“LGBT people don’t respect your boundaries, the game implies, and will force their desires on your unwilling kids.”
“What a line”, I thought to myself as I stopped for a moment to really let it sink in. “What an incredibly disingenuous and ignorant line.”
The quote in question comes from a recent piece on Polygon with regards to a particular ‘controversial scene’ in Persona 5 – a scene which has since been altered with the recent release of the game’s updated ‘Royal’ version. In the original version a pair of nameless gay men approach Ryuji seemingly out of nowhere and begin to act creepy for a lack of better word. They comment on his looks (he is a total cutie, to be honest) and how young he is, all the while Ryuji is growing increasingly more uncomfortable. The revised version removes the gay aspect all together and instead has the two men try to get Ryuji to wear women’s clothing and have him go into a drag club. Are either of these scenes necessary? Not really. Do they add anything to the story or character development? Most definitely not. But are they troublesome and harmful? Not in the least.
It must be an exhaustive lens to view the world through, to take offense at something that is rather innocent and genuinely played for laughs. How many times have we’ve seen a scene in any Hollywood comedy of an old woman hitting on a young attractive man? Now, as a gay man – who sincerely hates to use the phrase ‘as a gay man’ by the way – my opinion on this subject matter apparently holds a little more weight than most; these are the rules of the game after all. And my opinion is that no one should ever feel offended on my behalf. I am not so thin-skinned that I cannot find the humor in something that is ultimately so trivial. To even suggest that I should be offended by this, or that Atlus’ attempts to alter the scene were just not good enough to meet a certain standard is a huge detriment to my community.
Do you think that I don’t have a sense of humor? That you need to shield me from the idea that maybe someone like me won’t be portrayed in the best light? Lecherous old men – especially old gay men – exist. I have met hundreds of them, most of which did a lot more than try to get me to wear a dress. It wasn’t long ago when I found myself having a drink at a bar after work and an older man tried to take me home with him. After I politely declined, his advances became more intense, to the point where I had get extremely vocal and asked him to politely back the fuck off. Now I know what you were thinking when you wrote that article. Whether it’s the original scene or the altered one, you were likely thinking that lazy stereotyping such as this is dangerous for the LGBT community. That it’s the current year and such depictions no longer have a place in our society. And that’s a valid point. But allow me to spin it this way – this is what real equality looks like.
To pull an example from Persona 5, let’s take a closer look at Suguru Kamoshida – a volleyball coach and key character early on in the game. His personality is as archetypal as the come: he’s vain, has got a bloated sense of self-importance, loves to bully everyone around him, and has a penchant for abusing his female students in just about every conceivable way imaginable. If you had a checklist for ‘scumbag’ he would meet the criteria and then some. In short, he could teach a master’s course in how to be a sexual predator. Now, as a man, I could easily deconstruct this exaggerated caricature and say, ‘men don’t respect your boundaries, the game implies, and will take out their anger and desires on your unwilling kids.’ In fact if you look back at most media, more often than not, men are typically the villains, the murderers and the general pieces of shit: the rapists, the wife beaters, the thieves, the murderers, serial killers. Yet not once did I ever hear anyone say that these depictions were harmful and should go away. As the late George Carlin so famously said: let’s not have a double standard; one standard will do just fine.
There seems to be a growing concern with shedding tropes that are no longer politically correct. In recent years I’ve heard more and more desire to drop the ‘damsel in distress’ trope, yet here I am thinking, have you ever watched a single horror movie? Now there is a genre that not only has empowered females characters for decades, but it also has depicted men in the worst possible ways. So while I appreciate the sentiment, I find it a tad insulting. We should be able to laugh at ourselves every once in a while. When I told my friends about my incident at the bar, they asked me if I got his number and we all had a good laugh about it. It was relatable and something we all have experienced. There is enough resentment in the world, and we really shouldn’t be directing it at our video games. People alone have a hard enough time, let alone the LGBT community. So please, try not to take everything so seriously. If we expect our medium to evolve and embrace more queer themes, we can’t make a federal case every time we are depicted in a way that we don’t like. We have to take the good along with the ‘bad’. It’s what real growth and maturity looks like.
