Superheroes After All

   Comic Books continue to develop and mature as a medium each year.
If not for the talents of an incredibly skilled and diverse group of creators, we could never have reached where we're at right now. Even so, it's kind of been the giant elephant with a spitcurl in the room that for better or worse, Superheroes are here to stay.

   To avoid namedropping stuff this early into a Saturday Article, let me just state:
Even today, over 75 years after the dawn of the first Superman comic, there is still a fascination with Superheroes in every part of the world. Japan has its super-popular Henshin heroes, America has the classic icons still present today and everywhere else in the world lends its take on the concept.

   Yeah, there are people ardently opposed to the idea of Superhero comics, too. Oddly enough, those sorts of people (especially creators) also help the fascination with Superheroes continue, because they're usually the ones willing to think critically about them first.

   What is it, specifically, about the idea of costumed heroes that has then lasted for generations?
When that question was asked in the infancy of Comic Books as a medium, I think the answer might have been a desire to see heroes who were heroic and villains that were evil.

   Yet today that answer wouldn't hold up; that kind of black-and-white worldview died around the same time Jason Todd did, end of an age so to speak. We’re in a time now when most Superhero comics – especially creator owned books have started going through some great lengths to make their heroes more fallible and some of their villains more pious and noble.

   Batman is the good guy and The Joker is the badguy. We know that by way of how both characters operate in relation to each other. In earlier comics, that relationship had commonly been enough.
The question that writers are willing to pose now are things like whether or not a hero creates his own circumstances, his own villains. Could the continued existence of one or the other even be considered a good thing for Gotham City?

   More common, creators are starting to examine what the effect of people with superpowers existing in the ‘real world’ actually might be. Works like this can be placed all over the scale of cynicism versus optimism. That concept is also fairly new - outside of outright parody or pastiche, it wasn't something that commonly came up in Silver and Golden Age comics.

    As we've allowed our heroes to age, we're more willing to question them and question what they represent. Just as some characters hold up poorly to scrutiny, some are just as strong as others; a testament to the strength of the Superhero in the minds of pop culture aficionados.

   While they've in turn aged and yet stayed eternally young (besides some Elseworlds stories!)
The concept has changed as the same happened to the world and our culture.
At this point, it doesn't really matter what kind of perosn you are, there’s probably a story about folks in tights punching each other that suits your personality and worldview.

   Some people take to The Boys as if it were the only valid critique of Superheroes, depicting them all as deranged and sex crazed psychopaths above the law. Other people might see The Watchmen as the sort of ur-example of a Superhero deconstruction, so powerful that it's tone affected comics for almost twenty years after its release.

   On the opposite end towards the optimistic side, you have people willing to accept that
a story like Kurt Busiek's Astro City or All-Star Superman can not only exist in the same market that spawned The Boys but that all of those takes on the concept might be just as valid as the others.

   Superheroes have now been around almost as long as the, if nothing else, admirable works of J.R.R. Tolkien and have decidedly the same cultural impact. People are as used to the concept
of Superheroes as they are the kind of journey and mythology that Tolkien created in The Hobbit.

   Perhaps our costumed crimefighters are even stronger still than the works of Western Epic Fantasy.
See - might main problem with J.R.R. Tolkien is that every work that followed was beholden to the 'rules' he laid out. Sure, some stories have gone in different directions but the most popular examples and what most people tout as inspiration always follow that groundwork he laid out.
 
   Superhero stories aren't set to anything resembling that, people are as used to the concept now as any of the worlds in Tolkiens writings. When a creator wants to do something new with that, they don't have to waste time introducing or explaining things that people already understand.

   The reason for that strength - and another reason for our fascination might be the absense of any particular Superhero 'canon'. It's not just understood - it's accepted that not all Superhero stories are going to follow a mythos similar to Superman or any other existing characters.
When your cultural icon is as easy to identify and understand as Superman is, anyone is free to put their own spin on things.

  I'd never discount the his contributions to the medium, but even Alan Moore is a quite famous detractor of the Superhero. Very recently he was quoted as essentially saying the genre is for emotionally stunted adults, but he's also not reading any of the genre-comics that have been released in the last decade.

   So even when old-wizard-grandpa Alan Moore says it, I can't agree with it. Dozens of other writers have sense weighed in on his quote, some of them even agreed. My take away from it isn't so much about the statement, but more of what it implies. Even negatively, Alan Moore is still fascinated with Superheroes as a concept. I don't doubt for a minute he wants to know how they continue to persist even though by all rights pop-culture should have outgrown them decades ago.

Kamala Khan

   Maybe it's because a Superhero can be anyone - no one is told they can't be a Superhero based on the color of their skin, their religion, their gender identity or anything else. Comics now are becoming more diverse every year and it's a very welcome change. Just like anyone can be a Superhero, so can any story be written as a Superhero story.

   This is a bit of a double edged sword. Even as strong as the concept is, it's led to a lot of alternate stories getting pushed out of the comic market before they could really make their mark.
Writers like Alan Moore are disgruntled and continue to stew about it not because the medium itself, but how the industry has affected that medium. Fortunately, alternate publishing companies are starting to spring up almost every week, offering a wider variety of titles than there ever has been.

  In other words, there’s starting to be competition. Writers, artists, readers have finally discovered that while Superheroes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, other types of stories can be supported strongly by the medium.

  Some of the most popular comics in recent years have had nothing to do with bastions of truth, justice and the American way and that’s an absolutely fantastic thing.
When the medium is allowed to grow more, like fiction and film before it, the stories people create with Comic Books can only in turn become more complex.

   Recently, there’s even been a trend of ‘the big two’ (Marvel/DC) to branch out their types of stories more. I’ve been on a bit of a Matt Fraction kick lately so I’ll go ahead and mention that he’s one of the most notable creators for doing publisher-owned books as well as independent comics.
While he wrote Hawkeye, which itself is incredibly notable for having a massive effect on comics lately, he's also a bit of an independent comic giant.

   His comic Casanova is a good example of comics being able to tell spectacular adventure stories that aren’t about Superheroes. If you haven’t read it, Casanova plays out like some sort of intergalactic James Bond story only if the author was inspired by psychedelics.

   Matt Fraction had tied the book closer to spy fiction stories like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and sci-fi from the 60’s and 70’s than he did Superheroes, while still managing to fill the book with larger than life characters and events.

  Yet those very same tropes and elements Matt Fraction uses in Casanova have also been sort of co-opted by Superhero comics as well. Marvel has their ubiquitous super-spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. which has itself recently become the subject of a TV series. DC has Cadmus and Checkmate and dozens of these, all borrowing elements from popular spy fiction and espionage tales that were written in the last several decades.

  DC has even been willing to take it further lately with the announcement that one of their most popular characters, Dick Grayson (Nightwing/The original Robin) is going to be going all shaken-not-stirred on readers when he goes from Superhero to Super-Spy in his new series.

  Superheroes have maintained for the last seventy-five years in part to their ability to permeate almost all avenues of not only genre fiction, but the entirety of fiction itself.
Different authors have been giving us new takes on the same established concepts for years, each other twisting it or looking at it from a wholly separate angle than the ones before.
Just like a comic fan might prefer one book over the other, so too is each creators take on the concept just as valid as any other.

 There’s no established Superhero ‘canon’ between companies on what makes an acceptable story like with what people expect from something like Epic Fantasy.
As an example, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the thirties, in a way it’s a contemporary work of the Siegel and Shusters earliest Superman comics.

   Yet despite the time frame they’ve both been allowed with, The Hobbit almost codified the entire genre of Western Fantasy. When someone picks up a book with the most lointclothed and armored motherfucker on the cover with a sword above his head and maybe the grimmest title they’ve ever heard of plastered across it, they still expect a formula similar to The Hobbit just from the title alone.

   Being able to defy the readers expectations; that right there is what I think the fascination with Superheroes is really all about. That the next time I pick up a new series, it could be absolutely perfect and tailored specifically to me; or that it could use devices I am familiar with to set up something new or deconstruct what already exists.

  This isn’t about individual characters or adventures, but how Superhero comics – and if you were to look at it, the medium entirely, is participated  At some point writers start thinking they know and understand what the genre can offer, once things start becoming stale and old someone who’s unafraid of deconstructing things comes along.

   Sure, Superhero comics could be juvenile; in some cases they are. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a better future for the genre waiting for the day it can break out of juvenile fascination and the tired boys club mentality that’s seemingly grasped hold of the entire industry.
We’re fascinated by Superheroes, because as our society changes, so do they.

You Should Be Reading: Hawkeye

   Personally, I'm not the kind of comic book fan that could sincerely start an article out with something like "Hello, True Believers!"
I guess that kind of inoculates me from ever having to write for any of the major comic book blogs.
I haven't really been that particular breed of comic fan, the kind who adheres to mostly superhero comics and is totally baited out by any books with his favorite characters, since I was a little kid.

   Don't get me wrong: I don't read comics, I completely devour them. It doesn't matter if the book is Sweet Tooth or the most recent run on Batman by Scott Snyder. I love the art form itself, I love watching stories change and take new shapes as they're retold and re imagined, too.

   I never grew 'out' of superhero comics, maybe like Alan Moore before he decided he hated everyone, I just wanted to see them actually get intelligent. Stop pandering, stop writing stories for the guy who's favorite take on Superman was played by Christopher Reeve or drawn by John Byrne.

   There's no doubt though that in regards to even the most tight-wearing motherfuckers, that specifically superhero storylines have become deeper and more complex.
Sure; it has taken them a long time to catch up with indie comics and alt-fiction kind of stuff, but what I started noticing is that complex almost never translated to being smarter.

   We can see the ultimate distillation of our standard dumb superhero tropes in both Marvel Studios' pictures and the very best of Christopher Nolan's faux-deconstructions of the Batman mythos.
Bigger fights, more fights, explosions, better actors - but it's the same 'will I or wont I continue to be a superhero' and 'do they save the love interest or go after the villain?' stories. This gets repeated over and over again until I want to drag a writer out of their cubicle and into the street.

   When you examine a lot of comic book characters especially superheroes, they kind of start to fall apart. Batman doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, so we happily turn pages and never ask for anything more from the character until someone finally delivers it.

   Even the industry has massive shortcomings, with comic companies focusing even more on massive events and taglines like "Everything changes here!" that have been getting used and re-used since comic book writers discovered that a tagline alone could sell a book in the sixties.
You want to complain about new articles with clickbait headlines? Fuck you, try being a comic fan.

  The Big Two are especially smart enough to know that the average Comic-Fan will buy just about anything that has their favorite character on the cover or if it says "Jim Lee" in the bottom corner.
Even if that character might only show up for a single page, even if that artist draws the same bodybuilder and supermodel physiques on everyone, forever.

   For every comic we get like Casanova there are ten Savage Hawkman comics, for every illustrator like Rafael Grampa that can't get a solo book to save his life, there's dudes like Rob Liefield who somehow continue to find work despite being human punchlines.

  This edition of You Should Be Reading focuses on one of those aforementioned good books.
This is about the story of what Clint Barton does on his days off.

  Hawkeye is a book that takes averting and deconstructing superhero tropes to the next level.
Why it works is because it's not a book about a guy who is a superhero, it's a book about a guy who sometimes wears a costume and gets way in over his head.

   Matt Fraction and David Aja spearhead the book - with other artists stepping in occasionally to fulfill guest art duties for one of the best writer/artist teams in the industry right now.
Hawkeye looks at the character of Clint Barton in a way that other comics haven't ever really done before, putting the man before the costume.

  I've been asked before by friends what they should read if they like superheroes, but don't tend to usually read superhero books. They want the character studies done on people larger than life, with most of the usual tedium cut out.

   Hawkeye is through and through, that book. What I like about it is that in just the first issue it reminded me that cape stories don't need a massive event or world ending cataclysm to make characters shine. Sometimes it's just the feeling that they need to do good - to save a dog, protect a kid on the street.

   By taking the book away from the rest of the glitzy and glamorous Marvel Universe and down to dirty streets, we get our tale in a way that's novel and entertaining without being a super hyped-up gritty deconstruction.

   Hawkeye's simple premise is showcase the life of Clint Barton when he's not saving the world.
Matt Fraction spares no thought in showing us that just because you've got a costume and one of your friends is the Norse god of Thunder, that you aren't necessarily a bit of a broken person.
This book wouldn't work if Clint Barton was a fully-functional individual, so instead it revels in his various shortcomings.

   Clint Barton is constantly pulled between running away and helping people, and that's sort of what gets him into every mess in the series - this is a guy who might be as much of a hero as he is addicted to thrill. Matt Fraction asks if we know what kind of superhero would start a fistfight in the middle of a strip club, and shows us exactly what kind of superhero that is.

   As this book is called Hawkeye, it's not just about Clint Barton, but Kate Bishop too.
Kate Bishop held the role of Hawkeye during her teenage years and a costume that looked like a cross between how he looked in the Ultimate universe and his classic costume.
Kate operates as a foil for Clint in just about every issue, and the two bounce off of eachother like brother and sister in a way that's played expertly by Matt Fraction.

   Kate and Clint have one of the few May and December platonic relationships in a comic that's not creepy as hell, even if Kate's not drawn like she's a teenager.
She's most commonly the level-headed one compared to Clint's look before you leap "Captain America called me once!" attitude.  Before you notice it, the two are starting to rely on each other
like the best buddy-cop duo's envisioned, and the book starts becoming as much a story about Kate Bishop as it is anyone else.

                                                 
   In a way, Hawkeye harkens back to the earliest Spider-Man comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko,
yet Matt Fraction still pulls from a larger body of works than just comic books. Fraction himself is one of the few comic writers I'd be willing to actually call an artist, he knows you don't get anywhere writing Iron-Man and just drawing inspiration from earlier Iron-Man comics.

  Tons of other comic writers drop the ball and it shows. I've written about this before, but mostly as it applies to videogames - really, it applies to every form of art. That anti-intellectual 'only write what the reader knows' philosophy is everywhere but it may be the most damaging to comic books.

  Fraction brings that touch to every book he works on but besides his own project Casanova, I think it comes through the most in Hawkeye. This book exists in a part of the Marvel Universe where 60's fashions are still sometimes in vogue. If it had a soundtrack it would be Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. Hawkeye is a 70's crime movie with a French touch if it existed only in the head of Guy Richie.

  Hawkeye is just as grounded and as much of a cynical black-comedy as Guy Richie's movies. In between gags that flow naturally as a part of the story and never feel forced, or fight scene that evolve out of situations that seem real enough someone like Clint Barton may be dumb enough to start them, the book isn't afraid to let you get attached to people other than the leads.

  This isn't a guy with a closed circle of friends like Peter Parker or Tony Stark, the people Clint knows drop in and out of his life, old faces with new ones. There's a certain (almost melancholy) mood to the life of Clint Barton as he struggles to just not be noticed one day at a time.
  
   David Aja's art, along with the rest of the fill-in artists, helps solidify that mood. Clint might live in
Manhattan but it’s not the gleaming metropolis that The Fantastic Four live in, or the backdrop for a fight scene like it exists in most other Marvel books. Clint’s apartment is a homely, small place in a larger decades old building that looks like it’d be the kind of place you’d see utilized in a movie like Serpico.

  Which makes sense, you know? If you were a guy with no superpowers who wanted to have a semi normal life when your day job is hanging out with SHIELD wouldn’t you want to live in a place as unassuming as possible?

  That’s sort of Clint Barton’s problem. In trying to live as standard a life as a Superhero possibly can, let alone one without a real secret identify (“I’m an avenger” He says, stepping out of a ruined building to a squad of police) he seems almost indebted to the world’s problems. As the people in his apartment building get mixed up with the most hilarious eastern-european crime movie caricatures I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction before, He takes it on his own shoulders to solve their problems.

   Why that works so well as a Superhero story without costumes or capes is that those circumstances continuall become larger and larger. At the point Clint Barton knows he's finally in over his head, it's much too far to back out.

  That idea is totally riffed from indie comics in a way that is spectacularly crafty.
Fraction takes us to some of the same places indie darling Kick-Ass does, without the overbearing violence and problematic elements.

  Where Kick-Ass wants to make your stomach churn while you watch protagonists who are too dumb to back out of what they've gotten themselves into, Hawkeye takes a different approach.
Other writers might even be able to take a page from it; give us human characters, and give them reasons to continue to do the things they do.

   Fraction isn't writing Hawkeye like a traditional superhero book and Aja definitely is going through great lengths to ensure that the book doesn't look like one either.
In many ways, Hawkeye could be seen as Marvel taking a shot at making an indie comic set in its main universe of stories.

    With the success that Hawkeye has rightfully earned, that effect is starting to take hold.
There's been kind of an effect lately of more alternative style artists starting to catch on in the Marvel hierarchy, like Francesco Francavilla and Javier Pulido. If that is because of what Fraction and Aja have done with Hawkeye, well then that's a good point for both of them to have in their court.

    What the book is most successful with and thank god we're starting to see it in mainstream comics more, is that Hawkeye doesn't have 'required reading'. You don't need to know who Hawkeye is before reading this book. I'd go so far as to say that it's a book perfect for people that aren't fans of mainstream comics, either.

   Of course, Fraction's biggest skill has been creating stories that can be enjoyed as standalone or as part of a larger framework. Kind of like a Grant Morrison if he wrote indie comics and didn't do a bunch of psychedelics.
  

Seasoned comics fans will catch things like Black Widow wearing a dress based on her classic 60's costume, whereas people who aren't familiar with it will just gloss over it because its inclusion is just a natural part of a story. We're prepared for some older iconography by the style of the issues before it shows up. 

  I want to see more comics like Hawkeye. Ones written with comic fans in mind, but not necessarily FOR comic fans. That’s the classic barrier for entry with mainstream comics: when you have six fucking Crisis On Infinite Readership Numbers going on and nobody wants to read comics because they don’t know which Robin died ten years ago or oh thanks-for-rebooting-canon-and-somehow-making-it-more-impenetrable happens.

   Matt Fraction gets it with Hawkeye, he shows a firm understanding of how to embrace a characters history while not entirely making the entire book for people who read the issue of Ghost Rider where Hawkeye worked as a ranch hand in the 80’s after a disgraced fall from The Avengers.

   Hawkeye’s going to be good if you want a Superhero comic that can’t be defined as ‘a mindless fun romp’ every issue and if you’re not too stuck on seeing the same battles played out over and over again. If this is the direction that the Marvel Universe is heading in, I’m all for it.
Let’s have more books like it Marvel, and start sending the message that it doesn’t always take an angry old British dude to make comics grow up.

Persona!

WARNING: This contains spoilers for Persona 4!

  Persona 4 is a curious game. I don't doubt the intentions of the writers might have been good; but it's a good example of good intentions being hampered by how something actually turned out.
The plot of the game is thus: Every night on a rainy day, a mysterious channel can be watched on TV, called the Midnight Channel by the characters in the game. Usually the programming is a little more than TVY-7, and anyone who gets seen on the midnight channel is usually dead shortly thereafter.
    What kickstarts this all into motion is the main party discovering they can enter the world of the midnight channel by 'entering' a television. The worlds held within the Midnight Channel are often dark reflections of the character 'trapped' there's inner psyche, or, if you want to call it that, Persona.
    The plot of the game is structured almost like a televised murder drama, carrying forward on a day-to-day basis mostly similar to the structure that was introduced in Persona 3.
Each arc is usually spent trying to balance grinding characters in The Midnight Channel while balancing social duties, made a little bit more stressful because there are immediate chances for failure if you aren't able to save someone in time.
     

    Usually, saving someone involves some invested storytelling detailing how they're not necessarily who they choose to be. The interactions follow a very simple format: usually, as soon as someone is shown on the midnight channel, the rest of the school talks about it during the days following. Usually, it's to the tone of 'x person can't possibly be a miserable self loathing piece of shit' which I guess if one of my friends appeared naked on TV saying they hated everyone, I probably wouldn't believe it either.
I'd like to think my friends know me well enough that if it was me, they'd probably just shrug their shoulders.
   You can tell from most of these scenes that the planners behind the game wanted it as a way to showcase character development, and reveal some 'inner truth's' about the rest of the cast so that the player might feel closer to them.
   Persona 4 is pretty evident of one of the biggest phenomena that happens not just in videogames, but comic books too. The story and it's interactions hold up and present perfectly, as long as they exist examined. What's bad about the way Persona 4 is generally plotted, and the way all of the interactions happen, is that the second they're scrutinized they begin to fall apart, and even in some cases, become problematic.
   The characters of Kanji Tatsumi and Naoto Shirogane have been pretty divisive. On one hand, both characters fall into a paradigm that the internet has taken to as being "Kawaii as fuckin' hell"
Kanji is even one of my favorite characters in the game; despite the fact that the entire cast is Goofy As Hell (if this we're a movie, it would be An Extremely Goofy Movie)

   Kanji's trademark macho-boisterousness feels the right kind of out of place with everyone else's Anime Teen act of either being mopey as hell or completely loud and obnoxious, talkin to you Satonaka.
   His character arc is essentially that the macho-tough-guy facade is a bit of a put on. Deep down,     Kanji enjoys traditionally 'feminine' things like sewing and stuffed animals.
Indeed, most of Kanji's storyline is spent juxtaposing his macho exterior with his more sensitive nature. It all comes to head when Kanji Tatsumi is eventually the next person shown on the midnight channel - and the next victim.

   Kanji's dungeon takes place in a steamy bathhouse, and in his midnight channel appearances he's all nude and oily like a Hakan cosplayer without the red greasepaint.  
Kanji's story is that he's repressing his true nature - much like the other characters in the game.
How this is presented though, is entirely unique to Kanji - he's the only character who's psychosis is so linked to sexuality and seemingly sexual expression, even more than another character who's inner self has to deal with the prevalence of gender, Naoto Shirogane.
   Yet even when Kanji's story is completed, he seemingly reverts to the exact same character he was before. That's actually kind of a problem with almost everybody in the game, really - but Kanji's magnifies it because of the subject matter of his inner Persona.
   The game's message becomes perverted when you start to examine it closely and scrutinize it; it slowly erodes and becomes a reflection of what the developers intended.
Like a bad aesop on a TV sitcom, the message almost becomes that it's better to keep who you really are hidden and pushed away, because your friends may not like the 'real' you.
    Looking at the reaction of the cast to Yosuke's true Persona - that he's a bit of a self-hating jerk with a bit of a superiority complex writes it on the wall pretty effectively, yet they react favorably to other characters 'real' selves.
    Dang, that's pretty messed up! You can use the term problematic or whatever, but the reason I chose Kanji to make the observation was not just his role as my favorite character, but again the fact that he's one of the few characters who's Persona is tied into a concept of sexual identity, making the aesop of the game a little more damned.
    Above all else, that inconsistency between the tone of the game and the writing of the game is what
continues to leverage games like Persona 4 more towards the 'good videogame writing' category, and why I think no matter how many deep concepts the developers throw in there, we're still stuck in a world where the best videogame writing is still worse than daytime television.
     Kanji's change isn't ever really reflected at all besides him being more open to announce that he likes things that are traditionally non-masculine, but who he is as a character never changes.
Persona 4 never even goes to a length to clarify his sexuality - any time it's brought up it's usually for the point of making other characters uncomfortable or the punchline for a joke.
What's the deal with that, huh? The developers chalked it up to 'cultural differences' but I don't think anyone buys that for a second.
  

SMT and Me (Persona)

The Cast of Persona 3

   Persona 3 was my first experience with that particular satellite of the Shin Megami Tensei series. While I’d had a ton of experience with the main parts of the series, having played the first two SMT games and gorged myself on reading about Nocturne; noticing that more than playing games the lot of us probably spend more time reading about games.

    In my gorging on the series ‘lore’ if you want to call it that, I eventually tumbled to the much more organized and tidy corner, which was of course Persona.
Initially writing off the first game as a dismal wreck (I’ve still yet to play it) from hearing about the awful localization job done on it; there was still this gnawing desire to try out the rest of the series.

    In what I can only describe as a leap of faith I decided to grab the FES version of Persona 3 online. Certainly I’d had some other purchase lined out in advance, I tend to never impulse order shit off of Amazon, but I remember the game being a price way lower than I’ve ever seen featured before.

   Among my prior experience with JRPG’s were the regulars – pretty men, dragonball-ass-lookin-warrior dudes and folks that wear black lipstick on their upper lip (Thanks, Kazuma Kaneko!).
Persona still represented something I wasn’t entirely used to.

  Let me be sure to recommend the games if you've never played them. In a wealth of traditional fantasy epics in videogames, Persona may be one of the most true-to-fiction games in the 'urban fantasy' category.

   All of the games are set in different cities located in Japan, taking a page from Detective Comics and envisioning them as either real places or fictionalized hodgepodges of various culture centers in the country. In all of these cases, there's some sort of Paranormal occurence that only the plot-important characters know about.

   While still in the same series, I’d like to note that Persona 2 and Persona 3 are practically apples and oranges. Much like apples and oranges are both fruit, the two games have a lot in common in the way of setting. Yet both are set wildly apart by their tone, older games in the series tend to deal with more mature subject matter like YA novels. The later games drift into videogame melodrama category a bit more, though from what I can tell they also tend to feature a cast that skews towards the younger cats.

   For a series featuring mainly Anime Teens as the leads, it’s a fucking huge surprise when you realize that most of them aren’t whiny. Persona 3 is the game that made me think maybe it’s actually appropriate to be asking for better writing in the games we play. Probably the best part of Persona’s Social Links system is that if you can’t tolerate a character you don’t have to deal with them for most of the game.

   Most – if not all modern roleplaying games go out of their way to pad out the cast. Besides a few western examples that all tend to be more of the triple-a mega Epic kind of games, very few of them give you any freedom on who you have to interact with.

   Even fewer give you a reason directly tied with the mechanics to deal with them.
Social Links in Persona function by giving you points the more you spend time with your peers. Each one of those characters is associated with the major Arcana in the same way that the Persona the player can summon are.

   On the surface, this can just be taken as a simple way of making the player deal with the relationship aspect of the gameplay. Even if you were to focus hundreds of hours into raising and combining Persona, the only way to get the strongest one is by maxing out the relationships tied to their Arcana. That’s fucking cool as hell because it means the player doesn’t just have to deal with ascending through the dungeon in the game, but also managing time spent among school activities and doing things with friends. Nobody strengthens relationships by brushing people off after all, even if a fitting excuse to be a prick would be saving the world.

   What’s most interesting to examine about Persona 3, and really the concept of the Social Links system is that the actual story of the game presents both the strongest argument for and against its inclusion.

   The game briefs us that the core events take place in a hidden hour between 11:59 and 12:00.
During this hour, the people of the city the game takes place in are turned into coffins while they’re locked in a daze. Anyone caught outside during the midnight hour are incredibly vulnerable and hunted by the monsters called shadows.

   The player gets much more heavily invested in the tertiary characters than most games offer the attempt to. What reasons the story has for the justification of Social Links is actually negligible, what’s more important is how it presents that relationship.

   You’d expect a game that puts so much emphasis into character relationships to have some sort of failure condition. Outside of just not making enough time for people – no one is ever put in danger.
The question that arises is why include the system at all. If it’s going to directly tie to the mechanics of character progression, why have no failure option, or risk involved?

   At no point in the game’s story is one of those Social Links characters ever placed in any danger.
There’s no real way to ‘lose’ a Social Link other than simply not encountering a character, or deciding on a different route through the story.

   Rather than attempt to build any tension by making the player not only fear for the safety of others – but by putting their own choices and power at risk, the game opts to simply have the idea of Social Links be another way for the player to make progression easier.

   The route the developers opted to take is much more manageable for players as well, but seems significantly less interesting when considering other things they could have done.
ATLUS decided to pick the most videogame-y route ont op of what was most manageable, I think.
While social links are an interesting concept, i'm ultimately more curious to see what ATLUS might do with the concept of the 'social' RPG they've been working on with the Persona series.

   Pencil me in under eagerly awaiting Persona 5, I guess. A game which, so far, has promised to go to darker places than the existing Persona Games.
I don't really see a point in that.

   The Persona series is practically built on darkness – where Shin Megami Tensei prefers the outright macabre; Persona takes a more subtle approach. It's the filtering of standard interactions through a slightly distorted worldview.

   Much of the tension of Persona 4 in particular comes from the interactions with side characters and the direct supporting cast. It is the only game where you can interact with a character knowing full well if you can't rise to the challenge the game presents, they will be dead tomorrow.

    Maybe the reason I like the games so much is because of the youth of the cast is something I can actually relate to. Contrast the protagonist of a game like Final Fantasy VII with that of the Persona games, for a better example. 'Final Fantasy Teens' are pretty impossible to relate to easily because I've never saved the god damned world, or blown up a nuclear reactor. Instead, we have to wait to get through the exciting parts with those sort of games until the time the characters are allowed to become fleshed out. 

  With Persona, the cast is comprised of fairly average people. You will have a friend that is super-into sports, much like you probably did in real life. The main character of Persona 2 has friends of a wide variety of ages, which I think Is true to anyone who grew up around a small enough pool of people.

   The effect that's there; the drama the series goes for works because it's easy to relate to.
Darkness like I previously mentioned still creeps it's way into every interaction. There are things wrong in the places the game is set, whether it's the Midnight Channel in Persona 4 or the way rumors affect reality in the earlier games, they capture that feeling people get where they think they're noticing stuff the rest of the folks they know don't. That insistence to self-other so you can hold yourself up to the esteem of being the person who really knows what's going on.

   That's what endears Persona as a series to me; the setting of the games is a reality enforced upon the characters on it's stage that shapes and tempers them. Rather than going for what is traditionally prevalent in role-playing games, sometimes you can't shape the world the way you want; just like in real life. Just like we end our relationships with people we know, breaking those social links, it's common for games in the series to begin with some kind of reunion, and end with a trading of goodbyes.

-skeletons.