I finally got to play Persona 4 again, after roughly a 4-month hiatus. (Damn term.) Anyway, I'd answered ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
abyssina's recent "Fuck You, She's Awesome" theme-spam, pretty much with female characters from video games who had a profound effect on my development and psyche as a child. (Although I forgot Cecilia from Wild Arms 1 and Kanon from Wild Arms 2, dammit) Because unlike many people, apparently, I grew up on books and games, rather than TV and movies. So my cultural references are a little skewed. But I disgress.
The Persona games (and SMT games in general) are rated M, so I didn't come to them until well after I entered college, despite the fact that the characters are generally all high school students. I wonder what impact it might have had on me if I had been introduced to the series earlier, if any at all.
The thing that triggered this is that, like I said before, I started playing P4 again. And I started grinding Naoto's Social Link. Initially, my reasons for doing so were purely mechanical: I had moved Naoto into my primary party as crowd-control (despite the fact doing so bleeds MP, it's better than my Protagonist doing it), and thus absolutely needed the party S.Link cookies that come with leveling the S.Links up.
That was the initial reason. That's not entirely true anymore. As I was watching the character development scenes, I came to a rather surprising conclusion, one that explains just why I was drawn to this character so much:
Naoto Shirogane is me when I was roughly twelve years old.
Too damn bright and trying too damn hard to be an adult. Wanting adult conversations, but the adults alternated between treating me like a child and not. Not fitting in with kids my own age, leading them to think I was horribly aloof and cold (possibly inhuman), when in reality I was painfully shy and uncomfortable. Wanting to desperately get out of where I lived, because I didn't fit in anywhere, and I wanted someplace, any place where I could be accepted for who I was and do what I wanted to do.
I hated being a girl. I wanted to be a boy. I wanted my hair cut short (and spiked, in all honesty). I wore the boy's uniform to my (Catholic) school. I was the kid who made my soccer team co-ed. I hated dresses and skirts. I hated the expectations of me because I was a girl. I thought that maybe if I was a boy, I'd fit in better, because damned if I could fit in with the girls, and there was always a level of awkward between me and the boys.
The difference is that I grew up and learned that it's not so bad being a girl, in fact, it's can be pretty damn awesome. That my gender and biological sex doesn't fucking matter when it comes to who I want to be and what I want to do and what my dreams are. More importantly, I found that place where I can fit in, and where people accept me for who I am, flaws and all.
And the reason Naoto has resonated as a character so much with me is because I see this character going through that same process. This game, this game, has given me someone who I very honestly can relate to, in all it's painful glory.
And it's for this reason why we need characters like this. Characters and stories with whom we can identify. Stories where it doesn't matter what a character's sex or gender or sexual orientation or race or ethnicity or ability or whatever are, because that character can still be a hero, still reach their goals, their dreams, their aspirations. They can still be the most determined bastard there ever was and still save the world. Or change it. And we need characters like that, we need stories like that, stories with people we can identify with, and go "yeah, I can do that. This character could, so why can't I?"
Stories are what define us as a society and as a culture. What are the stories we tell our children and tell each other?
Once upon a time, I posted an excerpt from Utopian Entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel. Laurel is a veteran of four of the major tech-booms of the last 30 years, and was one of the founders of the late game company Purple Moon, who designed and produced actual games aimed at young adolescent girls, rather than cheap marketing tie-ins other companies were producing for the same market at the time. I'm reposting it here, original typography included:
Many of the rules and stories that I grew up with - even venerable stuff like proverbs and Greek myths - don't seem entirely applicable in today's world. One of the stories that doesn't work very well these days is Aesop's fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare." As you will recall, in the original story, the Tortoise wins the race because the Hare is an over-confident slacker. Here's how the story might go today:
One day a hare was boasting of his running speed and laughing at the tortoise for being so slow. Much to the hare's surprise the tortoise challenged him to a race. The hare, looking on the whole affair as a great joke, readily consented. The race began and the hare, of course, soon left the tortoise far behind and went on to beat him handily. It was probably the case that the tortoise thought the hare would stop and fool around and maybe take a nap. But the tortoise failed to notice that the hare did everything fast and hard. He drove fast and he talked fast and he ate fast and he ran fast. He traded hot stocks on his handheld during boring business meetings. No time was wasted. The tortoise, on the other hand, felt that his maturity and balance made him superior to the hare, and if he worked steadily and paid his bills on time, he would do well in the end. The hare made millions on internet stocks before the NASDAQ crashed, and his fortunes sent several generations of little hares to the best colleges. After retirement, the tortoise was unable to survive in the city on his shrinking social security checks, so he ended up living in the park.
Okay, what's wrong with that story? It's cynical. It doesn't give good advice about how to live. We probably don't want our children to believe it, even though some of us may be afraid that it's true. One of our perennial fears about technology is that as technology gets better at telling stories (though means like virtual reality and special effects), people - especially kids - will be increasingly unable to distinguish reality from illusion. But to my mind, the danger isn't technology; it's the stories of our times that pose the greatest threat to our children and our future. Stories are tools for knowing and judging.
Change the stories, and you change how people live.
Change the stories. Give us characters we can identify with, who are strong and heroic (or anti-heroes) in their own right. Because stories are how we can tell how our society is doing as a whole, and what must change.
It's all about the stories.
abyssina's recent "Fuck You, She's Awesome" theme-spam, pretty much with female characters from video games who had a profound effect on my development and psyche as a child. (Although I forgot Cecilia from Wild Arms 1 and Kanon from Wild Arms 2, dammit) Because unlike many people, apparently, I grew up on books and games, rather than TV and movies. So my cultural references are a little skewed. But I disgress.The Persona games (and SMT games in general) are rated M, so I didn't come to them until well after I entered college, despite the fact that the characters are generally all high school students. I wonder what impact it might have had on me if I had been introduced to the series earlier, if any at all.
The thing that triggered this is that, like I said before, I started playing P4 again. And I started grinding Naoto's Social Link. Initially, my reasons for doing so were purely mechanical: I had moved Naoto into my primary party as crowd-control (despite the fact doing so bleeds MP, it's better than my Protagonist doing it), and thus absolutely needed the party S.Link cookies that come with leveling the S.Links up.
That was the initial reason. That's not entirely true anymore. As I was watching the character development scenes, I came to a rather surprising conclusion, one that explains just why I was drawn to this character so much:
Naoto Shirogane is me when I was roughly twelve years old.
Too damn bright and trying too damn hard to be an adult. Wanting adult conversations, but the adults alternated between treating me like a child and not. Not fitting in with kids my own age, leading them to think I was horribly aloof and cold (possibly inhuman), when in reality I was painfully shy and uncomfortable. Wanting to desperately get out of where I lived, because I didn't fit in anywhere, and I wanted someplace, any place where I could be accepted for who I was and do what I wanted to do.
I hated being a girl. I wanted to be a boy. I wanted my hair cut short (and spiked, in all honesty). I wore the boy's uniform to my (Catholic) school. I was the kid who made my soccer team co-ed. I hated dresses and skirts. I hated the expectations of me because I was a girl. I thought that maybe if I was a boy, I'd fit in better, because damned if I could fit in with the girls, and there was always a level of awkward between me and the boys.
The difference is that I grew up and learned that it's not so bad being a girl, in fact, it's can be pretty damn awesome. That my gender and biological sex doesn't fucking matter when it comes to who I want to be and what I want to do and what my dreams are. More importantly, I found that place where I can fit in, and where people accept me for who I am, flaws and all.
And the reason Naoto has resonated as a character so much with me is because I see this character going through that same process. This game, this game, has given me someone who I very honestly can relate to, in all it's painful glory.
And it's for this reason why we need characters like this. Characters and stories with whom we can identify. Stories where it doesn't matter what a character's sex or gender or sexual orientation or race or ethnicity or ability or whatever are, because that character can still be a hero, still reach their goals, their dreams, their aspirations. They can still be the most determined bastard there ever was and still save the world. Or change it. And we need characters like that, we need stories like that, stories with people we can identify with, and go "yeah, I can do that. This character could, so why can't I?"
Stories are what define us as a society and as a culture. What are the stories we tell our children and tell each other?
Once upon a time, I posted an excerpt from Utopian Entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel. Laurel is a veteran of four of the major tech-booms of the last 30 years, and was one of the founders of the late game company Purple Moon, who designed and produced actual games aimed at young adolescent girls, rather than cheap marketing tie-ins other companies were producing for the same market at the time. I'm reposting it here, original typography included:
Many of the rules and stories that I grew up with - even venerable stuff like proverbs and Greek myths - don't seem entirely applicable in today's world. One of the stories that doesn't work very well these days is Aesop's fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare." As you will recall, in the original story, the Tortoise wins the race because the Hare is an over-confident slacker. Here's how the story might go today:
One day a hare was boasting of his running speed and laughing at the tortoise for being so slow. Much to the hare's surprise the tortoise challenged him to a race. The hare, looking on the whole affair as a great joke, readily consented. The race began and the hare, of course, soon left the tortoise far behind and went on to beat him handily. It was probably the case that the tortoise thought the hare would stop and fool around and maybe take a nap. But the tortoise failed to notice that the hare did everything fast and hard. He drove fast and he talked fast and he ate fast and he ran fast. He traded hot stocks on his handheld during boring business meetings. No time was wasted. The tortoise, on the other hand, felt that his maturity and balance made him superior to the hare, and if he worked steadily and paid his bills on time, he would do well in the end. The hare made millions on internet stocks before the NASDAQ crashed, and his fortunes sent several generations of little hares to the best colleges. After retirement, the tortoise was unable to survive in the city on his shrinking social security checks, so he ended up living in the park.
Okay, what's wrong with that story? It's cynical. It doesn't give good advice about how to live. We probably don't want our children to believe it, even though some of us may be afraid that it's true. One of our perennial fears about technology is that as technology gets better at telling stories (though means like virtual reality and special effects), people - especially kids - will be increasingly unable to distinguish reality from illusion. But to my mind, the danger isn't technology; it's the stories of our times that pose the greatest threat to our children and our future. Stories are tools for knowing and judging.
Change the stories, and you change how people live.
Change the stories. Give us characters we can identify with, who are strong and heroic (or anti-heroes) in their own right. Because stories are how we can tell how our society is doing as a whole, and what must change.
It's all about the stories.
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