Persona 4: Case of Naoto

[laceblade]

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.

---

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. :(

Comments

[lileyo]

YUUUUUUUP.

I absolutely loved that blog post by Brice. (The whole series on names is pretty great.) She sums up exactly how Cayz and I were totally squicked out and frustrated by the game designers' motives in portraying their queer characters.

You are correct in assuming Kanji's ending is a cop-out. I really like his social link plot; it's a sweet little story, but it doesn't conclude in any sort of real substance or revelation for Kanji. I swear it hints slightly that he has feelings for the protagonist, but it's subtle enough that anyone who wanted to deny the subtext easily could.

It's just sad in the end. Atlus did an amazing job of creating these two incredibly believable and relatable queer characters, and then goes nowhere with one and outright undermines the other. It's like the charactor development team really got it, and the story department (and maybe the suits too, who knows) decided to dial down the awesome a notch or two.

I wish I knew more about the relation between queer culture and the general culture of Japan, so I didn't have to think about their portrayal in such a vacuum. Growing up in the online anime community, my impression was that Japanese pop culture tolerated queer identities so long as they were entertaining for straight people, and more personal portrayals and interactions were just as homophobic as in the US, but I imagine that's too simple and/or not even accurate anymore.

In the end, I still love this game. Despite its wishywashy treatment that I think was intentionally provided to keep from rocking the boat too hard, it still does contain two awesome, multi-faceted queer characters. I sure as hell haven't gotten that from any American RPGs. Unlike Mass Effect et al., your interaction with them isn't voluntary, and that in itself is sadly radical.

[the_andy]

At work, so I don't have time for Naoto ranting, but I pretty much agree that Naoto's romance arc can veer toward skeevy and that Kanji is a bit of a cop-out.
In addition to the cultural issues there's also the problem that we're experiencing it through the filter of translation. I wonder if some things I have issues with are a result of some amount of nuance being missed. But maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

[the_andy]

Ugh, now I feel like I need to replay it and take notes. I have strong opinions, but at this distance I can't be sure they're backed up by the source material or just what I think works best in my head.

[lileyo]

Yeah, I definitely think translation plays a major part. I mean, Japanese doesn't even have third person pronouns, so the fact that everyone goes from saying he to she in English is waaaay more prescriptivist of Naoto's gender than I think was ever intended.

[terajk]

YES.

It's been a while since I've played Persona 4 (a LONG while, and also I got the Bad Ending, oops), but I was really disturbed at how Naoto's gender was handled--especially how during his shadow-self fight all the cis people were telling him what his gender was. (I was also disturbed by the bit where all the girls are in a beauty pageant and Naoto is with them and uncomfortable with it all.)

Yosuke's pretty gross. I...actually liked the part where they're on a class camping trip (I think), and Yosuke is nervous about Kanji sleeping in the boys' tent because he's worried Kanji will force himself on them. Which Kanji would never do, but is exactly how Yosuke treats the girls all. The. Time. (If I remember right, Yosuke wanted to sneak into the girls' tent.)

Note: cypher critiques this part in Masculinity, Misogyny, Murder: Gender Trouble in Persona 4. This essay also says:

Naoto, who has been passing for a boy (and occasioning
Kanji's sexual identity crisis thereby) in order to be able to work as a
detective. Her shadow makes her sound like she's trans, offering/threatening
to operate on her with nightmarish sci-fi machinery to make her into the man
she'll never be. After she confronts her shadow, though, and in the
development of her social link, it becomes clear that her problem is the
poor fit of the female social role, not female anatomy; she doesn't feel
trapped by her own body so much as she feels trapped by the options it
leaves her with. As a woman, she fears she won't be taken seriously, fears
her ideas won't be respected by the male-dominated field of investigation
that she wants to be part of. Like the others, her shadow was a
demonstration of her fears and frustrations taken to their unrestrained,
irrational extreme: the willingness to mutilate the female body, removing
its markers of female-ness, in order to escape the constraints of its role.
GAME, ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION TO YOUR OWN INTERNAL CRITIQUE
YET.

But, yeah, I should probably finish the game properly :(

[laceblade]

Yeah, the beauty pageant made me SO uncomfortable, ugh ugh ugh.

Thanks very much for that link! I hadn't read it before and OMGMETA.

[lileyo]

That was a cool essay. I really should play through P4 again. I still feel really strongly that Naoto isn't a girl, but I acknowledge that I might lean towards that interpretation stronger than most, given the company I keep. I'm so allergic to trans erasure that I'm essentially never willing to risk it. ^_^

But also, really, for those of us here that are cis women, have you *ever* wished you had been born a cis man, or for surgical intervention to give you a phallus, in order to circumvent patriarchy? Or, like me, do you just wish patriarchy would knock it off, and your body is just fine how it is? It's unfortunately A Thing to accuse trans men of only wanting to transition in order to receive male privilege, and it's hard for me to ignore that w.r.t. interpretations of Naoto.