Chie Satonaka is a character I really like but don’t think about enough. I did a writeup about how she’s much smarter than she realizes, and another drawing parallels between her and Kanji with their relationships with toxic gender norms. But I really want to just talk about her relationship with gender and how it interacts with her self-esteem.
Chie is very much not what you’d expect of a “traditional girl.” Her hair (which notably is dyed) notwithstanding, she’s a bit of a hungry person. She eats tons of meat, especially red meat like steak. This contrasts her with her more traditionally feminine friend Yukiko, who she invites to get a meal with Yosuke and Yu, and Yukiko declines citing worries about her weight. The apparent “strangeness” of this gets commented on by people around her, such as the totally-not-blunt Marie in rank 2 of her social link.
Also, her animal theming. She is heavily associated with dragons. The movie she lets Yosuke borrow is titled “Trial of the Dragon,” her signature move is “Dragon Hustle,” and her Dual Attack with Yukiko is called “Twin Dragons.” Also, her associated magic element being ice, the solid state of water, which further ties her to dragons implicitly via Japan's association between water and dragons, as stated by N.N. Isotova's essay Dragon Images in Japanese culture: Genesis and Semantics:
In Shinto, the dragon (龍 ryū or 竜 tatsu) is associated with rain,
bodies of water, the sea. In agricultural cults, dragons played an important role. It was believed that bodies of water were inhabited by water spirits Mizuchi (蛟 or 虯), which could cause plentiful rain. The etymology of the word can be traced back to the ancient word みつち mitsuchi (み mi –water, つ tsu – indicator of the genitive case, ち chi – snake). Usually, the Mizuchi is described as a snake-like creature which lives in the water, has horns and extremities, and hurts people by spewing poison. The Mizuchi can reach 24 meters in size.
Dragons, while capable of being depicted as either male or female, are usually associated with masculinity, as historically men have typically led Japan with only eleven recorded eras led by female emperors. Haley Petersen talks about how while snakes are usually depicted in the feminine, dragons are usually depicted as masculine while say, snakes are depicted in the feminine in her thesis HERpetology: Gender, Power, and Snake Transformation in Edo Period Japan.
Dragons, a more powerful and serpentine creature in East
Asia, are predominantly represented as male. While they are also associated with water, they possess fire and can make their home in air, thereby representing a masculine counterpart to the more feminine snake spirit. The amazing strength of male dragons and their associations with storms can be contrasted to male snake spirits, who are described by their female lovers as being ‘beautiful’ and their aqueous associations likened to gentle rain or dripping.
(I must praise the pun on this thesis title, it gave me a chuckle!)
Also, she’s a fighter, and the only female character who really prefers Strength to Magic. Her Magic stat is much higher than the only other main physical attacker in the party, probably to compensate that you can only get Bufula through her social link and Bufudyne through the bike trips. (This is very likely related to who her Persona is).
She's also associated with tanuki at one point, to contrast her with Yukiko. I'm talking about that time she ate instant noodles with Yukiko after her rescue, they were eating soups named after youkai. Chie had tanuki soba and Yukiko had kitsune udon. They’re easy to tell apart because they’re in Yukiko and Chie’s signature colors—soba is green, udon is red.
If you're wondering what a tanuki is, it's an actual animal that got a prominent role in folklore, much like the fox (referred to as 狐 (or in biology キツネ) in Japanese). They're tricksters, but the males in folklore have comically large testicles that shapeshift for some reason. There's even a children's song about their testicles!
All this to paint the picture that Chie isn’t what you’d consider a traditionally feminine girl. She’s actually quite masculine.
Chie is also clearly very friendly, as she offers for Yu to sit next to her in class pretty immediately, and is the first student in Yasogami to introduce herself to him, and offers herself and Yukiko to walk home with him.
Actually, a few seconds later, we see Yosuke apologizing to Chie for breaking the movie disc she let him borrow. (Contrary to popular belief, he ran into the desk, she didn’t kick him—Yosuke is canonically a klutz), which shows she’s normally pretty generous, she’s just irritated with Yosuke for breaking her favorite movie disc. And even then, it’s shown they’re pretty close throughout the rest of the game. All this to show that Chie is pretty often shown having friendly rapports with the male students around her, unlike the more reserved Yukiko who only really has Chie as her friend. I also noticed that I didn’t see Chie interacting with girls other than Yukiko much before the IT.
But the thing is, Chie’s a masculine girl. Usually, though not always, straight guys prize femininity in the women they pursue relationships with. And this leads to Yukiko being the one pursued far, far, far more often, which is a detriment to them both as the pursuit of Yukiko by most of the male student body is mentally taxing on her, and Chie begins to start comparing herself to Yukiko negatively out of being entirely overlooked. This is a bit of a phenomenon when it comes to girls and the attention of the boys around them, actually. Teenagers, especially teenage girls, have a tendency to compare themselves to the people around them, and their images of what is attractive is often shaped by the media they consume, and as you can expect, this does negatively impact their self-esteem, as proven in a study from the University of Washington about how social comparison would impact the self-esteem of teenagers.
A review of the correlations in Table IV revealed that the students reporting higher levels of social comparison were more likely to feel greater dissatisfaction with their bodies. These relationships were consistently significant for the physical attributes among the boys and primarily so (except for height) among the girls. The relationships were particularly strong for the attributes of weight and shape among the girls, but were only at a moderate level among the boys.
This phenomenon of social comparison actually ends up being what her shadow Tomoe talks about when Chie confronts her, detailing her jealousy and feelings of worthlessness in comparison to Yukiko due to her perceived lack of attractiveness.
Tomoe points out Chie’s sense of self-hatred over the fact that she’s overlooked, and how little she thinks of herself, that she’s began to tear herself apart comparing herself to Yukiko and having it lead her to feel like nothing as a girl. Which… comparison is the enemy of happiness. Tomoe points out how Chie feels totally pathetic, because she’s the sense of feeling that she only exists relative to Yukiko. Which is part of why Tomoe is in Yukiko’s dungeon in the first place and not a dungeon that belongs exclusively to Chie.
Actually, I totally glossed over who Tomoe is and why she’s Chie’s Shadow—and later her Persona, and it’s pretty relevant to her character. Tomoe Gozen (Lady Tomoe) is a famed female commander who commanded during the Genpei War. She was said to be equal to a thousand men in terms of strength, and is written of in the Heike Monogatari, which is the only major source for her existence.
Which fits Chie pretty well, since Tomoe's strength is shown through her frankly obscene ability to critical hit any enemy that isn't immune (Chie gets some ridiculous Critical buffs), and her being more of a physical attacker.
Not only that, but when it comes to Tomoe’s influence on Japanese culture as the most famed of the female warriors, she was believed to have the strength of a thousand men, and killed multiple commanders, but still mainly had the fact she was a female warrior highlighted above all else by history, from her lord Yoshinaka telling her to run because she was a woman and her death could potentially bring humiliation to him, to later depictions of her in Noh plays. As Steven T. Brown mentions in his research paper From Woman Warrior to Peripatetic Entertainer: The Multiple Histories of Tomoe, he discusses how her tale has been brought into legend and how she ended up. How her status as a woman seems to take precedent over her status as a warrior.
I would contend that such acts of masculine-to-feminine and feminine-to-masculine cross-dressing in the noh tradition are not "subversive," but in fact uphold the very gender categories blurred by performatively demonstrating on the noh stage that man is still the measure of all things.
It seems unlikely that the figure of Tomoe actually pushed the
medieval envelope of gender, since on the battlefield Tomoe was
rarely perceived as anything other than a woman warrior. Likewise
on the noh stage, though the waki in Tomoe is initially dumbfounded by the nochijite's appearance, he soon recognizes that the nochijite is a
woman dressed in military garb.
This fits Chie’s own personal self-image as she confronts her Shadow, as she initially only focuses on how guys around her think of her since she’s constantly comparing herself to Yukiko, as Tomoe the Shadow points out. Actually, this is part of why Chie tells Yukiko she needed her—because initially she believed she existed pretty much existed as a satellite figure to Yukiko, similar to how Tomoe is treated in comparison to Yoshinaka.
But we see Chie does have admirable strengths and qualities on her own, it’s all overshadowed by her focusing on what others see (or rather, don’t see) in her, so she ends up hating herself. For example, she’s got an incredibly powerful sense of justice and is willing to throw down whenever she sees anything unjust happening. She just runs in to save that one kid in her social link and tells his bullies to square up.
Honestly, this sense of justice fascinates me so much that I’d like to make a writeup about it myself sometimes.
She’s also much smarter than she believes she is, like figuring out how to use a snowboard in 0.5 seconds because she applies martial arts logic to it, and is the first one to piece together who the conductor is from Adachi’s letter.
Chie, to be crass, is a badass. But Chie’s genuinely great qualities are overshadowed by her tendency to negatively compare herself to others. She doesn’t even realize what’s there that’s so good. This is partly because of the treatment she faces, and partly because of her own lack of self esteem leading her to negatively compare herself to Yukiko.
But when she learns to stop comparing herself to the people around her, she slowly begins to realize that she really isn’t worthless like she believes herself to be. Again, she's not only the one to piece together who gave Adachi his powers, but is the first to actually realize Namatame isn't the Midnight Channel Killer.
She's huge to the team, even when her self-esteem doesn't totally allow her to realize it, because of her sense of justice, her wit, and her desire to protect others. She later begins to get a sense of it, because not only does she give help on the case, she becomes able to protect the ones she loves through her Persona, something she always wanted to do.
