#kanji isn't as gay as him and that dude's entire dungeon was about attraction to males and masculinity | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

arcplaysgames · 1 year

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I am a Persona 5 enthusiast above all else and a Persona 3 Portable lover directly after that, but fuck if the MC x Yosuke relationship doesn’t own my entire life

I should prob wait until I'm fully done bc I think I'm at the final dungeon now (or, there's a bonus one later i guess that's optional?) but

jesus fucking christ can i please just talk about Yosuke finally because I feel like i'm gonna explode

I don't think I see Yosuke as bisexual is the thing that I have settled on. I feel like Yosuke is a badly closeted scared shitty teenager who is simmering with so much repressed anger and resignation, he doesn't know how to adequately handle it (and frankly he's slowly getting better over the course of the game). But all of his worst moments in the story feel like he's acting from a script, namely the CompHet Script From Hell.

(Also, I would say that I think of Kanji as The Bisexual One while Yosuke is just attracted to dudes, which isn't what I anticipated from the start.)

But Yosuke mostly makes me sad. I feel like the expectations on him, the ones that he has wrapped around himself like a shield in an attempt to ward off people hurting him. Because he's so isolated and desperate for affection, he's willing to do stupid shit to get the attention he wants. All of his bad antics always feel like.... they come from less of a place of horny lust and more from a place of....... fear?

Like when he does the shit around the camping trip and his other sketchy actions, it always feels like a way to say "please be with me in this thing, this is what guys do, right?" like if he hits his mark well enough, he'll unlock some happiness he hasn't figured out yet.

but it's all so SCRIPTED! like when does Yosuke go off the deep end? when there's a script he thinks he has to hit. oh, the spring camping trip can't just be a school trip, it has to be a chance to score with the ladies. oh, you can't just want to get motorcycles and hang out with your best friend, it has to be for laaaaaadies.

but as soon as you separate him from those scripts and he goes back to being him, he's.... such a fucking decent, empathetic guy. he takes in teddie and outright fights to keep him living with him. he takes the lead in the case alongside naoto. he is the first person to rope in Nanako into the group and consistently keeps her involved. and once he gets over his homophobic panic over kanji, he keeps fukcing trying to wingman for kanji, even if kanji would prefer he didn't. and that feels genuine! kanji reacts to it like a cat in a bath, but more than once, yosuke prodding kanji for his taste in boys (and girls and naoto) feels like real interest, not a set up for a punchline. and I've remarked before that he's REALLY decent to naoto re: gender, esp in comparison to the rest of the game, which was STUNNING.

and then he's like "OH SHIT i need to be more of a Dude's Dude" and he morphs into an asshole for a day. then he snaps right back.

the out of universe explanations are clear, i'm not a dumbass. but I am choosing to kill the fucking author and examine what all this genuinely means for the character.

and the guy who attaches himself the MC's hip, and who's growth thru his bullshit is linked to the MC, and who cries around the MC and who accepts a long lingering hug and lets not forget if you roleplay wanting to date him, he's happy.

Maybe in the future this will change, but for the Yosuke of now, in the moment, it feels like his expectations of what Guys And Girls are supposed to be gets in his way of forming stronger relationships (which, again, is why the Naoto thing intrigues me). It feels like he thinks he's supposed to want to date Chie, but when he seeks out intimacy that veers into the romantic, it's not with girls.

ANYWAY I THINK YOSUKE'S GAY, but his closet is sadly made of knives, and it cuts him as he tries to keep himself contorted into the correct shape to keep hidden.

best case scenario is him hanging around the MC until he trips happily into the relationship he wants, built brick by brick until the plausible deniability is left out in the cold

worst case is he's going to get married at 20 and make some poor woman abjectly fucking miserable until they're divorced.

phew okay, all that felt like an exorcism, i feel better now

#Anonymous #yosuke hanamura #p4 #persona liveblog

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