As much as I love The Persona series, being realistic, I don't think we will ever see fair representation of lgbt characters as long as Soejima is the director/main writer. To call him a bigot outright is unfair, but obviously we need someone who can understand & respectably create lgbt characters that aren't harmful stereotypes or queerbait(I'm looking at you P4). On top of that, if we ever get a P6, it'll probably be a long way away. Might have to hope another JRPG does it right b4 then.
Oh, actually Soejima is just responsible of creating the design and artwork of the Persona games, he never changed from the team, the writing is completely a different story.
But yes, I completely agree with you as much as it hurts to say that.
I just feel like as fans there isn’t a single reason to not treat the issue and recognize the flaws that the game has instead of just being completely blind about it.
It’s hard for us to talk about how the writer or the director treated the game without knowing the whole story behind it, but I feel like having a lgbt writer/head writer/director/producer in the team would be incredibly helpful. I don’t like Hashino direction/production as much as I respected some of his works, he is a person with a very closed mind and just… needs to learn some good things.
As a writer it pains me to see how they never researched about it to begin with, there’s writers who spend months just researching for one single characterization because of the mistake of bad representation :/
ah, my bad. I have the P5 artbook and their was a interview for Soejima in the back of the book, and since I don’t know a lick of Japanese I just assumed he was also the director of the game >_>;;
As far as the actual director, yeah. I want to be frustrated, but at the same time I have to tell myself that he probably views the LGBT community in Japan the same way many other straight people view them. Pure ignorance. I do agree they could have done a better job researching, maybe then they would have realized that not all lgbt people in Japan live only in the red-light district, or are sultry, perverse people, but no, they just “played it safe” and stuck with how many ignorant straight people in Japan view the LGBT community.
The thing that gets me the most though, is that you have 9 possible women you can romance with, yet they couldn’t have thrown in one single male character for the mc to romance just baffles me. They did it in Fire Emblem Fates, sure, the character of Niles was a stereotype(all the characters in that game were pretty much cliches tbh), but at least it was SOMETHING. For P5, the male character the mc could have romanced could have been a co-op character, leaving it totally optional to the player if they wanted to do the Social Link. Honestly I probbaly won’t even romance anyone. From what I’ve heard from those who have played it, P5 really toned down the romance part, where thr girls don’t start acting in love/flirting with the mc towards the end of maxing out their social link, and it’s really up to the player to initiate the romance
