The accidentally incredible trans storytelling of Honkai Star Rail - Part 1: Firefly
In update 3.8, Honkai Star Rail went back to Penacony and gave us an extended look into the full picture of everything that truly happened back on Penacony, including everything that happened to and was experienced by the character Firefly. This story update became to me the most singularly, hilariously, irrefutably trans writing of a character I have maybe ever seen in my life, the comedy of which is only added to due to the fact that I know it’s entirely accidental.
To begin my analysis, I will give a basic summary of Firefly’s story to establish key events and themes in her character that I’ll be referencing throughout the post. Firefly, originally named AR-26710, is a girl of about 16-18 years of age in appearance and acts somewhat mature for her appearance, but her actual physical age is likely quite young since she was born seemingly as an early adolescent, grown in a cloning lab as a genetically engineered child super soldier to fight as part of the Iron Cavalry of the Republic of Glamoth under the direct command of Her Majesty, the Queen and Empress, Titania. Wearing a suit of Fyrefly Type-IV Strategic Assault Mech armour, simply called "SAM", she is one of utterly countless numbers of faceless Iron Cavalry super soldier clones that fought for Glamoth against the Swarm Disaster brought about by the Aeon of Propagation. The entire assigned and designed purpose of her life is to fight and die for the honour of Her Majesty, because she has been genetically engineered so that the moment she tries to desert or rebel in any way, her body will be compelled to shut down and die due to the fictional condition known as Entropy Loss Syndrome. Her SAM armour is her cradle, coffin and life support machine. To leave it is to willingly progress the intentional genetic defects of her own body, hastening her own death. Even long after Glamoth was gone, she would fight on against the remnants of the Swarm, watching her comrades die and throw their lives away for the Glory of Her Majesty. At the end of a battle that she was the last survivor of, surrounded by the corpses of everyone she knew and loved, she at last abandoned her life's designed purpose and was picked up by and began working for the Stellaron Hunters, becoming an intergalactic outlaw known as SAM as she worked tirelessly for their cause in exchange for their help in changing the destiny her cruel and fated death.
Her single, most earnest wish is to live as just an ordinary girl.
With all of that out of the way, let's begin the analysis properly. Throughout 3.8, we have it regularly told to us by Firefly that her one, single wish in life is to live as just an ordinary girl. She is stopped from this by not just the timer on her life, but also by the fact that the world at large knows her not as a girl, but as SAM, the Molten Knight. Her SAM armour renders her totally concealed and the voice it speaks with is a deep, gravelly masculine voice, completely obscuring any and all traces of her femininity behind the armour and the identity of a genetically enhanced super soldier. In game, SAM is referred to exclusively with masculine pronouns by anyone who doesn't know her true identity underneath. This hyper masculine armour and this identity she's been assigned, it is the purpose she is shackled to on threat of very real and literal death. If she dares to live as an ordinary girl, if she dares to desert her assigned purpose in life, she will be slowly crippled and killed by the machinations of those who created her.
Let me repeat. If she abandons her life as a hyper masculine weapon and loyal tool of her creators to live as an ordinary girl instead, she is forfeiting her right to live at all. Her hyper masculine armour, the armour that she was taught never to leave for any reason once she was sealed inside of it, is her literal life support device. If she stops wearing her safe, life guaranteeing hyper masculine armour, she will begin dying rapidly through the intentional design of those who created her and controlled her. She was designed to die in battle, never to outlive the system that shackled her or the republic that created her, only to live as their tool that she should gladly die for, even after it is long gone. If that's not assigned masculinity under patriarchy, I literally do not know what is. The average man under patriarchy is not expected to be a leader, he is expected to be a cudgel, a weapon, an aggressive tool in love with the idea of dying honourably and nobly giving his life for the perpetuation of the status quo if that's what he must do, to love the scraps of power he is given to keep those who are weaker than him in line. You are not expected to prioritize a long and prosperous life. You are expected to enjoy that as a privilege until you are asked to lay it down for your country and if you dodge a draft or refuse the call? Cowardice. You are less than a man. You will be punished severely.
And to refuse the masculinity they've told you your life depends on that they've assigned to you, to yearn to be feminine by choice, is to forfeit your very right to live at all under patriarchy.
Following this chapter of her life, she is adopted by a group of fellow miscreants and outlaws who also refuse to accept their fates and work tirelessly to change the inescapable destinies they have found themselves consigned to. For all intents and purposes, this is pretty much indisputably equitable to what you'd consider her queer found family who will stop at nothing to make sure she'll one day get to live the ordinary life of her dreams. They help her with her chronic illness, protect her from danger as she protects them in kind, support and cherish her in EVERY way they possibly can, among the Stellaron Hunters, Firefly gets to LIVE as a girl who is loved and cherished by a family she has NEVER had before. She fights for this group's cause of halting the coming of Finality to the universe and in exchange, they have given her the guarantee that she will be able to alter her cruel destiny of inescapable, early death.
On its own, this is enough for me to start pointing fingers at the screen and going omg she's just like me fr, but I need to talk about the events of 3.8 specifically and the conversations she had with other characters in that update because that's when we get some of the most aggressively trans dialogue I have ever heard in my entire life.
Taking key moments from this conversation, it's hard not to see this as a conversation between a trans woman and a person who wishes to refute her transness once you begin looking at it through such a lens. Arguments of "Give up because the end is immutable, your past (birth) has defined your ending for you, you are merely deceiving yourself," and "Who cares what people will think when I reach the end, it's my choice to decide how I live along the way," are things any trans woman will recognize as common rhetoric she has heard tossed back and forth before. Gopher Wood is (in an effort to goad her) arguing that her struggle is sad and pointless, but Firefly says a beautiful line here about how the willingness to accept a sadder and harder fate, to make that sacrifice, is an act of true and profound resistance, a power that belongs to everyone. Rather than giving up and dying because the world was ugly, she has decided to bear that weight and choose to struggle on, seeking to live how she yearns to live best as an act of resistance against destiny.
Gopher Wood even observes that the only way to change destiny is to give up your own desires entirely, to kill yourself spiritually and live as a hollow shell, but Firefly refuses to back down saying this too is resistance and that she will embrace it passionately, burning brightly and living as proudly as she can because that is her RIGHT. The choice to live even if only as a shell of your former self in the eyes of others is still a choice to LIVE and embrace a BETTER destiny than the one you were once doomed to. It is a choice to live so ardently and hotly that it burns the candle at both ends, so brightly and beautifully it cannot be looked down upon and seen as less than the truest embodiment of what it means to live well in and of itself. It repaints the idea of transition as a way of saying, "It is true that I cannot escape this destiny (body) I have been born with, but it is my choice to live in it how I wish to live and that shall be my ultimate act of resistance. I sacrifice what I wish could have been to live well and happily in what I am." I simply have no words for what a beautiful sentiment that is. That is so sundering, to choose to give up on wishing you were born cis so you can live happiest and proudest as a trans woman is the kind of thing that takes some trans people years to arrive at the feeling of. Truly it is an empowerment like no other. The next conversation I want to look at though is the real meat of the transness of this quest.
We begin with a vision of her Past self asking her, "Who were you before?" "Who are you now?" "Who shall you one day be?" to which she replies, "A Glamoth Iron Cavalry Knight" "A Stellaron Hunter" and "Just an ordinary girl"
Her past replies to these answers by saying she might as well kill herself now because it would frankly suit her better.
And here we get to part of the quest that dropped my jaw directly through the floor, what do you MEAN Firefly just asserted to the masculine embodiment of her past that no matter how odd or strange the circumstances she has been handed, it doesn't invalidate the fact that she herself, the girl named Firefly, is ultimately just and ordinary girl who happened to survive and live through extraordinary circumstances. That, to be an ordinary girl like any other girl, you don't have to luck into the right circumstances or be born with a certain past. You just need to WANT it. Any ordinary girl who lived as she lived would turn out the same way and do the same things. She IS an ordinary girl, a girl who could've gone to high school, made friends, graduated, lived a full life, just like EVERY other girl out there. However, it is her EXTRAORDINARY past that has shaped who she is today and taught her such beautiful things about how to live her life and cherish it so very, very deeply. Even in a perfect dream world, her past has still shaped her decisions and who she, but that's a wonderful thing too! Through the lens of transition, it CELEBRATES the idea that though we are just ordinary women like our peers, the way we've grown up and the lives we've experienced have given us an appreciation and understanding of life so uniquely beautiful that it is something to be deeply treasured. Any other ordinary girl who grew up believing she was and being treated as a boy her entire life would be just like us. It is not self deception. It is embracing who we are to live our lives to the fullest truth that we can embody, aligned with ourselves and becoming something far greater and more beautiful in the process. Even should we meet a cruel fate at the very end, we will have lived authentically as the ordinary people that we trans folk have always dreamed of living as.
Miscellaneous additional moments of incredible symbolism I have to mention:
The Myriad Celestia trailer for Firefly is just so disastrously trans it's hard to pin down where to start. For starters, we are introduced to other squad mates of hers that are all just as young as her, but one of them who is particularly rebellious and self expressive, AR-214, who honestly acts as a role model for inspiring Firefly to "transition", remarks that her long hair is beautiful and notes how it actually shows she's a lot older than the rest of them, having been able to grow it out so long. Firefly thanks her and says she's been intentionally trying to grow it out longer. As they all stargaze together and look at the beautiful surroundings whilst awaiting comms coming back online, Firefly take a scrap of cloth from a nearby torn banner and turns it into a hairband for herself. The entire interaction feels so special and beautiful and gentle, it is a deeply tender and colourful trailer that also takes the time to hammer into the audience the idea that it is EXPRESSLY forbidden to EVER leave their mech suits. What they are doing is forbidden and wrong and deserves punishment and yet they're just some kids spending time together and looking at the beauty of the world and each other in this private moment while they're unobserved by command. Long after this trailer aired, we see AR-214 in update 3.8 once again but this time we find her dead body, tragically slain by Gopher Wood while she was dying due to entropy loss syndrome. As Firefly mourns her, she remarks on how this girl was the only deserter she ever knew, admiring her bravery to strike out on her own despite the threat of death, but she also admired her deeply and praised her endlessly for the fact that even though she'd left to live her own life, like Firefly she still couldn't stop herself from coming to the aid of people in need when she flew past penacony so long ago. Because of AR-214's past, her future actions were predetermined, and yet those future actions of hers were a beautiful and noble thing that anyone else who'd lived the same life as her would make too. Just because she chose to help people in danger, exposing herself to that very danger as well, it never meant that AR-214 was any less of an ordinary girl either. Truly a splendid sentiment.
I need to talk about Empress Titania as well. It is revealed when you read deeper into the lore that Titania never actually held any political power of any kind and that she herself was nothing more than a bound and abused tool genetically engineered by the Republic of Glamoth to control their elite super soldiers on a tight telepathic leash. This says multitudes about being a woman in power under patriarchy of course, and the fact that the Republic bound her even more harshly as they grew scared of her growing power speaks to how self devouring patriarchy also is. Everything she ever did was governed by the Republic and she was nothing more than a hollow, empty weapon of control. It is unclear whether she destroyed Glamoth herself in vengeance or if the swarm ultimately destroyed Glamoth, but painting the puppet figure who controls the lab grown super soldiers that will gladly sacrifice their lives for her as an abused woman shackled by ruling patriarchy that grew so scared of her they considered killing her is A Very Loud Choice by the writers that really aggressively echoes the idea that womanhood is terrifying and dangerous to patriarchy and the choice to embrace it and live for your own sake is to tempt the reaper, yes, but it is always the right thing to do. That no matter how loyal you are, you will never be seen as equal or be loved by patriarchy, you will simply be owned and feared.
Lastly, I want to touch on Firefly's chronic physical disability. Firefly is a literal super soldier who is built better, faster and stronger than you, but she spends most of her life with the Stellaron Hunters in a life support tube to keep her condition stable. For a time, she gets to run around the Penacony Dreamscape freely as an ordinary girl because it's not her real body running around, it's her dream body, but eventually, even that dream projection of herself succumbs to a slow and terrible death due to her ELS. Irrefutably, Firefly is chronic disability rep. I will now also be informing you all that trans people are around 18 times more likely to have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a chronic physical disability that affects the connective tissue across the entire body, than cis people are to have it, as per this recent study across millions of people. If you are a trans person who knows a lot of other trans people, you know our community has a shockingly high rate of physical disability. The representation really feels like it speaks for itself here.
Now, you may be asking why I'm adamant about calling all of this accidental and I’d like to be frank about this and remind everyone reading that this is a story and character written by a group of Chinese developers who are expected to write the most marketable and digestible characters possible, characters you will feel profoundly endeared to and never for even a moment feel like you need grapple with your own internal politics over. They have to write them this way because Hoyoverse is a company that makes gacha games and is the single biggest and most profitable company to do it. Yuri and yaoi are impossibly, unfathomably profitable, so you will see Dahlia flirt endlessly with black swan while black swan waltzes with Acheron and Raiden Mei will confess to being more in love with Kiana than the entire world, ready to sacrifice all of it just for her. Transgender stories are not profitable and romanticized the same way. The most profitable anime waifu gambling company ever would never for even a single moment dare to put a truly transgender character into their story, nor do they think about our inclusion even in subtle ways just for the sake of doing what’s right. This company won’t even make black characters in the black regions of the world they pull their inspiration from. Do not delude yourself into believing they have love for us trans people because a story they told happened to tell our story too by sheer accident.
However, analyses like this are still vitally important. The beauty and the magic of storytelling happens not just in the intentional, elegant, beautifully crafted and clever moments, but in the accidental. The unintentional moments of telling a story that strikes a chord deep in someone’s soul and makes them feel so perfectly and completely understood and seen by what is playing out before them that it can never be taken from them. This is one of the most basic truths of the human experience. We see echoes of ourselves all around us, because again and again, even when we are forgotten, even when we are unloved, we will still live on, appearing again and again no matter how meticulously they attempt to refuse our existence. They cannot write an authentic life that we won’t appear in, because that’s how fundamental we are to the human condition.
