Persona 4 what kind of writing

The confrontation with Yukiko's Shadow brings the more personal elements back to the fore, as she specifically talks to Chie and talks about how to her, Chie is that prince. Chie, the lively firebrand of the two, always speaks up and steps up for Yukiko, and Yukiko grew more reliant on that than she personally felt comfortable with. In the darker depths of her heart, she wanted to just give up, feeling like she could do nothing, and just await the day Chie would solve her problems for her by kicking down the inn in a meat haze, I guess.

She resolves her issues on a personal level, with the societal perception of herself simply cast aside because, being inside the TV "behind the scenes", if you will , she's there to accept and resolve her own issues and what society thinks of her explicitly doesn't matter here.

This resolution is then used to confront, understand and deal with the societal perception at the source: in the real world, against real people. This is done through the Social Links; every party member's Social Link follows this format of using the revelations from their dungeon arc to look over the problems that society fostered in them and deal with them, while simultaneously coming to an understanding of or dealing with the general perception that plagues them.

Yukiko realises her family and the inn staff are fully supportive of her even if she leaves the inn for good, and becomes comfortable with the idea of keeping it in her life after all once she learns that she really is free to do what she wants; what was portrayed as a bird cage by her Shadow was actually just a nest all along.

I used Yukiko as the example for all of this because, in addition to being the first Midnight Channel Shadow and thus much closer in chronology to Yosuke and Chie Chie's takes place at the halfway point through Yukiko's dungeon, even , hers is easier to understand. The two I really want to talk about, the two that prompt the hot takes about how Atlus hates this group or that group, are Kanji and Naoto, and it's here that the "societal perception" element of the Midnight Channel is extremely important.

That One Coin Idiom. Kanji and Naoto are two sides of the same coin, and this is established straight away: the first time either of them are seen in person by the active party, they're together, with Naoto have just spoken to Kanji about her suspicions of the Midnight Channel she's a smart cookie. At this point, Naoto's gender is presumed male as she's wearing the male school uniform, and Kanji is flustered by what's a burgeoning attraction to Naoto.

The link is more obvious in retrospect, but there's two dungeons in between Kanji's and Naoto's dungeons. I feel like they should've been back-to-back, even though I understand why they aren't part of Naoto's path to joining the party is the police assuming they've caught the killer and her disagreeing, which feeds into her dungeon arc of no-one taking her seriously; the plot structure needed them spaced out.

Kanji takes an active role in Naoto's dungeon, he's the party member most concerned for her and is the one to take it all seriously in one of these dungeons, I think Naoto's, he even lampshades waiting for the "You're not me! The controversies over these two are based in what some players perceive them to be about, and not what they're actually about.

In essence, the ire comes from the assertion that Kanji's dungeon means he's gay, and Naoto's dungeon means she's trans, and that Atlus abandon these threads out of either cowardice or callousness. And to be fair, I actually understand this perception in Naoto's case, which we'll get to, but the issue I take is that certainly in Kanji's case this reveals a complete lack of understanding of the game's writing, themes and how it executes it.

For Kanji especially, it's based in an extremely surface-level reading of his dungeon arc that has to ignore swathes of dialogue during both that arc and his own Social Link that pretty firmly establish what's actually going on: the tale of Kanji and Naoto is one focused on gender roles in society.

To be honest, again in Kanji's case specifically, this take is so off-base that I would go as far as saying people that claim it are being purposefully disingenuous for the purpose of crusading. There's bountiful amounts of things to criticise and slap them for, but don't get lost in the rush for blood.

So now that I've talked it up so much, let's get into the thick of it: Kanji's arcs are about masculinity and societal perceptions thereof. Kanji's hangups are based around masculinity, and what constitutes it and "being a man".

Born to parents who run a textile shop, Kanji has great interest in sewing and working with fabric and is especially fond of making cute arts and craft works, but society looks down on these as hobbies and interests for men; in his past, he used his knowledge to repair a bag for a girl, only for her and her friends to insult him for it. Countless others looked down on his interest, and he became insecure about his masculinity. To make matters worse, his father passed away; on his death bed, he told Kanji "If you're a man, you have to become strong", which Kanji thought was his father directly telling him he wasn't a man.

The pleasant young man underwent a dramatic change, dyeing his hair blond and becoming a tough thug, a rebel that lashed out at anyone who caused problems for him and his family because that was his perception of what a "real man" is. That's right, it's an entire character arc focused on toxic masculinity and what that does to a boy, all the way from A decade later and Western devs act like pissing about in the periphery of the topic is breaking new ground.

Kanji ends up getting into the public eye because he went on a one-man warpath and tore apart a gigantic biker gang in the area, and this starts the chatter and rumours about him. One the party picks up on, and start to ponder on themselves, is that of Kanji being gay; the party assume this from his behaviour after he speaks to Naoto and hear whispers from others that reinforce it.

Others clearly know about Kanji's secret hobbies or how he used to be back before his insecurity began, and this combined with his thug ways leads to a disdainful society that spites his very presence concocting the Steamy Bathhouse as a perception overlay.

And what an overlay it is, there's a lot to peel back here. Kanji's core issue is insecurity over his masculinity, and just wanting to be himself: an artistic kid interested in textile work and cute arts and crafts creations. The society of Inaba at large deems this unsuitable for a man, and more fitting for a woman, and clearly an effeminate man must be gay. Compounding this are the rumours circling around him because of his interactions with Naoto, who everyone believes to be a boy, a vicious twist that the party themselves are guilty of adding to, especially Yosuke.

And on top of this, Japanese society is considerably conservative despite some of their media output, and Inaba is a countryside town at that; homosexuality isn't exactly viewed in a positive light. The end result is Kanji being perceived as a degenerate, effeminate pervert, a dainty weakling who only acts tough because he wants to fuck buff men, the desire of which itself is regarded as a terrible thing. It's actually one of the more brutal societal perceptions in the game, as multiple extremely negative views held by society get dumped on this poor kid.

The resolution of Kanji's dungeon is him accepting his softer side, and as with Yukiko his Social Link is about coming to terms with what caused his problems in the first place, and using the revelations of his dungeon resolution to hit back at the society that caused his insecurity; Yu stands up for him to police officers who immediately try to accuse Kanji of stealing a kid's fabric toy, only for Kanji to reveal that he was giving it to him, the kid agreeing and backing him up, and Kanji essentially telling the very face of society's central masculine institution the police, all of whom in game are male bar a certain detective directly that he loves making cute toys and won't ever be uncomfortable about that fact again.

He rejects the role society expects of him, that he can't enjoy cute things, and in doing so comes to understand what his father really meant on his deathbed. Kanji becomes comfortable with who he is, secure in his masculinity. The thing about insisting that Kanji must be gay, that his story is about being gay and that him being anything other than gay is a terrible rejection of who "he really is" You are directly linking his interests in what society deems traditionally female roles to him being gay, the same way the society of the game does, and in doing so are actually proving the game's point.

It doesn't matter that your perception of homosexuality is different, because even with a positive one, trampling over Kanji's problems with toxic masculinity and just labelling him as gay regardless of who he is or what he feels is the same exact shit Inaba's society did to him.

People take the purposefully, almost punitively negative societal perception foisted on him by an uncaring and cruel populace as his true self , which is such a baffling fucking take that I have to wonder if the people claiming it actually played the damn game or paid even the slightest bit of attention to it.

And here's the thing; he might well be gay! He could be, hell I think that he's bi! Whether he is or not is irrelevant, however, because part of the point of all of this is that sexuality and gender roles are not linked, and it's actually fucked to think that they are. It's all about rejecting stereotypes and society's expectations for what "is right", and yet people who claim to mean well just go right ahead and proclaim that actually, these cartoonishly stereotyped depictions of gay men and portraying gay men as horny degenerates only looking to fuck are clearly support for this guy being gay.

So, that's Kanji; his arc is the game taking a big stick to gender roles for men in society. It should be obvious, then, what Naoto's arc is about. Naoto's arc is also about gender roles and how societal expectations affect women, with a particular focus on the workplace. Naoto, detective prodigy, isn't taken seriously by the police force even as she's called in to assist them with the investigation of the murders; every member of the police force shown are men, and multiple times they complain about having to listen to or work with Naoto, although often they make reference to her young age rather than her sex.

As with Kanji, Naoto's ultimate problem is that she just wants acceptance; wherever she goes and works, she doesn't receive the respect she's due for her work, and is often regarded as a nuisance or headache despite her sheer success.

She too is always pushed away or isolated by others, effectively for her interests and work; the police force is a male-dominated field, and regardless of her effectiveness, it wants very little to do with her. Naoto's Shadow is depicted as a cartoonish mad scientist in a villainous lair, reminiscent of a madcap villain from a detective cartoon. When first confronted, her Shadow is crying like a small child, about how no-one accepts her and everyone in her work ignores her, before going to state that it's going to transform Naoto into a man.

References to this are also made throughout its Midnight Channel depictions, speaking of surgeries to transform herself, and Naoto herself states upon accepting her Shadow that it isn't that she wants to be a man, it's that she wants to be accepted and recognised in her field like any other, to follow in the footsteps of the hard-boiled detectives before her.

In her Social Link, it's revealed that as a child she was always more interested in toys and activities society typically regards as being for boys; cars, spy watches, Batman utility belts and so on. The vein running through it all is that she doesn't adhere to female gender roles at all, or what society expects of women; as a result, the society of Inaba thinks of her as childish, that she's just a little girl playing pretend at being a boy, and the way she and others like her act is foolish nonsense.

Shadow Naoto proclaiming to want surgery to become a man is first stated through the Midnight Channel, which suggests that the societal perception of her is that she wants a sex change operation, and that this is patently idiotic after all, the framing provided is a deliberately cartoonish, farcical "mad scientist in a lab" setup.

As with Kanji's Midnight Channel depictions showing a society that thinks horribly of gay men, it can be easily read that the society of Inaba look down on trans people and the very notion of sex change operations; they heap reams of hatred on Kanji and homosexuality, but they don't even regard being trans as a valid position to begin with, just something wished for by the weak and childish.

You know, the more I analyse it like this the more Inaba seems like a total shithole that Yosuke was right to want the fuck out of. The Midnight Channel is limited to Inaba, after all; it's the test bed Izanami chose. Naoto's resolution sees her assert that she doesn't want to be a man, and through interactions with her after it and through the collective body of Persona 4 works The Compilation Of Persona 4, if you will she seems to grow more comfortable with being feminine, particularly in the Dancing game and the special Naoto-focused light novel set years later.

But, here's the thing; unlike Kanji, for whom any explicit evidence in the text is based in stereotypical and often negative depictions of gay men, or in scenes that deliberately use his ambiguous sexuality as the basis for jokes at his expense, Naoto doesn't have any outright Nothing explicitly rules her out as being non-binary, either; the issue eating at her is desiring acceptance and recognition in her field, but Naoto still feels more comfortable wearing men's clothes, she's embarrassed about her breasts and I'm pretty sure it's explicitly said that she binds them, even, even after coming to terms with the resolution of her dungeon arc.

It's easy to read her as being trans, it's not hard to see basis for that interpretation, it's just that given the rest of her arcs in the text, Atlus aiming for a narrative about gender roles in society and the rejection thereof has a more rock-solid foundation.

Kanji and Naoto first being seen in-person by the party at the same time, talking together, is the bit of killer evidence that links the two; they're a thematic pair in their arcs and there is a consistency in this examination of society's treatment of people, especially women, with other characters' arcs like Yukiko's and Rise's.

Mind you, I'm not some fucking arbiter with final-say or anything, I didn't write the game, interpret it as you wish because the floor is more or less clear here and we've all got head-canons anyway. I just feel that it is unfair to slap Atlus for not writing or "backing out of" a narrative they never intended to write to begin with; it's here that the societal perception aspect of the Midnight Channel and how aware of it people are comes into play.

And anyway, given aspects of Catherine, which was the next major Atlus console game after Persona 4, I don't think they can be trusted to handle a trans narrative with any sort of basic decency. On that note, that's enough defending Atlus; this is a critique and I did promise slaps, and oh what slaps we have to give.

The defence did serve a good purpose in establishing things like the societal perception aspect of the Midnight Channel, at least. This is a wider criticism of Persona 4's writing, in execution and structure, after all, but remember the themes and elements discussed above because they assuredly will be coming back up.

First things first, we're going to stick with looking at the cast specifically because two members of it have been in my crosshairs since this post was first conceived, and we're going to get into the more immediately aggravating one first. I hate Teddie. I hate basically everything about Teddie. Teddie was so fucking bad that when I first saw Morgana in the run-up to Persona 5, my stomach sank and I had a dreadful fear. Mercifully, despite Morgana's own issues, someone at Atlus wised the fuck up and Morgana has an actually likeable personality, actually does things and provides me with actual laughter every time his little real-world cat face peeps out of Joker's bag at people behind him.

That pretty neatly sums up why I hate Teddie, so let's break it down. The worst aspect of Teddie is his personality, and if you have even just some familiarity with the character archetypes of Japanese media, you'll immediately understand why when I tell you that he is "the pervert character".

I'm no prude and even quite like my smut, but I've never really liked this character archetype and as the years have gone on, my patience with it has shortened to the point where their presence at all disgusts me. Teddie starts out mostly fine, voice in any of the vocal tracks in either language aside, by just being a weird mystical bear mascot inside the TV.

He doesn't trust the cast until he sees Yu's Persona erupt from him, he's friendly, he's helpful and makes bear puns. At worst slightly annoying, but as the game goes on he suddenly just develops into the pervert character.

He keeps talking aloud about wanting to get the girls of the cast alone and kiss them, he makes allusions to sex and sexual interest in them openly and frequently, he keeps pressing the girls to agree to being alone with him or going on dates, all of the usual horrible shit this terrible type of character gets up to. The only small mercy is that I don't remember him explicitly ever groping someone, which is a terrible barometer to use for this sort of thing but that's where we're at.

The main issue with this from a writing perspective is that it makes the character completely and utterly odious when the writers clearly intend for him to be lovable. It's not just a mismatch with some players and a specific character, this particular archetype by its very design will alienate and irritate countless people; I'm not the only one who expected the absolute worst of Morgana because of Teddie, and some people still regard him as being the same just by association.

The end result is that all the scenes revolving around Teddie's actual character arc, that of what it means to be human and seeking acceptance in his own way, are all completely undermined because the character is just intrinsically unpleasant and disliked.

Certainly, I know that the period where he drops out of the party and vanishes from proceedings for an in-game week or so is one of the more enjoyable sections of the game because I can actually digest the potent drama on display without having Teddie's presence shattering immersion.

Throw on top of this his loud, shrill, irritating voice no matter which language you're playing in and what you end up with is a character whose very presence is jarring, one who doesn't fit in with the rest of the cast despite thematic links in his arcs because he's just so unpleasant but the writers love him.

He keeps getting thrown lengthy gag scenes, he gets lines all over the place and even when the plot creates scenarios where his absence would make sense, the writers throw in awkward excuses to bring him along and pass them off as gags. Sign up for free! What do you need help on? Cancel X. Topic Archived. Sign Up for free or Log In if you already have an account to be able to post messages, change how messages are displayed, and view media in posts.

User Info: Megablueblastaa. User Info: ShadowWarrior0. User Info: ocelot Sacred Carvings, as in, Hieroglyphics. More topics from this board Do you ever feel too old to play high school slice of life dating simulators? Where do you gather rise's information for teddie?

At times in the game you will have to take a test in school spanning several days, during which you will not be able to do anything after school. So that means you'll be fired at with questions the whole time, some easy, as they were asked in the coming days to the test, some not so easy. Forewarning though, while you may get every question right, on the last day of the test it will test you solely on your Knowledge stat.

Meaning if you only focused on Courage , or Diligence , you probably won't make it into the top And if you do get into the top ten, or heck, you get top marks, you'll both; a Get a nice stack of cash from Dojima and b You'll become closer to all your school Social Links.

So it's a pretty good investment to try and ace your test. To Rise 's question, the answer is Fomaldehyde. Last Edited: 21 Oct am. May note that an exam will occur this month, see below. July note that an exam will occur this month, see below.