#hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii sorry for the repost just needed to fix the formatting on this <3 peace and love or whatever

[idiotsonlyevent]

wow, naoto's writing is bad! and its not even bad because "they should have been trans" or whatever tf ppl are saying, its bad because its inconsistent both internally as well with persona's canon lore. like, the whole basis of the persona series is that your shadow is part your true self. even though it says things that you don't want to hear or admit to others, it's still YOU. naoto's shadow 'wants to be a man.' naoto's shadow wants gcs. naoto's shadow is trans.

and that's not to say that you can't write a story or an arc about questioning gender. or a gnc woman. or about what it's like to be a woman in a male-dominated field. or a child that's forced to grow up too quickly because they're surrounded by - and doing the job of - adults. but to do that, then naoto's social link should have actually explored those things? we hear a lot about how it must be tough to be a woman detective. how the adult police officers don't take naoto seriously. but it's never shown; those issues aren't explored in a meaningful way. we know that they happen in the real world, but we don't get to see naoto react to those things; like the yosuke reacts to the junes part-timers, or the way yukiko reacts to the reporters and kasai-san. so that angle falls flat because those problems aren't acknowledged in naoto's arc.

naoto is openly dysphoric. i'm not saying that makes them trans bc dysphoric cis people exist, but they are repeatedly shown being uncomfortable when other characters bring up their height, the pitch of their voice, and their chest. and you can say that them deciding that they're a woman means that they're not comfortable being seen as a man either - that's fine, nonbinary people exist - but the scale of the discomfort is so completely different that it feels ridiculous and almost in bad faith to say they felt as uncomfortable 'as a man' as they did 'as a woman.'

and honestly, im a little tired of seeing stories where women 'dress up' as men to avoid sexism. i know the people writing these have never actually talked to trans men, but that's not how the world works. we don't come out and suddenly become magically accepted by society. you can be out for years and still be routinely misgendered! and in some cases, if you pass, you're expected to uphold and reinforce sexism - fun! /s. but those stories never show that, do they? i get that they're supposed to be escapist fantasies, and not real life, but persona 4 is a game that has relatively grounded themes and characters. many of us are or know a yosuke, a chie, a yukiko, etc. naoto's writing feels out of place because the themes it's trying to explore are either completely ignored or bastardized so badly that they become nonsensical.

it's also incredibly demeaning and egregious that to romance naoto, you basically force-fem them, when the whole point of their 'platonic' social link is that their gender doesn't matter (until at the very end, where they decide they're 'a woman after all'). this is pretty clearly done to assert the heterosexuality of the protagonist, but it's still really gross. are gnc women w lower voices not allowed to date men now? fellas, is it gay to date a woman?

but actually the most uncomfortable part to me is the rhetoric surrounding naoto's transness. i know this game came out more than a decade ago, but it uses the same negative tropes about transmasculine people that are being peddled by t€rfs and transphoßes today. and it's primarily other women (chie and yukiko) enforcing naoto's gender expression to stamp out any ideas of transmasculinity. naoto can't Actually be trans - she's just a confused little girl! she'll grow out of it and realize how stupid she was to throw away her beauty to be an ugly man! she was a girl all along! its straight out of social contagion nonsense, when their arc could have perfectly meshed w the theme of acceptance if they um. maybe accepted that they can be trans, even without needing to 'change their sex'? they can be a man with a 'woman's body'? they can see themselves however they want? (reminded of that post of a 'western' trans person saying they thought the trans man from one piece was a caricature or something, and the replies were just. japanese trans people saying that the way he's presented is empowering for them bc it's impossible to get hrt/gcs in japan, so they prefer narratives that accept their bodies as they are.)

naoto could have been amazing gnc woman, non-binary, or trans man rep, if atlus stuck to it and explored what any of those things meant to naoto as a character. instead, they fumbled the writing so badly that it becomes impossible to tell what they were trying to say. unless you're trans, then one day, you too can become normal!