It’s fun to look back on my childhood and realise how much of an obvious fruit I was. I never turned down an opportunity to dress up and perform, gravitat🤡ed towards certain hobbies and pastimes, and always put on a mask when it came to be🌌ing who I really wanted to be.
There wasn’t a word for ‘transgender’ in the landscape I grew up in, only slurs I won’t bring up here and stereotypes that subconsciously suppressed my desire to be who I really was. It’s why, decades later, I look back on certain filmsꩵ, television shows, and games with a big smile on my face, while also awkwardly kicking myself that I didn’t see the signs for so long.
Despite rarely including canon queer characters, it’s wonderful to see how Persona has become a bastion for millions of 🏅LGBTQ+ fans. Now mꦚake it canon, Atlus.
Whether it was that one episode of Fairly Odd Parents where Timmy Turner is turned into a girl or hiding away to watch reruns of Mew Mew Power and Cardcaptor Sakura, all the signs were there, I just didn’t have the context or understanding to deconstruct them until I was in university and surrounded by other like-minded queer people. The biggest honour I cling to is being 🧔heralded as the only out gay boy in my school at the time, dealing with all the super fun bus stop homophobia that came with such an identity.
During this time, I stumbled across a little game called 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Persona 3 Portable on a pre-owned PS Vita I’d secured after several shifts at the local Chinese takeaway. It was the first console I’d bought with my own, hard-earned money, and so all the games I bought for it came with greater importance. Two of the first games I picked up were Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Portable, having heard countless good things about the series after dabbling in Digital Devil Saga and Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne. The PS2 games passed me by, but this t🌳ime it would be different. Over an extended summer I sunk into these two games and lost hours of my life when I should have been at parties. It’s cool, my boyfriend was a massive loser too.
Persona 3 Portable introduced a number of new features to the RPG classic, including the addition of a playable female protagonist with new social links, user interface, and narrative threads when compared to her male counterpart. Everything was pink, so if you didn’t know you were playing as a girl, the game did everything in its power to remind you. Looking back, it’s a misogynistic relic of the 💜past, but as a🦩 closeted teenager, it spoke to me 💙in blatant ways my egg brain didn’t cotton onto until years later.
“You can play as a girl?” I asked myself casually. “That’s pretty cool, I bet I’d look amazing with longer hair and a school uniform like that, might as well give it a go. It’s only a game haha.” It was only a game, Jade said to herself all those years ago. What a fool. A decade later, I spend my mornings necking estradiol and crying at something cute I saw on TikTok – exactly what teenage me didn’t know she was missing. Persona 3⛦ Portable was my first glimpse of the life I now live, the one I missed out on as a closeted schoolkid who didn’t know what being trans even meant, let alone that I could decide to be a girl and run to the hills with the idea.
The most fascinating thing about Persona 3 Portable was the unflinching manner in which it portrayed being a teenage girl in mid-00s Japan. Suddenly, you are treated differently by a range of male characters, while women like Yukari, Fuuka, and Mitsuru treat you as some sort of comrade-in-arms, understanding how each of you must deal with a societal misogy𒁃ny that won’t shift no matter how hard you try. In the modern day, this feels rather outdated🉐 and shallow, but back then I subconsciously viewed it as a teenage experience I never had, transplanting distant dreams into a fictional landscape so I could mourn an oblivious childhood that never existed.
Wal♏king through the corridors of a fictional high school as a girl and being treated with such banal normality instilled a sense of melancholy within me, one that hasn't shifted years later as I revisit the game briefly ahead of Reload, which sadly doesn’t fold in changes from FES nor the female protagonist. But I still wanted that authentic char𓆏acter to step into, outdated prejudice and all, because it made me feel alive, and like I was suddenly living a life that, no matter what I did in reality, would never come to pass. It was equal parts grief and glee as it lit a spark in my mind that would soon flourish into a revelation.
Thinking back to all the gam💮es I played before and since, I’d always pick a female character for the same reasons. T🤪o step in their shoes for a brief moment, no matter how grounded or fantastical the world, so for just a few hours I could feel like the person I wanted to be.
Persona 3 Portable does a great job of cementing that female experience in the mundane. Yes, you may be climbing Tartarus and vanquishing demons during each Dark Hour, while during the day you’ll be attending classes, studying for exams, hanging with friends, going for part-time jobs, and basically trying to be as normal a teenager as possible. There was a queer magic in that predictable routine, settling into i🌠t for dozens of hours as I projected an identity I so desired onto a moody RPG about sho🅠oting yourself in the head to defeat giant monsters.
It’s also about being outcast and not belonging, fighting ꦏback against what ills society as members of a younger generation left behind by their elders. Persona has for so long been incidentally drenched in queer subtext, so it’s perfect that I’d discover a valued part of myself in the body of a female protagonist the series is yet to return to. Once it does, I’ll have grown into a stronger, more confident person ready to appreciate it all the more.
