Thank you for the reply! The exchange of ideas which are not your own is always a welcome and productive bit of personal growth.
I can completely understand someone taking umbrage with cheap objectification being imposed on any character, and I especially understand being dissatisfied when you feel like you’re being fed poor writing. Even more so do I understand the incredible frustration felt when what you see before you is something that you’d call a cheapening of a character’s foundation.
It’s just that I don’t see the cut scenes as cheapening her character. If anything, I think it’s more interesting to see a female character who fights against a sexist society while still embracing her femininity and confidently flaunting her sexual appeal. Ann is quite traditionally feminine (in a Japanese sense of the ideal), and reveling in one’s sexual appeal is a very real part of that. I do believe that her outfit and means of presenting herself in a sexual manner is her own choice, as well, considering her complaints in Mementos about how she wishes people would be more accepting of clothes like that in a public place. I’d even say that the fact her outfit emphasizes her feminine form is a very deliberate means of inverting the type of stereotypes she faces as a Hafu - by making her empowerment something which can draw on the objectification which she faces as a Hafu, she takes that which had held her down, and makes it her weapon on her climb up.
Besides - and this is likely just a matter of personal interpretation - but the only cut scenes in where Ann is rather heavily sexualized which I can recall are her awakening scene, a cut scene from the desert palace, and her bikini reveal in Hawaii. In her awakening scene, Ann is most certainly being objectified, but this objectification is coming from the most detestable villain in the whole story - Kamoshida. This objectification is most certainly not portrayed as anything less than evil. I even recall her directly yelling “Love? What would you possibly know about love? To you all women are just objects to be toyed with.” As her awakening scene, this is the scene in which her outfit plays the most significant symbolic role in the story, and so the fact that she was empowered in a means which flaunts her sexual appeal while she takes down the man who has most objectified her is a very clear inversion of what her sexual appeal can mean for her.
As previously stated, the other cut scene which I can recall placing Ann into a situation where she was negatively sexualized is one from the desert palace. The scene is, I’d agree, just plain old lazy writing for a cheap joke: they’re in a hot place, since it’s hot Ann lowers her top a bit, this results in Ryuji ogling her now more exposed chest, and so she pulls hard on the brakes to punish him with a comedic sound effect accompanying it. It’s a dumb gag which we’ve all probably seen and grown tired of many times before, but what I will say of it is that the setup does at least make sense. When it’s hot, it makes sense for Ann to let her top down a bit to let her body breathe. When Ryuji’s been established as an asinine teenage boy, it makes sense that he’d continue to be an ass. Does this justify the scene’s placement in the story? No, no it doesn’t - I 100% agree that Persona 5 would have been stronger without that scene, and in fact I’d say that the resources and time spent on that cutscene should have been put to animating a more pivotal plot moment.
The last cut scene which I remember heavily sexualizing Ann was when she first walked out in her bikini during their days in Hawaii. This, however, is an example of a time when her sexualization is completely in her control and embraced. She tilts her hips as she walks out, then responds to Ryuji’s perverse motions by placing her arm around him and mocking him for it. This is a positive example of a woman owning her sexuality in an empowering way. Though this is arguably another example of a scene for which the resources should have probably been spent on a more pivotal plot moment, the scene still reinforces Ann’s character in a constructive way by showing her owning her sexual appeal.
Also - and this is just pure conjecture on my part - but I don’t get the sense that Atlus made the animated cut scenes themselves. They felt so tonally divorced from the rest of the game to me that I’d guess they were made by a dedicated animation studio outside of Atlus. In fact, my experience within the games industry has informed me of a common pattern across publisher-developer dichotomies: that publishers will often allow passion projects between “moneymaker” games, but that for the “moneymakers”, the publisher will often incorporate some fail-safes in help guarantee financial safety, such as sex appeal or the latest marketing buzzwords. For Atlus, Persona is their clear moneymaker. As such, I almost wonder if the cut scenes which feel as if they might have been outsourced may have, perhaps, included ample sex appeal at the behest of SEGA, rather than Atlus. That’s just pure conjecture on my part though, so take it for what it is.
A more important point which I feel should not be glossed over, though, is that sexualization of Ann does not undermine “Persona 5”'s central themes. Most precisely, it does not undermine it because “Persona 5”'s core theme was not the idea that women should not be sexual. Though I’d personally say that the story’s theme was “justice can be found in rebellion”, I am well aware that director Katsura Hashino has a different opinion, saying that “Persona 5”'s theme is “Mankind’s tendency to each view the world through their own individually distorted sense of reality - and its consequences on society and relationships”. This is not a theme which is at odds with any character being sexualized.
Though that is where I’d like to leave off my wall of text for now, there’s one last part of your post which I feel almost honor-bound to respond to:
how much do you really understand what’s unacceptable about the way these people are treated?
Since this statement followed a sentence which was discussing an imperative “you” but was separated from that sentence by an ellipses, I cannot tell whether the “you” here was meant to refer to me or not. If it was, then I don’t think it was necessary to accuse me of being detached from another’s suffering. In fact, the game’s dealings with the treatment of Hafu hit me harder than much of the rest of the game did, on account of the fact that I’m married to a Hafu woman. If, on the other hand, this was just a case of unintentionally unclear punctuation, then I’d apologize for any ill conclusions drawn, but reiterate my need to be cautious first.
Ignoring all of that, though, I’d like to, above all else, repeat that I thank you for taking the time to reply, and once more state that I am grateful for all free, open dialogues of ideas.
