A few weeks ago, I happened to stumble upon a blog called The Border House, a site dedicated to looking at games with an objective, feminist eye. The post in question was “Did she just money-shot herself with his neck blood?” a title that I have to admit caught my eye with its striking title. I enjoyed the article thoroughly, a look at the new (at the time) Mortal Kombat DLC character, Skarlet. While I was finishing up the article, I noticed a word on the sidebar of the website that usually catches my eye – Atlus. The link was to a post entitled “It’s Time to Talk About It: Atlus, Naoto, and Transphobia” and it was this post that inspired me to write this post (link to it below).
In the article, author Mattie Brice looked into some of Atlus’ transgendered and gender-confused characters from their previous games, including Persona 3 and 4 and Catherine. The points on Persona 3 and Catherine were well-made and did nothing to raise my ire so we won’t bother talking about them. It was when I got to the part about Naoto that I started to think the author missed the point.
Naoto Shirogane is a female character from Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. However, the character is at first presented to the player as a boy, when he comes to town to investigate the ongoing murder case as a special helper on the police force. The theme of the Persona games tends to be coming to terms with things you can’t admit to yourself and Naoto isn’t any different. The player learns at a late point in the game that Naoto is in fact a girl and hides her gender from everyone. She does this because being a female does not line up with her perfect idea of a detective, something she wants to be more than anything. She hides her gender so that the police force will respect her more than they would if she was more forthright.
These are the points that the game clearly tells the player but Brice’s article about Naoto gives me the impression that she didn’t understand this at all. The first thing she brings up is that the character is immediately referred to as she and her, as if the other characters are immediately forcing her to come to terms with herself. While this may be true in some cases, most of the time the characters still refer to her as Naoto-kun, “kun” being a Japanese honorific primarily used for males, not females. Whether it’s from the other characters being slow to change their ways or doing what they think would be most comfortable for Naoto is never discussed but the tone of the game certainly suggests the latter, this being a game about teenagers coming to terms with themselves, even the parts they don’t like.
The next point that caught my attention was Brice pointing out Naoto being grouped with the females on several occasions, the game’s obvious attempt to push her in with that group instead of the one she feels more comfortable with. While this does happen in some occasions, it usually tends to be the ones where a girl would NEED to be grouped in with other girls, like taking a public bath or sleeping in the same room. If Atlus had grouped Naoto in with the guys on these scenes, she would have been far less comfortable and much more objectified in the eyes of the character and the player.
Most importantly, it seems like Brice missed the whole point of Naoto’s character. In my eyes (and several others, according to wikis and others I have asked about the matter), Naoto is a girl who wished to be in a male’s body simply for the ease of it. Being an ace detective is all she had ever aspired to be but that is a job that, especially in Japan, is hard to move forward in as a girl. Not only that but her lack of experience and young age made it extremely hard for the adults to accept her for what she was. She hid her gender to get at least a tiny foothold to fall back on; the adults couldn’t reject her help just because she was young.
Over the course of the game, Naoto (through her Social Link in particular) learns and admits that she doesn’t truly want to be a man. All she wants is respect from others for her talents and respect for herself. It is my belief that Atlus didn’t mean for Naoto to be this questionable character who didn’t really ever say what she truly wanted (we have Kanji for that!) but someone, like everyone else, who discovers their true self over the course of the game.
Now, I don't disagree with everything Brice said. As I said above, the points on Persona 3 and Catherine are pretty much spot on. Also, the views on the romantic side of Naoto’s Social Link are in line with my own, forcing the character to go down a road that she doesn’t really seem to want to go down. Things like the beauty pageant and the Christmas Eve scene with Naoto as your lover are a bit disgusting but don’t ruin the work that the rest of the Social Link does (at least not entirely). I even don’t mind the author’s (seeming?) uncertainty as to what the true gender of Naoto really is. As in most good stories, everyone can see different themes and messages in the work; I, like Brice, just wanted to show the side of Persona 4 that spoke the most to me.
> Here is a link to the article I reference throughout this post.
http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=6088
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