Robot, Persona 4 Arena, and Trans Allegory
Androids have long been a staple of science fiction, a go-to means to explore the essential element of humanity: what critical quality differentiates a problem solving tool from a sapient being. But usually this is in broad terms, where it’s accepted that robots are certainly a different sort of person than a flesh and blood human, but still a thinking being deserving of all the rights and empathy as a human or any alien.
But there’s something distinct about the way Persona 4 Arena (moreso even than the two games it’s spun off from) approaches its robot girls. And I strongly suspect it’s not intentional, given the series it’s in, but specifically Aigis and Labrys lend themselves to a queer reading, at least in Arena. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself here.
Let’s establish the normal for android stories a bit. The go-to example for my money is Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Given the long run of the show and its movies, Data’s status as its breakout character, the sheer number of stories dedicated to both his successes and failures in his quest to become more human, and the willingness of the show to never make too much progress at once, to let his humanity seep little by little into Brent Spiner’s performance rather than moving in leaps and fits, it covers the subject more thoroughly than any other work I’m aware of, and hits most of the strongest points of those other stories.
While some episodes lend themselves to a literal reading (Data is called Pinocchio more than once), his quest to ‘be more human’ is generally shorthand for becoming a better rounded, more complete, and more empathetic person. He was born into a society of humans and lives primarily among humans still, so he seeks primarily to emulate humans specifically, but it’s shown repeatedly that he researches the cultures and backgrounds of all his crewmates for inspiration and codes of conduct. And really that’s the thesis for Data’s entire arc, as delivered in Measure of a Man: Starfleet was founded to seek out new life, well there it sits.
Data is the founding member of a new race, and unswervingly presents himself in that fashion. He is the first of his kind, and must compile a code of ethics and form the foundation of his own culture based entirely on what resonate with him, though obviously studying and at times borrowing from other cultures. He belongs to a created race, and thus must forge an entirely new path for reproduction. He demands his basic rights and privileges be recognized by the society he belongs to, but as a new form of life with emergent culture knows that these rights are new things with their own unique interactions. He interacts with and befriends humans, but fully expects them to interact with him as an android.
In other words, while you can read the occasional queer coding into Data’s version of mechanical lifeform, it’s no more so than any use of Other in fiction.
The androids in Persona don’t work this way. Their personalities are based on the neural patterns of human children, and their capacity for sapience and emotionality is conferred by a mystic artifact (the Plume of Dusk) which infuses their computer components with a connection to the collective unconscious, the Sea of Souls. They have artificial bodies and circuitry for minds, but in a very literal sense they have human souls and the thoughts of young girls. They are, metaphysically, women trapped in robot bodies. The game is very aware of this aspect, and a lot of the drama around Aigis’ original arc, and the ways she’s attacked by the villains in Arena, lies in her coming to grips with balancing her human emotions and desires against the physical limitations of her mechanical body.
Labrys, being a predecessor to Aigis, has an even harsher background, and her story lies in the dissonance between having the soul and mind of a young woman while being raised as a heartless weapon. She indeed has inbuilt mechanisms that cloud her own senses to ease this dissonance, which the villain has ramped up in order to make her forget her origins entirely and think she’s actually a young girl attending Inaba High. This in turn is weaponized against Aigis in her route, since surely she “has no other choice but to wallow in this illusory school”, and it’s “only way she can be happy”.
Only the Persona team continually getting worse at responsibly tackling LGBTQ issues prevents me from claiming this isn’t a deliberate parallel to trans women. But the specific language and metaphysical nature of the androids bends that direction clearly enough that I’m going to comment on it as fact for a bit. On the whole, they do a credible job. The existence of magic and technomagic in the setting makes for some impossible scenarios, but they’re handled ably, especially for the relative youth of all the protagonists. Aigis is careful dress so she’s always perceived as a woman, as early-transition people are apt to do. Her friends acknowledge that she has unique features and medical needs compared to themselves, but unfailingly treat her as an independent woman who trusts them unconditionally. There’s a particular version of Labrys’ reveal to herself, in Aigis route, where Yosuke freezes in response. And after the fact his immediate reaction is to admit he fucked up and acknowledge he has to make amends!
Given the sort of narrative the Persona series uses, it was going to emphasize the social aspects of gender and performance regardless, but it does a fine job of showing respectful behavior and not dwelling too much on casual robophobia. And the conclusion the allegory suggests, that the added challenges Labrys and Aigis will live with might never fully resolve, but that this has no bearing on their ability to live full lives so long as their friends and the world around them accept them, is a common and valid sentiment. It does bring me to some criticism, although I want to stress that this is less a flaw in the game and more in the trends of the world in general.
Aigis and Labrys’ stories focus almost entirely on the negative. The narrative spends a lot of time on their pasts traumas, the dysphoria they suffer, and the uncertainty of their futures. Heck, Labrys backstory would be an utterly scathing critique of society without the layer of allegory: she and her sisters were forced to fight each other to the death, with only the last survivor being granted the honor of a proper name, along with the memories of all her fallen counterparts. This so closely mirrors the way bad actors frame discussions of acceptance and civil rights of any minority group that it’s painful: be one of the ‘good ones’, throw your comrades under the bus, and we’ll let you be a person like us. And that’s good, it’s important for society at large to have a way to grasp those stories. But there’s not the counter weight, the sense of all the ways their unique nature can enrich their lives, the unique joys only they get to experience. And no mistake, the allegorical nature of the story would make it hard for P4A to tell that story. But it stands out that the only good stories for many queer identities, even allegorically, are the ones about the unique hardships they put up with, mostly ones inflicted upon them by society.
On the other hand, we can infer a little bit of that, in the end. It’s suggested quite often that the androids will live for quite some times, or may not even have an upper limit to their lifespans. They and their friends explicitly seek a world where human nature can be changed, one where people no longer see comfort in death. And if they’re seeking such a lofty goal as that, the steps to reaching it will hold some big changes. It may well be that at some distant future, technology will let them bridge the physical gap between their selves and their bodies, or that they’ll no longer need to hide their natures from society at large, and the idea that some girls just have mechanical bits will be commonplace. Sure, it’s all inference, but so’s treating Persona androids as anything but robots.
Ultimately, Persona 4 Arena ends on a hopeful note even ignoring the distant future. The sisters are bonding during Aigis’ ending, and Labrys is trying to remember when she’s seen the sky before. Aigis thinks a minute, and Labrys’ own memory of the event, passed down to her generation as part of mad science, surfaces. “You hoped that your successor… would see someone precious to them, and that meeting would take place at that pier. You dreamed you successor would go beyond that pier, and see places you could never visit yourself.” She then recounts “when I was searching for someone, I found myself drawn there for some reason”. She starts crying “all the feelings I got from the others, they didn’t go to waste”. The power of your story, and its ability to influence and inspire others, is never to be underestimated. Even in the face of horrible oppression and erasure, those stories tend to live on, and it’s important to tell them, lest they be forgot.
I probably can’t ask for a better thought to wrap this up on really.
