Sexual Diversity - How a Queer Character Made Persona 4 Great - Extra Credits

A while back, we promised we would talk more about the varieties of diversity in games. And since then, we've been mulling over the best way to do that. When we put out that original introductory episode, we got a lot of responses from people who weren't convinced that diversity's really that big an issue for games. Why should I care about diversity in my games? This isn't nearly as big a problem as you make it out to be. Who cares if you're playing an Italian plumber, a grave-robbing bimbo? What difference does it make to the game? Well, we're going to try to answer that today. We aren't going to discuss diversity by going into some high-minded moralizing lecture, though. Instead, we're just going to talk about games that couldn't be made or would be patently worse if they didn't have diverse characters. Since we're all, apparently, masochists here at Extra Credits, we've decided to tackle what many of you seem to find the toughest and most unpalatable subject first, sexual diversity in games. And to do that, we're going to take a close look at the LGBT issues in Persona 4. If

you like turn-based RPGs at all and you haven't tried this game, you definitely should give it a shot. It's a fantastic game and one of the few modern RPGs that actually involves RPing. We'll have to do an episode on that sometime. I know, I know. We're going to try not to spoil too much, but we are going to talk about one early section of the game in a fair amount of detail. So, well, you know the drill. Okay, so today we're going to talk about Kanji Tatsumi and to a lesser extent Naoto Shirogane. Let's start at the beginning. Kanji Tatsumi is gay. The developers stepped back from stating this outright in the English version of the game. They're even on record saying that they made things more subtle for the English release. A choice that doesn't do our industry credit, but nah, it's not what we're here to talk about today. This has led some fans to justify that Kanji isn't actually gay, perhaps because the character's sexuality made some of them uncomfortable. There's a great interview with Troy Baker, the voice actor for Kanji, who's a phenomenal voice actor, by the way. We really got to get to that voice acting episode one of these Ah, focus. Anyway, in the interview, Troy talks about the character of Kanji and the direction he received from people at Atlas who, in short, told him that Kanji was gay. They

even go so far as to have Kanji's character say, "That other me is me." If you complete his social link. The evidence is piled pretty high. But hey, we don't take much stock in authorial intent here at Extra Credits anyway, so who cares what the developer say his sexuality is? What's actually important here is that Kanji's sexuality is what makes him interesting. It's a key part in making him a compelling multi-dimensional character. Imagine if Kanji was an unambiguously straight male character. What does he become? All you're left with is a stereotypical tough guy with perhaps a softer side. That's a cardboard trope we've seen played out in game after game after game after game after movie after comic after game after movie after game after movie. What? Whatever. A quick recap for those of you who haven't played the game, the player is introduced to Kanji as a mysterious hooligan and a wild child who never shows up to school and is in general too busy tearing up the town to actually appear in the game. In the course of the game's central mystery, the player's character begins to suspect Kanji might be involved in the strange goings-on and starts to follow him around. This whole section raises the

question of Kanji's sexuality and then the game does what it does best and throws Kanji into an alternate reality that is representative of the repressed parts of his psyche. This entire area is a mix of symbolism that expresses everything from Kanji's conflicts with authority to his homosexual desires. And here's where Kanji moves from being a stereotype to a fully fleshed out human character. He's a teenager wrestling with his sexuality. Even if you never had trouble coming to grips with sexuality yourself, this is something we can all empathize with. Our teenage years are difficult for all of us. There's a lot to understand and we're usually not as secure in who we are as we become in our later years. After all, our teen years are when we're just discovering who we are in the first place. There's a great pressure to conform, to fit in, or at least to establish an identity for ourselves. We get to watch the conflict in Kanji play out. He's got it figured out. He knows who he is, or at least so he thinks. He's a man. He won't take lip from anybody. He's tough enough that he's going to be free no matter what it cost him. He's not going to listen to anybody but himself. And yet, here he is, growing up in a society that tells him homosexuality is unmanly, that it's weak.

So, he fights against what he feels because he believes it conflicts with his identity. There's an almost beautiful irony to it. He sees himself as completely independent, unchained, beholden only to himself, valuing his personal freedom and liberty above all else, and yet even he is ruled by the views of his society. Throughout the game, it's reinforced that Kanji thinking his sexuality is unmanly is not a view he came to internally after much personal consideration. Instead, it's a view continuously reinforced from the outside by strangers and other people in his life. But, he can't recognize that, and he tears himself apart over it. This is depth. This is a character with character, with a real struggle, with something we can learn from regardless of our own sexuality. As the game progresses, we watch him mature and become comfortable with who he is, and by playing through that process, we can learn about our own conflicts and how we choose to address them. So, would Persona 4 have been a better game if it didn't accept sexual diversity? Would it have been anywhere near as good if its developers had been complacent and just written another story about a heterosexual white or Asian male? No. It would have just been another day RPG, but it's not. Its use of sexuality

allows it to create characters who we can learn from and empathize with because sexuality wasn't used to define Kanji, but rather was an aspect of Kanji's life that helped to give depth to his character. I think it's also worth mentioning Naoto Shirogane, another character from the same game. Interestingly enough, Atlus touched on transgender and societal gender issues here. In Naoto's alternate reality, we learn that she feels trapped by her body, that she wishes she was a man. The idea of a sex change is even brought up as something she's considered. It's left ambiguous whether she feels this way because of how she's been treated while trying to fit into and gain respect from a male-dominated society, or whether she's actually wrestling with more fundamental gender confusion. Unfortunately, Naoto enters the story later in the game, and we're left with less exploration of her character. But, without her gender struggles, Naoto would have been a little more than the tiring, awkward girl character we see in so many RPGs. So, should all games work these sorts of issues into their characters? Definitely not. That would be pretty ridiculous. But, does a well-thought-out use of diversity improve games and allow us to explore narratives we'd otherwise be unable to delve into? Yes, it does.

Thanks for watching. We'll see you guys next week.