#like there are places where persona 5 as a whole is utterly unselfreflective

[yusuke-of-valla]

Lol the thing here is people will give headcanon reasons for why the Okumura thing isn't bad or a sign of P5's bad politics, but they're not framing it in the real world way. The game is literally just "because Okumura is Haru's dad it's sad". Why have the choice to not give a voice to any workers fucked over? it's a deliberate choice of the game to not show this or humanize them to make the capitalist look good and forgiven, and that's worth criticizing.

I don’t think there’s a problem with people having more complex headcanons for how Haru feels or how society at large feels about Okumura, and I’m not gonna pretend I’ve looked at all the fluff or incidental dialogue or stuff like that so maybe it is mentioned somewhere, and I don’t think a game has to spoon feed the audience everything, but at the same time

We KNOW the game can portray the child of an abuser having complicated feelings about their father despite the bad things they did with Yusuke

We KNOW the game can portray multiple people having different feelings about someone who harmed others but still suffered a terrible fate because that’s how they handle the Phantom Thieves reacting to Akechi in the third semester

So like, while this game has a lot of problems that overshadow the writing as a whole, the fact that it doesn’t touch on these ideas with Haru is kind of notable. And chances are there’s a Thieves Den conversation that touches on this but I also feel in a game about giving voices to people without it IS notable that we never hear from any workers directly. And part of that might be the plot is happening and we don’t have time to stop and discuss this because the Phantom Thieves are wanted for murder, but at the same time that could have been the focus of Haru’s confidant. She mentions not knowing who in the company to trust and that idea could have been expanded on while also focusing on Haru’s feelings about her father

I’ve gone on too long again but basically, while there is a lot of good meta and annalysis and stuff expanding on how Haru feels and the effects of Okumura’s death, that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have to do that much digging for similar situations so it’s more notable.

Though I will say it may not be entirely a capitalism thing, Persona 5 as a whole doesn’t really seem to like having their female characters be anywhere near as emotionally messy as their male characters so keeping Haru as the “dutiful daughter” might be a result of that