women for no reason when looking solely at their historical context, but within the context of the series they build on this expectation of genderbending to shape their arcs. 

Hephaestion (who is actually his sister using his name) from Lord El-Melloi II Case Files (2014-2019) looks like a genderbent version of the series’ own Alexander the Great, an intentional move to throw off the titular El-Melloi II, who had summoned the actual Alexander before, as well as make her identity a mystery for the audience. The male Alexander was already known to both the protagonist and readers at this point, so we know she’s lying when she introduces herself as Alexander, but then who is she? The resemblance turns out to be because she was his body double, an unacknowledged shadow who nonetheless sacrificed her very identity to keep him safe. As with the examples above, this character draws attention to the heroic women who might have fallen through the cracks of history. 

Similarly, Fate/Grand Order’s Musashi being a woman is explicitly “wrong” according to historic record—this female Musashi escaped from a parallel timeline that was destroyed after reaching a dead end. On her journey she is constantly compared to the male Musashi that the people of her era heard about. However, it’s precisely because she is a woman and faces unique struggles as one that she is able to perfect the sword technique that the male, “real” Musashi never achieved in his lifetime, and she inspires several other young women in the process. 

Jacques de Molay outright appears in both male and female versions in Fate/Grand Order, with the male one being Molay as an honest knight (exclusive to the arcade version) and the female one being the Molay that was arbitrarily vilified (obtainable in the main game), continuing a long tradition of Fate exploring how easy it is to dehumanize people through both glorification and vilification. The female Molay hams up how she’s supposed to be this unforgivable bastardisation of a true knight, and directly points out the discrepancy in her gender as part of this, as if in direct response to “ugh, not another genderbend” complaints from Fate’s audience.

An Increasingly Fluid and Chaotic Approach to Gender

These casual genderbends have become increasingly common as the series progressed and expanded its body of genderbent and otherwise genderqueer characters (like Fate/Apocrypha‘s Astolfo), to the point where in modern Fate, most new genderbends are in fact just because they—both characters and writers—felt like it. Fate‘s understanding of gender has also become notably less binary over time, and Fate/Grand Order in particular features a significant number of explicitly nonbinary and gender non-conforming characters, some of which even changed gender after their debut. 

You can map this increasingly nonchalant approach to genderqueerness in FGO by looking at characters like Chevalier d’Eon, a figure whose wikipedia page decided it was safest to avoid pronouns altogether. Introduced with the game’s launch in 2015, the writing is needlessly occupied with playing coy about what their “real” (binary) gender is, to the detriment of anything regarding d’Eon’s actual achievements. In 2018 however, FGO introduced its version of Qin Shi Huang, who left their gender behind together with their mortality because neither were of use to someone who considers themselves the ultimate human. 

Similarly, Romulus, originally introduced as a man on release, becomes representative of the concept of human civilization and likewise discards his binary gender in the process with a story update in 2020; civilization encompasses more than men alone, after all. In 2023, Yamato Takeru from Fate/Samurai Remnant was designed as genderless simply because the writers decided it was high time time they made a genderless Saber already. The presentation of Fate‘s nonbinary characters covers a spectrum from muscular monk to ethereal androgyne to military lolita. Fate/Grand Order notably features nonbinary living human character Scandinavia Pepperocino in a major role as well, sidestepping the pitfall of presenting nonbinary gender as something that only happens under whacky magic circumstances.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Not all of Fate‘s gender experiments are equally tasteful. Sometimes it really is just fetishistic about it. Sometimes it loses its own nuance in the forest of in-jokes and bastardizes previously complex characters into being fetishistic anyway. Sometimes its more recent understanding of gender clashes with established gender-based gameplay systems, leading to the creation of internal categories like “female-looking” to make sure the obligatory otaku sex pest character won’t try to harass the theys that look like hes. But in context of the series’ consistent, decades-long commitment to finding and spotlighting women and exploring non-conforming genders, it’s hard to see any of its missteps on this front as malicious.

While occasionally thematically messy and narratively convoluted, Fate’s long history of genderbending is rooted in a genuine interest in exploring gender, identity, and personhood, and sincere desire to develop a deeper and more respectful understanding of these ideas. The writing considers how the change in gender would impact the character, their relationships and self-image, and the friction between their reputation and true self. Additionally, rather than simply inventing women where there weren’t any, the series is dedicated to spotlighting the women that did exist as well, and will use its established framework for genderbending as a tool to achieve this. Well over twenty years in, the series shows no signs of either slowing down or running out of new angles to keep approaching the topic from, and I, for one, look forward to seeing what unconventional interpretations its future holds.