ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google “Hobby Lobby” and get a page full of results that make me go “wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq”
They are also that! And it comes from the same place.
Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their “Museum of the Bible” that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible… using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.
They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that’s only tangentially related.
The straight woman is unsatisfied with straight studio porn. She wants to get off to something in which the actors actually emote and show passion beyond canned moans from the women and, at best, vacant grunts from the men. She turns to gay porn. She knows it’s not “for her,” but neither was the straight porn, and at least the actors look like they’re enjoying themselves. And for a short while she is satiated by Sean Cody et al, but she runs into the same problems she had to begin with. She was not looking at sex but a simulacrum of sex, trapped in Plato’s cave. Unsatisfied, she turned to vintage gay porn, harkening to a time when most gay bars still had darkrooms and reliably smelled of piss and Amyl Nitrite. Here was the real thing, in all its animalistic passion. But she still couldn’t immerse herself in the fantasy. She wanted the media to engage with her own imagination and meet her half-way, rather than having it spoonfed to her onscreen. She turned to yaoi, with its elongated figures reminiscent of mannerist portraiture, then bara, including hardcore BDSM scenes. But the tactile sensations depicted in the pages didn’t do justice to their real life counterparts. She turned deeper into her own imagination, this time reading erotica. No, not the poolside paperbacks sold at Barnes and Noble. The good shit. Why then, was she still not satisfied? She dug deeper, searching for the true meaning of eroticism. She studied the psychoanalysis of Freud, the cultural criticism of Susan Sontag, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde. She took vacation time and flew to Europe, starting at the caves of Lascaux to explore the human urge to create, then traversed the Camino de Santiago on foot, along the way meeting a 56 year old carpenter from Burgos named Andrés, with whom she had an explosive affair. They both knew it couldn’t last, which made them cherish each other’s touch all the more. Upon flying home, she gave up. If her search for true eroticism never bore fruit this whole time, why would it now? It would take years before she stumbled upon the answer by pure happenstance: dubstep.
It is so so important to show that queer people have always existed and are allowed to live long, happy lives. Young queer people–especially those in conservative areas–need to know that beingqueer is not a death sentence. Despite the many struggles we have faced, throughout history there have always been queer lives filled with joy and love. and you will find yours.
Beautifully, I’ve just discovered the photographer has all of these images available on their website to view:
you criticize one milquetoast game with great aesthetics for being all bark and no bite and suddenly u got people in ur inbox talking to you with a straight face about how adult Japanese men are babies who know nothing about the world or even women
That’s not what any of us are saying, you’re intentionally misconstruing our words so you can keep pretending you don’t hate all Japanese people
We’re saying “this is a dumb take” and you took it hella personally
This is only kind of a half reply but there’s a real problem when it comes to critiquing foreign media where it’s assumed that it is unfair to provide criticism about issues deemed “too American” to be fair points of judgement. I think it’s important that we check our internal biases and thought processes in these instances; yes, there is an enormous ocean of difference between USAmerican and Japanese culture, but I don’t think it is unfair to judge a piece of media that is still written by adult creators with agency who are probably far more worldly than I am.
Anti-black racism is not unique to the USA; it is prevalent in all corners of the world, and that is why it is important to call it out in the first place. To co-opt the language of emancipation to sell your JRPG where one of the main characters eventually becomes a cop is shitty. To use jazz and funk as tenants of your games aesthetic and yet still not have a character with skin darker than whole milk in a game set in one of Japan’s most diverse and densely populated areas is shitty. To imply that the very real Adult Japanese Men who made this game can’t be aware of this issue because Japanese society is simply too different for awareness to make sense is infantilizing. If the creators behind Persona 5 want to use black culture like that, surely we can assume the same level of intelligence that they can be made aware of the issues that come with it. They are not babies bashing together colored blocks, they are professional adults in a studio making conscious choices, and much like others parts of the game (see: Ann) they want to have their cake and eat it too; usage of a culture without the due respect it is owed is all over in P5 (using the aesthetics of punk and anarchism but a refusal to actually meaningfully challenge the status quo or make queer characters anything but the butt of the joke) and critiquing the anti-black parts is just one part of a larger issue later Persona games have with being both thematically cohesive and giving proper credit and respect to the cultures it co-opts to sells it’s millions of copies with.
The people who made this game are adults like you and I, and by saying “oh, they can’t have known/these issues are too western/that’s just what Japanese society is like” we are both assuming that the Japanese need protection and shielding from criticism as if the entire country is made up of children AND denying ourselves the chance for a better world in some small way through genuine critique. If we can agree there is at least some issue on some level, why should critique of that issue not exist? Do we not want things to improve? Did the game not market itself by asking if you are tired of the current world? I desperately want to enjoy the Persona series; I think there is much to love and I understand why people enjoy it so much. But until we get over this hurdle, the games will continue to be made for heterosexual jewel thieves wearing the skin of anti-authority aesthetics. The games people love are never going to actually get better if we keep making excuses for real adult creators that exist in the same world as you and I.
Any excuse made for Persona falls flat on its face when directly compared to other series like Street Fighter and how they approached a similar topic. Street Fighter 3 and 6 both owe a lot to black culture aesthetically and the developers of the latter not only acknowledged this point openly but paid due attention to better represent black people and ensure they had black staff input on their designs accordingly.
It’s so infantilizing and infuriating to act like it’s any harder for a Japanese dev to do than it is for an American dev to do, especially when there’s so many examples of Japanese devs handling this topic better than Persona does.
(And even Persona has handled some of these topics better in earlier games, specifically in regards to queerness it was actually fairly progressive until Persona 3 came and mucked things up. It seems like they’re making a conscious effort to do better now that they’ve faced such backlash for it, but that’s why it’s important to allow people to criticize them when they feel they should. They are not exempt.)
