I thought it was a nice touch in Persona 5 Royal that the scene where the player is given the option to choose to have Joker enter a romantic relationship with Makoto takes place in the Lala Escargot’s Okama bar “Crossroads!”
Although Atlus as a company unfortunately has a track record of including homophobic & transphobic stereotypes in several of their games, even in vanilla P5 which has that AWFUL 3-minute-long scene where two predatory gay men sexually harass Ryuji and it is played for “comedy” (although thankfully, the Royal edition at least tried to censor & rewrite the scene for the American localization, wherein the two men were now instead overly enthusiastic drag queens who mistaken Ryuji for one as well and want to give him a make-over after they saw him exit the Crossroads bar…), I honestly thought that the bartender Lala Escargot was a more positive example of a genderqueer character in the game. While the game never specifies whether Lala is actually a trans-woman or just a drag queen, she’s at least never treated like a joke since the all the other characters respect her pronouns, she acts as a responsible voice of reason, and she repeatedly defends Joker during Ohya’s confidant line whenever the drunken journalist tries to offer him alcohol (Lala doesn’t put up with Ohya’s bullcrap). And I know that I’m alone in that opinion that Lala is one of Atlus’ more positive or less problematic examples of LGBTQ+ representation, since I’ve seen other players compliment her character as well!
Still, even though I thought Lala was a solid step in the right direction (even if it's still imperfect) despite P5’s other problems with queer rep, I do hope that Atlus tries to do better going forward in future games, especially considering that the Persona franchise is no longer being directed by Katsura Hashiro since most of the widely criticized queerphobic content occurred under his leadership. Heck, even the Royal re-release for P5 (which rewrote the aforementioned homophobic scenes to make them less problematic) had a different director, Daiki Ito, who thankfully gave us more queer-coded bonding moments between Joker & Akechi (I totally ship them together as boyfriends, similar to how I also ship Joker with Makoto).
