character/ship/etc analysis!

It's still got some major flaws in terms of how it treats LGBT stuff (game, please stop being awful to poor Kanji, and give us a "Yosuke realizes he's bi and lashing out" romance route), but it definitely makes a lot more sense with Japan Context. I saw stuff from Japanese and Chinese players talking about it before I played the game, so I came in knowing what the Deal was, but I can imagine it could feel pretty Unfun not to.

 

In the spirit of this thread, while we're on the subject of Persona 4, I'd like to mention that I went "...ooooooh" when I found out that idol singers are often required by their agency to sign a contract that they won't date or get involved in any sort of relationship, because they're essentially selling the concept of a theoretical relationship with the idol to an audience of lonely straight men, and marketing thinks knowing she had a real-life boyfriend would mess up that image.

And that explains so much about Rise's Shadow.

Because it means everybody gets a piece of Rise's sexuality except her.

 

yes this to both of these but ESPECIALLY the breach stuff
she's like the only thing i really remember from the show and that's because she was A Good, someone hug her

 

I DEEPLY WANT HER TO GET HUGS. AND A LEGIT BACKSTORY.

(random headcanon: the reason that that college librarian didn't react to Breach being in the library was because she's actually one of Breach's family, and Breach usually uses the library as a return point/calm down space.)

also i. well i really want to read something about Rose and Jericho, but freaking NO ONE has written anything decent. so i might have to write it myself.

 

i want a breach family reunion now. "Hey, how's my fav cousin? Still working for that creepy guy? Cool."

do eeeeeeet

 

i mean the main problem is that, while I can do SOME stuff in oneshots, anything dealing with Slade would probably need to be longer, and I don't know WHAT that plot would be about, yet. Also, betas. I'm not sure how to write most of the other Titans properly.

 

just be like "ah yes, these particular three need to go to an isolated spot, just them, for, uh, reasons."

 

Waggles eyebrows suggestively. (But seriously, I'd be up for character voice hashing out; I might wanna rewatch parts of the series to remember, but it was my primary fandom for years.)

 

Does the same thing happen in Korea with K-pop idols? I have a gut feeling that it probably does.

 

Yeah, it does. That was where I first heard about it, actually.

 

Then that leaves me with a lot to work with wrt Overwatch's D.Va, who is kinda in the same boat: I bet she's forbidden from having a boyfriend too.

 

that's depressing as fuck
just in general, poor idols.

 

Well, D. Va's also a military operative, so she might have a slightly different situation since she's serving as a combatant and not only a celebrity. On the other hand, considering how important morale can be I've got no doubt her celebrity status mixes with that in interesting ways. So if you wanted to play with that idea for her there's more than enough justification, but there's also enough room to avoid it if it doesn't appeal.

 

Yeah, D.Va is definitely really in the military and has been in significant combat, it's not just Army publicity.

The expectation would certainly be that she not distract from her work or hurt her public image, though.

 

!!!!!!!

 

OH HEY I THOUGHT OF ANOTHER RADIANT HISTORIA THING I CAN RAMBLE ABOUT RELATED TO PREVIOUS.

WHO WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT SOME CHARACTERIZATION THAT I'M PRETTY SURE HAPPENED MOSTLY ON ACCIDENT BUT IT'S AWFUL AND I LOVE IT.

Spoiler: Big ol' spoilers

Late in the endgame, you have to fight a series of bosses to get to the final boss. They're all souped-up versions of fights from earlier in the game- it's got a bit of a half-assed and unclear ~time shenanigans~ explanation, but basically you have to beat these people and things being controlled by the Big Bad to unseal a door. The Doylist explanation is that they ran out of art budget and couldn't afford boss sprites for any of the remaining antagonists but wanted something to build tension before the final boss battle, so they reused existing bosses that had some emotional weight to them since patricide was off the table.

The thing about doing that, though, is that within the story, the one selecting those bosses was Heiss. Whose primary goal at that point was to convince Stocke to give up and stop fighting and agree with him that the world was terrible and ought to be destroyed because it doesn't deserve to live. And considering that he dared Stocke to come after him and made no move to attack Eruca even though she was right there, the only possible motives for him to go to all that effort to seal that door are 1) he wanted a few more minutes for his apocalypse-triggering to get farther along, or 2) because he thought it would help convince Stocke.

And here's the thing about selecting bosses with emotional weight: the list looks like this-

1. The unbeatable boss from the start of the game who slaughtered Raynie and Marco and landed Stocke in the hospital for three days
2. A friend and ally of Stocke's who's been reduced to a groaning zombie (Stocke even says, "This isn't funny, Heiss" about this one), the fight also serving as a reminder of "Hey, remember that time you and your friends got kidnapped and sold into slavery?"
   
3. A giant spider (in most stories this would be a cop-out, but in this game giant spiders are basically Satan)
4. Another highly respected ally whose initial boss fight was essentially her committing suicide to get her army to give up, while everyone she was fighting begged her to please not do this.

This isn't a perfect lineup for rubbing every horrible thing that's happened to Stocke in the last year in his face, but it's a pretty spirited attempt. The main things it's missing are "Hey, remember that time you murdered your best friend?" (which Stocke erased from the timeline well enough that Heiss probably doesn't have any idea it happened) and "Hey, remember that time a kid who hero-worshipped you got himself killed protecting you while you couldn't do anything but watch helplessly?" (which didn't have a boss fight to repurpose and Heiss might not have realized was as traumatic as it was, because why should Stocke care about a random army grunt who died in a battle?).

So the boss rush essentially comes across as Heiss making an extended attempt to deliberately trigger Stocke to make him obey.

A+ parenting there, Heiss, way to go.

 

(sets up camp and lurks for own fandoms) this is my summer home now

 

OH HEY does anyone want to hear about how Jade Curtiss from Tales of the Abyss is a reaction to the ~child genius~ archetype?

 

YES.

Yes I do please do go on

 

Jade Curtiss 101 for the uninitiated: Jade is basically the party black mage, a 35-year-old snarky asshole in a party which, this being a JRPG, is otherwise full of teenagers. He's a colonel in the army, and such a skilled, powerful, and feared spellcaster that he joins the party at level 45 and only drops down to the level of the rest of the party because somebody uses a device that cost a significant fraction of the national budget just to put his powers on lockdown (and he still eventually breaks the seal). The game's also about as explicit as it can be that he doesn't experience empathy; he has trouble dealing on anything but an intellectual level with the fact that other people have feelings, and feels like he's broken because of it.

Spoiler: Here thar be spoilers

When he was a child, he invented a new type of magitech that can (imperfectly) duplicate something. He got really attached to his magic teacher and wanted to impress her, and accidentally ended up burning her house down, killing her. He poured a ton of time and energy into research and made a copy of her to try to get her back... which was a crazed, vicious monster. His research did, however, attract the attention of a powerful military family, who adopted him. He joined the army and continued his research for a while, gaining the nickname "the Necromancer" for how much he messed around with corpses on battlefields (actually gathering Replica data).

He eventually abandoned the entire field he helped invent, feeling that nothing but death and destruction came out of it, and it's stated that he's been turning down promotions for years because he doesn't trust himself and doesn't think he deserves them.

90% of the problems in the game are directly or indirectly his fault, because the villains' plans all hinge on the ability to create Replicas.

There's a scene late in the game where he matter-of-factly says he wishes he could prevent himself from being born.

So essentially, here's what Jade is: a ~child genius~ who made a Nobel-worthy discovery as a preteen, made exactly the sort of mistakes you'd expect a young child who's too smart for their own good in a highly dangerous subject to make, and has been living in the shadow of those things for the rest of his life. He's a child genius who grew up, but because he made such an impact he can never forget everything he did and was as a kid, and he's had to live to watch decades of genocide, war, and death as fallout from things he did because he was 12 and fonic arts were cool.

And yeah, it's written large, but that's honestly a really honest narrative regarding the whole wunderkind trope. It's like that whole phenomenon where people talk about autistic kids but act like autistic adults don't exist; nobody thinks about what happens when they grow up. I know a lot of people who were ~child geniuses~ who are now disillusioned, burned-out messes with their childhood accomplishments and mistakes hanging over them (myself included). Jade is us that way- he's 35 and his life is still being defined by what he did as a child, and there's only so much he can move past it.