It’s often been joked that the standard JRPG boss fights as “God”, “your evil Dad”, and “God who is also your evil Dad”. The Persona series has certainly been no slouch in this respect; the most recent entry’s storyline bosses include no less than three of your party members’ fathers (one’s an unofficial adoptive father, but it counts).
One may note that none of the recent Persona games have gone so far as to include your evil Dad as the final boss. This is not because the series is bucking the trend. This is because it’s already taken the concept to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion. In Persona 2: Innocent Sin (which is largely unfamiliar to Western audiences due to its late and little-publicised localisation), the final boss takes the form of all of your party members’ fathers fused together:
Yes, this is in fact an unholy abomination made of everybody’s evil Dads – in latex bondage outfits, no less.
There’s not really anywhere to go from there, is there?
I know next to nothing about the Persona series and very little about fathers in general, and I usually have no active interest in either of these fairly popular subjects, but that right there is an official illustration of a repulsive, obscene, baffling monstrosity of a final boss made out of five fathers in shiny rubber sex outfits stuck together in a vaguely humanoid formation by one big shiny rubber sex outfit with suckers, wings on the chest purely for aesthetics and a faceted tentacle chest-phallus, and presumably posed in a way that implies that the five individual amalgamated evil fathers are glaring menacingly at their children while mostly hanging upside-down in a bewildering and disconcerting configuration presumably designed to bypass body horror altogether and combine Freudian themes with BDSM design elements within one big, bold, horrifying mutant freak. ‘Unsubtle’ wouldn’t even begin to describe what I’m seeing right now with my own two eyeballs. This is official art of five evil dads ‘sexy’-shrink-wrapped together by their legs into an evil dad starfish.
This new information simultaneously lowers my previously fairly neutral opinion on the Persona series and my previously already quite low opinion on fathers while sharply piquing my interest in the video game Persona 2: Innocent Sin.
To be fair, this arguably isn’t even the most Freudian thing you can fight in that particular game, much less the Persona series as a whole.
(Other demons you can throw down with include a bearded, naked man sitting on a toilet, and a giant, fang-mawed penis with chariot wheels.)
Flying through Storytelling 