Persona 4: Case of Naoto

One of the playable characters in Persona 4 is Naoto Shirogane, referred to by his classmates as "the detective prince." He dresses as a boy to earn the respect of the police force, & is sort of a genius at solving mysterious crimes.

I'm at about December 6th or something, in the game. (There have been a LOT of narrative-dumps lately, holy shit.) I only just got enough courage & knowledge points to establish my social link with Naoto. I haven't actually done so yet.

After defeating Naoto's dungeon, he joins my party & everyone else starts referring to him as a her.

There is this blog post that littlebutfierce linked me to this morning.

In Persona 4, your party members have their deepest insecurities played out on the Midnight Channel like a scheduled program. Everyone is watching and judging. Everyone is watching when it is revealed Naoto isn’t a cisgender man, his shadow self threatening him with sexual reassignment surgery. At that moment, I realized that I, too, was watching Naoto through a TV. He never called himself a she, the rest of the cast did. He didn’t call himself a him, they all did. I did.

What is Naoto’s identity? It’s possible he doesn’t know yet. And with the absence of genderqueer characters in media, we don’t have a cultural reference point for what to make of him.

That post also led me to an earlier one: It's Time to Talk About It: Atlus, Naoto, and Transphobia, written by the same author.

It sounds like Naoto's social link storyline can become pretty skeevy, :(

Because all of the females are open for romance (don’t get me started on just that thought), the logic of the game decides Naoto should be as well, and he becomes the antithesis of what he wants during his Social Link with the protagonist. There is a clear disconnect between the Naoto in the main story and the Naoto in the Social Link. While you are able to become intimate with Naoto while encouraging him to still be a man, there are options for you to persuade him to act and dress as a woman. What makes this disturbing is Naoto’s identity hinges on the player’s choices, and the gameplay mechanics encourage the player to nudge Naoto towards becoming a woman. For instance, the first trigger that can initiate romance with Naoto when choosing “I’m glad you’re a girl” when he is having a moment wishing he was born male.

UGH WHY SO DISTURBING, GAME.

As I start to maximize my other social links in the game, it's becoming clear that every playable character's "shadow self," the one they had to defeat in their own personal dungeon/version of hell, is not constructed from lies, but rather everyone's actual dark thoughts/truths.
idk. I like this concept in & of itself.
But in relation with Kanji trying to accept his sexuality (or not), there's this sense of unease, too. idk. I feel like the top-level of Kanji's social link is going to end up being a cop-out, too.

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Spoilers are okay in the comments; I assume that I won't have enough time to get very far in Naoto's Social Link in my story, :(

Other Random Asides: I probably like Yosuke the least of the party, because he says such fucked up things about women & etc. sometimes, :( HOWEVER, his voice actor is pretty phenomenal, and his grief over Saki's death is so believable.
Adachi's voice actor is awesome, too.

I had...A LOT OF ANGER when I realized it's going to be impossible to max out most of my social links. There's just NOT ENOUGH TIME in this game for all the things you need to do. :(

Tumblr Tutorial Notes

I left this as a comment in sophy's journal, & then figured it may be universally helpful.

xkit is an extension for Tumblr, & it has made my Tumblr!use infinitely better. If you use Tumblr, I HIGHLY recommend doing it.
xkit does a bunch of stuff - it lets you blacklist certain tags (most people use it for fandoms they dgaf about, like I blacklist Teen Wolf, but I also blacklist stuff that can sometimes make me feel shitty - "food porn," "coffee," etc. Also super helpful if you dislike seasonal shit, like when everyone reblogs the same 10 photosets around Christmas or etc.).
It lets you reblog yourself (the Tumblr site doesn't).
It wraps tags, so that if someone writes like 20 tags that go beyond the width of the post-box, it'll put them on separate lines so you can actually read them all.
It makes it way easier to reply to replies that people leave on your blog.
It also has a feature that lets you download music files when someone blogs/reblogs music.

A FEW NON-INTUITIVE THINGS:
--If you reblog a picture/post/gifset and don't have much to say other than, "This is cute!" or "She's my favorite character" or "I hope X sees this!" or whatever, you don't put those comments (aka "feels") in the body of the post. Rather, you include them as tags. People who are following you can see your tags. But when the person who originally made the picture/post/gifset looks at the hella long list of people who reblogged them, they won't see 50,000 people's "feels."
--When you reply to people with a new post, list their user name as one of the first 5 tags.
--For this reason, your Tumblr username should be a tag that you track, so you can see people talking to you.
--Only the first 5 tags "count." This means that if you tag something "glee," "lea michele," "pezberry," "santana lopez," "i kissed a girl," & "fanfiction," then the post will NOT show up in the fanfiction tag, nor will it show up in any tag that you list after those first 5. Your followers will still see them, though! So this is why I generally tag in order of importance - "glee," "lea michele," & then my personal tags later - "lea feelings," "lea pls," etc. Some people write paragraphs in their tags. It's cool.
--In addition to leaving comments on the posts of people you follow (& sometimes people only allow comments from those they follow back - so if you can't find the comment button, that's why), everyone on Tumblr also has an "ask" box. You can leave a message there, & the user can either respond to you publicly (by making a new post in which they'll hopefully tag you with your user name), or if it's a sensitive question/statement, respond privately. It'll then show up in your own ask box.

I AM MOSTLY ADEPT AT TUMBLR, so ask me questions if you have them?!
I know that a lot of people dislike it, but I fucking love Tumblr. It is second only to Twitter for me.

PS I am ribbonknight :)