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havocthecat mentioned in passing of my possibly doing a video game recs list, since Video Games Are Where I Come From. Said recs list would be probably focusing on a balance of gameplay, story, and characters (preferably, female characters who are awesome), because I'm me.
Anyway, I've been playing Persona 4 lately, and beyond eating my brain, it's kind of been tickling that idea of a recs list. Not only because it'd totally be on there, but because there's a lot in there to meta on. Well, people with more background than I have can meta on it. Because P4 got a couple of articles written on it by academics when it came out, because one thing the Persona series is not afraid to tackle is the issue of identity. And I guess it surprised a lot of people that P4, since it stars teenagers, did this by not shying away from going to gender identity.
Yeah, I know my flist.
Anyway, I was going through a Google Image search for icon material for P4 (okay, okay, it was for the still of Naoto's silhouette in the intro) when I came across this article on Bitmob: Boys Wear Blue, Girls Wear Pink: Persona 4 and Queer Subjectivity. It's a short article, and I wish it did go a little more in-depth, but it did tell me that I'm not the only one pinging on a certain thing about Naoto Shirogane. And how it is rather telling that more focus has been on Kanji Tatsumi and his ambiguous (by Word of Atlus) sexual identity.
Actually, one of the things that's interesting to me is how much I have this instinctual resistance to using pronouns when referring to Naoto. I've talked about the character both here and on my DW journal before, and in each case, I seriously resisted the urge to use pronouns. At first, I thought it was because I did not wish to spoil "the reveal", or to pretend that the reveal was still a secret (I hear the Japanese VA had a much easier time of keeping the voice in a lower register than the English VA did. The English VA is pretty obviously an alto. Although one could make the argument that it's harder to find female English VAs who can sound convincingly like young men). But now, I'm not entirely sure.
In any case, in my opinion, it's to Atlus's credit that they left things fairly ambiguous in many cases. The game takes place over the course of a year. Some things honestly cannot be resolved in that time frame, especially concerning issues of identity. All the characters, Naoto and Kanji, but also Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, and Rise, are believable teenagers. (Teddie is fairly believable too, but he's a special case.) Even the main character, who doesn't talk is believable as the kind of guy you'd want to hang around with and depend on (because to do well in the game, you have to Not Be A Jackass and Be A Responsible Human Being). And while none of the others is as blatant as Naoto or Kanji, Yukiko and Rise have a more subtle version. Yukiko, who feels trapped in tradition and wants her prince to save her (I suspect reams of meta can be written on the fact that she labels Chie as her "prince"). Rise, a teen idol who is terrified that she's doomed to be nothing more than a sexual object and not a person.
And some of these issues are easy. Finding a group of people who accept you for who you are is the critical first step in resolving these issues in the game (after beating the crap out of the repressed part of yourself manifested into a physical form), but there's more to it than that. And some parts of these issues take longer to resolve. They're people's lives, and they're messy. Every "ending" (I'm defining a Maxed SLink as an "ending", because that's the end of the one-on-one interaction tangential to the main plot) to these issues gives the feeling that the person in question has resolved something, but they're going to keep working at it.
It's life.
Okay, that got away from me. Like I said, I'm not finished with the game, and I'm quite curious as to how much these impressions stick.
havocthecat mentioned in passing of my possibly doing a video game recs list, since Video Games Are Where I Come From. Said recs list would be probably focusing on a balance of gameplay, story, and characters (preferably, female characters who are awesome), because I'm me.Anyway, I've been playing Persona 4 lately, and beyond eating my brain, it's kind of been tickling that idea of a recs list. Not only because it'd totally be on there, but because there's a lot in there to meta on. Well, people with more background than I have can meta on it. Because P4 got a couple of articles written on it by academics when it came out, because one thing the Persona series is not afraid to tackle is the issue of identity. And I guess it surprised a lot of people that P4, since it stars teenagers, did this by not shying away from going to gender identity.
Yeah, I know my flist.
Anyway, I was going through a Google Image search for icon material for P4 (okay, okay, it was for the still of Naoto's silhouette in the intro) when I came across this article on Bitmob: Boys Wear Blue, Girls Wear Pink: Persona 4 and Queer Subjectivity. It's a short article, and I wish it did go a little more in-depth, but it did tell me that I'm not the only one pinging on a certain thing about Naoto Shirogane. And how it is rather telling that more focus has been on Kanji Tatsumi and his ambiguous (by Word of Atlus) sexual identity.
Actually, one of the things that's interesting to me is how much I have this instinctual resistance to using pronouns when referring to Naoto. I've talked about the character both here and on my DW journal before, and in each case, I seriously resisted the urge to use pronouns. At first, I thought it was because I did not wish to spoil "the reveal", or to pretend that the reveal was still a secret (I hear the Japanese VA had a much easier time of keeping the voice in a lower register than the English VA did. The English VA is pretty obviously an alto. Although one could make the argument that it's harder to find female English VAs who can sound convincingly like young men). But now, I'm not entirely sure.
In any case, in my opinion, it's to Atlus's credit that they left things fairly ambiguous in many cases. The game takes place over the course of a year. Some things honestly cannot be resolved in that time frame, especially concerning issues of identity. All the characters, Naoto and Kanji, but also Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, and Rise, are believable teenagers. (Teddie is fairly believable too, but he's a special case.) Even the main character, who doesn't talk is believable as the kind of guy you'd want to hang around with and depend on (because to do well in the game, you have to Not Be A Jackass and Be A Responsible Human Being). And while none of the others is as blatant as Naoto or Kanji, Yukiko and Rise have a more subtle version. Yukiko, who feels trapped in tradition and wants her prince to save her (I suspect reams of meta can be written on the fact that she labels Chie as her "prince"). Rise, a teen idol who is terrified that she's doomed to be nothing more than a sexual object and not a person.
And some of these issues are easy. Finding a group of people who accept you for who you are is the critical first step in resolving these issues in the game (after beating the crap out of the repressed part of yourself manifested into a physical form), but there's more to it than that. And some parts of these issues take longer to resolve. They're people's lives, and they're messy. Every "ending" (I'm defining a Maxed SLink as an "ending", because that's the end of the one-on-one interaction tangential to the main plot) to these issues gives the feeling that the person in question has resolved something, but they're going to keep working at it.
It's life.
Okay, that got away from me. Like I said, I'm not finished with the game, and I'm quite curious as to how much these impressions stick.
(no subject)
Basically, while some people grew up watching and processing TV shows and being able to meta the hell out of them, I grew up on JRPGs. :)
In this particular case, although the protagonists are teenagers, the audience for the game is higher. The game is rated M, which is the functional equivalent of R, and Atlus takes advantage of that. Sure there's swearing and mature topics, but for a video game, it handles them pretty well. Far better than some other media examples would.