We Need To Talk About Persona

I love the Persona games and the Shin Megami Tensei games as a whole. The bleakness, the gameplay, the balance between rpg and social sim. It scratches many an itch that most games do not. The games also have themes that are interesting, typically revolving around the need to make connections with others, the strength that comes from a community, and coming to terms with yourself as you grow from adolescence into an adult world. Further, a desire to change the world or situation one is in, or even just undergo a personal transformation is a forefront in many Persona games.

But. Well. Let's talk about representation, shall we?

The Outer Worlds, Obsidian's masterpiece of a game that borrows from 1950's space-age fiction does a lot of great things. Certainly, there are a few essays I could write about The Outer Worlds (essays I will certainly write because fuck that game is good) but one of the big things that Outer Worlds does well represent a diverse cast of people. Readers will likely remember the articles that abounded about the asexual character of Pavarti, a darling that has never not been in my party.

Outer Worlds manages to really flesh out Pavarti and humanize a character that a lot of people probably haven't had a lot of exposure to. Part of that credit is likely due to the writer's own experiences, a fact that really shows demonstrates how important it is to have a diverse crew when it comes to writing and creating.

Art, in my humble opinion, has a great deal of potential. It can do what writer Ursula K. Le Guin said and allow us to escape into a world, to find answers and courage and inspiration to forge a better world. It can be a kind of cultural capital and way of building relationships. And, most importantly, it can be a way to express different viewpoints, different experiences.

It's like, you can have a painting done by a very rich person, one of a city, that shows that the city is amazing and ideal. Beautiful and serene. And then you can have the same city done by a very poor person and see that the view is very different. It is, objectively, the same place, but the experience of that place is different across different classes, races, religions, orientations and so on. Having plenty of voices and perspectives is a good way to build not only tolerance but understanding across groups and to build a better society.

But Outer Worlds doesn't just have characters that are great, it allows you to be a character you want to be. I remember one instance where Pavarti expresses anxiety about the "physical stuff" and you, as the character, are given a dialogue option to agree. Physical stuff is hard and, you know, not always what you want or what you might be looking for. I'm not going to claim any membership to the asexual community or pretend to speak on their behalf but I have always felt that, though enjoyable, the physical stuff can feel muddy or forced. Sometimes it isn't what I want, sometimes I want to talk late into the night, lying in bed with all the lights off and just whisper.

So I get it, and my character in Outer Worlds is allowed to express that in a few lines of dialogue. It seems so small, but a small declarative statement is powerful. I am here, you say, this is me.

Why am I saying this?

Well, Persona 4 has a character designed to bait the audience and that character is Naoto. She is a character that is coded as trans but, no, actually, she is she and comes to accept herself as such. I like Persona 4, but it feels low for the game to build this up to only then use stereotypes and have Naoto's inner struggle equate to "killing off the girl" as opposed to an embrace of who they are. Or, shit, even for Naoto to maybe be non-binary?

Nope. Not the case.

And that's trash, you know. Because the logic is dangerous here. That Naoto is a character whose internal struggle is not that they do not feel comfortable in their skin, that their struggle is not between what they look like and who they are. Their struggle is basically, "well, girls aren't taken seriously and I want to be taken seriously so I dressed as a boy."

And that would not be an issue if the dungeon and dialogue didn't make Naoto seem more like a character struggling with dysphoria and the desire to be outwardly who they are inward. I distinctly recall my first time playing Persona 4 and thinking, at first, how forward-thinking it was for a game from like, 2008, have a trans character. But as the game progressed it really sank in what the narrative was, what the arc was, and that they wrote this character to flirt with the idea of being trans without committing.

This, of course, is not the only piece of media to do this kind of thing. Queer-baiting is a huge practice that continues to this day. And queer characters have been used as jokes all the time. Persona 5 did this in an infamous scene involving Ryuji. Or queer characters have been rewritten, despite a bunch of lore that and backstory, (lookin' at you WoTC).

And we deserve better. I mean we as LGBTQI folks as well as the general public. We deserve narratives that expand our horizons and allows us to experiment with our own identities. We deserve art that changes us. And we deserve creators that are different from us because how else will we understand both the difference and similarity between us all? How else do we become better, do we build better, and grow without more inclusive narratives?

The answer: We Don't.

What You Feel is What You Are: The Worlds of Neon (JY Yang)

Picture this.

You are sitting in your bed late at night, and there is a pit in your stomach or a great weight on your chest. You are careful not to let your mind drift too much because you fear the places it will go. There is something about, well, you, that doesn't sit right, and you can't really put your finger on it.

Or you tell yourself you can't put your finger on it anyway. Truth, you know exactly what's wrong. You don't feel like what everyone says you are. I won't spend my time here trying to guess at the specifics of how that feels for you, I think that would be cruel of me to do and a waste of time.

For me, it was the nagging feeling that I was not 'boy' or 'man.' I had been with that feeling all my life, I think. At first, I thought it was one of those NLOG things. I like poetry and dressing androgynous and sailor moon and romcoms. I want to pamper myself and do my nails from time to time and flirt with these ideas of femininity, these surface-level expressions of self.

I did this because that was all I had really. I think about Lacan and how he looked at fashion as an expression, a means by which we (poorly) communicate how we feel in our own inner world. Because, let's be honest ya'll, language is sort of shit at communicating how we F E E L, so we supplement.

There are a lot of different roads I walked down to be comfortable calling myself non-binary. A lot of people in my life, some of them dear friends whom I asked awkward and leading questions, and some public figures I know literally nothing about. There were also other forms of media, shows like Steven Universe or, for a young, baby version of myself, Looney Toons in an odd way.

But one of the most impactful moments was when I read The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon (their name is displayed as JY Yang on their books, but they have chosen Neon as their name. Here on, we will refer to them only as Neon).

I've had trans and non-binary friends for the majority of my adult life, so I'm not totally lost on the concept of not feeling at home in your own skin. But, even though I felt that way, I never really applied it to myself. On the one hand, I felt like maybe I was trying to steal the spotlight, or that I was faking it for attention. I thought it would be uncouth or unfair of me, someone who had lived so many years as a man, as cis, to suddenly shout out that no, this is not me.

I buried how I felt because, well, I didn't think it was real, and, on some level, I don't think I wanted it to be. Because I was afraid my friends and family wouldn't accept me, which is shitty for a lot of reasons, but it was a deep-rooted weed in my heart that I just didn't have the strength to yank out.

And one of the things that Neon's book, The Black Tides of Heaven, the first in the phenomenal Tensorate series, helped me realize is that that feeling that questioning is okay. When Akeha begins his struggle to grip his own identity early in the novel, I found it intensely relatable. There was a sense that Akeha had always known, deep down, that he was he, but had stuffed it down, down, down, and that realization in the book was eye-opening.

This isn't the first time Neon has done this to me. In their short story, Tiger Baby, the protagonist's feelings of being uncomfortable in their own skin, in their society, in their home, also resonated. And, much like in the Tensorate series, the act of transformation comes and is met with a newfound sense of self-love.

Neon is no stranger to the social systems that bend and break us and the hidden strings that work to force us to fit into a kind of binary. One of the things I love most about their work is the intersection of the personal and the political, the internal and external. However, the sheer power that comes from being able to declare, if only for yourself, who you are, is awe-inspiring.

There is a lot more to say about Neon's work. And I plan to write about because they have a talent and insight and experience that deserves to be looked at. But here, at the beginning of all of that, I think it is important to mark what, I feel, may be the most essential thing in Neon's work.

What you are is what you feel. The world outside of you may not like it, and there may be a thousand voices telling you that you're confused or wrong or that it is all an illusion or sickness. But fuck all that, because you know yourself best, so be honest, be true, and claim who you are and bask in the love that comes with that proclamation.