des larmes pour la Bonheur de Xion (Stars of Fears)
The world has become a stranger and far more interesting place in spite of itself during the 2010s, and while admitting an obvious bias, few of them are more striking a change than the advent of social media causing the formation of a distinct and visible trans culture. To be sure, what we today call trans people have existed throughout human history, but European colonialism did an astounding job of erasing all the knowledge and identities of the cultures it dominated, we may never know what gender identity variations existed in pre-Christian Europe, and much more recently, any scientific understanding of being trans was literally burned by the literal Third Reich. As recently as the 1990s, the trans experience was understood as a specific, medicalized dysphoria, with the end goal of disappearing from one life and appearing elsewhere in a truer one. Science managed to catch up to the lost knowledge of Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, but trans people were isolated, scattered, and had little way of articulating or expanding their understanding of themselves or what being trans could be. And that has changed very rapidly: some 10 years ago, a friend of mine came out as trans and quite openly chronicled her transition, so I had a far better understanding of what being trans was than the average person. Yet despite having thought, and I believe this is the precise phrasing, “my life would make more sense if I was a girl” sometime before then, complete with hours-long daydreams about what I’d do if I just woke up as a woman one day, I never thought to apply the term to myself. “I mean, I don’t hate how I look because I’m a boy, it’s because I’m fat, and I don’t have any desire to self-harm specifically related to genitals, so I just hate myself the regular way, not in a trans way”.
It’s just absurd, really.
But let’s circle back around to the point, seeing as this is a video game article. Even allowing that I was in a state where I was sad, or indeed outright depressed, about not being born a girl and somehow never thought “wait maybe I’m trans”, it still floors me that I never put together that Xion is trans in 2009. While Xion is a magically constructed person, which does give her a different identity formation from non-fictional people, she is otherwise trans in a literal sense, not merely an allegorical one (see also The Matrix): she is created as a replica of a male character, forms a feminine identity, undergoes increasing masculinization as the game progresses and expresses clear confusion and distress at the process, and even when her appearance is unmistakably male she insists clearly on her chosen feminine identity. Trans is the accurate word for that form of identity and the experiences that influence it.
The fine details are particularly interesting. Due to differences between Xion and other replicas seen in Kingdom Hearts, how Xion appears to people depends on their relationship to her, and specifically what memories they have of the people she’s connected to. So those who knew Sora personally see her with his appearance from the very beginning, characters with no connection to her at all don’t see a person at all, while her chosen identity is seen by her close friends Roxas and Axel.
(Tangent: This does touch on the ways Xion’s artificial origins differentiate her, since Xion begins forming identity at all in response to Roxas’ insistence on befriending her. But this rings true in a way, since interaction with peers is definitely a way people identify their gender, making Xion a sort of reverse order trans girl- she develops her gender identity alongside other aspects of her personality, and only realizes it doesn’t match her assigned sex later in life.)
The way Xion’s original story in 358/2 Days ends is the most real to me however. Due to the way Xion was created, it seems that she and Roxas cannot coexist in the long term: ultimately either she, Roxas, or Sora will end up in possession of enough of his memories that the other two will be unable to wake up. Unwilling to be responsible for such a thing, and increasingly aware and distressed by her nature as Sora’s replica, Xion engineers a confrontation with Roxas where she can terrify him into killing her. However, because her identity is so closely tied to Sora’s memories, returning them will break her own memories and connections to others and leave them disconnected: any memories others have of her will become so fragmented that it’s functionally impossible to remember her.
Xion comes to believe she’s not truly human, a burden on those she loves, and it would be best if she not merely died, but effectively never existed at all. For me, that sentence is the most succinct explanation I’ve ever written about how dysphoria felt. It looks so very much like depression, and yet when you start poking it the reaction is entirely different. A pervasive feeling that you’re stealing from others when you enjoy their company or your own life in any capacity. The future can only be the misery of the present, but you’re older and less capable each day. You lack in the emotions and experiences of real people, and inflicting your subhuman self on them is a terrible burden.
Even in 2009 Xion immediately became a favorite character of mine. Day 357’s title, Tears, was and remains true for me. And while I only fully groked how much and why I identified so heavily with her upon playing Kingdom Hearts III, I was always happy to have something that reliably could get me to tear up. And at the time that seemed strange, because actual, full on crying usually didn’t work for me: I got no emotional catharsis from it and just felt worse from the physical strain of working up to tears afterward. Hell, when I finally gave myself permission to explore those feelings I’d had over those ten years, one of the tipping points was reading stories from trans men lamenting that being on HRT had created that problem for them: they’d developed physical difficulty crying. Realizing that wanting to be an emotional being, with tears as a natural expression of that, and feeling unable to was not merely a block put in place by the rigid standards of masculinity but a physiological limitation of unwanted masculine biology was one of the more exciting discoveries of my gender journey. I didn’t just want to cast aside masculinity, I wanted to embrace femininity.
As true as all that is, there’s also a disconnect between Xion’s original story and how Kingdom Hearts III picks it up again. She ends Days with a sort of contentment about, effectively, having never existed and giving up her own life to prop up Sora, and the emotional journey from that low to her return in KHIII is glossed over. And despite Xion’s transness being almost certainly an accident on the part of Nomura and any other writers involved, it is utterly marinated in misery porn. Like so many things of this nature, showing this in such a real way is not without merit, but we also exist in a time when we can’t limit trans stories to these things: that’s how we get the New York Times publishing an article by a trans woman comparing her upcoming gender confirmation to inflicting a permanent open wound on herself.
So I’m going to bridge that gap with another formative character for me. While not trans, she informs a lot of how I think of femininity, and her journey is shares a few parallels with Xion in key ways that speak a lot to me. And her story ends in a place I feel compelled to find for myself, and not surprisingly, her name is one I’ve adopted for myself.
Elhaym van Houten, heroine of Xenogears, and a character who I’ve always loved but only now feel equipped to figure out why. Elly starts the game as a soldier of Gebler, an elite amongst the citizens of Solaris, the hyper advanced racial supremacists secretly controlling the nations of the world from their city in the sky. When we first meet her, she attempts to shoot Fei in a blend of disdain, self-defense, and blind panic, but within a day comes to question the entire value system of her society of sky Nazis. While she can recite the founding justification of her superiority over Surface Dwellers from memory, the way she talks about it suggest she’s been struggling with these questions on her own for a very long time, and being thrust into the larger world has only reinforced things she already believed: there’s nothing superior about Solarians and inflicting such violence upon others is inherently wrong.
In her next meeting with Fei, she helps him evade pursuers and escape back to Bart’s base, but warns she’ll finally have to be his enemy.
A scene preceding their next meeting suggests why this lingering attachment to her homeland exists: she’s leading troops in battle and feels compelled to support them and set a proper example (no doubt pushed along by having to assert her rank and call one of them out for casual sexism when they were receiving orders). And so once she and Fei meet in battle, she takes a psychoactive drug that boosts combat abilities in order to quash her empathy and act the part of an imperious soldier. This lasts for approximately 5 minutes before her true nature reasserts itself with nudge from Fei. Ultimately Elly is someone who sees her own flaws much more clearly than her strengths or the flaws of others, and for whom putting aside those concerns is painful. Empathy comes naturally to her, but often in spite of herself, and from a place of self-deprecation: her mind is one that sees her own greatest failures and private fears and measures them against the best of those around her. She elevates the humanity of others against her own, and to some degree deems herself unworthy or inadequate for falling so short.
This comes to a head in the game’s second chapter, set in another nation after some catastrophic events land Fei in a city-wide prison. Solaris decides to drop a bomb directly into a nuclear reactor and destroy the entire city for the express purpose of killing Fei, and as he and just one other try alone to deflect the ship carrying the bomb, Elly formally changes sides and joins the effort. They manage to divert it enough to avoid the reactor, but it’s still headed for another part of the city, and their mechs have reached automatic shutdown due to overheat. Elly continues on by herself, insisting her Solarian mech can take more strain due to the more advanced tech even as Fei pleads for her to withdraw. It cannot, and a minute or two later she’s in freefall directly underneath the falling bomb-ship. As above with Xion, she’d decided the well-being of others (although innocents rather than her own friends in this instance) were worth more than her own life and no longer cared if she died so long as it might prevent their suffering. However, another character, one of the villains, covers her and absorbs the blow unseen by the rest of the cast, and so Elly’s quest to find her own worth ends not suddenly in a fit of self-destructive sacrifice, but in her continued growth as a character to grapple with her own sense of self and discovering her true nature.
From here Xenogears is, in large part, a love story, and a good deal of Elly’s development is tied up in how she explores her growing relationship with Fei. At first they bond over their similar traumas, of being responsible for losing control of themselves and hurting those around them, and fearing their ability to be with other people (Elly quips at one point “so you’re saying we lick each other’s wounds?”). Fei is terribly injured, and Elly’s drive to get him care and carry on while he recovers pulls her thoughts more closely to him. Elly and Fei infiltrate Solaris, both its seedy underbelly and the palatial estate Elly used to call home. Shared experiences of confronting the depths of the horrors underlying her upbringing and finding renewed determination to fight against it together, and of having a respite in Elly’s home where both can simply be two young people for probably the first time to that point, both brings them closer together and sets up opportunities to tease and contrast. It’s reasonable to say that this is when they properly fall in love, compared to the growing tension that happened before.
And then… Fei’s alternate personality is fully revealed, and threatens to go on a full rampage. Elly goes out alone to bring him back, a recurrence of her self-sacrificial streak, but here she does so not out of guilt, but because she believes she can succeed where no one else can. She could die, but she may not. But more importantly, when the two return, Fei is deemed too dangerous to roam free and the pair decide to escape rather than let Fei be imprisoned in carbonite. But Solaris’ survivors manage to shoot them down, where they are again saved by the same villain who protected Elly before. And then they recover, Fei is offered a chance to return and rejoin the fight… and Elly wishes him well, saying she’ll accomplish another mission while he fights.
Elly explains her reasoning to another character: everything’s been happening very quickly, and she’s no longer sure of her own feelings. So she wants to be apart for a while, and see if the feelings for Fei remain even when they’re not in a rapid sequence of life and death circumstances side by side. We can also infer she never fully reconciled her natural empathy with the rest of her life. This touches on where she overlaps with trans experiences, because Elly is someone who was raised in a deliberately alienating way and who had to reclaim her own inner nature. She, an elite amongst the chosen people, is among the only ‘true’ humans, and not only are all those on the surface jealous animals who would murder and steal all she has, but even other Solarians who cannot withstand her power are to be dismissed as expendable. And of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that I specifically identify with the part of herself Elly reclaims being empathy, emotionality, and forging connections with others. That is, traditionally feminine traits. The reasons were different of course, being raised to be a disdainful aristocrat in a militarized culture versus being raised in a patriarchal culture, but the feelings are so very similar.
Of course, Xenogears does have one further twist with Elly, which is a bit troubling in some respects but does underscore the ultimate conclusion her character arc comes to. Elly and Fei are actually part of a cycle of reincarnation going back 10,000 years, with Elly being born and tweaked originally as a “mother” figure for Fei’s original incarnation. Elly’s inner nature being specifically feminine, or rather specifically maternal, is very deliberate for this reason. Elly spends the last portion of the game possessed by the main villain, having been captured as part of an exchange to rescue the rest of the cast. And indeed it turns out that such things are a pattern for Elly in all of her lives: for one reason or another, in one way or another, a time comes that the fate of everyone she cares about, from Fei to all the world, depends on Elly alone, and each time she sacrifices herself, her last words always begging Fei to live.
As much as I honestly identify a lot with that, there’s… implications, to be sure. Being fated to enter a doomed, if seemingly happy, relationship over and over until who knows when, always being the one who has to die so others may live, attributing all that to a maternal nature… that’s a troubling notion, even as someone who finds a weird sentimentality to it. Except Xenogears isn’t quite done with this concept. In the very end, Elly is freed from her possession, but is the only one who can move the villain’s craft safely away from the world before it detonates and takes out the planet with it (more or less). Everyone’s powerless to go after her… except Fei, who rockets into space, pulls Elly out of the mindscape, and flies safely back home. He explains thusly:
“Sacrificing yourself for others is a noble thing. Even if it were to benefit yourself, there will always be a person who’s healed. One or the other. Love gains its original shine only when there’s an interrelationship between the giver and receiver. The two are one.”
Elly’s drive to self-sacrifice doesn’t have to be truly destructive, so long as love exists between those she’s trying to help and herself. We see through Elly’s escalating self-sacrifices that the circumstances evolve each time as well, the first out of a sense of worthlessness, the next with confidence she would make it through to the other side, the third when enemies had forced her hand, and the last finally reciprocated.
This is the sort of missing piece of Xion’s character, the growth from sacrificing herself out of desperation and lacking any appreciation for her own worth to living with a sense of purpose. Xion is pulled from an unknown point in her past to the time of Kingdom Hearts III to round out the Xehanorts and fights Axel, seemingly oblivious to who her is. Sora steps in, and Xion immediately attacks him far more viciously, as you do when presented with the face everyone tried to force you to wear. During the beat down, Roxas’ sleeping heart recognizes her and says her name, which seemingly awakens all her memories. She immediately breaks down sobbing. Xemnas, frustrated with her ‘uselessness’, kicks her aside and goes in for the kill. Axel realizes who she is and futily grabs and Xemnas’ foot, but this seems to create enough of an opening for Roxas’ heart to awaken and for it to take on a body that was ready for him. Everyone present fights off Xemnas and his remaining underling, allowing Sora to move on while Xion and her friends recover. Axel and Roxas idly wonder what they should even be doing before Xion bursts into tears, prompting a group hug.
From Xion’s perspective, she’s spent a year or so in a state beyond death, mere fragments of memories shuffling around in someone else’s head. It’s entirely likely her last memories are dying in Roxas’ arms, knowing he too would go off to his death and they would exist merely as splinters of Sora’s psyche. In what must have seemed like two minutes, she went from wanting to die in the hope her friends would live on to walking into a wall of realization: they refused to accept this, and nearly a dozen people had conspired to not only undo her sacrifice, but to change her nature such that she would never have to again. Her body was hers, her memory was hers, her identity was hers, and no one could ever take it from her again.
The missing piece here is that the nature of love, a reciprocating relationship where sacrificing for someone else will be met in kind, so nobody is ever really lost, is something built into the Kingdom Hearts universe by nature. Xion essentially failed to realize the nature of the world around her, a world that despite no shortage of darkness and melancholy will always bend towards love: “I know now that deep down there’s a light that never goes out”. Elly exists in a more… let’s say realistic universe, and so she spent most of the game building and coming to understand such a relationship. She had to develop into a person able to accept things Xion lucked into.
And yet, Elly expresses a very similar sentiment.
“… let’s pray that everyone comes back safely.”
“To god?”
“No… to your own innermost feelings that everyone believes in.”
Everyone has a core within them, feelings that want desperately for the world to be better, for those they love to be safe, to be their best selves. Elly’s story is scraping away layers, the false teachings of supremacy, fears of your own strength and of outshining others, the fear of embracing your own identity, the fear that those false things are your ‘real’ nature and losing them is becoming someone else, not someone better. Elly is someone who did all that, but still had things to learn, and never stopped learning ways to be better, and how to reach out to and inspire that same journey in others.
Xion is a more-or-less literal trans character, and her personal struggles and misery are things that are so obviously true of my own life I don’t know how I ever failed to see them. But the journey she goes on and indeed her being trans at all seems like an accident of writing. But Elly’s story, much more purposeful and rooted in real-world humanity, gives us a framework to better understand that indeed, that is the journey Xion was on. Kingdom Hearts III was my first return to that franchise since cracking, and the amount of the game I spent fluctuating between almost in tears and actually in tears in the end, punctuated by the much more personal Xion material, highlighted just how much changing my perspective and pursing my own femininity has made a difference even with no other changes to my life.
But making that connection, of placing Xion’s story in the framework of Elly’s, reinforced choosing Elly as an identity. Elly, and later Elhaym Sophia, was a bit of a snap decision, just needing a feminine signifier to attach to a headspace that wasn’t old go-to names. But the bit I remembered and drew me to it was the quoted passage of praying to your innermost feelings. Something within that is true and good and has to be found in yourself is just very trans. But taking the time to really lay out Elly’s story, and immediately seeing why it would have resonated so strongly with me in long ago 1999 yet never registered why, that was an experience. We had the same lessons to unlearn, the same fears littering the skies of our dreams, and the same deep, fearful, desperately wanted desire to love the world and find love returned.
So… hi. I’m Elly. And that’s how I’m here.
