for what it's worth, that's not really what goes on in that scene.
rin collapses after a shower while at home as vincent's about to visit. vincent hears, heads in, checks on rin in concern, and the towel comes off. vincent reacts with visible surprise when he notices that rin is flat and has male genitalia, but doesn't react with anything more than a jawdrop similar to how he reacts to catherine earlier in the game and stammering out a "you're... a guy?". rin cheerfully says he is, and starts to talk about having gotten his memories back. vincent spaces out while he listens, unsure how to handle the revelation, and when rin reaches for his cheek and asks if he's alright, he reflexively slaps his hand away. rin is knocked back (partially from shock) and runs off, and vincent immediately realizes he fucked up.
a few moments later, he tries to go after him to talk to him, but gets held up by katherine. he lies to get away, runs to stray sheep (where rin works) in hopes of talking to him. he's not there, but erica is, and as soon as vincent mentions just part of what happened (that he suddenly found out rin is male), she asks "don't tell me-- you said something awful to rin!?" and tells him to call and apologize which he immediately does. they talk things out on the phone (with rin hanging up after explaining that he'd kept his feelings secret because he's male, and ending the conversation with saying he wants vincent to be happy). the next day, vincent sorts out his feelings for rin while talking with the other guys, and if you're on track to his good/true ending, he resolves to make it up to him (and to katherine for cheating on her) by basically deciding to make things right.
the rest of the path is spent breaking up with katherine (at her suggestion) and catherine, finding rin again after a catherine-caused nightmare, dealing with dumuzid (who tries to get rid of rin due to him being an angel; the rin route version of the confrontation with him has him getting called on his archaic values and homophobic attitude toward the two of them, with vincent at one point declaring that there's more ways for people to be [romantically] close than just as a man and a woman), and proving that he's worthy of being with rin to rin's brothers because they're overprotective and initially don't approve of their little brother being with someone, let alone a human. everyone except for catherine and boss is pretty supportive of their relationship (with even rin's brothers coming around by the end; they even oversee their wedding).
here's a video covering the initial gender reveal up to vincent's talk with the guys where he sorts his feelings out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47KCyKjar4 - the uploader also has the rest of rin's route up right now, if you want to give it a look.
it's definitely not ideal (i.e. the slap part is still uncomfortable even if it's portrayed as vincent fucking up and realizing it immediately, and rin being non-human and a crossdresser arguably cheapens him being a gay option; the non-human part can be seen as being intended to parallel catherine, since rin is set up as an counterpart to her in almost every way), but it's still a huge step up for atlus overall.
>vincent reacts with visible surprise when he notices that rin is flat and has male genitalia, but doesn't react with anything more than a jawdrop similar to how he reacts to catherine earlier in the game and stammering out a "you're... a guy?"
vincent calls rin an otoko no ko, though. the nuance there is different than him realizing that rin is amab (otoko no ko is kind of a fetishy thing) and calling him a guy. the fact that rin’s route goes hand-in-hand with erica being “”cured”” of her transness is definitely not a huge step up for atlus in every way. if anything, the company’s treatment of lgbt characters and themes has gone further and further downhill over the years when you consider that persona 2, a game that came out in the 90’s, had a gay romance as the preferred option, a non-fetishy kiss between two girls, etc.
actually, i forgot that erica not transitioning and rin’s whole deal aren’t part of the same route so i guess disregard that. still, i think that both of those things (rin being identified as an otoko no ko and not just a dude, the fact that erica not transitioning is apparently fixing her life for the better) coming together in fullbody is kind of skeezy all the same? atlus was doing better (significantly so) almost 20 years ago so treating scraps that honestly feel more fetishy and toothless than anything else doesn’t really seem like the right thing to do.
"otoko no ko" can still be used in the sense of just "guy," if it's written as 男の子 and not 男の娘. vincent uses hiragana for all of his dialogue here to show he's a bit out of it (even for words he normally uses kanji for), making that phrase unclear (which could be both on purpose, but all later cutscenes make it clear that he meant it in the sense of "guy" or, at most, "crossdresser." rin is unambiguously male-identifying and makes this even clearer in later scenes (he calls himself 男 several times, his brothers refer to him as 弟, etc) if his response here wasn't clear enough due to the way おとこのこ is written.
i also wouldn't say it's fair to call everything else in rin's route "scraps." yes, it's still flawed, but it's still great to see most of the cast being supportive of vincent and rin as a couple, dumuzid getting shot down for his archaic values and explicit homophobia, and the game proclaiming through its protagonist that relationships aren't just a thing between men and women. that's a lot more than just scraps when most of atlus' games don't even give you a same sex romance option, to say nothing of things like the constant homophobia jokes regarding kanji being an atypical guy in p4-related materials or the two okama in p5.
the ending you're referring to for the erica stuff mentions nothing about her life being "better" there, that's misinformation being spread around. here's a video if you want to verify the scene yourself: https://sendvid.com/39ldd924
that ending is the result of catherine and vincent going back in time using her powers after he wishes they could've met earlier, and the changes are all the result of her being around starting from high school and dating vincent since then (which affects katherine and anyone who was affected by catherine's work as a succubus for dumuzid by extension); catherine's only concern is making vincent happy, not anyone else. erica's response to toby jealously wondering if there's any other angelic girls like catherine still implies she's trans, although her not having transitioned in that ending does feel iffy at best and like it's just for the sake of a tone-deaf "wink wink nudge nudge remember the main timeline?" punchline.
"[...] a non-fetishy kiss between two girls [...]"
just to make sure i'm not forgetting anything because it's been a while: are you referring to shadow yukino and anna? because i'll give you that that's not presented as fetishy, but i'm not sure if i'd mention it as a positive when it only happens in a wrong-choice scenario that leads to anna's death.
i guess you have a point, but the whole thing still just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth; if the game wanted to make a positive statement about being gay/bi, it would’ve had a lot more punch to have the gay romance option be presented as something other than an extremely feminine crossdresser, i think. as it is, to me it’s coming off like “it’s okay to be gay, but only if your partner is a man so feminine that he passes for a girl in his every day life”. i’m glad the things with erica seem to be misrepresented (in terms of her lack of transition(?) not being a result of cathy “making her life better”) but i do think it’s a really bizarre, and potentially skeevy, choice nonetheless. if they’re not saying she’s “cured”, and if the wedding takes place far enough out of high school that she should’ve transitioned by now then why hasn’t she, y’know? considering this team has already fumbled her once before, it’s really difficult for me to give the benefit of the doubt.
and yeah, i do mean the anna/shadow yukina kiss. fwiw, i never said it was a healthy relationship or anything like that (it’s not, even if anna and the actual yukina did have a nice thing going on) but it’s definitely something, and considering it happens in the game where the staff talk so much about the gay male romance option in such a positive light, i still think it’s more than the persona games that came after it had to give.
that's a fair point! i agree that rin being a really feminine crossdresser (and non-human, even if that point is meant as a parallel to catherine) cheapens him being a gay option, but in my personal opinion, the actual execution alleviates it a lot.
from what i recall, rin's femininity is never brought up as a point in vincent's attraction - it's mainly their interactions and vincent's admiration for rin's free lifestyle that leads to him falling for him, and at least off the top of my head i don't recall anyone else's approval/support ever being due to rin looking feminine. plus there's that whole scene in rin's good/true ending path where dumuzid is basically used as a representative for homophobia and archaic values and is hard-countered by a speech from vincent (and rin, but it's mostly vincent), who in this path is genuinely trying to be a better person. 「世の中には、男と女がくっつく以外にも、道はたくさんあんだよッ！」 is a line that's gonna be sticking with me for a while, and it's honestly amazing to see a (previously pretty popular) game that was so intensely heteronormative in its original release go so hard on driving home that it's not just men and women that can be close in the relationship sense.
on erica, i do agree that her still being pre-transition in the wedding scene is really weird. i feel like it's either supposed to highlight how different that timeline is (catherine being involved with vincent starting from so early on and helping dumuzid with the great trials would cause a lot of other changes by extension), or it's a fuckup on their part timeline-wise; the game itself is actually vague on when exactly the wedding scene is supposed to take place (it uses "several years later" as a followup to the previous highschool scene, instead of clearly defining a timeframe like for every other timeskip), and the only thing that actually pinpoints it as seeming around the same time as the main timeline is toby's presence and him wearing his work outfit. which could be because they didn't want to come up with another design for him, but it sticks out anyway.
...that and, uh, she's still shown pre-transition at all. feels like someone thought "hey, i bet it'd be cool if we used this to show people what erica used to look like! :D" and didn't really think about the implications.
re: anna/shadow yukino, fair point! i'm not very fond of that moment myself because of the context it pops up in (it's... kinda bleh that the clearest confirmation of anna's interest in another girl only comes up in a scene that gets her killed as a direct result of exploiting her feelings if it happpens), but i can see why you'd consider it notable. i'd rank p3p above something like that for having two female romance options if you pick the female protagonist, personally, but i can agree that p2 does handle same-sex relationships better than regular p3/p4/p5 currently do.
erica *hasn't* transitioned and that particular ending implies that she will at some point. that catherine ending in particular seems to have catherine "fixing" everything by having everyone be high school friends.
it's the year 2019 and ya'll still taking cues from resetera
it's not even that. catherine isn't "fixing" anything in that ending. the only thing she's doing is acting on vincent's wish that they could've met earlier by making it so, sending them back time and becoming one of their classmates as well (the others were already classmates at the time) so she and vincent can date starting from that point instead.
every other change in that ending is a side effect of that. paul is still alive presumably because catherine and dumuzid aren't bothering with the nightmares this time, katherine gets married to paul because she never started dating vincent (since he's already dating catherine), etc.
erica not having transitioned yet even though the wedding part of the ending seems to take place around the same time as the maingame timeline is still weird, though, because i can't think of a reason for that. unless it's supposed to imply that whatever made her decide to finally transition didn't happen (yet?) in this timeline or something, but there's way too little context to work with in her case.
so basically, the internet shitfits we’re seeing are about shit that didn’t actually happen and come from egocentric morons in meed to stroke themselves to the thought of how woke and brave they are
ehhh. there's definitely things that could've been handled better. there's definitely a lot of misinformation and exaggeration going on, though, and most of them can be cleared up by just watching the corresponding cutscenes (which aren't too hard to find; they've been linked in a fair few discussions already), so it's a little weird that they blew up so much.
yeah, and even the jp version only came out a few days ago so most fan translations that are floating around are largely rushed ones. still, that should be a reason for people to wait for more/clearer information, if anything, and at least some of the misinformation going around (like the sequence for the vincent-slapping-rin thing) can be verified just through the visuals.
...normally i'd say anyone with even just a basic anime fan 101 grasp on japanese could probably verify rin's gender too, since it doesn't take much to catch him referring to himself as 男/otoko several times in later scenes or his brothers referring to him as their 弟/otouto (it's all in voiced scenes), but somehow there's a live-made fan translation going around youtube by someone who missed that despite otherwise being alright at the language, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the people in question get high off their own angry farts and I don't know why anyone listens to them. Always ALWAYS at least watch the scene in question or verify the information yourself before you get mad.
i might be wrong, but i thought otoko was supposed to be ambiguous. like an umbrella term for crossdressing men and pre-op transwomen who all have a cutesy aesthetic. then again i've known people who got into otoko stuff only to realize "whoops i'm actually trans", so maybe i got mixed up there
"otoko no ko" might be ambiguous because that can mean either "boy" or "fetishy cutesy crossdresser," but in the former meaning it's typically not used for adult humans
otokonoko is a terrible kanji based pun. in normal Japanese conversation one might use 男の子 which just means boy, or a child that is male. Crossdressers are sometimes referred to as 男の娘 or a girl that is male.
like the other anons said, it's definitely not ambiguous here. the initial reveal scene does use "otoko no ko" in hiragana due to vincent being a bit out of it at the time which is more ambiguous (as that could be 男の子 because of rin's appearance being on the youngish side or 男の娘 in the sense of "crossdresser"), but all later uses of "otoko" are in contexts where it's used solely as 男 without the ambiguity.
he's very, very firmly established as someone who identifies as male, he just happens to also be a crossdresser.
on 男 itself, that word on its own absolutely just refers to someone being male. the only context it's ambiguous in is when it's written as "otoko no ko" as that can be read as 男の娘 (read as otoko no ko which would normally be 男の子 which is usually used in reference to boys, but written this way instead it's read as "male girl") which is used for both crossdressers and mtf trans women (especially if they present female but are still pre-op).
using 男の娘 for trans women is frowned upon, but it still sees use in that sense in fiction because a lot of writers are pretty bad about transgender matters. the one instance of "otoko no ko" ambiguity here is definitely supposed to invoke it in the sense of "crossdresser" only, though, given that the character's gender identity is established more clearly in other scenes.
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wankgate2019-01-28 11:47 pm
spoilers for rin's route
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 05:49 am (UTC)(link)rin collapses after a shower while at home as vincent's about to visit. vincent hears, heads in, checks on rin in concern, and the towel comes off. vincent reacts with visible surprise when he notices that rin is flat and has male genitalia, but doesn't react with anything more than a jawdrop similar to how he reacts to catherine earlier in the game and stammering out a "you're... a guy?". rin cheerfully says he is, and starts to talk about having gotten his memories back. vincent spaces out while he listens, unsure how to handle the revelation, and when rin reaches for his cheek and asks if he's alright, he reflexively slaps his hand away. rin is knocked back (partially from shock) and runs off, and vincent immediately realizes he fucked up.
a few moments later, he tries to go after him to talk to him, but gets held up by katherine. he lies to get away, runs to stray sheep (where rin works) in hopes of talking to him. he's not there, but erica is, and as soon as vincent mentions just part of what happened (that he suddenly found out rin is male), she asks "don't tell me-- you said something awful to rin!?" and tells him to call and apologize which he immediately does. they talk things out on the phone (with rin hanging up after explaining that he'd kept his feelings secret because he's male, and ending the conversation with saying he wants vincent to be happy). the next day, vincent sorts out his feelings for rin while talking with the other guys, and if you're on track to his good/true ending, he resolves to make it up to him (and to katherine for cheating on her) by basically deciding to make things right.
the rest of the path is spent breaking up with katherine (at her suggestion) and catherine, finding rin again after a catherine-caused nightmare, dealing with dumuzid (who tries to get rid of rin due to him being an angel; the rin route version of the confrontation with him has him getting called on his archaic values and homophobic attitude toward the two of them, with vincent at one point declaring that there's more ways for people to be [romantically] close than just as a man and a woman), and proving that he's worthy of being with rin to rin's brothers because they're overprotective and initially don't approve of their little brother being with someone, let alone a human. everyone except for catherine and boss is pretty supportive of their relationship (with even rin's brothers coming around by the end; they even oversee their wedding).
here's a video covering the initial gender reveal up to vincent's talk with the guys where he sorts his feelings out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47KCyKjar4 - the uploader also has the rest of rin's route up right now, if you want to give it a look.
it's definitely not ideal (i.e. the slap part is still uncomfortable even if it's portrayed as vincent fucking up and realizing it immediately, and rin being non-human and a crossdresser arguably cheapens him being a gay option; the non-human part can be seen as being intended to parallel catherine, since rin is set up as an counterpart to her in almost every way), but it's still a huge step up for atlus overall.
Re: spoilers for rin's route
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 08:27 am (UTC)(link)vincent calls rin an otoko no ko, though. the nuance there is different than him realizing that rin is amab (otoko no ko is kind of a fetishy thing) and calling him a guy. the fact that rin’s route goes hand-in-hand with erica being “”cured”” of her transness is definitely not a huge step up for atlus in every way. if anything, the company’s treatment of lgbt characters and themes has gone further and further downhill over the years when you consider that persona 2, a game that came out in the 90’s, had a gay romance as the preferred option, a non-fetishy kiss between two girls, etc.
sa
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 08:33 am (UTC)(link)ayrt, more catherine fb/rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 09:20 am (UTC)(link)i also wouldn't say it's fair to call everything else in rin's route "scraps." yes, it's still flawed, but it's still great to see most of the cast being supportive of vincent and rin as a couple, dumuzid getting shot down for his archaic values and explicit homophobia, and the game proclaiming through its protagonist that relationships aren't just a thing between men and women. that's a lot more than just scraps when most of atlus' games don't even give you a same sex romance option, to say nothing of things like the constant homophobia jokes regarding kanji being an atypical guy in p4-related materials or the two okama in p5.
the ending you're referring to for the erica stuff mentions nothing about her life being "better" there, that's misinformation being spread around. here's a video if you want to verify the scene yourself: https://sendvid.com/39ldd924
that ending is the result of catherine and vincent going back in time using her powers after he wishes they could've met earlier, and the changes are all the result of her being around starting from high school and dating vincent since then (which affects katherine and anyone who was affected by catherine's work as a succubus for dumuzid by extension); catherine's only concern is making vincent happy, not anyone else. erica's response to toby jealously wondering if there's any other angelic girls like catherine still implies she's trans, although her not having transitioned in that ending does feel iffy at best and like it's just for the sake of a tone-deaf "wink wink nudge nudge remember the main timeline?" punchline.
"[...] a non-fetishy kiss between two girls [...]"
just to make sure i'm not forgetting anything because it's been a while: are you referring to shadow yukino and anna? because i'll give you that that's not presented as fetishy, but i'm not sure if i'd mention it as a positive when it only happens in a wrong-choice scenario that leads to anna's death.
ayrt
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 06:35 pm (UTC)(link)and yeah, i do mean the anna/shadow yukina kiss. fwiw, i never said it was a healthy relationship or anything like that (it’s not, even if anna and the actual yukina did have a nice thing going on) but it’s definitely something, and considering it happens in the game where the staff talk so much about the gay male romance option in such a positive light, i still think it’s more than the persona games that came after it had to give.
ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-18 01:15 am (UTC)(link)from what i recall, rin's femininity is never brought up as a point in vincent's attraction - it's mainly their interactions and vincent's admiration for rin's free lifestyle that leads to him falling for him, and at least off the top of my head i don't recall anyone else's approval/support ever being due to rin looking feminine. plus there's that whole scene in rin's good/true ending path where dumuzid is basically used as a representative for homophobia and archaic values and is hard-countered by a speech from vincent (and rin, but it's mostly vincent), who in this path is genuinely trying to be a better person. 「世の中には、男と女がくっつく以外にも、道はたくさんあんだよッ！」 is a line that's gonna be sticking with me for a while, and it's honestly amazing to see a (previously pretty popular) game that was so intensely heteronormative in its original release go so hard on driving home that it's not just men and women that can be close in the relationship sense.
on erica, i do agree that her still being pre-transition in the wedding scene is really weird. i feel like it's either supposed to highlight how different that timeline is (catherine being involved with vincent starting from so early on and helping dumuzid with the great trials would cause a lot of other changes by extension), or it's a fuckup on their part timeline-wise; the game itself is actually vague on when exactly the wedding scene is supposed to take place (it uses "several years later" as a followup to the previous highschool scene, instead of clearly defining a timeframe like for every other timeskip), and the only thing that actually pinpoints it as seeming around the same time as the main timeline is toby's presence and him wearing his work outfit. which could be because they didn't want to come up with another design for him, but it sticks out anyway.
...that and, uh, she's still shown pre-transition at all. feels like someone thought "hey, i bet it'd be cool if we used this to show people what erica used to look like! :D" and didn't really think about the implications.
re: anna/shadow yukino, fair point! i'm not very fond of that moment myself because of the context it pops up in (it's... kinda bleh that the clearest confirmation of anna's interest in another girl only comes up in a scene that gets her killed as a direct result of exploiting her feelings if it happpens), but i can see why you'd consider it notable. i'd rank p3p above something like that for having two female romance options if you pick the female protagonist, personally, but i can agree that p2 does handle same-sex relationships better than regular p3/p4/p5 currently do.
Re: sa
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 09:21 am (UTC)(link)it's the year 2019 and ya'll still taking cues from resetera
anon they replied to, catherine fb spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 09:39 am (UTC)(link)every other change in that ending is a side effect of that. paul is still alive presumably because catherine and dumuzid aren't bothering with the nightmares this time, katherine gets married to paul because she never started dating vincent (since he's already dating catherine), etc.
erica not having transitioned yet even though the wedding part of the ending seems to take place around the same time as the maingame timeline is still weird, though, because i can't think of a reason for that. unless it's supposed to imply that whatever made her decide to finally transition didn't happen (yet?) in this timeline or something, but there's way too little context to work with in her case.
Re: spoilers for rin's route
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 10:32 am (UTC)(link)lol, why am i not shocked
ayrt
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 10:42 am (UTC)(link)(frozen comment) Re: ayrt
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 10:54 am (UTC)(link)(frozen comment) Re: ayrt
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 02:01 pm (UTC)(link)AHAHAHAHA why am i not surprised? dis bitch i s2G
Re: ayrt
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 03:33 pm (UTC)(link)ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 03:43 pm (UTC)(link)...normally i'd say anyone with even just a basic anime fan 101 grasp on japanese could probably verify rin's gender too, since it doesn't take much to catch him referring to himself as 男/otoko several times in later scenes or his brothers referring to him as their 弟/otouto (it's all in voiced scenes), but somehow there's a live-made fan translation going around youtube by someone who missed that despite otherwise being alright at the language, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 04:01 pm (UTC)(link)Re: ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 06:15 pm (UTC)(link)Re: ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 06:21 pm (UTC)(link)"otoko no ko" might be ambiguous because that can mean either "boy" or "fetishy cutesy crossdresser," but in the former meaning it's typically not used for adult humans
Re: ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-17 06:23 pm (UTC)(link)ayrt, catherine fb rin route spoilers
(Anonymous) 2019-02-18 12:29 am (UTC)(link)he's very, very firmly established as someone who identifies as male, he just happens to also be a crossdresser.
sa
(Anonymous) 2019-02-18 12:37 am (UTC)(link)using 男の娘 for trans women is frowned upon, but it still sees use in that sense in fiction because a lot of writers are pretty bad about transgender matters. the one instance of "otoko no ko" ambiguity here is definitely supposed to invoke it in the sense of "crossdresser" only, though, given that the character's gender identity is established more clearly in other scenes.