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Literary Criticism, Part II
Jul. 23rd, 2025 10:16 pmI’ve been thinking about this again lately, partly because of the remake (and what are they going to do, call it Persona 4 Golden Xtreme? That’s a kiwami joke btw). And also because I realized that if someone’s literary reading skills are so poor, then just dunking on them isn’t too productive. So rolls up sleeves part 2. It will be a lot shorter than Part 1, mostly because I’m doing a Critical Lenses 101 with some minimal ‘this is how it relates to Persona 4’.
I will also note this has nothing to do with people who want Kanji to be straight and Naoto to be cis for the purposes of genderfuckery and nonconformity which are awesome and valid reasons—unless you’re going around and telling people that they’re not allowed to read a text differently from you. That’s not only not going to happen, because everyone’s going to come out of a text with a slightly different reading due to individual differences: socio-economic class, gender, sexuality, etc, and going to make you miserable because your game of whack-a-mole of different readings will never be done, but also, the act of telling people they’re existing wrong being bad is maybe one of the key Persona 4 themes, so don’t? I’ve run into that a couple of times, but for the most part, it’s people bemoaning the existence of gender or sexual minorities within their line of sight. Which, valid reading within one interpretive lens, but it is the blandest of the bland and not just because they think it’s the only correct interpretation, when it’s more of the sorta default?
Lenses are the particular way we’ve chosen to view the text. Sending us back in history, yeah, the main lens was cisheteronormative and also author’s intent. In several cases, this involved reading every single piece of correspondence written by an author. If they hadn’t said something definitive about the point in question, it was your duty to either ignore it or argue about how some unrelated line in an interview could be stretched to apply. With the advent of the theory Death of the Author, you could just read the text and let it stand on its own without needing to know anything about the author outside the work. (I’d also argue a lot of people also like to engage in psychoanalytic or Freudian criticism these days, because everyone’s so sure about what a text reveals about the author...and while, such as with Hashino, especially combined with outside statements patterns between works might reveal something, I feel it’s safe to say that it is vastly overapplied). Other lenses you may have heard of are Marxist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory...which I hadn’t actually realized was a literary critical lens because it hadn’t been taught while I was in school, and in which case the hyperbolics against it comes off looking even less informed, because lenses are not meant to show you the capital-T Platonian Truth. Then again, I forget that for some people critical thinking is the enemy, because it lets you evaluate for yourself rather than following exactly what you’ve been told to do.
Unless you and someone else are using the same lens for a text, arguing about how “you’re reading the text wrong” is pointless. If the other person is reading in a lens that decenters the author, then arguing about how “the author said x on twitter” is useless. (And things get convoluted even if you do care about what the author says in multi-creator works, such as a game—if the writers, the voice actors, etc all were on board with a romanceable Yosuke storyline and the director said no, who gets priority?) If you’re both arguing from within the same lens, you can then look at how a particular piece of the text is better or worse for a particular reading through that lens.
I also don’t expect a lot of the people to care, mostly because a lot of the people making the argument come off like homophobic, biphobic, and/or transphobic jerks, but the idea that gay or trans stories aren’t deep, worth a deeper look, and are just shallow surface level *aesthetic~* that can be used for any story just as set dressing especially when mainly applied to either give the relief mentioned in the last chapter that “oh, phew, I’m not trans after all” or “oh, phew, I’m not gay after all” or to set up for jokes is deeply insulting. I don’t care if you have a different critical lens, but it is yours, and it is common, but it is not universal. Let me have mine.
(I also am going to English Nerd here and say that maybe headcanons are extensions of our favorite critical lens of reading applied with various degrees of evidence to back them up, even when we don’t necessarily realize that ourselves, but. I’d probably need a lot more research to explain that particular theory and I’ve only seen one other academic thing even dive into headcanons and how they relate to this. Let me know if you have more; I’m actually really curious how that would get defined. Especially if there’s something in Transformative Works and Cultures [the Ao3 published peer-reviewed academic journal] or something.)
