SUPER MARIO TENSEI: Persona M

Tenet the Second: Persona M as Critique of the Thematic Failures of the Persona Series

Any good critique comes from a place of love, and I love Persona! It's a JRPG whose stories revolve around the struggles of being a teen in Japan, and deal with matters of alienation, trauma, friendship, and identity. I love all the kids we get to know, I want them to be safe and happy and I wish, really wish, that the game devs wanted that too.

See, the Persona series is either a victim of developers with very low introspection, developers that expect their consumers to have high introspection, or both. Here's what I mean:

In Persona 5, the most recent installment, every player-aligned character is a victim of abuse, and every villain, major or minor, is one of their abusers. The player gets to know each of their allies intimately as a key component of gameplay, and help them through emotionally turbulent times of their lives. Meanwhile, the villains' crimes range the gamut from direct physical and emotional violence, to sexual assault, fraud, blackmail, and murder.

So, naturally, one of the main messages of the game is: sympathize with victims and condemn abusers...

...unless the abuse has comedic value.

for Persona 5Show

your very first ally, the only person up to that point in the game to not judge you, who's reviled by strangers in the same way you are, who suffered and suffers physical, verbal, and emotional abuse at the hands of family and teachers, whose near-death spurs you to awaken your powers and use them to take down corrupt authority

is beat up verbally and physically by friends old and new, and sexually assaulted by homophobic caricatures twice, while you personally abandon him to these fates without even being given the choice to defend or comfort him

as a joke.

And then we have the gay and genderqueer and trans characters wherein one half get walked back to Heteronormalcy^TM and the other half feel like they're there on accident because of how otherwise garbage at subtext Persona is.

This is a series explicitly about True Selves and The Acceptance Thereof, mind you.


I'm angry and bitter and I can do better.

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