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Housemate.Dave is playing Persona 4. Category: Games I Should Never, Ever Play, by the looks of things.

In addition to it being creepy in ways that might be problematic for me, he was playing for over an hour and his interaction with the game had amounted to occasionally making dialogue choices, and later one of the characters was at risk of wetting his pants. It took over two hours to get to the first fight scene.

Also, the English-language voice acting is hideously bad, especially since the characters' names are still Japanese and some of the voice actors have trouble pronouncing them...

I, today, am watching Jeeves and Wooster (note for people as likely to find this fact as nifty as I do: the Pirate Bay version has it with subtitles for the hearing impaired), practicing some music (I learned to play tonic triad scales in C on the piano, from Chas, and am working on guitar scales as well), and in general staying calm.

Michael Jackson has died. This makes me a little sad, but in some ways a little relieved, I think, because at least people will leave him alone now, and he will be beyond his problems.

I've always felt sorry for him. I've never really believed he did the bad things he was accused of, to be honest; I don't think it was in him. He was obsessed with children, yes, but not in that way - it seemed more like he'd been deprived of any kind of real childhood himself, and was forever trying to recapture it. Hence Neverland. Hell, hence Moonwalker.

The surgery, the obsessions, the general bizarre behaviour - he was a man in desperate need of therapy and possibly psychiatric help, and it broke my heart that no-one ever seemed willing to make that intervention. He was rich and famous and somehow that meant that people just let things slide no matter what. Until his talent was largely wasted and his reputation destroyed. If he did do the things he was accused of doing... he still needed help, too, because I don't at all believe he could have done that and known better. He was an incredibly damaged person.

It's a bit like Elvis, in some ways. That boy needed an intervention, too, but nobody was willing to step in and up.

So, that's that. Not least because I got distracted. I went and looked for Jeeves and Wooster fic, and came across one of my pettest of pet hates: people not understanding old money. Even people who've otherwise tried hard on their Britishisms, even people who are British, get this stuff wrong, and it drives me mildly nuts.

In this instance, the author's error was referring to "two ten-bob notes" as being equal to "twenty pounds". Which, no. A bob is a shilling. A ten-bob note is ten shillings. Two ten-bob notes is twenty shillings, or one pound. The slang term for a pound is a quid, but that's largely a lower-class term. (And, to cover another error I've seen on many occasions: a guinea is one pound one shilling, or twenty-one shillings.) A crown is five shillings, a half-crown is two shillings sixpence, or two-and-six. Tuppence is two pence, I've even seen someone get that wrong. There are twelve pence to the shilling.

Other than that, I liked it, mind you.

I shall have to read some of the books. I've long meant to, and Project Gutenberg has at least some of them.
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From:[personal profile] eisen
Date: June 26th, 2009 01:30 pm (UTC)
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Short version! Your initial assessment of the game is correct: The game is not very interested in providing a safe space, and it shows, and I would recommend it to fans of JRPGS and the Persona series specifically, but not without a lot of caveats, and not to many other people outside those categories, because I do not think they should inflict some of this stuff on themselves unless they, like me, were prepared for it beforehand and believe they can cope with that anyway.


Longer version! (Read at your own discretion; there shouldn't be anything triggery in the following, but I'd rather err on the side of caution with this game. Also, I get angry.) Text whited out; highlight to read.

P4 has subject matter you should definitely avoid for fear of triggering yourself. It's a v. v. explicit game - and with some very uncomfortable situations that, while intended to be so, aren't any less uncomfortable. A lot of the boss fights essentially strip the characters down till they're psychically naked - and yes, the metaphor is apt - and the game doesn't pretend the consequences of that are any less discomfiting than they ought to be. (Extremely late in the game, a villain the main characters have to confront turns out to be a serial rapist.)

Also, Yosuke (the one who was so terrified he nearly pissed his pants) is kind of a giant asshole who likes to humiliate his friends for his own amusement, which gets kind of old fast and easily glides into potential triggery territory at certain points, and he's a giant homophobe because he's so goddamn closeted. (I like Yosuke as a character, but he's a jerk, and P4 fandom is full of Yosuke apologists, and it annoys me because he really is such a bastard and the game doesn't excuse his behavior, so why the fandom??? But I digress.)

Prooobably playing P4 for just the battles is a bad idea, at least in the beginning. It has a bazillion hours of plot to go along with the amazing battle engine it runs on inside the Midnight Channel - comes from the game engine's architectural history. It's a refinement and expansion on the P3 game engine, which was heavily influenced by Japanese dating-sim games, with multiple relationship routes and hours and hours of interaction feeding into each - and that's not even counting the actual plot of the story, which rivals any major long-form fictional story for scope and depth. (And it does expect you to go through that stuff - without it, you'll have no ability to access certain parts of the dungeon crawl sections.)

Also, do not talk to me about the game's treatment of trans people. Do not talk to me about this, because as [journalfen.net profile] persona on Journalfen knows, I will EAT SOMEONE'S FACE, I get so pissed off about it. Obviously, I like the game, which is why this infuriates me, because it is such a violation of trans people's - trans men's, in particular - dignity and safety. argh brb face-eating >:(

I really do love the game, and its characters - I wouldn't have an icon of it if I didn't - but that just makes the ways it screws up even more frustrating.
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From:[personal profile] sami
Date: June 26th, 2009 01:36 pm (UTC)
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Hmm. Thank you for that, actually, because that's actually incredibly important and useful information for me - now I know I need not to be around when Dave's playing. (This is more important than you might think, because of the layout of our house; upstairs are bedrooms and the bathroom, downstairs we have a main room we all share as primary living space. Dave is playing on a very large TV down here. Avoiding whatever's on TV takes conscious choice/effort in this house.)

I was aware of the social game stuff, because I saw bits of P3, but it's reallytruly not my kind of game for that reason. I would rather it be one or the other, because if it's not, then my fun battle game is getting interrupted by long talky bits, or my fun relationship game is getting interrupted by fighty bits.

I'm now curious about how trans people fit into this, but... I won't ask.
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From:[personal profile] eisen
Date: June 26th, 2009 01:39 pm (UTC)
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You're welcome! Glad I could help. (I am in fact summoned to tl;dr whenever P4 comes up, so.)

I don't have the mental capacity to explain right now, but I'll point out one of the dialogue options for getting the "romantic" option with the trans boy character is "I like you when you're acting more like a girl." And leave it at that.

face eating!
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From:[personal profile] luludi
Date: June 26th, 2009 10:02 pm (UTC)
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I completely agree with your thoughts on Michael Jackson. You said it better than I probably could. To be so young and have so much money, to be loved by everyone but the people he really wanted to love him (and, as a result, probably harbored a lot of self-hatred), the deprivation of any real childhood... if you add it all up, it isn't difficult to see why he ended up on the path he did, and I think what scares people and causes them to make jokes is because they know it could have happened to any one of us. It also isn't difficult to see how he could easily become a target for those kinds of allegations... people thought he was weird, strange, a "freak", but he was a freak with a whole lot of money and a reputation that he needed to protect, which many people probably used against him to line their pockets along the way. To think that those people were the only ones to take advantage of him would be a mistake. Unfortunately, in America, you're guilty until proven innocent once charges are made, and those particular charges carried such a weight as to drag him down for the rest of his life. Yes, he was strange, we all are in some way, some more so than others, but that does not automatically equal criminal or illicit behavior... it doesn't make you a child molester any more than being gay makes you one (something a lot of people used to think).

I am glad he is far away from all of that now, the financial problems and the constant scrutiny and chaos, but I am so sad for his children. I worry for them and I hope they won't be split up or made to bear the same suffering that their father did because of who he was and the choices he made that people didn't understand. I hope that, least of all, the world remembers that beyond who their father was and whatever our opinions are of him, three children lost their Dad and they deserve our respect, our sympathy, and our love.
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