tw: homestuck

Persona 4, sexuality, and hyperreal (Quick notes)

chocotaur:

leroystr8road:

It’s rather important that Persona 4 plays with themes regarding sexuality, especially homosexuality, not just because it is contemporary and it attracts people into it.

Part of Carl Jung’s psychological analyses (which is used in a lot in Persona 4) of archetypes involve looking at the Anima (female personality) and the Animus (male personality). Encountering our Anima as males or our Animus as females involve encountering our shadows. Successful resolutions with our shadow (either as anima or animus) brings our the light aspect of our personality and our creativity. Unsuccessful resolutions bring about petrification and death. Light and dark aspects of personality is part of understanding the 22 Major arcana as archetypes of personalities. Thus the themes of sexuality.

This is organically plotted in the wonderful story by recontextualising the animus and the anima within the hyperrealities of postmodernity we face today. Part of our encountering our shadow of sexuality is encountering it in the arena of postmodern hyperreal, thus confrontation in the television, and resolutions and recovery in real life (of the characters).

The culprit that sends people inside the TV world is then representative of the postmodern force that drives us into the world of the hyperreal, a world of convoluted events that drive us to alienation, a world where we are coerced to engage with our animus and the anima, and our sexuality in general.

For sexuality represents the negotiation of our repressions, wants, and desires vis-a-vis what the society dictates as proper, normal, moral. And what better design captures these elements than the use of the metro design language in both the game and the anime.

What?

what?