Ogiga99

One of the main arguments against ShuTaba is that they’re “like a family!” “Like brother and sister!”

While of course, that’s a valid interpretation, there’s something you’re missing.

Futaba does not see Akira/Ren as family.

How do I know?

The headpatting scene!

In Futaba’s Rank 8, she asks the protag to pat her head like her mother used to do. It’s a familial touch that she’s asking her “supposed older brother” Akira to do. She’s expecting it to feel the same way.

But it doesn’t.

It feels different, because she does not see Akira as family. 

Then there’s the Sojiro scene. In his Rank 10, he calls Akira family. He then wonders if Futaba will become someone’s bride someday.

The line people focus on from that scene is him asking Akira not to “get with” Futaba.

They take it as “you’re going against Sojiro’s wishes by dating her!”

But…isn’t that a bit sexist? Futaba isn’t Sojiro’s property, she has her own emotions, and she gains a crush on Akira that he can reciprocate. That’s not going against Sojiro’s wishes, that’s reading the mood and saying yes.

(This is another interesting thing to note. She sees Sojiro as family, so he has a reason to care about her the way he does. But she doesn’t see the protag in the same light.)

Plus, Sojiro isn’t concerned about the Protag taking advantage of Futaba. He just thinks that the Protag calling him dad would be a bit odd. (Which is also a bit odd to say after you said you consider someone family…)

But, he immediately follows it up by saying, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

He’s interrupted by Futaba and seems a bit embarrassed afterwards, like he was imagining something he wasn’t supposed to be.

Can you imagine if this scene was Sae and Makoto? People would be praising it for Sae supporting ShuMako, but instead, one little line is taken out of context for ShuTaba to argue against it. And that’s not really fair, is it?

Don’t worry ShuTaba shippers, Sojiro may be a little overprotective, but he approves.

~ Mod Jinxii

P.S. Like Sojiro being Akira’s father figure? If he marries Futaba, they’ll be a real family! Bonus points!

Happy birthday Es!

Arc System Works Official Fanbook ARC-MIX! scans

Ahhh, to Marie or not to Marie. The old song and dance of love, betrayal and the fandom ripping each other’s heads off in the neverending cycle of waifu wars.

To give you my take on the issue:

Short Version: I like the character. A lot. Love her, even. 

Long Version:

When I first played Persona 4 and was made aware of the fact that “The Golden” had some additional content I had no chance to experience yet, I was fully prepared to hate her. What I saw go around in the Fandom were horror stories of badly written dialogue, character derailing escapades and a character who has no business being there taking over the entire narrative. Additionally, I wasn’t really sold on her design, since her fashion style seemed pretty badly out of place for P4.  So that’s what I went in expecting. A one-note plot device character who’d make my experience worse for it.

Then I actually played P4G and realized that absolutely nothing of what I’d heard was true. Instead of the “obnoxious Tsundere Mary-Sue” I was warned of, I was greeted by a very well-woven in story about a lost girl trying to deny her own loneliness and confusion by distracting herself with the material world and channeling her emotions into secret writings. In many ways a typical teenager, but the way she acts isn’t romanticized at all. It’s ridiculed where it deserves to be ridiculed and treated seriously where it deserves to be treated as such. At no point is she framed as some great, romantic “ARTEEEST” whose suffering makes her a bigger person. She’s just somebody desperately trying to not feel lost. Everything she does, having the protagonist take her out, her stance on consumerism (which she seems to embrace), her constant boredom and impatience, and her poems are symptomatic of how desperately she wants to *not* talk about her real issues that are making her hurt, simply because she doesn’t know how to talk about them. That is, of course, because she’s actually a fragment of Izanami which once rebelled against the goddesses’ corrupted desires and was cast out for it, now resigned to forgetting about its own ideals, which adds a whole layer more to the character. She’s the embodiment of a desire for people’s most honest, sincere wishes to come true, but since Izanami has abandoned her, she can no longer believe in the very ideal that makes her up, hence why she’s so resigned to materialism and living out her own desires only in secret. Additionally, the fact that she’s not actually human makes it hard for her to understand human social norms (just how Izanami doesn’t actually understand humans either), so she often acts terribly out-of line, which is where we get the “Tsundere Archetype” accusations from. However, unlike most cases, Marie is actually a GOOD execution of that character archetype: Not only is her “Tsundere-ness” not just an expression of embarrassment towards a guy she has a crush on (she acts like that towards EVERYONE, not just him), she also has damn good reasons to act like that, since she never actually learned about social guidelines. 

Still, I am not surprised the fandom is often as opposed to her as they seem to be. As soon as I’d decided that I actually really like Marie, I felt immediately reminded of the exact same thing happening with a character in another fandom I am big on: Xion from Kingdom Hearts received pretty much the exact same cold initial reception from the fandom as Marie did. And that even though in character analyses she tended to be called a “very good character”. 

Of course, the parallels between the cases are immediately visible: Both characters are black haired girls who were added to their respective games in retrospect by the way of expansions to the stories, turn out to be deeply important to the story and lore the players have cared about ever since before they knew this character exist, also turn out to be intrinsically connected to an important canon character, and their absence from the initial release ends up being explained with “All memories of them were destroyed when they died, BUT you now have a chance undo that!!!!”. They are perceived as somehow acting as a “forced love interest” towards a major character. 

It’s pretty clear how a character like that would irk players, who might already have invested hours and hours into doing fanwork and crafting fan-theories that do not involve said character. It can be extremely frustrating to have your image of canon foiled like that by a retroactive update to the narrative. However, in both cases I think the kneejerk reactions were actually greatly overstated:

Even though both, Xion and Marie, change something about the lore they were introduced to, the changes are not so great as one couldn’t accommodate for them with ease, a love-relationship with a main character is only implied as a possibility in both cases (In fact, with Marie you can deny taking her down a lover’s route, just like you can with any other character, and with Xion I’d argue it isn’t there at all outside of Axel’s overinterpretation; Xion and Roxas’ relationship seemed strictly platonic or brother-sisterly to me) and, again, timelines where the characters have been erased from existence still exist in both cases, so if you really don’t want to involve them, you can still set your fanwork within those timeframes/timelines. 

MY HERO by Ron.