A researcher puts on an EOD suit, enters Mewt’s containment, and asks “Having never played P4, why is Yokuse being less homophobic a problem?”
>Having never played P4
You're one of the lucky ones
>"why is Yosuke being less homophobic a problem?”
Okay, so assuming you've played P3 (although you could trace it back to P1 honestly), Yosuke functions similarly to Junpei where they're kind of a goofy "dude" foil to you as the protag
Yosuke is introduced falling into a trash can and it's established very quickly that everyone else in the rural town that he and his family moved to like half a year ago fucking hate them because his dad manages the local Junes that got built and Junes is basically Walmart, so it's obvious why this small town full of like maybe 1k people wouldn't want a Walmart there
He's got a crush on a girl named Saki who doesn't really seem to give a shit about him either way (She does not) and after she "goes missing" he devotes himself to trying to figure out what happened to her
This involves fighting his shadow version who says he hates it in the town he lives in now, he hates the people and he thinks it's boring but he pretends like he's happy there because the alternative is being by himself and he's deathly afraid of being alone and that Saki disappearing is the best thing that's happened since he moved there because now he can pretend to be the hero as opposed to nothing he does the NO THAT'S NOT TRUE bullshit but ultimately has to accept that on some level he does feel that way and he gets his persona
That is largely the end and beginning of his "arc" as far as Shadows go
So the two of you are besties and the game continues on which allows you to learn more about him
And what you learn over the course of the next 40+ hours is that Yosuke is kind of an asshole
That's sugar coating it, honestly
He is a profound asshole in the way that an early '10s teenage boy would be an asshole
He frequently tries to look at his female friends undressing or suggests trying to, which is a hold over from P3 since Junpei is similarly perverted, but it's there
Unlike Junpei, he is insanely misogynistic in a way that doesn't even make SENSE. The only people who have been kind to him since he moved there are girls, but he belittles their efforts whenever he can and at one point just straight up goes "Girls can't get this done on their own, you need a man" which is so fucking funny because the girls in this case are as powerful as he is
Most if not all of the fatphobic jokes/comments are from him outside of the few moments where the MC can also get in on it
All of the "ew an older woman wants me gross no one wants to fuck a woman over 25" shit comes from him
He's also weirdly slut shame-y, it doesn't come up OFTEN but there's a handful of moments where he just does that
Once they get Kanji, a boy whose entire arc is about being into traditionally feminine things and not being able to be open about this because he's a boy, Yosuke also adds homophobia to the list of things he'll just do with no prompting.
He bullies Kanji regularly over being "Gay" (Kanji is not gay, it's the central point of his arc. But at the very least, he's bisexual), up to and including suggesting that the MC and him not be left alone with Kanji at any point because Kanji will try to rape them
He never lets up, even when they become "friends", he's still suggesting that Kanji is a danger to him because he could be gay. I have to stress this one because Kanji is not gay, it wouldn't be better if he WERE but my point here is the mere implication is enough for Yosuke to start doing hate crimes
He does all of this so frequently that Teddie, a character who knows nothing about the world as it exists, immediately starts mirroring it the second he stays in the human world for longer than like five minutes
About the only person he's unquestionably nice to, to the point of being suspect at times (YOU LOOK LIKE YOU'RE GOOD WITH YOUR HANDS), is the MC/You
He's on your team, he does the right thing when it comes down to it, he's not mega Hilter
BUT
It's undeniable that he's an asshole
He's my favorite character game tied with the very erotic eyeball because he provides friction in a way that a "good" character is no longer allowed to provide in focus tested video games
Okay, got all of that?
Good moving on
Yosuke has been a point of contention in the P4/Persona fandom for years, even back when the game was new there were multiple discussions about the way he treats everyone else (outside of You)
Gotta restate that
His treatment of women and The Gays was so out of pocket people were discussing it in TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT
So it wasn't rare to find people saying he was the worst party member outside of Teddie who we don't have time for but Teddie sucks shit and has always sucked shit and he's directly responsible for Morgana sucking shit and always sucking shit
And part of this comes down to the narrative all but taking his side
The game has characters call him out when he's being a pervert or sexist towards the female party members and ONLY the female party members. He's free to mock women for being fat or old because they don't apply to the main characters, so it doesn't matter
A SINGULAR instance of him being homophobic towards Kanji gets called out and that's it
The MC/You can go "Oh, but I like Kanji" a handful of times, but you are not allowed to go "Cut that shit out"
At best, the narrative thinks he takes it a little too far when it comes to women that he knows
And all of this makes sense, it's a game released in '08 by a JP studio about a bunch of teenagers
But it aged worse and worse as the years passed
HOWEVER
A couple of years after the game released, while trying to solve a completely unrelated mystery, some dataminers found a bunch of cut lines for various S-links
Several of which were for Yosuke
And in these cut lines, he all but confesses that he loves You/MC, MC can return those feelings by hugging him which is responded to with "You're supposed to do that with girls, stupid" and then it does the cut to black THEY HAD SEX that it does with any of the girl romantic S-link paths
All of these lines were fully voiced in Japanese and English, which suggests that it was cut at the absolute last possible second
This was a big fucking deal when people found it and basically everyone completely 180'd on him as a character because it recontextualizes literally everything he does the entire game
Him lashing out at Kanji is both internalized homphobia and overcompensating because he feels like if people knew, they'd treat him the same way he treats Kanji
Him pretending to be a womanizer who gets laid all the time and who wants to see nude tits is overcompensating
Him being completely devoted to the MC/You is less weird when you read it as him just having a huge crush on this dude and not being able to say it (He calls him Partner more often than he uses his name it's so fucking gay)
Even the earlier bit about him being terrified of being alone fits
As does the fact that his "arc" begins and ends in like the first hour of the game, they cut all the shit that would result in him actually having something
It gives him a level of unmatched depth as far as P4 is concerned and fits in perfectly with P4's "You have to accept and be true to yourself if you want to be happy" moral that it hammers in over and over
So "Dipshit with Internalized Homophobia" has been THE read for Yosuke going forward even though it's technically not IN the game
And this was helped by ATLUS making him a SORTA gay option in spinoff games, like in PQ, you can get "married" to him and he goes "It doesn't matter if two men get together, all that matters is if you make a big deal out of it" which is a far cry from the dude who thinks being in the room with a "gay" guy means you're gonna get raped
ATLUS was and still is more than happy to reference it but they have never taken the S-link off the cutting room floor in any of the numerous ports that P4 has gotten
A lot of people were genuinely hoping that they'd do it in P4R (which is stupid because this is the b-team), but they announcement that they're making minimal text changes and nothing else but ALSO removing the "insensitive" parts of his character is the worst of both fucking worlds because it leaves you with NOTHING
He's not allowed to bring his arc to a completed point by actually bringing the cut content back
He's not allowed to be a dipshit with internalized homophobia by making it clearer that's what his problem is even if you can't actually romance him
He's just not allowed to be anything but "Your friend who is nice and horny for woman but only in an acceptable way"
Rather than just have a character who's allowed to be a mess and grow from it, they've decided the idea itself might offend so he's just not allowed to be messy at all
WE GAINED FUCKING NOTHING HERE
WITHOUT ANY OF THE ABOVE HE HAS NO DEPTH AT ALL HE'S JUST A GUY
