#let toshiro's mom be mad! let akechi's mom be mad!

[batbeato]

been thinking about persona and its depiction of motherhood. or: what it doesn't depict.

this started with me being annoyed that there is yet another dead saintly mother in persona 5 tactica. then I started considering: wait, when are persona mothers not saintly? when are persona mothers human? and the answer is: almost never.

I cast my mind back, thinking over all of the prominent depictions of mothers in the series. I think the one that stands out the most to me is Maki's mother in Persona 1. She loves her daughter unconditionally, but she also screws up sometimes, and doesn't spend enough time with her sickly daughter in the hospital, causing her daughter to resent her.

After that, the next one I can think of is Junko, from Persona 2. She isn't nearly as prominent as Maki's mother is in the narrative, but her focus on beauty over her child is certainly something of note that I wish the story had explored more (even if, as a girl who married a teacher and gave birth a short span of years later, as far as I remember, her obsession with her beauty and youth is understandable). In the end she seems to regret her actions and how they affected Jun.

Then we have Yukari's mother, Persona 3, who Yukari doesn't get along with due to how they dealt differently with her father's death. It's a big rift between the two that only slowly begins to heal, and that shows that both sides are human and how they were hurt and split apart by a tragedy that they might have better dealt with together.

After that... We have very little. What mother figure exists in Persona 4? We have Nanako's mother, who died tragically but is referred to as a loving and wonderful woman. What mother figure exists in Persona 5? We have Akechi's mother, who died tragically but is referred to as a loving and wonderful woman. Same with Wakaba, who is distorted by Futaba's perception of her, but is ultimately a kind and loving mother. Persona 5 Strikers? Akane's mother. Persona 5 Tactica? Toshiro's mother.

If we consider the Confidants, in Persona 5 we do have Shinya's mother, who... is overprotective, yes, but also loves her son very dearly. There is no resentment, merely concern that goes too far.

There are many absent or missing mothers in Persona, all of whom are said to have been loving and kind and wonderful woman. Several times, people will repeat lines about the unconditional and wonderful love of a mother. There are so many loving and kind and wonderful mothers that it seems like recent Persona games take for granted this idea that "mothers will always love their children", which seems rather ridiculous when compared to the presence of abusive fathers (Akechi, Ryuji, Akira in Strikers, and now Toshiro).

This sort of double standard, wherein lines about the unconditional love of a mother, even when their children come from men who are cruel or unkind to them, are spouted whilst men are shown to be abusive, annoys me. It is as if women must have some sort of inherent goodness, some inherent quality of motherhood which men lack, that makes men more prone to abuse.

The Persona series is no stranger to having issues with gender - look at the depiction of drag in Persona 4 and 5, the one-off transgender woman in Persona 3 who was depicted as predatory, the trans NPC in Persona 2 who wants to rip men's dicks off - but I don't think people often talk about how it choose, in recent years, time and time again, to depict mothers as holy saints.

I was playing Tactica, watching Futaba insist on the love of mothers and Toshiro's cognition of his dead mother insist that she loved him dearly, and I thought: why? Why is this trope of the saintly dead mother so pervasive in recent Persona games?

I hope it stops soon.