The (Probably) Accidental Feminism of Trails in the Sky
We live in a strange era, where “Feminism” is both a product to be sold and a dirty word that boils the blood of a significant number of people. The mere word Feminism both creates more division and holds less meaning than it has at most points in its history. So a lot of times discussing whether a work has feminist themes can manage to piss off everyone involved, because people in favor of feminism will claim you’re using the definition wrong or too restrictively, while everyone else hates you for associating the work with that dirty, dirty word. But Trails in the Sky presents an odd case I think, where it has both surface level feminist attributes and touches on greater feminist themes… but I’m also not entirely sure it meant to when looking at how it presents them.
Trails in the Sky is a story told in two parts, with a full length epilogue game created shortly thereafter. The leading characters appear in two subsequent series of games, set further along the fictional timeline and during which time main characters Estelle and Joshua are treated as something akin to living legends. We’ll be focusing solely on the Sky series, and only briefly touching on The 3rd, albeit the relevant portion I want to discuss are in its ending sequence. While I’ll be summarizing the plot of the first two games as a means to organize and highlight relevant aspects of the story, that summary will assume a basic familiarity with Trails in the Sky and obviously be full of spoilers.
Estelle lives in the least populous region of the kingdom of Liberl with her widower father Cassius and his ward Joshua. Cassius was a high ranking and influential member of the military during an invasion of Liberl some 10 years prior to the start of the game, but retired and instead became a Bracer. The Bracer’s Guild are an international organization of… well basically jRPG heroes, folks who take on missions ranging from criminal investigation and diplomatic negotiations to monster hunting and civil maintenance work to doing contract work for things like finding lost pets and delivering specialty goods. Unsurprisingly, Estelle and Joshua have decided to take up the work, and at the beginning of the game have recently become 16, the minimum age for starting Guild work, and pass the field test to obtain junior membership. Cassius is called away to a large mission, and leaves some of his smaller jobs to the kids, so they can prove themselves and work towards full membership in the guild.
For the next segment of the game Estelle is joined by her mentor/teacher, an older student of Cassius’ and overall family friend named Scherazard. Schera is great, a woman whose competence is rarely questioned and who’s unafraid to use either her sexuality or her whip in negotiating with the less savory of the world, while the game is unafraid to show her as having a troubled past and as a prodigious drinker. These two chapters detail Estelle tangling with the Capua Sky Pirates, a two brothers and a sister trio of fallen nobles turned to a life of crime, who have unexpectedly escalated their crimes to kidnapping an entire passenger airship, the same one Cassius supposedly left on (spoiler he wasn’t there). Estelle forms a budding rivalry with the youngest Capua, a foul mouthed girl named Josette, and along the way allies with Olivier, a wandering bard/spy(/secret prince) of Erebonia, the nation which invaded ten years prior. Once everything is resolved and Estelle moves on to her next adventure, he and Schera go off on their own, opening up party slots for two more companions.
Here’s a good spot to talk a bit about jRPG conventions. Because jRPGs tended to have multiple main characters from early in the genre’s life and made interaction between them a core element of the genre’s appeal, some degree of parity between genders often exists in gameplay terms. In turn, then, it’s pretty common for this to be true within the setting, creating an outward appearance of gender egalitarian societies. Until demonstrated otherwise, in a typical jRPG we can assume that the world does not consider it unusual for women to have an Adventurers lifestyle and engage in deadly combat with monsters, soldiers, and gods as a matter of course. Sky, having a woman protagonist, seems to be conscious of this and trends towards equity in numbers between men and women in addition to a theoretically unrestricted gender roles. The first game has 8 PCs, with an even 4 and 4 gender split. We encounter a quartet of other Bracers frequently, and they too are two men (Kurt and Grant) with two women (Karna and Anelace). We’ll have more to say about this later, but at a first glance Trails in the Sky presents itself as having some measure of gender equality within Liberl.
The next region of Liberl centers around the Royal Academy, and there Estelle teams up with Kloe, a student (and to the surprise of no one with basic knowledge of jRPG tropes, the Princess Royal of Liberl). Along the way she also interacts with Agate, a brusque senior Bracer with no particular respect for Estelle and Joshua’s lack of experience or recklessly fast climb through the junior ranks. Ultimately the local mayor is attempting to burn down an orphanage in order to build a beach resort there, but little did he know the actual goddamned princess loved all the children and has no mercy for the damned.
Before we breeze through the next chapter, we’re also introduced here to Dunan, Kloe’s uncle and the other main candidate for the throne. It’s said explicitly by the end of the first game, but it’s made clear from the moment Dunan’s introduced that he’s an unworthy candidate to rule a nation, and nothing in the game particular indicates that the Queen in any way considers him a real option. He remains in contention purely because Kloe herself has not formally accepted her place in the royal succession. Despite having the same low opinion of Dunan as anyone else in Liberl by all indications, Kloe is so uncertain of herself she entertains the notion of letting him ascend the throne by default. Given how Kloe talks about her grandmother, the answer to this seems to be that Kloe doesn’t feel she measures up to her grandmother, and that it takes a woman of exceptional ability in order to rule a country. We’ll touch on this again shortly.
Our heroes have some misadventures with lost technology in the heart of technological revolution, and in so doing befriend the prodigious granddaughter of Liberl’s chief researcher, a girl named Tita. This whole section of the game is far more devoted to the actual mystery plot happening in the first game’s background and setting up further mysteries and world building for the sequel, so I’ll be moving on, but it’s worth pausing just to note that Tita is adorable and it’s cool that they made the unrealistically gifted engineering nerd a 13 year old girl in this game.
The first game ends in the capital city, starting with a grand tournament and ending with thwarting a coup. It turns out all the various troubles we were solving in each chapter were orchestrated by the army’s Intelligence Division under Colonel Richard, who has imprisoned the royal family, threatened the Queen to name her nephew as successor in exchange for the safe return of Kloe and other hostages, and been excavating ruins beneath the castle. Richard was in search of an ancient artifact that he believed would activate these ruins, and in so doing grant them access to lost, miraculous technology. In particular, something called the Aureole is thought to the key to everything, although when confronted in the end Richard seems not to truly know what it is or what it’s so important, merely that it would somehow be a source of unfathomable military might.
So here’s where we touch back with Kloe’s plot and Liberl’s cultural as a whole. When informed that they plan to announce the princess’ engagement, Joshua responds thusly:
“It is the appropriate age for a young lady to make her ‘debut’ in high society. But unless we’ve reverted to a more repressed time, it is much, MUCH too soon for marriage…”
Queen Alicia herself seems to believe that many have supported Richard’s attempted coup because naming Kloe as her successor, and thus having two women in a row ruling Liberl, would be perceived as weakness during an era of increasing international tensions. She seems to take this, in part, as criticism of her emphasis on using the free exchange of technology and learning as leverage in maintaining strong diplomatic ties. The previous war with Erebonia was won in no small part by sudden technological superiority on Liberl’s part, and so she worries they may be right to some degree, but ultimately believes such an advantage would be unsustainable and Liberl must find some other way of standing among the powers of the continent.
Dunan, Richard’s puppet in the whole affair, is pretty consistently established as just the worst person, but his thoughts on Estelle, Schera, and Kloe (ie his niece and preferred heir to the throne) forcing their way in to rescue the Queen are… telling:
“H-how dare you make a fool of me?! It’s because of things like this that those creatures known as ‘women’ are not to be trusted! Sly, narrow-minded, nit-picking, nagging wretches… how could I ever give up the crown to such a vile creature?!”
Colonel Richard never expresses his concerns or goals in these terms, instead focusing specifically on his hero worship of Cassius Bright and need for some hidden, miraculous ace in the hole in order to replicate his feats should the time come. Estelle, professional Cassius Bright skeptic, points out the obvious: Cassius didn’t build a technologically advanced airship or negotiate with the Church and Erebonia’s rivals for reinforcements or fight the war on the ground all by his lonesome. Liberl’s ability to withstand their vastly more powerful foe was the culmination of an entire nation working together, not one man’s daring stratagem that depended solely on those pieces being there. While Richard doesn’t seem to indulge in the base misogyny of a reprobate like Dunan or the implied “Well of course a refined man like me has no problem with a Queen, but other nations would surely judge us for letting any woman less accomplished than Alicia take the throne” form of misogyny alluded to by Alicia herself, Richard nevertheless fixates on the deeds of one man without seeing all the hard work that made it possible for him to exist or for his plans to succeed in the first place. He believes that only crushing superiority somehow, in some fashion, be in technology or manpower or the control of information, is necessary to make a country strong, never able to think of statecraft as anything but a matter of survival of the fittest.
While Trails in the Sky presents a nominally egalitarian world, I think it’s no accident that once we look at the higher ranks of society the even gender distribution we see among the party or the Bracers disappears. We meet a plethora of military personnel, but the highest ranked woman is a Captain. Liberl is ruled by a beloved Queen who led her country through the greatest crisis in generations, and yet she’s certain many within the nation would be skeptical of her naming her granddaughter as successor. Despite having lived her entire life under her Grandmother’s reign and having lived through the 100 Days War, Kloe still feels she must be somehow exceptional to “deserve” the crown more than her layabout uncle. Liberl, while making no judgment of women for pursuing a ‘masculine’ occupation like soldier or Bracer, is clearly still patriarchal under the surface; merely placing a woman at the top of society hasn’t changed how society thinks about gender or who they consider as “deserving” of power.
However, as we explore Liberl, we see that when pressed and presented with this fact in a naked, understandable form, most character we encounter don’t like what they see. So over the course of the game, we see a clear divide in the country that falls along what we could call masculine and feminine lines of thinking; on the one side, those who believe a country is defined by its strength and standing among nations and thus requires a man to lead them, and the other, growing segment who believes a country is defined by its people and how they can come together to make the world around them better. Estelle, even at this early stage, not only demonstrates an unwavering belief in the latter, but an ability to embody this idea in a way the gives weight to her words, and sways those she fights into seeing the virtue of her beliefs, and I think it’s no accident that this is the strength and character arc of our heroine.
To wit, after beating Richard in battle, it turns out his plan was never going to succeed: he merely activated a defense system which threatens everyone present. Estelle and company are able to win the first round, but start reaching their limit… only for Richard to leap in and deal a severe blow, allowing her to regroup and hold it off for a while longer. Seeing Estelle in action and her resolve proving stronger than his own was all Richard needed to realize he had been wrong all along and begin to undo his mistakes, starting with the defense robot. It’s a crying shame Cassius reappears here to finish the robot off, because it really undercuts the themes this first game has been building, but still, we see Estelle in action very well here.
Rather than talking about the first game’s cliffhanger or going linearly through SC’s plot, we’re going to skip around a bit. Most of SC is dedicated to establishing the secret society, Ouroboros, and their laying the ground work for their assault on Liberl late in the game. Colonel Richard was manipulated for the entirety of the first game in order to undo a seal on the systems that would allow the society to retrieve the Aureole, ultimately revealed to be a manifestation of a fundamental force of the universe, or perhaps essentially a piece of the Goddess. In order to access it’s final resting place Ouroboros has to control key portions of Liberl all at once and prevent any other parties from reaching it first. Ultimately the game is structured such that we spend the first half meeting each of the members of the society, then have two further confrontations with each during their takeover of Liberl and again trying to stop the party from reaching the Aureole. So let’s go through how Estelle relates to each of these characters over those confrontations, to build up to the ultimate goal of their boss.
Bleublanc, the Phantom Thief, is mostly here to find new people to troll and treasures to make off with. He is something like the Riddler, always leaving a certain amount of clues for anyone to find if they’re so determined, and so our party quickly becomes an object of interest for him. His primary rival ends up being Olivier, but it’s certainly true that he gains a measure of respect for Estelle. During their final confrontation, he asserts that the most beautiful treasure in the land is the hope she and her allies are carrying, and stealing it away is his last goal for staying here. A villain to the end, but a softer one, willing to bow out when he’s defeated.
Luciola, the Bewitching Bell, an expert in potions and poisons and manipulation, in Liberl primarily to reconnect with her ‘sister’, Schera. Luci is a woman torn between a deeply motivating sense of betrayal by the man she held dearest and her unending guilt for betraying Schera’s trust in turn. During their initial confrontation Estelle is able to escape a poison-induced dream which seeks to trap the target in pleasant memories, a sign of her resolve and all that, but Schera pulling Luciola’s sins and guilt from her kicking and screaming is much more the focus of her scenes.
And now on to the ones who connect much more directly with Estelle’s story.
Renne the Angel of Slaughter, a genius child who uses manipulation, intellect, and control of a massive prototype armored mecha to get her way. Because of her penchant for manipulation, Renne presents herself to the party as an impish lost child and quickly bonds with both Estelle and Tita, causing both to become determined to rescue her from Ouroboros just as with Joshua. Estelle zeroes in on this selfish, childish insistence on getting her way in their final confrontation, insisting that Renne can’t just force people to believe what she wants them to and that instead she has to understand they hurt and love just like she does. And then… they hug, and Renne’s so confused and uncertain of what she’s feeling she has to flee the battle. Estelle is uncertain she did the right thing, but is determined to keep looking in hopes of succeeding again.
Joshua Astray, the Black Fang, the boy whose heart was broken and put together again by the big bad, who broke Estelle’s heart trying to spare her his past and out of fear of the big bad’s ability to control him at the end of the first game. Estelle begins her journey in SC trying to stand on her own feet and find her own identity apart from Joshua, and throughout the game discovers more and more her immense talent for connecting with others and inspiring the best in them. But it is always, just a little bit, a front, and our goal remains to bring Joshua home. After chasing the members of the society all around Liberl, Estelle is ultimately captured and held aboard their airship. Joshua, on his own quixotic quest to defeat them alone, realizes this and comes to her rescue, meeting her half way. He relates to her his memory of the moment his heart was broken, when he shot a man trying to save his sister, only for his sister to take a knife for him during the man’s death throes and die instead, and how those distant memories feel like they belong to someone else, no longer having any feeling attached, just as he doesn’t feel anything anymore. And that’s why he has to stay away.
And Estelle calls him a liar. It’s not that he’s lost his emotions or that he’s broken, it’s that he’s been so hurt he can’t even process it. She doesn’t know the word, but thanks to all the people she’s helped and seen hurt since they parted ways, she recognizes Joshua’s story as traumatic dissociation, and his insistence on running from her as fear for her safety and fear to love someone again.
“No one’s looking. Cry as long as you want. And I’ll just… hold you like this.”
Loewe the Bladelord, once upon a time Joshua’s brother in law, the man behind most of our big bad’s wet work, the one who helped him manipulate Richard in the first game, and the most imposing physical presence Estelle encounters in her journey. Joshua’s sister did not merely die in some accidental assault; their village was invaded and razed to the ground during a false flag operation by Erebonia, the pretext for the 100 Days War. Loewe has lost faith in humanity entirely, and his bitterness has only increased during his time with Ouroboros. He sees the larger plot as a means of putting the world on trial, and openly demands for Estelle and Joshua to prove him wrong. And so, Joshua does: if he, someone who shared the same tragedy and was broken by it, could put himself together again with the compassion and trust Estelle taught him, then surely anyone could, given enough time and love. It creates a single opening, and Joshua disarms the Bladelord, both literally and rhetorically.
Before coming to the finale, there’s an important bit of setup. In causing the Aureole’s resting place to rise again, power across Liberl and a little beyond is shut down, and it quickly becomes an international incident. Estelle and her team walk from region to region, a deliberate reenactment of her journey in the first game, to carry news of how everyone can respond to the crisis and specialized communications equipment that will work during the blackout. Or put another way, the heroine has come full circle, retracing her earliest steps not as a learner, but as a seasoned veteran come into her own, bringing hope in her wake.
However, she does not do so unopposed. The Erebonian Army rolls in specially-designed diesel engine tanks to… “assist”, demanding Liberl either end the crisis or they shall end it for them. Estelle meets with the General and the Prince commanding him to negotiate for more time… and it’s Olivier. She successfully corners him into admitting that if Liberl has a means to overcome the nation-wide power shutdown they can handle the crisis alone, only for Cassius to swoop in on the royal airship.
It was all staged, worked out long before as a contingency between Olivier and Cassius, to deflect a plan by Erebonia’s war hawks they were pretty sure was waiting in the wings for exactly this eventuality. And they let Estelle flounder thinking the entire world was on her shoulders and she had no plan to actually back up her brave words.
At the end of SC we get to a scene which sent me thinking about Trails in the Sky as a feminist work in the first place. Our grand villain Georg Weissman, whose machinations have caused so much suffering, lays out his justification and goals for all of this. He views mankind as animals, who will be driven either to war with one another unto extinction, or else fall into hedonistic pleasure until society rots from beneath them. So he must introduce a third path, using the power of the Aureole, described thusly:
“The beasts of mankind must be led to the point where they obtain the two things required for TRUE, enlightened sentience… a flawless rationality, capable of resisting any temptation and unswayed by even the fiercest circumstances! And peerless intelligence, ever capable of finding the correct solution, unmoved by crude emotion!”
And when he begins fusing with the Aureole, his battle cry is:
“Keh-heh-heh…Oh, this sensation…Even better than I’d imagined…Shall we experiment, then? The power of apotheosis, unflinching reason, indomitable intellect, guiding humanity to the future”
So you see, Weissman is just some internet atheist asshole. Every entitled, “of course I am objective!” incel piece of shit you’ll ever meet embodied with the power and resources to dominate a country on his own initiative.
We beat him by preying on his predictability and the usual suspects like friendship and determination. He attempts to dominate Joshua as he did at the end of the first game again, and commands him to kill Estelle… the most obvious, predictable thing he could have done; manipulate someone into acting out their own worst nightmare. With additional assists from clergyman Kevin and Lowe, whom Estelle had helped win over just prior, Joshua is able to shatter the control Weissman holds over him, precipitating his downfall. Weissman’s façade of rationality is dismantled brick by brick until our heroes’ combined might can take him down. Suck it patriarchy, it turns out that making friends, looking for the best in people, and trusting in others are a lot more powerful than some asshole’s self-assured performative masculine “rationality”.
For the most part SC ends here, but there is one more thing to discuss from the follow up game 3rd: Renne. 3rd takes place in an extradimensional space originally powered by the Aureole, allowing it to bring the team and many of their allies into the game without creating a deeper reason for them to reunite. Indeed, Renne is still on the run to find herself as she was last seen in SC, with Estelle and Joshua having only vague ideas of where she might be. Because of the game’s setting however, we instead find Renne sucked into the game while sleeping, and indeed takes some time to realize she’s not merely having a happy dream about being surrounded by Estelle, Joshua, and Tita. She immediately becomes aggressive once she becomes fully conscious, but becomes convinced quickly enough that it’s logical to work together with everyone else.
In the end, after all is done, the cast by ones and twos say their goodbyes, giving them a grand finale as the franchise moved on to the next series. At the last there is the hero of this game Kevin and his squire, Estelle and Joshua, the heroes of the series overall… and Renne. She asks why everyone seems so happy saying goodbye, when they have no idea if they’ll see one another ever again. And so Estelle tries again, not just to try and get Renne to leave her post and try for a normal life, but to make her a specific offer: to join her and Joshua as a family, to find happiness together every day, so that even when they have to say goodbye someday they’ll know they did everything they could to make their time together matter. And so she promises to keep running, and Estelle promises to keep following until she decides one way or another. She runs off crying she hates them… and loves them just as much.
Estelle watches until Renne is out of sight before she cries, saying she finally got through, able to tell Renne how they felt. Unsurprisingly the story between Estelle and Renne is not over and carries over into later games, but the biggest part of the work is done: Renne knows she has a home, when she’s ready for one. She knows Estelle won’t reject her for her past or abandon her or hurt her. She merely needs to find a little more peace, and a little more strength, to trust again.
Estelle ends the Sky series in a fascinating place. She starts marked with a series of tropes normally reserved for male protagonists, and those are always a part of her but so too are her resilience, compassion, and ability to understand and redirect how the people she meets think and act. While perfectly capable of holding her own in combat, she lacks the overt super powers or sheer experience of most of her companions or the lead characters in later Trails games, and yet she has the best record against the major antagonists so far, playing a leading role in three Enforcers turning against Ouroboros and taking part in defeating one of the Anguis. And she accomplishes these feats against the Enforcers via those feminine qualities compassion and empathy, understanding what motivated Joshua, Renne, and to a lesser extent Loewe to support Ouroboros and relentlessly reaching out to them until they reached back. Estelle is herself, defined by neither conforming to nor rejecting her gender and at her most effective when embracing feminine attributes.
I’ve talked before about how I approach feminism and gender equality (https://medium.com/@cmdrking/yer-a-girl-corrin-fire-emblem-fates-and-feminism-e4361fb62bb ) and in particular the idea that it’s important not merely to elevate women, but to stop the denigration of femininity or the elevation of masculinity. And while there’s always a gender abolitionist approach of not coding particular traits and attributes as either masculine or feminine, to achieve that end we still have to combat the biases in society that view things like compassion, emotionality, and caretaking as inherently lesser, and women as inherently lesser still for engaging in them.
More selfishly of course, being trans these traits and how they’ve warred with what society expected from me going up are very important to me. And while I can’t say I was ever pushed as hard as most, I can still attest that supposed boys are bullied for displaying these feminine behaviors or otherwise not performing masculinity. In this way, you can say that boys experience misogyny, and unaware trans girls far more so on average, since they’re far more likely to display and insist on engaging in those feminine behaviors.
However, while cis boys and trans girls absolutely experience misogyny, there is an additional, specific form leveraged against AFAB children. To simplify, despite the century that has passed since the era of the Suffragettes, in the end society still carries a baseline assumption that women will and want to devote themselves entirely to motherhood and men will and want to climb to positions of power and influence. Even as the assumption carries more caveats, an ever escalating number of asterisks, it exists and colors how adults respond to the behaviors and achievements of children. Girls are assumed to be less capable, their actions more frivolously motivated, and their goals more worthy of derision. In other words, when a girl tries to express herself, society yells in her face “you’re just going to go get knocked up anyway, who cares if you get good grades or what you ‘want’ to be when you grow up”.
And it is this specific form of misogyny that Trails in the Sky displays from the men Estelle meets in her journey. Cassius and Joshua never dip into the most extreme forms of this, but the entirety of their interactions up until Cassius departs for Erebonia is Estelle’s father and her eventual partner poking fun at her any time she expresses confidence in her abilities or the slightest hint of smugness at a job well done. She brushes this off in most instances, but the first time she genuinely feels she messed up, she comes perilously close to falling apart; it seems clear that this continual barrage has left her brittle and easily crushed. Most NPCs in her home town comment on her being scatter brained with speculation that she was dropped on her head. Estelle’s first meeting with hard-nosed investigator Nial includes the line “Whaddya mean, ‘lady’? There’s nothing sexy about you in that outfit! If you don’t like my assessment, then how about slipping into a skirt and acting like all the other girls your age.” After a point characters meant to be sympathetic engage in far less of this sort of thing: Olivier is perhaps a little less flirty with Estelle than other characters, but it’s established she doesn’t really cotton to such attention directed towards her so of course he doesn’t, and while Agate is notably abrasive to Estelle… he’s exactly as abrasive to Joshua, and in fact addresses them as a unit because his objections are the same for both. However, the game still toes the line between “behaviors probably in line with the character and setting as established” and “why did they go that far here”, best exemplified by Dunan’s drunken behavior.
Ultimately, Estelle surpasses this by embracing her best instincts, her ability to reach out to the best in people and then beat them about the head until they reach back. Similarly, Kloe is able to let go of the idea that her grandmother is somehow exceptional and that her ascending the throne is not some perversion of the natural order. This touches on another key point however: was it necessary to show the misogyny they experienced in such detail in order to then show them overcoming it? To what degree must we display the ugliness and flaws of society in order to explore and solve them?
Creating a fictional world free of the prejudices and limitations of our world can be both comforting and powerful. She-Ra 2018 is a good example of this: Etheria has many flaws, but it also seems to be a world where there’s no real concept of homophobia. The characters still struggle with the possibility a love interest may not reciprocate their feelings, the main characters still suffer from many problems familiar to queer people, but the idea that you should be ashamed of not conforming to heteronormativity just doesn’t seem to exist. There’s something to that that doesn’t immediately register, yet is powerful all the same.
And yet… it can tell us what the world can look like, and help us isolate and examine aspects of life that can be covered up by those hardships, but it also can’t really tell us how to recognize those hardships, the ways the operate, and how to overcome them. Art like She-Ra and art that show the cruelty and blemishes of society both have a place and need to exist, but art which specifically displays society’s prejudices also runs the risk of merely reproducing, rather than deconstructing, those same flaws, which is why such things have to be done carefully and purposefully.
If Trails means for Joshua’s early treatment of Estelle to be an intentional set up for him later being proven wrong, the final arc of their relationship is rather ambiguous about that intent. The emotional climax comes when she rejects his paternalistic drive to ‘protect’ her. However, that’s not really what he did wrong. He does leave and hurt her at the very end of FC due to that drive, but his pattern of behavior includes so many worse things. His earlier statements belittling her ability could stem from such an attitude… or not. And when doing this sort of thing, showing an ill to debunk it, clarity of intent and statement is crucial.
This stands out to me because Sky does avoid this pitfall in other respects. When we catch up with Richard in 3rd, he’s running a detective/information broker agency. While he still believes that the control of information is vital to Liberl’s future as has deep skills in doing so, he seems to understand himself as a part of the whole. He has seemingly learned, or begun to learn, how the beliefs that prompted his coup were wrong.
Meanwhile… at the opening of SC, Cassius reveals he knew from the beginning what Joshua’s backstory was and how he would react if he ever felt his past would catch up with him. Seeing the inevitable heartbreak and anger as Estelle fled the scene, Schera says the following:
“If I may make a single comment, though. From a woman’s perspective? At this point, you and Joshua are, essentially, the two most wretchedly miserable sons of dogs I have EVER had the displeasure of knowing.”
And yet, by the end of SC, after all the growth Estelle has managed and all the things she accomplished during the game? Cassius is still keeping secrets and manipulating Estelle. Despite being told off by every woman he knows, he has only acknowledged Estelle’s martial skill.
So how do we square this? I think it’s safe to say that Trails understood the feminist implications of its setting and Kloe’s story… but cannot say the same for the misogyny directed at Estelle. I think the background radiation of Liberl echoing the real world, where men and women are equal on paper but in reality the old systems of patriarchy is alive and well, was an intentional choice within the setting and Kloe’s story of overcoming her doubts to accept her role as future queen was intended to be strengthened and highlighted by that lingering bias. Meanwhile, some other factor in the writing of the game generated the girlhood misogyny directed at Estelle, and while some elements of her story are an intentional reflection of having a young woman in the lead role of the game, others are accidents and this is reflected in the lack of care in executing some of this content.
And so it’s time to talk Shonen Tropes.
In several key ways, most jRPGs made in the past 20 years draw more heavily from action anime targeted at boys and younger teens, a genre usually called Shonen. Given this focus, most shonen tends to feature a young male protagonist coming into his own, a bit of an outcast from society but nevertheless possessed of rare talent, drive, or an unending optimism. Whether they stand out for their particular undeveloped talent or for their determination in the face of seemingly lacking much talent, it’s key for the protagonist to somehow be underestimated and misunderstood in some capacity. A common version of this need, then, is for the protagonist to be energetic and willing to put their physical skills to the test, but be too inexperienced, foolish, and lacking studiousness for their peers and the adults in their lives to take them seriously.
You can see where this is going. This sort of protagonist is generally belittled and their braggart tendencies met harshly by those around them at the beginning of the story. It’s part of showing how far they have to go and creating a sense of adversity for them to overcome above and beyond whatever fantastical threats or situations they find themselves in as part of the setting; it’s something that grounds their struggles for the target audience. Trails in the Sky simply transposes this characterization onto its female protagonist.
This does not excuse the actual outcome of this choice. In several places the game is very aware of how the world around Estelle will react to her gender. Nial and Dunan engage in specific, overt misogynistic behavior (to varying degrees). Estelle’s hobbies and what drives her are overtly a riff on how being a woman might influence a shonen protagonist (a tomboy who loves sneakers? A martial artist whose greatest weapon is compassion? These are not accidents). And yet, the belittling and undermining of her confidence , most especially from her father and her eventual love interest, shows no such awareness of the added, insidious dimension such treatment takes against girls in particular. It simply is, a blindingly obvious oversight from writers who otherwise are so careful and deliberate in their story, alienating any in the audience who’ve experienced such misogyny in a particularly strong way. We can perhaps say that this particular form of misogyny is so omnipresent, so endemic to the culture, that even those deliberately using feminist themes to inform their work do not recognize or account for its presence. But even if it’s not malicious, that does not dull the impact of its presence. As noted when we started examining this aspect of the game, a story incorporating elements like targeted misogyny as pervasively as the opening chapters of Trails in the Sky do must be done judiciously and with purpose, and by instead being in the game more or less by accident it taints any conclusions we can draw about feminist themes in the work.
Despite all that, I don’t think my love of Trails in the Sky is much diminished. This has been more an exercise in understanding more fully why the game makes the missteps it does, how such stories can be handled better, and being willing to understand why some people can bounce so hard off a story that seems like it would be particularly appealing to them in many respects. But I must admit, I still find Estelle’s story of compassion overcoming cynicism and trauma deeply compelling and… even aspirational. It’s one of many things that came so sharply into focus after realizing my own femininity. When I first played the game, when I still believed I was a man, and one whose particular form of dysphoria manifested as depressive thought loops about having fake emotions, being broken, being less than human, a drag on anyone foolish enough to care about me, someone whom the world would be better off without? Indeed, who at that time had been using writing about cartoons and video games as a means to examine my emotions and trying to reclaim my emotional range, who was slowly concluding that finding opportunities to cry was immensely healing? In spite of all that, being in a place in life so precisely mirroring that of Joshua during his and Estelle’s reunion scene… it was Estelle who captured my imagination, whose role in the scene I wanted for myself. And of course, these things are probably not achievable; heroes aren’t usually someone you can catch. But as messy and perhaps accidental as Estelle’s full character is, it’s still something I find important.
That’s all lot to take from any story. We can both know how the things we love could be better, and how perhaps they were never quite so good as we thought or hoped they were, while still cherishing what we gained from them. And while Trails in the Sky is far from the most disappointing such a story has been for me, if I can’t be honest about where both its strengths and missteps lie, did I really learn anything? But if I can instead pass that lesson along, I think I’ll also be one step closer to being the sort of women I’ve admired in my journey too.
