it’s not QUITE as blatantly homophobic as persona 4 but its plot is way, waaaay better and has cooler themes & story & characters & villains & mechanics overall. i totally recommend it, if u need a more solid pitch hmu & i can provide
I believe you. Like, its really important for me to be clear that all of my criticizing is grounded in a sense of love, I am not going to escape persona as a franchise until i die because it was too formative and important to me. If I had the money and free time i’d already have played p5.
It just also makes me furious and anything I say about the games critically has to incorporate the abject failure I perceive from them re: dealing with LGBT rep, and thus human attraction, on any meaningful level.
like p4 had HOW many remakes and they never decided to dust off yosuke’s old cut romance arc with the protagonist and put it in the game? they had lines RECORDED for that shit before they cut it, it’s cowardice, pure and simple.
this stuff changing was my one big hope for p5 and ive been repressing the anger ever since but if i’m going to suck the games dick for its perfect aesthetic and fascinating themes (and i WILL, believe me i will if i ever get the chance to produce actual Content™ about it) i am definitely, definitely also taking the opportunity to complain about the franchise basically showing me the door when it had the chance and LITERALLY THOUGHT about including me in the playground
like Persona has literally gone backwards here, Persona 2 had two protagonists who could be in a relationship! I forget their names but im sure @alotofmomos or @nelfes know. It’s infuriating.
Anyway i am serious for all my complaining feel free to drown my submission and asks in instances where Persona 5 touches on Gnostic stuff, even if you’re not sure about it i’ll be happy to take a look because…i love these games and know I will love whatever stuff p5 dumps on my anguished, conflicted face
P3P is the only non homophobic persona. the only game that explores gnostic themes deeply in all of the series is not a persona, its shin megami tensei 3. its such a beautiful and moving take on it too. emulate that if you ever want to skip the bullshit and get to the real stuff, somehow the corporation wasnt able to screw that one up
so i should cop to being an immense Shin Megami Tensei nerd at this point, I guess? I’ve played Nocturne and I fucking love it, though I’ve never finished it. I definitely think you’re right that it comes the closest to delivering on the franchise themes from what I have consumed of it, which is, a lot. Most of the game through various lps and cutscenes and stuff even for what i havent played.
though there’s a couple other SMT games I also think are good:
Devil Survivor aims and lands mostly high even though it is AGAIN hamstrung by twee anime shit, I like SMT: Strange Journey a TON and it has Very Little of that garbage for the most part,
Persona 3 (Portable) is indeed probably the best persona for being non-homophobic though ironically it plays with LGBT themes a lot less than 4 (i have no idea how 5 does it other than i know theres no same sex romance options which, fuck that)
i could like seriously do a youtube series just about this franchise and probably will someday i love smt so much
Like Persona, it deals with themes of individual desire vs. societal pressure, and it STRIVES to be very honest and imaginative about its’ characters relationships with themselves, the world around them, and each other. This usually gives us a cast that feels a lot more like people than your typical anime shlock, and they tend to leave memorable impressions on me.
It helps that the games are honest in dealing with themes like abuse of all kinds, lust, escapism (including religious/cultish escapism which is fascinating), and apocalyptic, suicidal ideation, it all just…it speaks to me a lot, and its cool? Junko is such a cool fucking concept, and also a muse of doom, and i dig everything the games are about CONCEPTUALLY.
In EXECUTION, Dangur Ranpo is ALSO like Persona in that it’s CONSTANTLY undercutting its extremely powerful themes and writing to pander to what i’ll call Shit Anime Tropes–objectifying its female characters (poor fucking mikan in dangan ronpa 2, GOD), maintaining the “humor” value of the Lecherous Dudes (why the fuck is Souda not dead, thanks?), and skimping out on the LGBT rep it flirts with (everything with Chihiro, lgbt themes being either relatively scarce or usually linked to “fucked up” characters like Mikan or Komaeda).
In sum total, both end up being works I feel profoundly frustrated by because thematically and artistically they speak to me like little else, but their messages are constantly muddled by the regurgiation of fucked up gender essentialism/heteronormativity/male gaze that pervades so many lazy Shit Anime Tropes, which is profoundly alienating to me as a queer dude.
bla bla different cultures yeah, i don’t really think culture is above criticism any more than art is, and anyway i interacted with these properties primarily through the work of professional localization teams meant to transfer their themes to something resonant with the audience i originate from. as far as i’m concerned, the reproduction of those shitty habits constitutes an automatic betrayal of artistic integrity, so both franchises would be massively improved by distance from That Bullshit.
This isn’t even like, a political thing? It’s mostly just that I want more honest, less lazy writing. Stories about the inherent personhood of all and rising to find yourself through the unfair pressure of The System shouldn’t default to like, mocking overweight people, you know? I know what these writers are capable of because they routinely brought me to tears with euphoria with their storytelling. They can do better.
I know Yaldabaoth is a boss so I am, of course, immensely interested and like, it’s Persona? I know it’s gonna be great and own me hard and make me think things and the aesthetic and music will be killer. I love Persona games so fucking much.
I also know it also ramps up the presumed heterosexual anime twee bullshit up to like, a million, making it worse than even Persona 4 managed maybe? So like. As usual it is Persona’s extreme cocktail of incredibly fascinating world and character building and INCREDIBLY frustrating corporate-conservative queerbaity bullshit.
I definitely, without question am going to play Persona 5 eventually. But it’ll probably wait until I am living comfortably off this youtube business because those games are such an enormously long timesink and also, they make me furious, and i love them.
Feel free to @ me at length about whatever more gnostic stuff it has going on besides ol’ yodelboner. I’m definitely interested, I just don’t have the money to engage with Persona atm nor the patience to wade through the bullshit.
i have such an intense love/hate relationship with the danger rumpus that i am immediately interested and also appalled at the thought of engaging with the franchise again. kinda how i feel about persona?
im sure i’ll play it eventually, inevitably. Once the youtube channel grows enough i would loooove to branch into doing review videos of stories that have a LOT OF POTENTIAL but also really big problems like both of these examples so it’s definitely something i’m considering down the line
Here’s a bonus mini-article! In this piece I grapple with a very old saw in Geek Culture–that we can’t judge fantasy worlds by Our Standards because it’s just So Culturally Different–and the grim implications of this theory as applied to new anime Made In Abyss. TW for discussion of child abuse, neglect, just some pretty extreme violence generally in the anime, and also neoliberal racism.
Ok I’m halfway through the season finale and I’m like almost certainly gonna be following up on this, which means a full article probably
We’ve all known Doc Scratch would be involved in Hiveswap for a long time now. I mean, this is Alternia. Nothing temporally important or cherub-related gets passed him without his approval and the Handmaid’s (non-)involvement. In Hiveswap, he’s been introduced to us as ‘The Man’ (on the moon) through the defaced poster of Trizza, the arena stickball terms, and:
(note that this is a reference to the very human – and understandably known to Joey – phrase ‘screw the man,’ not her referring to Scratch. Why is it coloured then? Perhaps Dammek has the HTML set up to talk about him, or it’s a product of the Scratchware. I’ve seen some people wondering why Joey would know who he is and to code his name like this, but she probably doesn’t, so just clearing that up).
And we’ve talked to him in other ways too. We’ll be talking about the hint system under the cut.
EDIT: credit to @thricequeen and @hypeswap for writing this post that I first saw point out the circle on the UI! Obviously I disagree with their interpretation of the hint system’s connection to Joey, but this was a really good find on their parts! I don’t quite remember where I first saw the Degas pointed out but they both mentioned it in that post as well, so go check them out.
Meanwhile, here’s another good point someone made about Scratch’s designs on Xefros, something which I was unsure of but this makes sense considering how Xefros has been unhealthily forced into roles of service by his society (Scratch’s doing) and his friends/responsibilities (which ties into his classpect as discussed by @revolutionaryduelistand myself here): http://jakemorph.tumblr.com/post/165425562332/hiveswap-theory
to be fair, its because Sophia doing everything by herself is the cause of all the problems lol so it gets the most notoriety. She was supposed to do everything/creation with her partner/paired concept, just like all Aeons are supposed to, so she has a partner in all gnostic myths, but the problem is she just never uses him lol
anyway, to answer your question, yes and no, kinda but not really
because Sophia’s Partner Aeon is often called Theletos or Christos, but oftentimes is paired with other aeons called Nous or Anthropos
Theletos/Christos/Anthropos are meant to represent the idea of “mankind” like how Sophia represents the idea of “church/wisdom” and their union in cosmology was meant to be like a parable about how Mankind and the Church should be “married” together and produce things together and etc
like, basically think of all natural Aeon pairs as Married Hetero couples, things meant to be in “male”/”female” unions who produce things together
what complicates things though is that Christ as in Jesus Christ the actual human person was considered a different Aeon who’s natural partner was the Aeon called “the Holy Spirit” and these guys were like, the lowest of the rungs of Aeons
and basically the reason everything is complicated is because different Gnostic practices considered Different Aeons married to eachother or lower or higher up in the Hierarchy, especially Sophiua’s partner, he’s constantly changing
and because people like to equate Sophia/Church/Holy Spirit and Nous/Logos/Anthropos/Mankind/The Word/Jesus Christ into these hodgepodges of symbolisms, even when they really should be and are kinda seperate concepts
and also because people see the word “Christos” and immediatealy assume they mean Jesus Christ, not some other dude who happens to share his last name who isnt even really a dude hes and aeon and even though he represents the Idea of Mankind, he’s not exactly human shaped
Jesus Christ the person is always explicitly a human man born of a human woman (and god)
Aeons are not humans and have nothing to do with humans and existed before Humans were ever a thing
but also sometimes Jesus Christ the man IS also an Aeon, just not the Aeon that Sophia’s partner is
its, complicated and inconsistent lol
aaaaa this is fascinating and im never going to be done researching this stuff. I would love your take on how it seems to me that the Sophia/Christ link is presented in Homestuck if/when you have the time, feel free to shoot me a message on discord about it! (dont wanna say too much about that publically until im sure about it)
Solar generators can power medical equipment and refrigerators, and they will be useable as soon as they arrive. They’re also portable and can be moved to safety if any further storms occur. These things will literally save lives.
Flying through Storytelling 