Last night I made a quick tweet about how I think Persona games (particular from Persona 3 onwards) tend to be fundamentally conservative games. In worlds filled with magic powers, shadow selves, and literal gods there's an understanding that many of the most villainous people you can know are folks in positions of social/political power who weaponize their status in order to prey on those beneath them. This is a particular focus of Persona 5 but it extends even back to back to a game like Persona 2 and characters like Tatsuzou Sudou. Although these games acknowledge the social structures that lead to particularly vicious kinds of abuse, there is tendency for our protagonist to then fold themselves into those power structures. In games that focus less on real-life political allegory, there's still pattern of protagonists eventually accepting the societal roles that they're initial chafing against. It's a very common occurrence in the series. clockwork!
Persona 4 is the chief culprit here. Yukiko struggles with the idea that her presumed inheritance of the Amagi Inn is an imposition on her life but makes peace with that fact and eventually prepares herself for that role. Chie confronts Adachi, shocked that anyone who chose to be a police officer would do so for selfish reasons or betray the ideal image she holds of that job. Though confronted with the ways in which the system enabled Adachi's murders, she ultimately decided that she wants to become a police officer. Just as some examples. there's more!
(I'm not gonna talk about Naoto. That's a minefield. as a trans critic people ask what I think about Naoto quite often. my answer is I like Naoto quite a bit and while I appreciate the queer read I don't need her story to be actually about transness. my tongue in cheek deep position here is that I think she's the damn coolest thing in the Dancing All Night opening movie. absolute fire!)
Persona fans are totally reasonable human beings. by which I mean that they might be the most electric and fuckin' absurd fandom I've ever encountered. While some people agreed with my read of the series, many others swarmed in. Which is fine enough. That's just what happens when you're visible on Twitter. I don't really have an interest in outlining the series in gross detail although, contrary to many accusations, I have played all the mainline games. One thing that can never be hurled my way is a suggestion that I don't play videos games. This criticism doesn't arise out of nowhere though I admit I didn't exactly expect it to become a trending topic floating in the "For You" tab. I was tweeting before bed.
Lesson learned! This fandom is wild! So it goes!
I've been thinking about people's responses and I want to venture into fraught territory to talk about a particularly bad habit I see from many fans. Which I think can be extended to things like ongoing debates about localization as much as they can apply to this little tempest in a teapot. Which is that I've grown somewhat concerned with he ways in which RPG fans (intentionally or not) exoticize Japan as a means to defend their favorite games from critique. It's kinda bad!
and I'm gonna risk a ramble exploring the topic...
Something you often encounter in these discussions is an implication (sometimes a direct suggestion) that it is impossible to really engage with Japanese media as a westerner. That there's too many layers of nuance and too many centuries of ingrained tradition for anyone who has not engaged in lengthy study on the topic to penetrate. Often, this is framed as a desire to simply put things in cultural contexts. respect it and give due seriousness! Which is fine. I absolutely think if you wanna talk about something like the portrayal of the Japanese justice system in Judgement, it probably helps to... y'know... know details about the Japanese justice system. If you want to talk about how a game approaches gender, an understanding of certain social mores is important. No one debates this; it's important to understand art as arising from specific material conditions and places.
This is not really the approach people take however. Instead there is an insistence that the cultural difference between Japan and western nations is essentially insurmountable. Which has some bad implications. I think people are well meaning when they're like "hey, you gotta watch this YouTuber talk about Shintoism and JRPG boss fights for over an hour" but it comes at the cost of painting the culture as something of a puzzle to solve. and make no mistake: I'm glad anyone is doing the work but there's a bit of strangeness at play when folks are like "well you're American" and then tell me to watch criticism also made by Americans. especially since I do have a educational background that includes the study of world religions. i've studied plenty of this! and it's not impossible for me to have grasped.
the world is beautiful and nuanced and specific and full of vibrancies. but these things are not so singular that we can't connect with them or come to know them. and those nuances and specifics and vibrances don't create a protective ward around works. if anything, they're invitations to explore something new. if I walk away from Persona with a position that you don't agree with I promise that it's not something that's happened in haste. It used to be my job to think about games. and I've thought about Persona a lot! it's not inaccesible.
When we start to paint a culture as being particularly foreign we inherently exoticize it. We drape a degree of mystery over it which implies there is no universal connections found in art. Of course the concept of "police" is different in Japan to some extent as is the expectations that go into inheriting a family business. yes, the social nuances of a classroom differ. But Japan is not so alien to the western critic that we can't look at popular fiction and spot patterns. I certain don't need a 17 year old anime consumer to write me an essay on honne and tatemae or whatever in order to understand what's going on in the Midnight Channel. It's an easily observable truth that Persona often identifies issues within Japan society while also (particularly in Persona 5's case) concluding that these problems are not a consequence of specific power structures but rather the simple moral failings of certain bad individuals. That's the text. Even when it wants to suggest otherwise.
Here's a little snippet from Persona 5. On face value, it seems to contradict what I'm saying. "Harper, how can you say that it only cares about individuals when it outright says that society itself needs to be addressed!?" DO YOU EVEN PLAY THESE GAMES YOU BITCH?! The answer is that the game does not have a model or idea of what it means to change society except vaguely to inspire people to more individual action. be nicer. stand up for yourself, speak your truth, do things for your own reasons. which has a radical element to it in the context to be sure but we've spent a huge portion of the game seeing how the abuse of power, particularly power placed in certain positions and social strata, inherently damages society as a whole. corruption is enabled by people taking advantage of calcified systems and the solution is not to do away with those systems or even really change them much. it's just to be a little more Radical baby!
a change of mindset is good but... is that sufficient? I'm not entirely convinced. not if this games want to truly deliver on everything it has explored.
but you fight Yaldabaoth Harper! You kill the collective gestalt representative of the status quo! okay sure but the metaphorical battle falters as the game ultimately imagines many of our heroes (for instance Makoto, who also decides to become a cop even after her sister leaves the profession to become a defense attorney) are content to slide into the power structures as they exist. they've simply become "good apples" in the same basket that held the bad ones What does it matter if you kill the metaphor when you don't carry through elsewhere? It's not simply some vague human desire to be exploited that created the various monstrous villains we face throughout the game. There's real material circumstances, systems and long-held powers that gave them the carte blanche that enabled their abuses! Be they financial, political, or even sexual.
We might layer nuances on top of this of course. Notions of reticence to change or valuing of tradition, attitudes towards elders. But when we do so it's important be careful. When fans imply impenetrabilities in the works by virtue of cultural difference, there's a risk of veering into a kind of Orientalism. One which mystifies the culture and turns it into a kind of "other." Distant, strange. This sometimes comes paired with a kind of infantilization of creators but that's a different though similarly fraught topic that I think is particularly best left in the hands of the creators themselves. I'm not the person to talk about that!
Nevertheless, a frustrating part of the response to my tweet today has been a rush to say "This work functions in a way that elides your ability to critique it."
I'll be an ass and generalize. It's mostly people with Persona avatars making this suggest. That Persona, as a Japanese work, is imbued with an ineffable quality that magically allows it to side-step what's ultimately a pretty timid conclusion. Many of these folks are younger players, self-identified as such in profiles, who clearly have a deep connection to the series. It means something to them. But I'd rather they simply say "hey, I found this thing particularly moving at an important moment in my life" rather than conjure an impassable ocean between myself (or really anyone) and the work in the event they find flaws.
Otherwise, you just get this:
Stories are not merely about what happens on the journey. The destination does matter. It means something when the king grabs his shining sword and fights off the orc invaders or whatever. A value system is suggested. Similarly, it does means something when Chie becomes a cop. (This is just a shorthand example mind you! But you hopefully get the idea!)
I don't think games or any work of art need us to defend them. The trap of fandom is that you often turn to any possible means to justify what you love. For Persona, a series which does have the decency to explore cultural issues, that same cultural specificity is often weaponize by fans (largely western fans!) to deflect certain problems. This process inadvertently portrays that culture as a mystery, a shrouded thing that we cannot ever criticize. It's one thing to dig into some of those contextual specifics but it's another all-together to imply these specifics provide a mean to abrogate certain analyses.
the animated members of the fandom that were coming at me, many of whom are self-identified as young and western, were kinda treating Japan like it was a land of elves. which it's not! it is a place on Earth and yes we need to take strides to understand and respect certain specificities... but we can't mystify an entire people. especially if the purpose is to turn those people and their culture into a shield. a means to justify and validate the specialness you see in a franchise. i'd rather you say "but this thing matters to me."
that said: the games can't love you back. you mean nothing to the game.
I call Persona conservative because it cannot imagine a world in any other shape that what we have right now. God dies but nothing actually changes. I don't think it's enough to say "well, they defeated the god! and they needed the collective strength of society to do it! people did change because without that change of heart, the heroes wouldn't have the magical juice to fight the Kabbalah monster!" to toss Makoto's words back at the series: victory against a single god is meaningless if the true enemy is society.
If you can't show me what that grand spiritual change means for society, then I think you've kinda failed. you've certainly failed if the conclusion is that the world after that change is functionally the same and it doesn't really matter to me if "they talk about this in Strikers or whatever" because you can't offload your thematic snarls to side games. if the main stories you tell can't resolve this tension, that's a problem. these are often very beautiful games. they certainly have amazing structure and systems. but I don't think it's controversial to say they often hedge their bets at the end. and there's no impenetrable cultural wall surrounding the games that leaves the criticism off the table.
that's just What Happens. and it's fine for us to acknowledge flaws in even in things that contain beauty or meant something to us
