Sunday, October 4, 2020

Persona 5 Theory

 Okay, so since Wordpress went evil on me by removing the most basic functionality for free blogs while pretending to still allow free accounts, I have decided to try swapping to Blogger.  We'll see if it works.  (At least this editor format looks like a word processor instead of an empty screen, so that's promising.  Still not as nice as the old Wordpress editor, but it'll do, I think.)

This is just a short (I hope) temporary post, but I plan to have a new one up for the Insecure Writer's Support Group on Wednesday.

And, fair warning for anyone stumbling across this post, my blog is not typically going to be about video games or Japanese pop culture, despite that I personally spend a lot of time with both.

I, personally, came to Persona 5 pretty late; I was in the throes of working on my Master's Degree in History when it came out, and did not dare risk getting caught up in a really addictive game while I was having to read upwards of 500 pages a week.  (Sometimes it felt like I was reading that many pages per day.  Though I don't think I ever actually had to read quite that much.)  I gave myself a copy of the game as my graduation present to myself. ;)

Anyway, as I watched the opening movie for the first time, I wasn't thinking much until I suddenly said "Jun?!" because one of the cast members looks a lot like Jun from Persona 2: Innocent Sin, particularly the way he's first shown in the opening movie.  (Jun is particularly well known for being one of the three love interests in the game.  Definitely the only same-sex love interest in a JRPG on the original Playstation.)  Then, while I was still reeling from that, everyone starts doing ice-skating moves as if it's Yuri!!! on Ice, so then and there I decided that must mean that you finally had another same-sex love interest choice, and so I was going to make my player character gay and go for that one.  (I had not been following any internet reactions to the game, because I was so caught up in my studies.)

Now, from this point onwards, I am going to include some character-based spoilers for the game.  (As it's several years old, hopefully that's not a problem for anyone, but if it is, please stop reading now.  I would put in a "Read More" tag to make sure no one has to see past this point who doesn't want to, only I don't see any way to do that.  I suppose that was a Wordpress thing.)

Anyway, as I played through the game, I of course found many references to all the previous Persona games, since it was an anniversary year release, but I found far more references to the Persona 2 duology than to all the others combined.  (Yes, there were two Persona 2 games.  Though at the time we only got the second one in English.  And then when they were remade for the PSP we only got the first one.  *sigh*)  This only added to my certainty that Yusuke would be romanceable.

And so I was stunned when it turned out that no, he was not.  There was no option to ask him to be your boyfriend, despite the myriad hints that he was gay, and all the constant references to Persona 2 and to Jun.  (One of the most telling is the fact that in both games masks are very important, and Jun used the codename "Joker" during Persona 2...as does the player character in Persona 5.)

In the end, I came to the conclusion that while Sega said they would not interfere with Atlus following buying the company out, some executive at Sega found out that the new Persona game was going to have a male love interest as well as female ones, and insisted that the choice to romance him be removed, but that they weren't paying close enough attention to remove all the myriad hints and suggestions that Yusuke was supposed to be romanceable.

Fast-forward to a few days ago.  My brother just started playing Persona 5 Royal, the slightly revamped version of the game with a new (really annoying) character added, and some quality of life fixes like your talking cat spending less time nagging you to go to bed.  He commented on how bad the opening was, and wanted to see what the original was like, so I brought over my copy of the original game for him to check it out, and while I was there, I watched the new opening, too.

One of the things that most struck me (aside from the general lameness and lack of style in the new opening movie compared to the original) was not only the fact that they added Akechi to the opening movie, but also the manner in which they did so.  Akechi, for those who haven't played the game, is...um...how do I put this?  He's one of those characters who is popular with some fans because he has a pretty character design, despite that he also has a terrible personality, and in fact has done some really quite awful things.  (Seriously, seriously awful things.  Which I hesitate to mention as they are plot rather than character spoilers, and from very late in the game, but he's a real and true monster.)  Over the course of the game, he becomes more and more obsessed with Joker, and there is definitely a sexual component to it, to the point that by the end of the game it seemed like most of Akechi's dreams were probably about hate-sex with Joker.  I mean, it's that obvious and that warped.  Now, I did hear that one of the changes they made for this new version was to retool some of what passes between Joker and Akechi (obviously only on Akechi's end, since Joker is a silent protagonist), so they may have made it slightly less warped in Persona 5 Royal, but probably not by a lot, given how all-around twisted Akechi is.

So how did they portray Akechi in the opening movie?  It was brief, but it was him and Joker lying in a field of flowers with their heads near each other.

Um, what?  Dude's a bad guy who spends the whole game hating on you, and they depicted him like a love interest in a shojo romance anime.

But the more I reflected on that, and on the way Joker's relationships with the other characters work in the game, the more I came to a realization:

I don't think Sega told Atlus it couldn't have a game with a single gay love interest.  I think Sega told Atlus it couldn't have a game with a gay protagonist.  I think originally Joker was only going to be able to romance male characters.  Not only is Yusuke obviously the primary love interest (the opening places him in a place of considerable prominence, he's the last one to call out in worry when Joker is captured at the end of the in medias res opening sequence, and of course their personae are Arsene (after the fictional French thief Arsene Lupin) and Goemon (after the historical 16th century thief/outlaw Ishikawa Goemon) both of whom have fictional grandsons in the perennially popular manga/anime Lupin III) but there are jealousy events between him and Mishima, another male character who clearly was originally supposed to be someone that Joker could romance.

On top of that, only one of the potential female romances builds in an even remotely natural way.  All the others are just a random question out of the blue towards the end of the S-link, where they just suddenly seem to expect Joker to ask them out (okay, technically there are a couple I didn't see, because they required him to have really high Charm stats and that's really hard to raise in a first playthrough, so it might be that Makoto and Haru's might be less abrupt). Even the multiple 20-something women all spontaneously expect this high school boy to ask them out.  Yeah, because that would happen.  I can accept one 20-something woman with an ethically questionable taste for teenage boys (as with Maya in Persona 2), but this is absurd:  there's the really awesome doctor, Joker's homeroom teacher (seriously!), a street fortune teller, a reporter (an obvious reference to Maya, who was also a reporter), and I feel like I'm forgetting at least one more.  (I know he can't romance Makoto's older sister, but I think she's the only one.)

If you just accept the game as it is, it's like "what is wrong with all these women, trying to seduce this little boy?"  But if I'm right and Sega forced them to make him straight instead of gay, then it all makes a chilling sense:  someone said "fine, if he can't romance anyone but women, then let's let him romance all the women, even those twins who look like they're twelve!"  (Yeah, seriously.  They're sort of supernatural, so they're probably a lot older than Joker is, but either way GROSS!)  I don't know if the two homophobic caricatures who pop up periodically would have been added at that time, or if they were always there as an object lesson in how not to be gay (and/or as a way to fool the player into not realizing that Joker's gay until late in the game) in much the same way that any game might include a perverted old man as a lesson in how not to be straight (think Master Roshi or Happosai, you know?)

Now, if you didn't link over here from my old blog (and therefore know what I'm like), you're probably wondering if I have a point with all of this.

And the answer is "no, not really."

This is just a theory I came up with that makes a lot of pieces fall into place for me that otherwise just land all over and make an ugly mess.  Can I or anyone else ever prove that this is what happened?  Well, I sure can't. As to other people, if it is what happened, someone at Sega or Atlus could say "this is what happened behind the scenes on Persona 5" but that wouldn't really be proof so much as one person's testimony.  And even if it is what happened, no one would admit to it, so all this will ever be is idle speculation on my part.  (Nothing will ever make me believe that Yusuke was not originally intended to  be a love interest, however.  There are way too many signs that he was intended not only to be a love interest, but the main one.)

Okay, with luck there will be another post on Wednesday for IWSG.

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