tl;dr: starting sometime in Jul-Aug 2012 I started writing a Persona 4 fanfiction. Today April 30th of the year of our Lord 2023 I'm starting to post it, chapter by chapter. The link to the first chapter will be here once I upload it, which should be shortly after this post goes up: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46864330/chapters/118047793
Below the cut is a, uh, "foreword" of sorts I wrote a few weeks ago. It is long and personal, but probably integral to understanding why I wrote this thing and why it took me a very, very long time to post it.
At the point in time that I am writing this (April 12th, 2023), I am not sure when, or even if, I will post this fanfiction. If you're seeing this, I guess I did decide to post it somewhere. Given it's strange history however, I felt like some sort of foreword or author's notes of some kind were in order. It feels incredible stupid and self-absorbed of me to write this for a god damned Persona 4 fanfiction but, well, I think a little context will make sense of why this is the way it is.
I played Persona 4 for the first time in... Well, I'm not sure, actually. Somewhere in the late of 2011 or mid of 2012. The specifics are somewhat lost to time as I do not remember much at this point in my life and have deleted most record, either intentionally (Internet presence, social media accts, etc) or by accident (computer hardware failures). It was the final (probably) year of my undergraduate degree and I was atrociously depressed. I would not be officially diagnosed as such until over a decade later, but considering this was a truly, incomparably low point in my life, I feel like it goes without saying. I didn't own any consoles that weren't made by Nintendo, so I emulated the game after emulating and playing to completion Persona 3. They ran like pure unfiltered shit, often single digit framerates, but I played the whole damn thing. I don't even remember who or what prompted me to pick up Persona 3/4; that too is lost to history. But I loved them, Persona 4 especially.
I loved P4, but something ate at me. The characters and concepts in the game were fantastic. I loved many of them immediately, but I felt like the quality and biases of the writing wasted a lot of incredible opportunities. I found myself disappointed in some ways that I wasn't with any other piece of media. Especially, as a young person struggling with my gender and sexuality, I found myself identifying strongly with both Kanji and Naoto, and also extremely disappointed by their treatment in the narrative.
So sometime in 2012, probably in the summer based on the earliest timestamps I can find in the massive OneNote book I use to plan this thing, I started to write a short-ish fic from Kanji's perspective, from the start of the game time in April up until he was welcomed onto the Investigation Team. I posted this somewhere at some point, but have long since taken it down, I think. I can't find it anywhere, at least. I decided I wanted to write about Kanji's perspective at other points in the story, about him and Rise, and about him and Naoto. I also wanted to write from Naoto's perspective too, as I found her (yes, bear with me on this) fascinating and extremely near and dear to my heart as well. A normal person would probably have written a series of smaller fics. Unfortunately, I was as previously mentioned very depressed, and realized what I was going to end up doing was write the entire timeline of the game from the alternating perspectives of Kanji and Naoto.
My outline spanned most of the game in very vague and broad strokes and I had various snippets of writing and scenes tucked away in my OneNote book of colossal proportions. I have a couple scenes from Magatsu Inaba written! They were some of the earliest things I wrote! The main draft was at the Culture Festival when I dropped it for eleven years. When Golden came out (I bought it and a Vita, of course. I still have and love my Vita to this day), I revised my outline to account for it, and used my actual real properly-running copy of the game to research all sorts of aspects of the game and story at my own pace. I wrote approximately 300k words of fanfiction in the polished text file, with many thousands more in the OneNote planning file. I also handwrote the entire thing before typing it out, because that's just how I operate, I guess. But I never posted it anywhere, or even shared it with friends, not that I had many at the time. I barely engaged in the P4 fandom at all. I followed some livejournals (because that's where the fandom mostly lived for quite a while), and read some fics published mostly on livejournal as well (none about Kanji or Naoto primarily, as I never found anyone whose interpretations gelled with me and even fewer whose writing style was readable; all the good writers were Souyo shippers, god bless you people tbh). Frankly I found the fandom often rather aggressive and unpleasant and felt like my work might not be appreciated, and to this day I prefer to stay out of view. I wrote the fic with the intention of it never being read by anyone else. It did make the experience rather lonely.
Those 300k-ish words took the draft to, in game time, the end of October. Then for a number of reasons--returning to school, new interests, new friends, and eventually gainful employment--I stopped writing.
You will note that I dated this "foreword" to April 2023. After over a decade since starting this fic, I decided to revisit it. Maybe even finish it, if I have the energy to do so. Why?
I think part of this is me coming to terms with the mental illness I experienced back then. It was severe, and I am not kidding when I say I don't remember much from this period of my life. Now, I have been treated for my major depression and anxiety disorder for a few years now. I want to go back and reclaim some of that time I lost, and part of that is revisiting this weirdly personal fanfiction where I put a whole lot of myself into Kanji and Naoto both as I sorted out my issues through them. As mentioned earlier, this fic is the events of Person 4 Golden through the eyes of the two characters I felt deserved some justice and attention. I truly looked at how they were handled and thought, they deserve better, and maybe I can give that to them in some way.
I will give this fanfiction content warnings for sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. It is no worse than the game itself, though I hope in some ways it is better. I'm not into pure wish fulfillment, and I don't think it makes any sense to put these characters in a world where suddenly everyone is perfectly understanding. However, I think by writing about their relationships with their friends, family, and each other in more detail, I can give some hope that it is possible to find acceptance, understanding, and love even in a world that beats you down.
I will now address the elephant that is constantly present in the room whenever anyone discusses Persona 4, and the primary (though hardly only) reason I sort of despise this fandom.
Naoto I know is an extremely prickly topic in the P4 fandom. Naoto is treated like pure garbage in the narrative far above and beyond any other character despite being presented as a strong, smart, and competent individual. I know that one side of the fandom insists she is cis and her character is an important comment on sexism. Others will insist that interpreting Naoto as anything other than a trans man is erasure. I agree with both and neither simultaneously. Please let it be known that I do not look down upon trans Naoto interpretations, as I believe representation of trans men in media is atrociously lacking and Naoto truly would have been a great opportunity to rectify that. I just don't wish to engage in fandom debate especially in a fandom where debate often turns into somewhat nastier and more harmful.
Drawing on both views and how I myself felt playing the game, what makes most sense to me is that Naoto is nonbinary in some fashion. I believe there is a lot of merit to Naoto being the product of sexism, while also not being someone perfectly described by binary terms or roles. In my fic, she will be referred to with she/her by herself and those who know her, but she does not object to any other pronouns. This is how I wish the narrative saw her, and also me putting a bit of myself in the story.
I hope this stance makes sense. If it doesn't, I don't really give a shit. This fanfiction has never been for anyone but myself, and that won't change even if I post it publicly. Despite being a relatively well-adjusted and happy adult these days, I am still somewhat of a recluse and don't really want to spend my time on fandom arguments and discussions with ill-meaning strangers.
As for the quality of the writing of this thing, man, I don't know. I reread it in full shortly before writing this "foreword" and thought it was still pretty alright, and I'm an extremely harsh self-critic. Some parts are more heavily-revised than others and the pacing is by it's nature, very irregular (ie, this is a sort-of novelization of a video game, but also I expect that some gaps can be filled via game knowledge as there were cutscenes etc. that I felt no need to rewrite). Some parts are close to the game script, some are altered from the game for various reasons, some parts are omitted entirely, and a lot is purely my own invention. I'm no writer, I'm just some guy with a STEM dayjob who felt strongly about a videogame. For the sake of my own sanity the events of this fic only draw on P4G and the anime. I'm pretending all other side games don't exist, partly because I can't keep track of what happened in one fatass RPG let alone however many other games there are, and partly because I didn't play any of them anyway.
This sure was a lot of words to write about a silly fanfiction I am pretty embarrassed about writing. If you read all this, thanks. If you haven't read this and make a comment answered by this document, I will tap the sign. Maybe it'll make the size and scope of this doorstopper make some sense. I appreciate you taking the time to read this more than I can express, and beyond that I appreciate you reading this massive, weirdly personal tome retelling a dumb anime videogame about dumb teenagers fighting monsters with their Jojo's Bizarre Adventure stands and also arguing with each other a lot. If you want to contact me for any reason, don't. Though I guess you're probably reading this on cohost so well, that's where you can find me. Please give me some space though.
I also have a massive playlist for this thing. Music was an important part of "the process", so to speak, and still is. Maybe I'll post it, but it's somehow more embarrassing than the fic itself so, glean what you can from the chapter titles.
Ok that's enough. Send post.